Category: Emergic

Emergic has got its first media mention — in Arun Katiyar’s Personal Technology column in the Sunday edition of Indian Express. Writes Arun in the brief story entitled Open Source:

Today, after almost 30 months of soul searching, Rajesh Jain has decided to take a very bold step: he has gone completely transparent with his next Big Idea. In fact, he hopes that the more he talks about it, the more he lets you know about it, the better his chances of developing it into a large, viable business.

As he jokingly puts it, his is truly an “open source” company, right from the business idea upwards. Its fascinating to see his thoughts turning into words and words crystallising into business ideas and these ideas morphing into his dream of building India into a leader in technological products, an “anchor store in the world mall and not a discount store”.

Of course, the flip side of writing about all that one is doing is if one fails, it is also available for all to see! Hopefully, I won’t be ending up that way 🙂

Arun is one of the best writers (and persons) I know. [Some of his earlier Personal Technology posts.] But writing is very little of what he has doing for the past few years! Arun’s writing has a magic in his simplicity. Wish we would all read more from him.

An interesting idea from Liz Barnett, Giga Information Group (quoted in an interview in The Rational Edge):

One of the things that I’ve been a proponent of is a concept I call the Developer’s Resource Portal. That may not be the best name because it doesn’t have to be a portal; it can be any kind of environment. It also is not limited to developers in the strictest sense; it applies to the whole project team. But the concept of easily accessible resources is very important: We need to bring together tools, people, and end-to-end process and make things really simple. I think a lot of demand and progress on this is coming from the user community right now. They are sharing and collaborating, posting best practices and shared component asset libraries. They are tying reuse, best practices, and the actual development tools all together in a way that will address all the types of people involved in development. I think this is a big trend, and a big usability feature that doesn’t need to be all that expensive. I’ve seen implementations that really improved not only the day-to-day technical deliverables, but also teamwork and the softer side of development.

To me, the concept of bringing together all your best practices in a portal or console with your tools and creating a team collaboration environment is very powerful and a huge step towards better, faster, and cheaper solutions.

The Developer Portal is an idea which we will need to look at later when we ready with the foundation for the Visual Biz-ic. A slight variation of this idea can be applied to SMEs. What’s needed is a portal for SMEs in Emerging Markets to share their ideas and thoughts. While we haven’t done any work yet, the idea has been around in my mind for some time: like an EnterpriseDigest.com — a Reader’s Digest and Slashdot combined for SMEs, targeted initially at industry verticals through associations. Then, cut horizontally to let SMEs interact and watch emergence happen.

The past quarter has seen us begin and make some progress in our Emergic vision. I’ll review key achivements of the past quarter, and then lay out the plan for the next quarter.

First, an insight into the 3 key innovations which are driving Emergic.

1. Server-based Computing: The Thin Client-Thick Server project is the key to reducing the cost of computing for enterprises. Any old PC can serve as a Linux Thin Client. This way, the cost of the desktop can be brought down to USD 100. All applications run off the server. I think the time is right for emerging enterprises to eschew thick desktops and look at moving processing entirely to the server. Linux and Open Source are making this possible. It has to co-exist with the Windows world. This is now possible with OpenOffice being able to read and write the proprietary MS Office file formats. The Server willreside on theLAN. Think of this as an ASP. Instead of the servers being centralised, they are no distributed to enterprise networks. I’ll be writing more on this in my current Tech Talk series.

2. Digital Dashboard: This is going to be the new desktop for near real-time enterprises. It will be built using Blogs, RSS Syndication, Outliners and Directories. It will integrate information (events) from multiple sources – newsfeeds, blogs internally and externally,and enterprise applications. What isimportant here is for individuals to narrate their work and enterprise applications to stream “events” on to the Enterprise Information Bus.

3. Visual Biz-ic: This is the equivalent of an Integrated Development Environment for business processes (like Visual Basic/Studio for software components). Enterprise Software needs to be architected usingWeb Services and Business Rules for SMEs, and assembled together like Lego blocks. Software needs to be built tobusiness process standards like ebXML and RosettaNet.

