Rajesh Jain

Broadband Shift

Many of the still-standing Web developers are beginning to view broadband as more than hype. Media companies and online services are rolling out a wide range of new music, videos, movies, games and other features suited for high-speed Internet hookups but too cumbersome for most people using slower dial-up connections.

In doing so, they’re setting the stage for what could be a major transformation of the Internet. Much of the new content being developed for broadband users is premised on the unproved assumption that people will be willing to pay for a wide range of entertainment on the Web. If they are, get ready for a two-tiered Internet, with the hottest content sites charging subscription fees. Cable companies, online services and phone companies already are beginning to explore the idea of offering subscriptions to packages of premium content, in the same way cable companies today sell premium channels such as HBO and Showtime.

Cable companies clearly recognize that content is the key to maintaining strong broadband sales. Up to now, millions have been signing up for broadband primarily for its speed and the convenience of a connection that’s always activated without a lengthy dial-up procedure. But for many others, those advantages are not enough to justify the cost. So cable companies are scrambling to figure out ways to use music, videos, graphics and other jazzy broadband content to keep the cash register ringing.

The story talks about the US situation, but what is also happening is that many emerging markets are also going to be getting broadband quite soon. In fact, many countries like India will bypass the narrowband step. Already many cybercafes in India and South Korea have high-speed connections. Providers like Reliance Infocomm are planning Ethernet into homes via fibre in the coming years.

China and South Korea

From NYTImes:

As China has become South Korea’s largest economic partner almost overnight, it has also become a threat.

“For years, Korea has long been the low-cost, high-efficiency producer, but now Chinese labor is eating into the South Korean margins,” said Scott Snyder, Korea representative for the Asia Foundation, a research group partly financed by the United States government. “The Koreans have to run faster — they are starting to feel the warm breath of China on their backs.”

Korea’s leading exports to China last year were cellphones and computers, displacing steel and petrochemical goods. By 2010, the Korean government forecasts, China will be on a par with Korea in such major industries as cars, semiconductors and shipbuilding. In other industries, the gap is measured in months.

South Korea’s shipbuilders, the world’s largest, are turning to building liquefied natural gas carriers and other value-added vessels, since China’s shipbuilding industry is already focusing on the market for simpler vessels.

In 2000, Korea’s $53.4 billion in information technology production amounted to 5 percent of world production, below China’s 6 percent.

TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Outsourcing to India and China

The importance of India and China in the technology value chain continues to grow. The world is now looking at markets like India and China for outsourced services. China has become the manufacturing hub, while India is becoming the first choice for outsourced IT and back-office services. As the two economies prosper, they will start becoming big consumers also, creating two huge markets of a billion-plus people in the years to come. More immediately, 2003 will see the outsourcing trend continue. Even as some Indian software companies try and move up the value chain to consulting, others are moving downward to offer business process outsourcing.

Business Week wrote recently on Chinas emerging technological prowess:

It seemed that hardly a week went by in 2002 without another multinational announcing that it was setting up a big research and development operation in China. From General Electric to Philips to Matsushita, the biggest names in American, European, and Asian industry were increasing their commitment to China.

For Beijing’s leaders, this investment is a key part of its strategy to move beyond labor-intensive manufacturing. For proud Chinese, it’s part of a drive to help their country regain its status as a world technology leader. For Americans in Silicon Valley, Indians in Bangalore, and Taiwanese in Hsinchu, it’s another indication that China is well on its way to becoming a far more powerful competitor.

Even as the manufacturing outsourcing to China continues, India has emerged as the preferred destination for services and software. A look at the spectacular new construction happening in places like Gurgaon near Delhi and Whitefield in Bangalore is a reflection of Indias arrival on the world scene – finally.

But 2003 could be the year that companies start to also look beyond India so as not to put all their eggs in one basket. Writes CIO: India has long been the leader in offshore IT outsourcing, with a $4 billion IT services export industry, a decade of lead time over most other countries and upward of 80 percent of the offshore market. The rising demand for those services and increasing risk of terrorist attacks are prompting CIOs who source work abroad to look beyond the usual suspects. In 2003, CIOs looking to outsource can expect to get solicitations from places like Bangladesh or Bulgaria. In reality, most countries are far behind India, which boasts 900 software companies employing 415,000 professionals and more software quality initiatives than even the United States. But there are three up-and-comers that are worth a look. The three countries identified are China, Russia and Philippines.

