Category: Uncategorized

Shrikant Patil points to a May 2000 Andy Grove interview in which he talks about his learnings. Some I liked:

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again–you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time–but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.

Best of all is this: “Take a bit of the future and make it your present.” It is what I have been doing for the past decade. Sometimes the future was on time, sometimes it wasn’t. Let’s see how it is with this time with Emergic.

Writes Jeremy Allaire, Macromedia’s CTO:

Our metaphors for social computing are under-developed. The common examples on the Internet today lack depth and creativity, and reflect the fact that real-time computing is essentially a new, uncharted world.

The most developed forms of social computing are multi-user online games. Many of these are full virtualizations of social worlds, attempting to model conflict and cooperation, notions of personal and communal health. Some, in fact, develop full systems of political, military and economic power. Unfortunately, the logic and interfaces for these are pretty simple — peer communication via text, enabling users to conspire with each other, and systems of killing and wealth accumulation which reflect themselves in ‘points’ that can be viewed by all players.

I’m interested in much more focused issues around real-time collaboration, as opposed to the development of ‘online social systems’ such as those found in online gaming. Simple things like metaphors for ‘taking turns’. The most common example of this is some shared design space where multiple users can jointly create some visual object (a.k.a. the shared whiteboard). Some legacy applications for ‘shared whiteboards’ use a mixed approach — a moderator can grant control to any given user, while users can ‘raise their hand’ to ask for control.

He goes on to give some interesting example. Most importantly, his articles makes one Imagine.

From Line56.com:

Enterprise 5.0 is angled toward letting portal managers simplify information management of relevant content through more than 100 personalized modules. Since Yahoo says more than 70 percent of business users already visit Yahoo from the workplace each month, the extension to enterprise services within the firewall is a logical one.

On the user front, 5.0 embeds “content in context” so that modules will dynamically refresh based on changes in surrounding modules and applications. A sales executive for example, could profile a series of client prospects, and with each new entry, surrounding business objects, both internal applications and external content, would reflect the change.

A research note from The Delphi Group puts the announcement in the perspective of a changing model of information delivery. “The direction here points to the content event of the decade: The emergence of the info-service appliance — the personalized Web content device(s) — that will set new paradigms for the delivery and use of professional information in the enterprise.”

Wired reports on the fifth Global Grid Forum, held recently in Edinburgh:

Most of the excitement centers on the integration of grid computing and Web services: The Web provides the service, and the grid offers the processing punch to deliver it. The GGF is finalizing the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) to deliver that integration.

“OGSA is very like TCP/IP. It won’t create any applications in itself but it will create a binding set of standards for services across the grid. It’s almost like the operating system for the grid,” says Tom Hawk, general manager, grid computing with IBM.

It is an advance that will be signaled by major improvements in services, speed and security of the Internet, but it will remain otherwise invisible to the users themselves.

Take single sign-on, for example, where a user signs-on once per session, and a separate site takes care of all the authentication and verification, delivering an OK signal to any sites the user visits.

Grid computing will allow a much higher degree of security for more speed, with the security processing handled by the wider grid rather than the already stressed-out home PC.

Gaming is another area where grid and Web services integration will create a new Internet on steroids. Right now, Sony and Microsoft are looking at distributed gaming, while Butterfly.net is another project developing massive multiplayer games using grid computing. A grid game developer’s kit is available at its website.

I’ll be writing later in my Tech Talk series about Grid Computing as one of the Tech’s 10X Tsunamis.

The Internet and e-Business seem to go hand-in-hand
nowadays. Companies want to know how the Internet can be leveraged for
business, just as their counterparts in the US seem to be using
it. This column explores five key trends which provide the background
for enabling e-Business in the Internet Age.

The Death of Distance

In a landmark Economist survey a few years ago, the author talked
about how geography was becoming irrelevant in telecom. The Net is
making this more so. While voice telephony itself has not much
affected much so far in India, email has made it so much more
convenient to keep in touch and conduct business with customers
worldwide. Internet telephony will speed this process, and will be
beyond regulators. The Net cuts through barriers imposed by space and
time. Businesses in India have to brace up for competition from
everywhere. At the same time, it opens up opportunities for Indian
companies to do business internationally. The world is becoming more
of a village, than ever before.

