Rajesh Jain

TECH TALK: Entrepreneur’s Enigmas (Part 2)

This is a dilemma the entrepreneur faces often. When an entrepreneur is worried about meeting payroll at the month-end or going through periods where it is difficult to generate revenues, it is all too easy to make decisions which can result in generating revenue in the immediate future but takes the enterprise away from the future he wants to create. If the entrepreneur considers only the near-term, he may fail to build out a sustainable, rapidly growing business, which is the ultimate objective and what is really driving the entrepreneurial venture. What makes it even difficult is that without survival in the near-term, the long-term does not even arise!

The challenge for entrepreneurs is, therefore, to create a two-fold strategy: one, build a business which may not be directly in line with the final goal but can help generate revenues in the near-term, and two, build out the new and exciting growth business, but whose gestation time can be unpredictable.

Building out a business which focuses on revenue generation in the short-term also helps keep the entrepreneur in touch with the market and the constantly changing competitive scenario. This also ensures that what the entrepreneur does for the long-term is grounded in reality, and not a static view of the marketplace.

Let me give a personal example. In IndiaWorld, our ultimate objective was to use the Internet to build out an electronic bridge and marketplace for Indians worldwide. But having gone through a couple of failed ventures, I realised that unless there is a bread-and-butter revenue stream, we will not live long enough to make that vision a reality. So, we took to creating websites for corporates. It may not have been the most exciting of businesses, but it helped us create positive cashflow, and thus gave us the money to invest into our portals business. We waited (waded!) through the initial years until the advertising business took off to give us the high growth that we wanted. Had we only focused only on the long-term, we would not have survived through the initial years. Had we focused only on the short-term, we would have been running just another commoditised business as other players got into the website design business.

I face a similar challenge now: we have an existing Linux messaging business that has been the breadwinner for the past few years but is now an undifferentiated business (too many competitors, falling revenues). Even as seek to build out a computing platform for the next 500 million users in Emergic, we need to ensure that we can build the messaging business into one which can generate a steadily increasing revenue stream.

My plan is to build out a Linux software solutions for enterprises which emphasizes customization to fight commoditisation and aggregates components from open-source and developed internally. This will keep the revenues coming in and keep us in touch with the enterprise market. In parallel, we will work on targeting new markets with the affordable computing solutions. This will take time to build out but has very a large upside if we can pull it off.

So, this enigma is not about either the near-term or the short-term. An entrepreneur needs to balance both to have a chance of succeeding.

Tomorrow: Entrepreneur’s Enigmas (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: Entrepreneur’s Enigmas (Part 2)

Weblog Ideas

Writes Dave Winer, providing examples of how weblogs can make a difference in the real world:

If a weblog is used by a workgroup to keep the members informed, and to connect with other workgroups; and if their feeds are aggregated to inform shareholders, management, regulators, and other interested parties, you might measure the money-making in the form of money saved, or shortcuts found, or new ideas discovered, or blind alleys averted. Weblogs have a place in business that’s as strong as their place in decentralizing news gathering and reporting.

And there’s more. Imagine a weblog for each patient in the hospital. Each patient defines a community, the people who want to know what’s going on and how the guy is doing. I know my friends and family would have found that useful when I was hospitalized last summer. I certainly wouldn’t have minded them having the information (although I’d want to control who could access this particular weblog).

How about weblogs for political candidates, and weblogs for citizen activist groups to get corrupt or incompetent politicians out of the way. Weblogs for every cellphone user in the third world (and the first and second too).

[Moblogging]: Imagine a small computer, a cellular telephone with a headset, and a standard qwerty keyboard, hooked up to an instant messaging network and to your weblog. To post a new item to your community, hit the Blog Post button and start typing. Hit ## to submit. Bing.

Microsoft’s SPOT

Business Week on Microsoft’s foray into the area of ubiquitous computing [1 2]:

The new gizmo [watch] gives users personalized, up-to-the-minute information such as stock quotes, sports scores, local weather, news headlines, horoscopes, calendar info, and even one-way instant messages — all on their wrist. The data will be beamed over FM radio airwaves to the gadgets, wherever they are. Consumers will pay $120 to $300 for the watches and perhaps $99 more a year for the data service.

The watch is the first product to roll out using Microsoft’s new Smart Personal Object Technology — or Spot. Microsoft (MSFT ) expects to follow the watch with a travel alarm clock that will cull traffic data and your calendar info to suggest an appropriate wake-up time so you won’t miss your first meeting of the day. Also on the drawing board: key-chain fobs that provide the same sort of data as a watch but might be more appealing to those who don’t want a big watch face on their wrist.

Chips Complexity

Writes Red Herring:

An insatiable demand for smaller, faster, and more adaptable chips is driving the industry’s embrace of greater complexity. In the last few years, the chip industry has managed to combine onto a single chip discrete components for functions like graphics, processing, and communications. But the resulting complexity makes verifying the design of these new systems-on-a-chip extremely difficult. And the complexity will only increase. “We’re on track, by 2010, to build 30-GHz devices of 10 nanometers or less, delivering a terra-instruction of performance,” said Intel’s chief technology officer, Pat Gelsinger.

TECH TALK: Entrepreneur’s Enigmas

The life of an entrepreneur is a confused one full of choices to be made and paths to be taken (or not). Every day brings forth its own enigmas, leaving the entrepreneur is a perpetual state of being caught between multiple worlds. And, surprising though it may seem, it is the entrepreneurs own making. It is a decision he has made of his own free will a life of continuous flux, uncertainty and unpredictability.

