Rules for creating content for the web
Filed under Innovation in India, Bloggers, Media, Society, Web on Jan 5, 2006 Add comment
From the Financial Express comes this interesting data point:
The average time spent on the internet is on a rise. From 58 minutes on weekdays in the Indian Readership Survey (which tracks media consumption) July-December 2003, it increased to 63 in IRS July-December 2005.
[Printer Friendly Version]
While 63 minutes sounds like a lot, email and instant messaging probably take up the lions share of the time.
What is left is very little time and attention, possibly as low as 10 minutes. All content creators (including blogs) are essentially competing for this small slice of time before the Internet user “switches off” and returns to her real life.
This leads to the following rules for creating web content:
- Be pithy! – No one has time to read/watch/listen to long anything any more.
- Keep it simple – Busy pages are a turn off for Internet users, as surely as a long queue is a turn off for a traveller or a shopper.
- Dont make the user register for free content – “Free registration” is not really free because it makes the user give up his most precious asset – time!
- Be easy on the eye – Use easy to read fonts and pleasing color schemes – make sure your ads comply to the same guidelines.
- Summarize, organize and itemize – Make your content easy to skim through, because thats all you are going to get anyhow.
I am sure many of these rules are fairly obvious – but I am continually amazed by the number of websites that dont get it.
Get out of IT and into science-based enterprises
Filed under Software, Society on Dec 20, 2005 Add comment
I discovered this gem of a post by Dave Pollard. Although it was written more than a year ago, like all true masterpieces, it sounds like it was written yesterday.
...... IT people are the sharpest analytical thinkers. They have a passion for their craft, and are the world’s best collaborators, but they rarely have the opportunity or the budget to do more than a minuscule portion of what they know could be done, and which could bring real value to the organization. To senior executives (an echelon IT people rarely penetrate—in most organizations IT is a career dead-end and a revolving door), IT are the menial technical people who make sure the clunky, horribly designed (by senior executive committees), outmoded, centralized information systems spit out their management reports. The revolutions in open source, desktop, connectivity, collaboration and personal content management technology that have been going on might as well be occurring in a parallel universe as far as senior executives are concerned. The only pleasure most IT people I know get from their jobs is working with wonderful, sympathetic IT colleagues. And perhaps they also get cold comfort knowing they’re part of the minority in IT who aren’t unemployed or working at McDonalds or Wal-Mart since the dot-com bust. Most of them tell me they do their best work outside the office, outside of working hours, online collaborating and conversing with people who appreciate what they can do.
That’s fun, and intellectually rewarding, but, let’s face it, it doesn’t really accomplish much. Although IT people can create wonderful software, quickly, effectively, to accomplish almost any information processing need, it’s all really just a hobby. It rarely makes the world a better place. Most of the world isn’t online at all, and most of the people online are still struggling with simple things like e-mail. And I don’t think that’s going to change in another generation: As I’ve said before, unless a technology is dead easy to use, it will never catch on, will never become mainstream, will never be more than a passing fad. All the social software tools, blogs, and cleverly coded programs that have been and are being developed are just a recreational drug for us, a tiny minority of the population bored with the inanity of our 9-5 jobs. It’s largely a hobby destined to be no more significant in historical terms than ham radio, CBing, or scrapbooking. The best that can be hoped is that all this software will ultimately be built into very simple, ubiquitous tools that will allow people to network better, find people and communicate with them more easily, and learn faster and more easily.
Stack those modest benefits up against the crises facing our world today: Poverty, violence and war, disease, inequality, crime, famine, overpopulation, pollution, waste, cruelty to children and to animals, addiction, mental illness, corporatism, lack of access to and poor quality of health care and education, fraud, political corruption, stress, oil shortages, water shortages, spousal abuse, consumerism, tyranny, ignorance, hate-mongering, social disintegration, abuse of power. There may well be answers to many of these problems, but they’re not going to come from IT tools developed and used by a small minority separated from the rest of the planet by a vast and growing digital divide. In fact, no one is looking for solutions to these problems. The few people that care about these problems are busy treating their symptoms, mostly as volunteers, and have neither the time nor the resources to address the underlying causes.
