Broadband as the new Utility

Australian IT writes:

BROADBAND internet access is becoming so vital for businesses that it can be seen as a new utility comparable to water and electricity, a new United Nations report has revealed.

The UN’s Conference on Trade and Developments 2006 Information Economy Report revealed that growing importance of high-speed internet access was “disturbing news” for the developing world.

The reports authors said that broadband access remained scarce in the developing world while technology was exerting an ever greater influence on global business trends, UNCTAD warned.

“It’s absolutely necessary for countries because without broadband, it is difficult to have e-business,” Genevieve Feraud, one of the reports authors said.

Dialler App on Mobile

Paul Golding writes:

In my book and some workshops, I give an anatomy of a mobile phone. A bit of modem here, an operating system there, a sprinkle of APIs, MIDP sauce and so on. I include a “dialler application”, which is not often found on the average handset block diagram. It’s the thingy that takes numbers from the user and passes them to the “call processor” software wotsit, which in turn invokes a protocol stack to go send a “set-up call” message to the switch in the mobile network. Incrediblty boring, mundane and obvious. So obvious, that it doesn’t often get a mention in the block diagram/handset overview in many (most) treatments of the subject. Is this perhaps why it is so lacking in innovation? After all, it’s a dialler – it takes numbers and green-button pushes and does its stuff. Why tinker with this?

Telco marketers have come up with grand gestures of customer satisfaction like the theme of “connecting people” (it has its variants). However, about the only parameter they fiddle around with is the billing arrangement – call home all weekend for free and so on. When I dial a number, why can’t I get useful info about the number I’m dialling? For example, the rating of this plumber on plumber-pages-dot-com [don’t look – I made that up], or the time zone of the person I’m calling (good for all those Indian/US/Euro projects)?

TECH TALK: 15 Years as an Entrepreneur: 2000-4

The next four years after I sold IndiaWorld were very disappointing from a results point of view. I spent a year at Sify and after that went back to managing Netcore, a company that had been set up in 1998 to focus on enterprise messaging solutions. I tried many different things as I have documented on my blog over this period. From our thin client software solution (Emergic Freedom) to an all-in-one open-source based small business software (Pragatee) to an IMAP-based RSS Aggregator to a Digital Dashboard to a blog search and analytics site (BlogStreet) to trying a create Lego blocks for business software (Visual Biz-ic) to grid computing to rural infrastructure and services, there was very limited market success for each of them. Some products did not even go beyond the development stage. It was a tough period.

There was one promise I had made to myself after the sale of IndiaWorld. The past was history, and I had to look ahead. I did not want to sit on the laurels of that single success. I happened to then be at the right time at the right place (benefiting from some smart foresight). I could not take that one success to mean that everything I tried would necessarily work. In fact, the initial failures had chastened me and made me realise that success and failure are two sides of the same coin.

For a brief period, I toyed with the idea of not being an entrepreneur, but instead setting up a venture capital and investing in other people’s businesses. A few months later, I decided that it was not what I liked at all. I actually liked the challenges of managing a business that was part of being an entrepreneur. Experience had taught me that bad times don’t necessarily last and good times are few and far between. But it is the daily thrill of facing up to challenges and finding paths around them that I liked. Failure was not alien to me. But I did not want it to be my constant companion!

Many people remark to me that it must be wonderful to have all that money (which I got from selling IndiaWorld). For me, money never was an end goal. Money has to be an instrument to bring about change, or more specifically, make the future come alive. For me, money gave me the freedom to experiment and live even more in the future. If I start thinking about money, I’ll probably never end up doing anything else in life. For me, ideas matters more than money. I don’t like businesses which need lots of capital. I like to look at blue oceans and think up things that haven’t been thought of before. The single success of the past gave me the freedom to do all this without having to worry about criticism of my business capability from the extended family (as my father had to in the period after I returned from the US).