The life of an entrepreneur is, for the most part, a lonely one. He has few others he can talk to who can understand the situations he faces. Enigmas are an inherent part of an entrepreneurs work and life. We will explore some of the enigmas that entrepreneurs face, and how they tackle these challenges.

For an entrepreneur, the chances of success are infinitesimally small. But that does not deter him. The thrill lies not as much in reaching the destination but in the journey. An entrepreneurs first mistake could be his last. There are no right or wrong answers immediately apparent in the decisions the entrepreneur makes. There are no management case studies which can help in recreating the situations faced. For many an entrepreneur, management is learnt in the real world rather than business schools. And as such, the driver for many decisions is just raw instinct the gut.

There is an unflinching confidence an entrepreneur has in his business sometimes, too much, which can be blindsiding. An entrepreneur has no rule book the rules of the game are made up along the way. Amidst all the challenges that he faces, what rarely wavers is the entrepreneurs faith and belief that he will succeed against all odds.

Here then are some of the enigmas entrepreneurs face questions they wrestle with constantly, and the answers to any one of which could make the difference between success and failure.

Strategy vs Execution

One of the first enigmas an entrepreneur faces is on balancing thinking and action. Thinking only requires the entrepreneur looking at the big picture, while execution requires getting different people to work together in an co-ordinated manner and focusing on the details. The former is easy and controllable, the latter harder and dependent on many others to make it a success.

The danger is that in search of the perfect plan an entrepreneur overemphasizes the vision and strategy part (which he is comfortable with) and does not pay adequate attention to the execution. Just thinking through the problem and solution does not make a business. Revenues, customers and profits are what is needed, and that is much harder for a new business to garner.

Execution is the discipline of getting things done. More than the thinking, envisioning and strategizing, it is perhaps the single-most important factor that will determine the fate of a venture. Results are what matter. For results, the entrepreneur needs to, after the initial thinking is done, focus on implementation and use the feedback from the marketplace to do course-correction.

Tomorrow: Entrepreneurs Enigmas (continued)

Smart Shelves via RFIDs

Writes News.com:

Gillette, Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based supermarket chain Tesco plan to install specially designed shelves that can read radio frequency waves emitted by microchips embedded in millions of shavers and related products.

In one scenario envisioned by retailers and manufacturers, computers sensing that stock is running low could automatically place an order for more–either by informing an employee to retrieve more products from a storage room or by notifying the manufacturer that another shipment is needed.

Continue reading Smart Shelves via RFIDs

Red Herring’s 2003 Trends

The 10 trends covered are: Wireless, Hardware/Software, Telecom, Venture Capital, Semiconductors, Nanotech, Financial Reporting, Biotech, Broadcasting, Broadband.

On hardware/software, this is what it says: “The technologies around virtualization, an umbrella term for a collection of technologies that allow a corporation’s IT infrastructure to exist as one seamless unit, get their finishing touches and become all the rage for chief information officers worldwide…only Cisco, IBM, and Sun have the dollars to spend on virtualization efforts. Sun has its N1 initiative. IBM has its Project eLiza and Oceana projects. And Cisco has tweaked its product lines to meet the needs of a virtualized enterprise.”

Continue reading Red Herring’s 2003 Trends

Remote IT Village Project in Laos

From Wired:

Imagine being asked to design an Internet-connected computer network that can function without telephone lines or electricity.

The equipment will also be subjected to torrential rains every six months, and will have to cope with high temperatures and choking clouds of red dust for the rest of the year.

Sounds like a system administrator’s nightmare, but volunteer tech experts working with the Remote IT Village Project in rural Laos say that all it takes is some pedal-powered generators, a few wireless antennas and some rugged, Linux-powered computers.

The rugged computers, built from components used in automatic teller machines and powered by pedal-pushing people, will be connected to wireless broadcasting stations. The local network will broadcast voice and data signals between five villages and the main server, which will be located at the Phon Hong Hospital nine miles away.

This has also been discussed on Slashdot [1 2 3].

Linux’s Readiness

Prakash Advani asks and answers 5 questions on Linux in the Indian context:
– Are large enterprises relying on Linux?
– Is Linux right for India?
– Is Linux cost effective?
– How do I get support on Linux?
– Is Linux ready for the desktop?

Home Platform

WSJ writes about the home platform war which surfaced at the Consumer Electronics Show:

At the heart of the dispute is whether the personal computer or the television will be the entertainment hub of the future – and the focus of a new wave of product development.

Making the products that are the fulcrum for the move to new forms of entertainment digital video and music downloaded from the Internet can mean the difference between growth and stagnation. It is not surprising that PC makers Dell, Intel and Microsoft see a powerful role for the computer. Barrett argues that the PC is an interactive device allowing material to be created and tailored for use, as opposed to a television, which is largely limited to a passive display. As consumers adopt wireless, broadband connections to the Internet, “I think we are increasing the importance of the PC,” he said during a speech.

It is the computer that is leading the way to online gaming, and not the game console, Dell pointed out at the show. However, Sony’s Ando sees the broadband connection to the home leading to the television, not the PC.

“The television is being reborn as an always-on interactive device,” he told show attendees during an address. Other devices in the home, from PCs and game machines to digital cameras, will become subordinate, feeding the TV content for display.

The same battle will play itself out in countries like India. My belief is that it will be an affordability issue: the TV is always purchased before the computer. For homes which cannot afford the PC, the TV becomes the first platform. From a technology standpoint, the PC can do much more, but then one has to spend more too.