Here’s my point: For restless and dissatisfied IT people, unlike their KM counterparts, there is an alternative, a career path that could really make a difference: Science-Based Enterprises. Your bright, disciplined analytical minds are desperately needed to develop practical new technologies that can solve the global problems of our world. But instead the majority of you are marginalized in IT, one of the few branches of science and technology that really can’t help solve these problems. And paradoxically this is happening at precisely the time when there is more knowledge about science and technology, more power of individual and collaborative enterprise to introduce new technologies at a modest cost than ever before.
[How to Save the World]
Stop whining about outsourcing
Filed under Innovation in India, Software, U.S. on Dec 20, 2005 Add comment
David Patterson says it better than I ever could:
I’m sick of hearing all the whining about how outsourcing is going to migrate all IT jobs to the country with the lowest wages.
The paranoia inspired by this domino theory of job migration causes American and West European programmers to worry about India, Indian programmers to worry about China, Chinese programmers to worry about the Czech Republic, and so on. Domino theorists must think all IT jobs will go to the Republic of Elbonia, the extremely poor, fourth-world, Eastern European country featured in the Dilbert comic strip.
I’m tired of this whining for many reasons. First, even if it were true, is there anything you could do to stop it? Second, it’s not true. Third, this Chicken Little rumor-mongering is discouraging young people from studying computer science. Finally, there are a lot more productive ways to spend your time than spreading false rumors, such as improving your job skills.
Let’s pretend for a moment that the domino theory is true. What could you do to stop IT outsourcing? Remember that the I in IBM stands for International, and both IBM and Hewlett-Packard have long had employees around the world. What legislation could stop international companies from hiring overseas? In addition, if a country passes laws to reduce layoffs, it makes international companies reluctant to create jobs there, just as economists predict. Hence, the “solution” could worsen the problem.
[Stop Whining About Outsourcing!]
8 Rules for the Indian software market
Filed under Innovation in India, Software, Business on Dec 19, 2005 2 comments
Srikant Sastri writes about several rules that multinational companies need to heed if they wish to enter the Indian software market successfully.
Eight Golden Rules for the Indian Market
Yet as many software vendors have experienced success entering India, many others have made time-wasting missteps. For software companies entering the Indian market today, there are 8 Golden Rules to follow to ensure success. These rules are based on experiences of companies which have already entered the Indian market and have been successful in their endeavor.Rule 1: Start Early. The mistake most companies make while entering the Indian market is that they delay their market entry until they feel that the Indian market can give them substantial returns. Successful companies have been those who have had the foresight and perseverance to enter the Indian market early. Indian customers by nature need comfort that a company is in India for the long run and only when a consistent presence is established, do they then adopt the company’s products.
Rule 2: Have a Long-Term Vision. Companies must take the long view in India. The typical time horizon for success must be between 3-5 years. The India initiative must have strong backing from the corporate headquarters and reporting must be to the VP of emerging markets or a similar role.
Rule 3: Establish a Direct Presence. Having an Indian distributor does not count as entering the Indian market. Distributors in India do not do market development nor do they help in positioning the company. The company must conduct market development and brand communication for themselves in India via a direct in-country presence.
Rule 4: Fund Market Development. To achieve good reach, awareness and market presence, software companies entering India must assign a “Market Development Fund” with an 18-24 month payback period. The fund will be used for marketing “air-cover” and local headcount. Indian CIOs give credence to strong brand/company identity.
Rule 5: Find the Right Messaging. Product and technology adoption in India lags behind that of the U.S. (Fifteen-inch monitors and Windows 98 are still popular in India, for example.) There are also regional skews within India making it seem like multiple markets. Given the lag in product and technology adoption, the right messaging can make the difference. Therefore appropriate, localized, relevant messaging is the key to effective marketing.
Rule 6: Leverage Pricing. Software marketers can use pricing as a powerful weapon. In order to build volumes and overcome piracy, vendors should think unconventionally. Dramatic and innovative pricing models often deliver value and business sense for customers. Think 10,000 customers, not 1,000.
Rule 7: Forge the Right Partnerships. The right partnering makes all the difference in India. Vendors can work with multiple partners based on which have expertise with specific segments or customers. It isn’t necessary to create exclusive partnerships. These partnerships help software vendors to generate demand directly.