Our focus with Emergic is to make computing available to the bottom of the enterprise pyramid for no more than USD 20 ppm (per person month), including hardware, software, support and training. The target audiences are the SMEs in Emerging Markets who cannot afford to pay for technology in dollars. This is where the next 500 million IT users are going to come from.

I have put together separate updates on each of the areas we have been working on: BlogStreet, Digital Dashboard, Thin Client-Thick Server and Enterprise Software.

On our core Messaging front, our collections for the quarter were on target (3% higher than what we had targeted). We’ve made some progress with channels, but not as much as we would have liked. We’ve also worked on putting together a plan for outsourcing some aspects of our Support and Marketing activities. We’ve also been working to strengthen our marketing activities in other parts of India. The next quarter will be challenging: our target is to show a 25% increase in collections from this quarter.

An update to how I see Emergic evolving in the coming months:

Phease 0 is what we are currently doing with the Messaging Server MailServ. This is a Linux-based product which has been deployed at 100+ corporates in India at 300+ locations.

Phase 1 of Emergic combines Thin Computing with the Digital Dashboard. The two taken together put in place the underlying IT infrastructure in enterprises: a computer on every desktop at a very low cost. The Digital Dashboard (comprising RSS Aggregation and Blogs) also provides a different user experience in terms of getting access to information in a faster, cheaper and better manner.

Phase 2 is building Content and Community to bring SMEs together online. This envisages an SME eZine and getting associations to pool the brainpower of their members in a Slashdot-like manner.

Phase 3 is creating the Visual Biz-ic framework and the Enterprise Software components. Visual Biz-ic is the foundation on which the Lego-like software can be built by software developers to provide an integrated eBusiness suite for SMEs. Events happening in the enterprise are published on the “information bus” in the enterprise and can be subscribed to by people and other applications. The goal is to enables SMEs to become RTEs (Real-Time Enterprises).

An important breakthrough in thinking last week was to view Emergic through a software/OS lens, rather than looking at it from a hardware and software solution. We are best at developing and aggregating software and have to work in putting together the channel/distribution network. I also finally completed the Tech Talk series on Rethinking Enterprise Software (the final parts will be published this week). Its my longest series, stretching over 5 weeks and 24 columns and over 12,000 words. It has also been the most productive in clarifying thought.

BlogStreet: Last week, we fine-tuned our proglets to get them to work properly in unison for the blogroll analysis. This week, we do the blog neighbourhood analysis. Am looking forward to the first cut version which we should have ready sometime this week. I am actually glad we changed direction a few weeks ago in the path we are now going. This will now serve as a perfect complementor to the Digital Dashboard.

Digital Dashboard: We now have the RSS Aggregator fully in place…from last week, we realised that we had to do quite some enhancements to make it scale up and work incrementally with feeds. This week, we’ll integrate with a blogging tool. A test will be for me to use the RSS Aggregator and post directly to this weblog, which means we’ll have connect with MovableType. After that, need to deploy it for everyone in the organisation.

Thin Client-Thick Server: The week was spent resolving some continuing minor issues which kept coming up — fonts, printer support, backup, a few crashes, etc. Also thinking through on the Architecture — how do we build out a scalable system. Need to also think on productisation. The Thick Server has now not been rebooted for 5.5 days.

Enterprise Software: Working on OpenOffice-Postgres-ODBC integration as a prelude to creating an application which can automate some internal accounting tasks (with integration into marketing).

My Blog: Have done some enhancements: added news headlines on the archive pages, changed the nature of the permalink from IDs, made comments in-place. Now, working on getting outlines on the month pages.

Messaging: Have released on ad for Channel Partners as part on an ongoing effort to reach out to more channels.

This is the last week of the current quarter. So, next week, I want to take stock of the progress we’ve achieved so far, a kind of big picture look. And also think on what we want to accomplish in the coming quarter. An initial thought: 2-3 months ago, we had a lot of ideas on Emergic, but didnt know where to start and how to proceed. Now, I feel a lot more confident about what we are doing as work has begun on multiple front. It is still very early days. The next quarter will be crucial in determining market acceptability of some of our poposed products.