The Exchange Economy

A recent article in Fortune magazine talks about “infomediaries”,
online exchanges that link buyers and sellers by effectively
distributing market information. It says that infomediaries are a
cross between electronic catalogs, efficient marketplaces that greatly
reduce transaction costs, and content libraries, which help companies
make purchasing decisions. This trend will impact many businesses in
India, as the Net becomes the electronic meeting and trading
place. The combination of content, communications, community and
commerce is the foundation on which an infomediary will be built. This
is a big opportunity area in India: set up infomediaries for vertical
segments.

The Net as your Intranet

In India, as I have mentioned in earlier columns, the killer
application for corporates is e-mail. Limitations on wide area
bandwidth and high costs will make it easier for companies to
interconnect their offices in different locations via the Internet
than through their own network. The Net effectively becomes the
corporate Intranet server, seamlessly merging internal and external
information. Just as portals like Yahoo and Excite offer utility
services like email, chat and calendaring, companies will use these
services within their organisation, but served off the Internet. This
will allow access anytime and from anywhere. All that will be required
is a Web browser on the desktop.

The Powerful Consumer

As information dissemination via the Net becomes easier, more
companies will put up greater information on the Net. The result:
power to the consumer, who will easily compare product/service
features of competing products. One area where this is already
happening is banking, where sites offer comparisons of interest rates
offered from different banks on a single page! There will be an
increase in such comparator sites in India. Combined with the other
trends, it means that the future battles will be based on price and
service, not physical proximity to the customer.

Content meets Distribution

An interesting point was made by management guru CK Prahalad at a
seminar recently. India’s telephone connections may be 15-20 million,
but access to telephony is higher by a factor of 20-30, if not
more. PCOs have succeeded in taking telephony to the masses. Similarly
for the Internet. While abroad the ratio is nearly 1:1 between access
and connections, in India the access multiplier can become as high as
100 if we can set up a network of Internet kiosks (or community
centres) across the country. Cybercafes are the first generation
kiosks. They make Net access available without the need for a PC at
home or in the office. Building up a grassroots distribution system
via a network of kiosks (with, perhaps, a smart card payment system, a
regional-language browser and local content) will make Net access near
ubiquitous across the country within the next 5 years. What is
required: e-Services.

The Internet will have a much bigger impact on India than we can
imagine. We have to create our own business models; just trying to
replicate business models from the US is not the answer. And that is
where the opportunities of tomorrow lie.

The Internet is the flavour of the day. Is your company
Internet-ready? Take this quiz and find out. Score 1 point for every
Yes answer.

E-mail

E-mail is the killer application in today’s context on the
Internet. Email can and should be made critical to your
business. Email does not work if half your company has it, and the
other half doesn’t. If you can use email well, you will find that you
are not only able to communicate better and faster, but that your
communications costs will come down.

1. Do you have an email address of the form name@companyname.com or
name@companyname.co.in?
2. Is your email delivered to your desktop when you are in office?
3. Do you reply to your email personally (i.e., it is not printed
out by your secretary, marked up by you, and replied by your secretary?)
4. When you are out of the office, can you access your email anytime and from anywhere?
5. At all times, wherever you are, does your e-mail address remain the same?
6. Does the e-mail account for every person in the company satisfy the above
conditions, irrespective of their office location?
7. Are your email costs independent of the number of messages and the size of
the messages?

Internet Access

The Internet is today the primary source of news and business
information. Internet access is important for having people exposed to
new ideas and developments. For example, your marketing department can
use it source customers in international markets by visiting their
websites and writing to them.

8. Do all employees in your office have Internet Access from their desktops?
9. Can you monitor the sites people access, i.e., is the access through a Proxy Server?

Website

The website is your public face to the world. It is like being able to
publish your own newspaper. Think of it as being your global
office. Give it as much importance.

10. Does your company have a website?
11. Is the URL of the site independent of the service provider?
12. Was it updated in the past 2 weeks?
13. Do you have the latest developments on your company (e.g. financials,
press releases, new products) on the website?
14. Do you a Webmaster internally co-ordinating the website and its updates?
15. If an inquiry were to come through the website, would the
sender receive a reply within one business day?
16. Do you keep a database of the email addresses that came in via theseinquiries?
17. Does all your promotional material (business cards, letterheads,
brochures, ads) carry the website address?