Rule 8: Service Revenues. Indian customers are no different than any others – they expect world-class services. That includes support, training and professional services. Offering a full spectrum of services – product customization, training, education, support, and so on – is crucial to satisfying customers in India. Typically, overseas support is not acceptable to Indian customers. A partner-driven model works best in most situations if volume is sufficient. Importantly, these services revenues can contribute up to 50 percent of a software company’s Indian market revenues over time.
[SandHill.com | Sales & Marketing | 8 Golden Rules for the Indian Market]
I can add one more rule here:
9. India is not a single market: There is really no such thing as the Indian market. India is much more like a continent and much less like a homogenous market. The closest analogy is probably greater Europe – Estonia and England have very little in common in terms of a common market for software, especially enterpise software. Any strategy that thinks of India as this homogenous market of a billion people is probably asking for trouble.
Wipro acquires chip design company NewLogic
Filed under Innovation in India, Hardware, Business on Dec 19, 2005 Add comment
The NewLogic acquisition will give Wipro the intellectual property, services, and the expertise in the communications R&D business. NewLogic’s cores are used in complex wireless applications such as wireless LAN and Bluetooth.
This acquisition will also give a geographic advantage to Wipro because NewLogic has a good customer base in Europe. Currently, Europe contributes to 9 percent of Wipro’s revenue for R&D services in embedded products.
The R&D services unit helps to differentiate Wipro from Indian rivals such as TCS and Infosys.
“[This business] is very critical because the margins on R&D outsourcing are very high and so are the barriers to entry,” Mr. Chowdhry said. “In this space, you need to have a very strong, experienced, and talented team that is comprised of PhDs.”
[RED HERRING | Wipro Buys NewLogic for $56M]
Learning from failures
Filed under Software, Bloggers, Media, Society on Dec 19, 2005 2 comments
Meredith, a librarian, describes her failures implementing wikis and blogs at her workplace, and the lessons she learnt from it.
After discussing the idea with the Library Director, I created a staff wiki and then spent many hours taking all of the existing content from the Web site and plugging it into the wiki, organized in the new Web page hierarchy I’d developed for the redesign. I then explained to the staff that they could go into the wiki and update and edit the content for the sections. I gave detailed instructions on how to use the wiki and told them that I’d be happy to give any of them a one-on-one explanation. This was almost 2 months ago, and so far one other person has gone into the wiki. No one else has even bothered to look at it, including people who had told me it was a good idea. Yes, wikis are easy to use, but many of the people I work with are averse to new technologies, especially those they don’t absolutely have to learn for their job. I learned something important from this: the tool may be the right one for the job, but if the staff isn’t ready for it, no one will use it.
[Information Wants To Be Free » Blog Archive » Technology Implementation: My Brilliant Failures]
Primer on information extraction
Filed under Search on Dec 19, 2005 2 comments
If you ever feel the need to build your own Google, this latest article from ACM Queue is all you need to get started.
Information extraction aims to do just this—it is the process of filling the fields and records of a database from unstructured or loosely formatted text. Thus (as shown in figure 1), it can be seen as a precursor to data mining: Information extraction populates a database from unstructured or loosely structured text; data mining then discovers patterns in that database. Information extraction involves five major subtasks (which are also illustrated in figure 2):
[Information Extraction: Distilling Structured Data from Unstructured Text]
- Segmentation finds the starting and ending boundaries of the text snippets that will fill a database field. For example, in the U.S. Department of Labor’s continuing education extraction problem, the course title must be extracted, and segmentation must find the first and last words of the title, being careful not to include extra words (“Intro to Linguistics is taught”) or to chop off too many words (“Intro to”).
- Classification determines which database field is the correct destination for each text segment. For example, “Introduction to Bookkeeping” belongs in the course title field, “Dr. Dallan Quass” in the course instructor field, and “This course covers…” in the course description field. Often segmentation and classification are performed at the same time (using a finite-state machine, as described in a later section).
- Association determines which fields belong together in the same record. For example, some courses may be described by multiple paragraphs of text, and other courses by just one; extraction must determine which field values from which paragraphs are referring to the same course. In the course extraction example, association is a fairly coarse-grained operation, but, if you are extracting records about trade negotiation meetings from news articles, then determining which governmental minister met with which other representative to talk about trade between which two countries can involve fairly subtle linguistic cues about relations and associations. This step is sometimes referred to as relation extraction for the case in which two entities are being associated. Commercial products that do relation extraction are rarer than those that do only segmentation and classification.