Previous Emergic Update

Is Nvidia the next Intel, asks Wired:

For a perfect example of the changing dynamic between the graphics processing unit (GPU) and CPU, look at the Xbox. It uses a special version of Nvidia’s nForce chipset, built around a tricked-out GeForce3 to handle graphics and sound. Microsoft paid Nvidia more than it did Intel for its 733-MHz Pentium III. For Huang, it’s a proof of concept. “The Xbox is how the computer will be built in the next 20 years. More semiconductor capacity will go to the user experience,” he says. “The microprocessor will be dedicated to other things like artificial intelligence. That trend is helpful to us. It’s a trend that’s inevitable.”

If he’s right, then Nvidia will be smartly positioned. Even more so should it encroach on the CPU business. An April 1 story posted on Slashdot announced a merger between Nvidia and AMD – where Huang used to work. It was meant as a joke, but such a merger has been the subject of serious speculation for months. It would give Nvidia total control of the PC’s innards and, eventually, an array of post-PC devices. Huang doesn’t cop to this plan, but when he talks about expanding into handhelds, dashboards, and cell phones, he never suggests waiting for Intel – or anyone else. “Some people say the network is the computer. We believe the display is the computer,” he says. “Anywhere there’s a pixel, that’s where we want to be.”

I also came across a comment by John Robb on Nvidia on why he’s buying their stock:

1. Graphics processors are chewing up cycles faster than the flatlined PC CPU. Usage equals demand. Control of the interface is extremely important.
   
2. The parallel architecture of graphics processors allow it to boost price performance at a 2 to 1 rate over PC CPUs. A doubling rate of 6 vs. 18 months. nVidia’s chips have twice the number of transistors the Pentium 4 has. That also means production scale will narrow the number of firms able to produce a chip this large.
   
3. There is going to be convergence between the graphics used to create movies and games. This is going to be huge. Imagine if the Star Wars game looked as good as the movie — the sales would be huge.
   
4. nVidia will likely acquire AMD to add CPU functionality as a side feature of its chips (to move beyond their joint venture). That means over time the price of a multimedia PC using an AMD/nVidia combined chip could be 30% lower than an Intel powered model. Given AMD’s major second quarter loss, this acquisition will likely be done for a song.
   
5. Microsoft is likely to create a home server that is tightly integrated (following on the heals of the Xbox’s second generation). An AMD/nVidia chip could be central to that new box. It’s also likely that the brand of the chip used will be subsumed into the general conumer electronics style marketing that this new home server will use. That loss of branding will hurt Intel.
   

As I thought about Nvidia and Intel, a few questions occured to me: can a similar thing can occur on the desktop and with Microsoft? What can dethrone Windows, what is its replacement, the next Windows?

A mistake we’ve been making is thinking of the Linux desktop as the replacement for Windows. Thats like thinking of AMD as the new Intel. It isn’t going to happen.

The new Desktop/Windows is the Digital Dashboard. Like Nvidia’s GPUs, it focuses on the user experience — what do users in enterprises see when they switch on the computer? Thats where the focus should be.

Windows still focuses on the world of files and directories, along with Mail, Office and the Browser. But they are just the building blocks. This is where there is an opportunity to build the new OS: think of it as the “Office System” rather than the Operating System.

This Digital Dashboard will be built using RSS Aggregation, Blogs and Outlines. This combo hides the underlying plumbing, doesn’t care where the information is coming from and focuses on the collaborative experience.

So, to do an Nvidia to Microsoft means rethinking the user experience on the desktop, and that means integrating the information flow onto one screen. This is the corporate portal, yes. But the portals of today are not open. The standard they need to support for reading and writing information is RSS.

RSS has so far been used mostly by few (primarily the bloggers) for getting their news from various sites. Think of the bloggers as the equivalent of the Xbox in Nvidia’s world. Just as Nvidia thinks Xbox will define the new computer of tomorrow, the interface that bloggers use will define the desktop of tomorrow. And that’s going to be primarily built around RSS and Blogs, with feeds coming in not just from news sites but also from within the enterprise.

Personally, I spent quite some time on the Enterprise Software Re-thinking. This is part of the Tech Talk series which has been ongoing for the past 3 weeks, and will continue for the next 2 also. The pieces are now coming together quite nicely. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the approach we are taking is the right one. The areas which need more work are (a) how to build the platform for developing enterprise software components, and (b) how are we going to market and sell to SMEs.