The four years from 2000 to 2004 were tough. Almost nothing that I tried worked. But I never stopped trying and reading, thinking and writing. It was in November 2000 that I started the Tech Talk series first on Samachar.com, and then also on my blog. It gave me a reason to sustain my reading, broaden the thinking, and share my thoughts through my writing. It also helped me build a framework for the opportunities in the future.

Tomorrow: 2004-6

Continue reading TECH TALK: 15 Years as an Entrepreneur: 2000-4

Building a Good Board

Fred Wilson has some suggestions:

1 – Have at least one founder on the board. Many VCs like to move the founders out of the way. They think they will be difficult and meddle. That’s always a risk, but the benefit of having founders on the board vastly outweighs any downside in my mind. Having too many founders on the board is bad too. You want a diverse set of people on your board, not any one concentrated group.

2 – Keep the number of VCs on the board to two or three. The number of VCs on the board is in inverse proportion to the success of the deal.

3 – Local board members are better. They will come to the meetings. Avoid too many board members who live elsewhere. They’ll call into the meetings. Trust me. And that sucks.

4 – Have at least one and ideally two industry insiders on the board who are independent of the founders and the VCs. They should bring operating experience. They should be mentors to the CEO. They should be local so they come to the meetings.

The Internet of Things

Business Week has an interview with British Telecom’s resident futurologist Robin Mannings:

Welcome to the so-called ‘internet of things’ which will replace today’s internet of people and data. Everyday items from TVs to toothbrushes, sports equipment and even buildings will have in-built computing power and wireless that will allow them to communicate and share information.

Current rollouts of RFID tagging will be dwarfed by the future development of sensor networks, according to Robin Mannings, BT futurologist and research foresight manager.

He told silicon.com: “RFID is just the tip of the iceberg and the iceberg is ubiquitous computing – more or less everything being a computer.”

Telecom Bundles

The World In 2007 (from the Economist) writes:

As a result, firms that used to be in separate industriestelephone operators, internet service providers and cable-TV companieshave all suddenly found themselves in the same business. Cable companies now offer broadband internet and voice services over networks that used to carry just television; telecoms firms have responded by upgrading their networks to carry television signals; and internet service providers have branched out into telephone and video services. In the new converged world, any firm that can deliver high-speed data to customers over its network can offer any or all of these services. And offering all of them together in a bundle is thought to be a winning strategy. The ultimate bundle is called the quadruple playthe combination of fixed and mobile telephony, broadband internet access and multichannel television. If your telephone company and a host of rivals are not already offering you such a bundle, you can be sure that they will start to do so in 2007.

The YouTube Effect

Wired writes that TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs.

The digital revolution is equally terrifying to Madison Avenue, which has been footing the bill for Gilligan’s Island, The New Republic, The Family Circus, Rush Limbaugh, TRL, and The Wall Street Journal forever. Until now, advertisers have underwritten mass media to reach mass audiences. Indeed, they’ve paid increasing premiums for the opportunity as audiences have shrunk, because even in a fragmented media world, the largest fragment network TV is the most valuable. But now they realize that they are losing not only mass but critical mass.

They see the old model collapsing before them, and they have $67 billion to spend and no idea where to spend it. Because, at least until recently, the Internet has lacked both the riveting content and ad space inventory to absorb it. But what if there were a means to approximate the reach and mesmerizing power of television online? What if there were a medium with not only the grip of TV but the vast scale to absorb all those ad dollars? And what if, as a bonus, the medium were able not merely to command eyeballs for marketers but to target content especially relevant to what the marketer is selling?

Talent War

Venture Beat has a column by Auren Hoffman who writes that the big high-tech companies are losing the talent war:

Big companies are losing their A players and theyre struggling to attract B players. In an industry where everything is about people, large tech companies are in trouble because they are losing the talent war. And keep in mind, an A player in an organization can usually produce the same results as three B players.
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At a big company youre stuck with corporate politics, paralysis decision making, and a lack of getting things done. At a small company youre having fun, pursuing your dream, and actually getting things done.