Intranet/Extranet/E-Commerce

The Net can help you communicate better with your own employees, and a
closed user group (the companies/agencies you deal with on a regular
basis). Business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic
commerce are rapidly reshaping entire industries in the West. Expect
the same to happen in India — faster than you can imagine. The Net
cuts across geographical barriers — meaning that companies from
anywhere can sell to your clients. It also means that you can sell to
their clients.

18. Do you have an Intranet for your employees?
19. Do you have an Extranet for your customers?
20. Do you have a strategy to sell / do business via the Net?

Scoring

16-20:	Excellent, you are truly an eCorporate and ready for the Internet Economy.
12-15:	Good, but you need to still fix the holes, and move up the ladder.
8-11:	Average. While you have made some progress, there is a need for action on other fronts. Quickly.
< 8:	A lot of work lies ahead for you. You need to put together an Internet strategy first. Success in the past does not guarantee leadership in the future.

Recently, I visited the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing
Federation (GCMMF) in Anand. About 45 minutes drive from Baroda, Anand
is the unlikely place for the headquarters of India’s largest foods
brand. However, rightfully so, because this was the place where the
milk revolution in India started some fifty years back. The
cooperative revolution which has made India the largest producer of
milk in the world today.

When I began my presentation to Amul’s top executives on the Internet
in Anand, I was told by Mr BM Vyas, GCMMF’s managing director, “Amul
is not a food company. It is an IT company in the food business.”
Amul’s 15-word vision for the future ends with the phrase “information
technology integration.” Internet access was available right through
the presentation (via a VSAT through NIC’s network). The presentation
I had sent via email the previous night had already been set up by the
time I arrived. I have had a harder time in board rooms in South
Mumbai making Internet-based presentations!

But then, that is Amul. Always the
one to look ahead, leveraging IT. An epitome of the Networked Economy,
where distance is irrelevant. Each one of Amul’s 40+ offices has email
connectivity and sends daily reports on sales and inventory to Anand
on the backbone of an ERP system. Over the past five decades, Amul has
engineered a revolution in the foods business and created one of
India’s most trusted brands. To understand the impact the Internet can
have, it is interesting to examine what Amul has done with it over the
past two-and-a-half years. To see the future of the Internet in India,
it is important to understand how the Internet can improve the lives
of the farmers, the first rung in Amul’s chain of food production and
distribution.

March 1996: I got a call from Anand, saying that Amul wanted
to put its topical on IndiaWorld. The Cricket World Cup was on, and
Amul wanted its hoarding on the Internet also. Amul wanted a 6-month
advertising contract. A year earlier, we had set up IndiaWorld. We
were just getting used to selling ads for a week or a month. And here,
we were being asked to quote for a 6-month period! Within 3 hours, the
rate was finalised, and the next day, just in time for the semi-final,
Amul’s “Little Moppet” topical was up on the Internet on IndiaWorld’s
hope page. It has stayed there since.

The response that the topicals evoked was extraordinary. Emails came
in from all over, as people commented on the topicals and Amul. The
topicals have always struck a chord, and now suddenly, geography knew
no barriers. For Amul, it was first-hand feedback — within minutes of
the topical going up. An outdoor hoarding may evoke a wry smile, but
it is not interactive: how do you write to Amul? The email became the
link.

Amul’s home page (one of the first
five among Indian corporates) began by talking about the Amul Story
and the history of its topicals. Over the next few months, topicals
from previous years and recipes were added. Amul also become the first
company to have its web address regularly carried as part of its print
ads. Feedback continued to pour in. People wrote about how they grew
up with Amul butter, and how they missed it. Perhaps, Amul had a
bigger market for its products abroad.