BlogStreet: Our proglets (10 of them) are working to identify blog rolls. They work reasonably well. We now need to put together a Blog Neighbourhood tool on BlogStreet. This week, we’ll be thinking through on how best BlogStreet should be — as a resource for bloggers and readers (there are 1000x more readers than writers).

Digital Dashboard: We were stuck for a couple days on a problem with the Apache-SOAP interaction, but finally fixed the problem. Have an RSS Aggregator in place now which uses the Outliner web service we built. Now, we are working to put the blog interface together, so we can get everyone internally creating blogs. Blogs+Outliners+RSS=Digital Dashboard.

Thin Client-Thick Server: Except the Marketing department, everyone’s now using Thin Clients. We bought a few more second-hand PCs, each for Rs 7,000 or so (including monitor). There have been some issues with the stability and hardware — rising load, increasing processes, disappearning icons, crashing applications. Nothing serious — just the occasional hiccups. Our target is that by the month-end we have a completely stable environment. Seeing how things are going here convinces me we are on the right track.

Enterprise Software: Got stuck with some problems using SAPDB. Decided to then drop it. Focus now is on using Postgres, JDBC, JBoss and J2EEas the building blocks. All are new areas for us.

Messaging: Have worked out a set of ideas to strengthen the core platform, and also thinking on how to integrate the Mail Server with the Thick Server. We also are thinking on a plan to expand in multiple cities.

This is the fun part of being an entrepreneur…each day brings its own share of unknowns. Thats why I strongly believe that for an entrepreneur its not just reaching the destination which is important, but the journey itself should be fun — one has to like, in the words of Dan Bricklin, “jumping from rock to slippery rock.”

Sunday was a good day got time to do a lot of reading, and there was a breakthrough in conceptualising Emergic. I used to think of what we want to do more on the lines of Microsoft and its MS-Windows and MS-Office. But in doing so, I was missing out on the bigger picture. What we are really want to do to Enterprise Software and the IT architecture is bring out the kind of revolution Intels microprocessor did. Thinking about the enterprise the way the personal computer is makes the model much clearer. Ill be writing more about this over the next few days as part of my ongoing series of Tech Talks.

Meanwhile, the updates on the current Emergic activities:

BlogStreet: Weve been writing various proglets for blogroll extracting. Need to integrate them together this week. We didnt do any blog addition, because of my realisation that the approach of manually adding and classifying blogs is fundamentally flawed. We need to automate that process, and have bloggers themselves add their blogs. Developments like RSS auto-discovery in the past week have also made me think that the process of identifying clusters can be simplified. Well be re-working our BlogSTreet strategy this week.

Digital Dashboard: We wrote out the Outline Web Service but were facing some problems when it came to larger outlines. Working to fix this. Also wrote out an Outline-to-Presentation utility. In parallel, as a precursor to working with blogs, have been putting together an RSS Aggregator.

Thin Client-Thick Server: We now have 13 people using the Thin Client architecture on their desktops. Next step is to migrate the others who are using Windows. My notebook (2-year-old Fujitsu) was also converted into a Thin Client so I no longer need a separate desktop. This is important because it validates what we have done the ability to take almost any computer and make it into a Thin Client. This week, as we migrate my Mails over, I should have little reason to use a Windows machine! Bookmarks and Cookies migration was smooth. The one problem with OpenOffice which I came across was that the apostrophes and quotes get replaced with question marks. Need to get a solution for that.

Enterprise Software: This continues to be the most nebulous area and the one I have been spending the most time thinking through. As a start, we are going to work on integrating information within our organisation from Tally (accounting) and the customer information in MS-Excel. We want to do this using Sash, an open-source database and J2EE.

Messaging: Work continues to build out the channel, and enhance the core product with support for real-time messaging through SMS alerts.

Previous Update

Blogstreet: We’ve added 50 more blogs for a total of 200, instead of adding 150 to take the total to 300. Hope to make up the deficit this week. Have also begun work on extracting blogrolls — writing small programs (“proglets”) to process the links and get the info necessary to identify the clusters.