- Normalization puts information in a standard format in which it can be reliably compared. For example, the times for one course may be given as “2-3pm”, another as “3pm-4:30pm”, and another as “1500-1630”, but we would like a search to be able to detect any overlap. Obviously, simple string comparisons will not do the job here; the data should be converted to a standard (likely numeric) representation. Normalization is relevant to string values also; for example, given the name “Wei Li” and “Li, Wei,” a standard ordering of first and last names should be chosen. Issues of normalization may often be intertwined with deduplication, the last subtask, described next.
- Deduplication collapses redundant information so you don’t get duplicate records in your database. For example, a course may be cross-listed in more than one department, and thus appear on more than one Web page; it will then be extracted multiple times, but we want only one record for it in our database. In news articles this may also involve determining that “Condoleezza Rice,” “the U.S. Secretary of State,” and “Rice” are all referring to the same person, but that “Secretary of State Powell” and “Rice, Wheat, and Beans” are referring to something else. Usually, commercial products for deduplication are offered separately from segmentation, classification, and association, although later I will argue that they should be integrated. It is somewhat of a joke in the community that this process of collapsing alternative names itself has so many different names. In the database community it is known as record linkage or record deduplication; in natural language processing it is known as co-reference or anaphora resolution; elsewhere it is known as identity uncertainty or object correspondence. In these different contexts the problem has different subtleties, but fundamentally they are all the same problem.
Could Web 3.0 be 3D ?
Filed under Web on Dec 17, 2005 Add comment
Joi Ito is already thinking of Web 3.0, and it might be 3D:
While we’re at labeling the web x.0. Philip Torrone jokingly mentioned to me the other day (inside Second Life) that 3D was Web 3.0. I agree. 3D and VR have been around for a long time and there is a lot of great work going on, but I think we’re finally getting to the phase where it’s integrated with the web and widely used. I think the first step for me was to see World of Warcraft (WoW) with its 4M users and the extensible client. The only machine I have where I can turn on all of the video features is my duel CPU G5. On my powerbook I have to limit my video features and can’t concurrently use other applications while playing. Clearly there is a hardware limit which is a good sign since hardware getting faster is a development we can count on.
[Joi Ito’s Web: Web x.0]
The comments on the above post reveal the scepticism that surrounds anything 3D outside of movies and games.
I am getting increasingly intrigued by the possibility of immersive environments and human computer interfaces that look and behave more like the real world.
More on these topics in the months to come.
Inspiration for the Indian mobile industry
Filed under Wireless on Dec 16, 2005 2 comments
Sure, news about i-mode is a little dated, but it is startling to see how similar it is to conditions in India today.
So why is the mobile web and particularly i-Mode so popular in Japan. There are many factors such as the high cost of both dial-up and broadband wired Internet. In 1999, when i-Mode was launched, only 23% of Japanese had access to the Internet by computer – the phone became their computer. Home computers are still less common in Japan than in the US and Western Europe and are perceived as hard to use compared with the simplicity of i-Mode! So how is it that Japanese find i-Mode easy to use and most Westerners believe that WAP is frustratingly difficult? If you look at the relatively few i-Mode sites that are in English, you will be surprised at how dull and sparse they look. There are several reasons for this. For one, almost all the graphics in i-Mode are provided by emoji, a collection of over 200 small icons that are resident in the handset’s ROM and thus don’t appear if you aren’t using an i-Mode browser. Cost is another factor. i-Mode has traditionally been a metered service and rates are high by Western standards, .20 Yen per 128 byte packet (about 2 cents per KB) although unlimited data plans have recently been introduced at around 4000 Yen ($33.20) per month. As high as these rates appear, they are cheap compared with the cost of making a phone call which is around 80 cents per minute (incoming calls are free). Keeping i-Mode pages small and task oriented makes i-Mode cost effective. Checking a train schedule or sending an email with i-Mode costs less than 5 US cents. Finally, i-Mode pages seem designed for utility rather than flashiness, i-Mode developers, who probably use i-Mode daily themselves, must know that unless a page is easy and inexpensive to use it will not get traffic.