Tomorrow: The Real New Markets

Continue reading TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Outsourcing to India and China

VoIP

From NYTimes: “Sending voice telephone calls over the Internet remains largely a niche service for technophiles and for people seeking cheaper international communications — like users of prepaid phone cards, who may not even realize that their discount calls are bypassing the regular phone network. Yet the technology is showing signs of gradually expanding to a broader audience, a step that could eventually mean wide-reaching changes in the telecommunications industry, if early experiments by individuals and businesses are any indication.”

Net 2003 = Net 1995?

Writes Kevin Werbach, stating that “The commercial Web in 2003 is getting back to what worked years ago”. He begins with the Search story.

Today, as companies retreat to their core businesses, they are finding, to their horror, that nimbler competitors have occupied the ground they neglected. Through the heady days of the dot.com boom, Yahoo! and other leading Web-based businesses larded on feature after feature, including stock quotes, Web-based e-mail, shopping, calendars, streaming audio and video, chat, instant messaging, and gamesanything to increase traffic and therefore revenues. Companies that were once simply “search engines” fattened themselves into “portals.” Yahoo!’s Web directory, its original raison d’tre, became an afterthought.

But as it turns out, the one thing people really want to do online is find things…While Yahoo! slept, Google quietly became the dominant Internet search engine, handling one-half of all searches…For many users, Google is the Web, in the way that AOL and Netscape once were. It’s the primary interface they use to maneuver online.

Werbach’s conclusion: “The Net has come full circle…The Googles of the world, who found valuable niches and stuck to their knitting, are thriving. Yahoo! and Inktomi find themselves the equivalent of a 1970s conglomerate: The whole is worth less than the parts.”

An interesting analysis. I use Google about 10-20x more than Yahoo (Yahoo as a MyYahoo page I refer to once in a while, while there is a Google toolbar for all my searches, of which I do plenty in a day).

TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Telecom, Cellphones and Gadgets

The action in telecommunications has not stopped. WiFi may become the enable for broadband, VoIP and its integration with GSM offers much promise. Americas Network identifies a few other technologies to watch:

UWB: Plenty of companies have been directing their efforts towards ultrawideband (UWB) technology, which promises high-speed short-range wireless connectivity well beyond the scope and applicability of Bluetooth.

Free Space Optics: Originally touted as a cost-effective option to connect urban buildings to metro fiber rings, or campus buildings to each other, free-space optics (FSO) – fiber-optic transmission sans fiber – has been held back by its own physical limitations of range (1.5 kilometers max, but typically much shorter), line-of-sight limitations and adverse weather conditions like fog, monsoons and blizzards.

DWDM and Optical Ethernet: Neither optical Ethernet nor DWDM are truly new ideas. DWDM totally changed the economics of long-distance networks in the late 1990s by enabling carriers to split a single strand of fiber into multiple wavelengths, each capable of carrying the bandwidth that previously would have required an entire fiber. And two or three years ago, a whole new crop of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) grew up to build next-generation metro networks based solely on optical Ethernet. What’s new is that established service providers realize that if they bring DWDM to their metro networks, they can offer optical Ethernet services – initially side-by-side with traditional Sonet offerings.

2003 will also see the worlds mobile phones overtake the number of fixed-lines. Mobile phones continue to find new markets. China now has over 200 million subscribers, and India is on the threshold of a revolution with prices crashing and consumption rising, as Reliance Infocomms entry threatens to cause a massive upheaval. SMS will continue its march, and the industry is hoping for a rapid adoption of its multimedia messaging service (MMS).

Cellphones will come with more and more features packed in from built-in PDAs to FM radios to digital cameras to location-identifying GPS. This year will also see the first 3G services being launched in Europe (outside Japan) the results have a lot of money riding on them. The mobile phone is increasingly being positioned as a lifestyle device rather than just one to be used for voice communications.

Analogue is giving way to Digital in every aspect of our life. Writes the Economist in an article entitled The Great Crossover in its The Year in 2003: 2003 is the real moment for digitals long march. This is the year more digital entertainment devices will be sold in America than analogue ones, a trend paralleled around the world. Since the CD, the only big analogue-to-digital transition has been only in mobile phones, which made the great switch around 1998 (leading to innovations such as text messaging). 2003 will mark three more historic crossovers. Each of which could have even greater impact.

According to the article, the three devices which will mark the crossover are DVDs, Digital Cameras and Digital Camcorders.