Digital Dashboard: On the Outliner, we have completed Edit-Share-Delete of outlines. Now working on making the text-to-OPML conversion and the outline presentations as web services. This gives us some exposure to XML and SOAP. We also want to them use the outlining service within Blogstreet and some other applications. Blogs will probably wait till later this week or next week.

Thin Client-Thick Server: We’ve cracked the Auto Identification of the Network card and Display card problem. Have a 2-floppy solution which gets this info from the client and ships it to the server. By mid-week, we will also be done with the user interface to add new clients and machines. Have moved 7 users to TC. Next step is to move the other Linux users (6 people) to TC also. Finally, next week work on the migration of the Windows users. On Windows, the problems we will have to address: migration of Mail and Address Book, Bookmarks and Cookies, and then the documents.

Enterprise Software: Explored a few options last week on what to do going ahead. Took a look at Business Rules also. The approach we are now looking at is to (a) understand Sash as a scripting environment for Mozilla and then write out an app (b) understand J2EE, XML (c) identify what database backend to use. We will then use these components to write out a prototype for accounting or sales. Have also met with some clients to get feedback on their needs.

Messaging: Steady Progress last week. Channel buildout is happening. This month, we need to work on making a brochure and sales kit.

Previous Week’s Update

Monday mornings are a good time to reflect on the progress of Emergic. Should do this every Monday.

BlogStreet: we have the basic directory of 150 blogs and search on the index pages of these blogs. We have been also putting in place a backend system for handling updates to the directory, with some code clean-up. The foundation has to be solid before we build too much on top. The plan for the coming week is to (a) grow the blogs to about 300+ (b) ensure daily updates on the Blog Daily (c) begin work on the BlogRoll analyser — given a URL how can we ge the blogroll (d) put in place a Blog Simulator, which helps us create the logic for analysing the world of blogs, identifying clusters and the like.

Digital Dashboard: Last week, we did the sharing of outlines between users. A little stuff still left on this, which should be done in the early part of the week. So, users will then be able to create outlines and then share various nodes with others. The next idea: make this a Web Service. So, I should be able to give a text file and get back an outline either in OPML or in a renderable format. This will give us exposure to XML and SOAP, and also make our Outline code a software component which can be used by, among others, this blog for the categories page and BlogStreet for showing more detailed listings (eg. we could use the RSS feeds to show the new stories integrated with the blog directory listings). Next on the agenda: explore blogs. We’ll probably only get to this next week.

Thin Client-Thick Server: The Server stability issues seem to have been resolved — it no longer crashes. We have 5 TC users and that environment seems quite stable now. What we’ve been working on is (a) Load Testing: how many TCs can a TS support; can we ensure that only a single copy of the app is spawned even when multiple users want to run it (b) Auto-identification of the TC Network Card (to get the MAC address) and the Display Card, so we can create the boot floppy for the TC and feed the same info on the TS (c) making all the necessary front-ends to do “single-click” addition of new machines and users, thus simplifying the life of the Admin. This week, hopefully, we’ll finish on these tasks, so we can add another 5-6 users who are already using Linux to the TC-TS world. After that, the migration of Windows users to TCs.

Enterprise Software: We’ve done the basic specs for an Accounting-Sales software system. Have also met with some clients and development companies. This thinking has still been too conventional. Some re-thinking on how we can make enterprise software using business rules in English to describe business processes, and then generate the necessary objects. I’ll be writing about some of these ideas in the Tech Talk series this week. I remembered a Red Herring article I had read in late 2000 (which I found) on Versata, which had business rules software for automating business processes. Doing some study on this.

Messaging: Making some progress on getting channels to sell. One idea we’ve been thinking on has been to ease the process of giving demos. Use a notebook to give demos. This eases the process of giving demos: walk into companies, connect the notebook on the LAN and integrate it with a test domain, and “show off” the product. Later, this some platform can be used for doing the Thick Server demos.

Personally, this week, I want to put in place more detailed plans for each of the above activities. We’ve been thinking on a daily basis what to do so far. Now that we’ve treaded into the waters and have a feel for it, we can look at swimming in slightly deeper waters. I also want to go through my notes of the past 2-3 months to consolidate many of the ideas together. Doing the Emergic picture helped in providing a nice view of our activities.

The one missing block in that picture is Services, and perhaps WiFi Communications. We’ll work on that sometime later.