[Webcams and i-Mode at Wap Review]
How King Kong was made
Filed under Software, Media, U.S. on Dec 16, 2005 1 comment
vfxworld.com has a great technical writeup on the immense amount of work that went into making King Kong. (free reg. reqd.)
To achieve this breakthrough, Weta’s facial capture builds on the program called Facial Animation Coding System (FACS) developed by Paul Ekman at the University of California at San Francisco. “The basic idea is that human muscles can only work in groups that form expressions,” explains senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri. “You can reverse engineer that by reading the patterns on someone’s face and figuring out what muscles activate it, pull everything into this pattern by starting with a neutral pose and going from there. Then you can infer what expressions are being made from those groups. But whereas with Gollum we sculpted all the group of expressions by hand, with Kong they were able to codify it by building an underlying muscle system to drive the facial performance instead of having to sculpt it all. And then by using the MoCap techniques on Andy, they were able to figure out what those facial expressions must have been.
“What worked well for that was we were able to figure out a system that could be driven not only by motion capture but also by keyframe animation. So we could go back and forth between the two. But you always got Kong out of the deal. You could keep him on model easily, with room to vary. What was interesting was that we were able to learn what the eyes were doing from the motion capture. You couldn’t track the eyes directly, but it was the same logic because once you figured out what the muscles in the face were doing, you could infer what the eyes were doing from the muscles around them. So we got that from our early tests with motion capture.”
In reality, only about 25% of Kong was performed through facial motion capture, with 125 markers on Serkis’ face. The vast majority was keyframed because of the physical demands of the performance, with Kong running, jumping, climbing and battling dinosaurs. “Even the motion capture work was run through the animators to make sure it was true to character because you don’t want the machine making all the choices for you,” Letteri adds.
[..... >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles < < .....]
I got an award too!
Filed under Innovation in India, Bloggers on Dec 16, 2005 1 comment
I am honored to get one of Pundita’s 2005 Weblog awards, alongwith a group of bloggers that leaves me feeling quite humbled.
Sudan Watch
For reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses in Sudan and other countries; for fingering the world’s biggest scoundrels and for calling again and again to conscience.Sumedh Mungee
For discourses on ICT innovations/business and how they are shaping this era; for windows on India’s role in the ICT era and the impact on global rural development.Simon World
For courage in hammering away from inside China at China’s regime about democracy issues.Untimely Thoughts
For expert analysis of Russia’s vast transitions in this era and their global impact.American Future
For massive research projects of importance to US foreign/defense policy.The Fourth Rail
For consistently delivering a coherent, informative picture of US military progress in Iraq.Belmont Club
The war’s most formidable polemicist.The Glittering Eye
[Pundita: Pundita’s 2005 Weblog Awards: the polite version]
The blogger’s blog—finds, tracks and analyzes blogs to watch and thoughtful essays on the full spectrum of issues. Also, for those who consume heavy-duty news virtually 24/7, a place to escape for a few minutes and remember the simple things in life.
Becoming simple is not easy
Filed under Business on Dec 14, 2005 Add comment
Wonderful article in rediff.com (from FastCompany)
In the late 1990s, Royal Philips Electronics was a slow-footed behemoth whose products, from medical diagnostic imaging systems to electric shavers, were losing traction in the marketplace. By 2002, a new CEO, Gerard Kleisterlee, determined that the company urgently needed to address the dynamic global marketplace and become more responsive to consumers’ changing needs.
Philips deployed researchers in seven countries, asking nearly 2,000 consumers to identify the biggest societal issue that the company should address. The response was loud and urgent. “Almost immediately, we hit on the notion of complexity and its relationship to human beings,” says Andrea Ragnetti, Philips’s chief marketing officer. Consumers told the researchers that they felt overwhelmed by the complexity of technology.
Some 30% of home-networking products were returned because people couldn’t get them to work. Nearly 48% of people had put off buying a digital camera because they thought it would be too complicated.
Strategists recognized a huge opportunity: to be the company that delivered on the promise of sophisticated technology without the hassles. Philips, they said, should position itself as a simple company. Ragnetti was dumbstruck.