Tomorrow: Outsourcing to India and China

Continue reading TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Telecom, Cellphones and Gadgets

Software-defined Radio

From the NYTimes:

Vanu Inc., is a prominent innovator in the effort to use software rather than hardware to control how radios, cellphones and all other wireless communications devices recognize and manage signals. Early versions of the technology, known as software-defined radio, are beginning to be deployed in military communications equipment and cellular base stations.

The goal is to develop software and related components that recognize various wave forms at any frequency in the radio spectrum and choose the appropriate applications to process them. A single device could provide cellphone service no matter what the format or frequency, exchange wireless messages with laptop or hand-held computers, and communicate with walkie-talkies or emergency services.

There is another potential benefit: being able to incorporate improved data speeds and features simply by downloading software, rather than replacing the customer’s hardware or the company’s network equipment.

Growing Volume of Files

Do you really need that file is the question asked by ZDNet and a very important one at that. We will keep creating new files (and new emails), but rarely delete many.

As the layers of information needing to be stored grows, IT departments are forced to try and think laterally to manage the storage overload. Any solution they come up with must be acceptable in budget terms. How do you cope with storage needs which are doubling or tripling without blowing your budget, or eating up all your IT spend on storage requirements?
How does your IT department cope with meeting enterprise storage needs?

Disk storage is very cheap, but that isn’t the solution. I think we need something like Google for our files and emails. It may be much easier to create this on a server-centric storage solution, rather than trying to put one on every desktop. Of course, there’s also Find.

ZDNet on 2003

Always interesting to read what to expect in the New Year! This is ZDNet’s look ahead to 2003: more worms, smaller form-factor PCs, tech rebound according to engineers, Linux pushes for the desktop, more spam and plenty of .Net action.

TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Linux, IM and Blogs

Will 2003 be the year Linux becomes mainstream? The question has two answers. The first applies to the developed markets. There, Linux will have an ever-increasing presence on the server, especially with the push coming from IBM and Oracle. On the desktop or in handhelds, Linux will not make much of a headway. But in emerging markets, Linux will perhaps see the best opportunities and biggest gains, including on the desktop. As efforts to curtail software piracy in these nations increase, so will be the popularity of Linux. These countries now need to start moving from consumers of open-source to producers also.

Robin Miller of NewsForge says that some of the biggest advances [in Linux and open source] we’re going to see in the next year will come from Asia, not Europe or North America. He adds:

A growing number of “next generation” Linux development is taking place in Asian countries, ranging from South Korea at one end of the continent to India diagonally across the continent’s map, with China rising hugely — in the Linux sense — right in the middle of it all.

Africa and the Middle East are discovering Linux in a big way, but don’t have nearly as much computer/IT infrastructure or as much computer-oriented education available as (some parts of) China or India — or South Korea or Vietnam or Malaysia. Or Japan, where it looks like Linux will soon be adopted as a preload operating system by computer manufacturers on all kinds of gear, not just on the server and workstation levels as we see 99% of the time in the U.S. and Europe.

I see an increasing amount of Linux development and related Open Source activity coming out of Asia, almost all of it in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian languages.

I also see an increasing amount of Linux activity coming out of India, most of which is in English rather than in one of the many local Indian languages.

Instant Messaging will also make an increasing presence in the enterprises.
Writes CIO: Already, almost half of all U.S. and Canadian companies are using some form of IM, according to a survey by Osterman Research, a technology research company in Black Diamond, Wash. IM’s faster than e-mail, delivering messages that pop up on your screen no matter what you’re working on. Employees can use it to see if someone is in and to avoid time-wasting e-mail and phone tag. The software can also be used for customer support and to deliver messages to hundreds of users simultaneously. It seems a perfect fit for the busy enterprise. But IM will need secure systems and common standards in order to succeed in business.

One movement which caught a lot of media attention in 2002 was that of weblogs. This is going to continue. I expect more of us to start tuning in to bloggers every morning. The activity will probably happen on the following fronts: more and more prominent people will start weblogs, enterprises will start paying attention to weblogs for collaboration and knowledge sharing, community weblogs will start being created as an upscale version of Yahoo eGroups. In addition, there will be efforts to organise the world of bloggers through search engines and directories. There will be also be efforts to use blogs for commercial activities like the two recent efforts to create blogs around New York (CityBlogs and Gawker) and one around gadgets (Gizmodo).

Tomorrow: Telecom, Cellphones and Gadgets

Continue reading TECH TALK: 2003 Expectations: Linux, IM and Blogs