August 1998: Amul Surabhi, the programme in Hindi on Indian
culture broadcast on Sunday nights, has completed five years on
national television. Surabhi carries a quiz question at the
end. Answers are normally sent on postcards. Amul announces an email
address where entries can be emailed. The first week sees 120
emails. By the eighth week, the number has climbed to 2600. The first
emails start coming in within minutes of the question being asked! The
convergence of three media: television drives people to dial out to
the Internet. And remember: the programme is in Hindi, and the
computer and the Internet speak English.

September 1998: Amul launches the
Amul World Cricket Rankings in
association with KHEL.COM. The
marriage of India’s finest brand with India’s most popular
sport. Rankings are updated after every match, encouraging people to
write in their comments. The first two weeks have seen over 500 people
writing in, with comments on what makes Amul and the Rankings so
special to them.

Within the next two months, Amul will launch its products in the US
market. Each of its products will not only carry a toll-free number,
but also its web address. The objective is to make it as easy as
possible for the consumer to send in the comments, and have it
redirected to the appropriate product manager.

Another example of the techno-savvy Amul is the commencement of
“Dial in Amul Icecream” service in Ahmedabad since last couple of
weeks. The phone no. is published in an advertisement in leading
dailies. Customer calls up the no. and orders min. Rs 50 worth of Amul
Icecream. Incentives like a Chocobar free on orders upward Rs 100 etc
are also built in. The delivery time is approx 30 minutes as
mentioned in the ad. The Order booking office calls up the area
distributor and informs about the customer order. Delivery boys with a
bike are kept ready at distributor point who get the stocks and rush
for delivery. Cash is collected at time of deliver. In peak hours, it
does take upto an hour but the customer does not complain. The
response has been very good.” Imagine ordering two litres of milk and
one pack of butter in the same way. From anywhere.

In the evening of my Anand visit, I visited a village to actually see
the chain of events which begins with the farmer delivering the milk
to the local milk co-operative society. Milk is delivered twice by a
day by the farmers, payment is collected 12 hours later. The farmer’s
passbook carries the details of the transactions. The record-keeping
is manual and paper-based. A tanker will come later and pick up the
chilled milk, and take to the dairy for processing. Two million milk
producers in 10,000 villages of Gujarat perform this task twice a
day. They collectively own 14 modern dairy plants which handle an
average of four million litres of milk each day. If the Internet has
to revolutionise communications in India, this is where it has to make
a difference.

Can India have 25 million daily Internet users by 2005? Can the
Internet really make a difference to us? We need technologies and
services which can (a) remove pain from people’s lives, and (b)
enhance their quality of life. Unless we can do both, there cannot be
a mass market. Over the coming weeks, we will explore ways and means
by which we can do so, and in the processs, build a Networked India.

Interactive Which are the services that cause pain in your lives? Can you think of a solution to the problem? The five best responses get a free copy of “The Amul Story” by Ruth Herediya. You can send in your comments, ideas and suggestions to Rajesh Jain at rajesh@indiaworld.co.in.

Part I of the IndiaWorld Story

Part II of the IndiaWorld Story

Part III of the IndiaWorld Story

Where does IndiaWorld go from here? Its a question we ponder on quite
a lot. There are no right or wrong answers. That only time will
answer. But being in the midst of it all, one develops insights which
can be quite different from what someone on the outside sees.

IndiaWorld began with content for NRI audiences, went into website
development, then created more sites for a growing domestic audience
and an international audience which wanted more than just news. The
wheel has come a full circle. The domestic audience is the key to the
success of a Web service, and that is something which few web masters
seem to realise. Everyone tries to target the NRI audience. The
numbers are there, but little else. Other than a handful of banks,
finance companies and financially-constrained real estate companies,
there isn’t really anyone else for whom the NRI clientele matters a
lot, AND who are willing to pay. Yes, the NRI audience gets hits on
the site, but not money. We began with NRIs because they were the
only ones who are out there. But we must not stop with them.

It is very important to create services which also interest the
domestic Indian audience. This group does not want to go online to
read newspapers and magazines, which they can buy for what they’d pay
to read a story online (the difference being the payment is for
telecom, and not content). And that is exactly what we have strived to
create in the last 10 months. Expect more of this in 1998. In the US,
one talks of audiences in terms of millions; in India it is still
thousands. And that will not change easily because the telecom
infrastructure will take time to improve. We don’t want to build a
business which is dependent on external growth constraints and policy
on which one have no control over. We need to go to where the eyeballs
are.

The Eyeballs are on the Corporate Desktop. This is where a significant
opportunity in India lies. Unlike abroad where there are many sources
of information between 9 am and 7 pm, in India there are no practical
ways to get information while you are at work. You still wait for the
9 or 10 pm news to find out what happened during the day on the
political front, and the morning newspapers as to what happened in the
world of business over 12 hours ago. India needs an information
service delivered over a phone line to the Corporate Network and
delivered on the Desktop via the Web front-end. That’s because
Corporate India, while being state-of-the-art on the LAN front, is 7-8
years behind on the WAN front. That’s where the opportunity lies:
Near-Real-Time Content Delivery on the Desktop over a nationwide
dial-up network. Use the Net for what it is: a distribution vehicle.

Another growth area is in Internet Strategy and Implementation. An
Internet Business Strategy does not mean a website on the Net. It
means envisioning the future (remember the last 2 lines of
Part III: your biggest competitor two
years from now might not even exist yet). It means ensuring that
email is present on every desktop in the organisation. It means
everyone in the company can access the Internet for mission-critical
website, and over dial-up (since leased lines are still way too
expensive). It means integrating the External website with an Intranet
and an Extranet, the former for employees, the latter for
customers. It means extending the system for business-to-business
commerce.

Developing Internet Vision is perhaps the most challenging aspect. How
will the Internet revolutionse your business? How would you do your
business if you started now, with the Net in place? This is where
organisations need to think through their strategy from first
principles. And perhaps, look at IndiaWorld’s example. India’s largest
Network of websites, reaches out to over 75,000 people via the Web and
an email service, generating 100,000+ page views daily, and arguably,
India’s only profitable Internet venture. It did not exist three years
ago!

We didn’t set out to do all this three years ago — some of it just
happened. We began with a belief that if we are in the business and if
we are close enough to our customers, the ideas will automatically
come. And they have!

The Internet is not about technology, it is about being better
informed, it is about communicating, it is about doing business. The
Internet is about doing the things that you do everyday — better,
faster, and without barriers. And in the process, perhaps radically
change — or create — a new industry. That, for us at IndiaWorld, is
the real essence of the Internet: the capability to translate ideas
into action rapidly, the knowledge that we are making a difference to
many thousands worldwide, the belief that we are at the forefront of
what is perhaps the most important development of our generation, a
conviction that battles of the future will not be decided by size or
money, but by the ability to out-think the competition. Three years
on, we feel we have just begun.

Part I of the IndiaWorld Story

Part II of the IndiaWorld Story

When we began IndiaWorld in early 1995, we had little idea what we
would be doing three years later. All we knew was that being early
would open up opportunities would others would not be able to spot
early. And that is exactly what happened.

IndiaWorld began by offering home pages and websites, the first Indian
company to do so. Banks, finance, real estate and publishers were
among the early clients. Setting up home pages did more than offering us a
source of revenue. It got us in direct touch with the domestic market,
and exposed us to requirements much earlier. IndiaWorld has been able
to downstream this advantage into multiple streams of business
(advertising, custom software development, and most recently,
messaging and communications) with the same clients.

The growth of the IndiaWorld website into a network of multiple sites
was also driven by the need to cater to a growing domestic
audience. Capturing mindshare in a segment early enough helps reduce
the investment it takes when there are many players in the business.
While India has been largely ignored by the international players
(there are no Indian flavours of international websites), it proffers
an opportunity for domestic companies to build up a strong
base. Having a strong local base is very important for long-term
success. It is a lesson Indian software majors have by and large
ignored.

What are some of the things we have learnt in the past three years?

Setting up a business in India is non-trivial. There is little help
from venture capitalists or from banks. Being small is almost a bane.
So, it is very important for a business to be profitable at an early
stage. Being acquired is not a long-term strategy (or for that matter,
even a short-term one). One has to build it and be able to run it for
quite some years to come. This environment makes it difficult for
entrepreneurs. However, it also offers a corollary: since resources
are always limited, it makes one think on optimisation their usage,
and on what one does. For a small business, there is no such thing as
a small mistake.

Because we had little or no access to external funds, we have to
ensure that each activity we took up was profitable. And
over a period of time, this ensured a very good base for the
business. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that short-term
profit motives are balanced by long-term strategic decisions. In our
case, the home pages business generated the short-term revenues, while
the investment in a Network of websites offered a longer-term
opportunity for building up page views to target advertisers.

In the Internet segment, it became quite evident early on that the
market will take time to grow. India was not going to go from 0 to a
million in a year, as we would have liked. In India, everything moves
a little slower! But we also catered to a significant audience which
was outside India. So, we had to keep up with the changes happening
worldwide. The Net itself was an incredible resource — in terms of
software, information and business ideas. It is important to spend
time on the Net and read emails coming in from surfers — they are the
best source of new ideas.

Technology plays an important role. We built our systems mostly from
public domain technology — Linux and Apache. This minimised the
starting cost, and also enabled us to implement projects rapidly. In
our case, the time from start to finish for launching
khoj was 10 days, for
KHEL, it was three weeks.
We find it easier to get support on Linux and Apache than on
some commercial products!

On needs to be almost-evangelical while marketing the Internet in
India. Technology isn’t hot in India, and the Net is still viewed more as a
technology, than a medium for communications, marketing and commerce.
That is why marketing requires more than adequate knowledge of the
technological platforms. One needs to convince companies that this is
the right approach. Its not as much as selling a product or service as
it is selling a vision — of doing things differently, of creating a
Business Strategy.

Internet Vision, Technology and Traffic — they’ve made IndiaWorld
what it is. Vision helps us see new market opportunities early,
Technology lets us speed projects to market and traffic helps us
generate the numbers which are required for making sites commercially
successful.

The opportunities on the Internet are immense. It requires one to
understand the fundamental changes which are being brought about by
computers and communications. Being able to think through the impact
the Net will have on future business will open up significant
opportunities for entrepreneurs and companies. Just think, your
biggest competitor two years down the line may not even be existing yet!

As the year ends, we look back at 1997 and ahead to 1998. (Part III
of the IndiaWorld Story will be carried next week).

1997 was the second full year of commercial Internet access in
India. The accounts grew to about 50,000 with 200 leased line
customers. This was the year Indian companies started setting up
websites in full gusto. Cybercafes sprouted up in many cities.
Tariffs for TCP/IP access have come down (starting Jan 1, it will be
as low as Rs 20 per hour). A whole variety of info-oriented websites
have been setup. Early adopters have set up Intranets, with some
Extranets (like NFDC). We have two magazines dedicated to the Indian
Internet (Web Vision and Biznet). Almost all the publishers got on to
the Net bandwagon. All in all, a year of reasonable progress.

The privatisation of the Indian Internet seems as distant as it did a
few months ago. The latest spanner comes from the Elections. It seems
unlikely that the guidelines will be announced by mid-Jan, and
indications are that the delay could be as much as 3-4 months. But,
what is clear is that by early 1998, there will be at least 3 ISPs:
VSNL, DoT and MTNL. While VSNL will continue to offer its services in
the major cities, DoT is likely to extend its reach into the
second-tier cities and MTNL will concentrate on Mumbai and Delhi.
With many companies waiting in the wings to come ISPs, 1998 will be
the year of significant Internet growth in India.

Companies are just starting to look at building Web-based
applications. This trend will accelerate during 1998. The next year
will also see the first forays into electronic commerce. ICICI Bank
has launched its Internet Banking service recently, and other banks
are likely to follow. Expect merchants to start selling, and
electronic payment mechanisms to be available.

For many websites, I expect 1998 to be the year when domestic traffic
exceeds international traffic. This is very important, since without a
reasonable local audience, Indian websites cannot survive financially.
Once you have a hundred thousand people accessing the Net regularly,
advertisers are bound to notice, and this will further speed up the
growth of the medium.

The defining moment of the Indian Internet in 1998 is likely to come
during the Indian elections: while TV will provide live coverage, I
expect the Internet to become an important alternate “channel”, and
one which people can customise. Try figuring out who is leading in
your constituency. Do you wait for TV to tell you in a few hours, or
do you hit the Net?