“I said, ‘You must be joking. This is an organization built on complexity, sophistication, brainpower.’ ” But he and Kleisterlee responded with an even more audacious plan. Rather than merely retooling products, Philips would also transform itself into a simpler, more market-driven organization.
That initiative has been felt from the highest rungs of the organization to the lowest. Instead of 500 different businesses, Philips is now in 70; instead of 30 divisions, there are 5.
Even things as prosaic as business meetings have been nudged in the direction of simplicity: The company now forbids more than 10 slides in any PowerPoint presentation. Just enough, they decided, was more.
The campaign, christened “Sense and Simplicity,” required that everything Philips did going forward be technologically advanced—but it also had to be designed with the end user in mind and be easy to experience.
[How to make your products simpler]
Complexity is most often due to an inability to decide. What are the three most important features of this product ? What are the ten most likely tasks that a user must do with this interface ? Inability to answer these questions leads to over-hedging, i.e. “lets do both“, which is a slipperly slide away from complexity.
Why you should get into the mobile market
Filed under Wireless on Dec 14, 2005 Add comment
Just in case you missed the deafening hype around anything mobile these days, here it is one more time:
The mobile market is big—really big. A report by CTIA, an international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, estimates there are more than 180 million wireless customers in the U.S.—that’s a lot of tiny screens. From business applications to software, digital content and more, the sky’s the limit for innovative entrepreneurs. KidsOK in the United Kingdom, for one, has developed software that allows parents to track their children by pinging their cell phones with a text message.
Paul Scanlan, co-founder of MobiTV, a Berkeley, California, TV and radio service provider for mobile phones, says opportunities abound because many carriers are giving away phones with advanced capabilities, like watching TV. And as Scanlan, 35, points out: “In the internet market, most services [are] free, but in mobile, everybody is conditioned to pay for it.”
At some point, though, consumers won’t be able to afford all those cool services, right? Scanlan, whose business has grown from 15 to 115 employees in just two years, observes that increased data plans have been accompanied by cheaper voice plans, so consumers spend about the same amount. Huge market, better hardware and stable pricing—maybe it’s time for you to get mobile, too.
[The Hot List]
Predictions for 2006 from an Indian perspective
Filed under General, Innovation in India, Software, Media, U.S., ecommerce, Society, Web, Search on Dec 13, 2005 Add comment
[I originally wrote this article for VentureWoods, a new group blog bringing together a diverse group of Indian VCs, entrepreneurs and engineers.]
It is the season to be jolly – but for those of us who compulsively seek out the next big thing, it is the season to ponder on the future and plan our strategy.
So, in no particular order, here are some of my predictions for 2006.
1. The Web 2.0 bubble will burst: This will happen due to two reasons. Firstly, it will become clear that most, if not all Web 2.0 sites have been unable to reach out beyond the very limited geek-dominated market of early adopters (illustration: even the supposedly wildly popular del.icio.us service has just 300,000 users. An anecdotal review of the popular links on del.icio.us will reveal this as well). Secondly, the acquisition spree seen in 2005 will slow as the big players digest their acquisitions of 2005 and re-evaluate some of their more outlandish purchases (Skype comes to mind). This time though the bubble will burst quietly with websites getting shut down quietly without much buzz. Not too many employees will be displaced as Web2.0 startups have hired very sparingly.
2. Yahoo will continue upswing: Yahoo will continue to make mindshare inroads into Google’s territory because of Yahoo’s superior partnering strategies (e.g. its recent partnership with Six Apart for MovableType) and also the fact that Yahoo “gets” content much more than Google does (also see prediction #8 below). Towards the end of 2006, Yahoo will start to emerge as a bigger threat to Microsoft than Google.
3. Outsourcing: A shortage of good tech workers, an unsustainable spree of pay hikes and continuing competition from companies like Accenture and IBM will start impacting the major Indian outsourcing companies. Also, 2005 has seen a trickle of good engineers leaving big Indian IT companies to join startup technology companies. 2006 will see a flood. Startups in India will have a good hiring year.
4. The blogosphere expands and consolidates: Professional, political and passionate bloggers will continue to see a fast growth in their readership. Overall the blogosphere will start to consolidate attention and resources into a relatively few trusted blogs. “me-too” bloggers will start to drop off the blogosphere, as the novelty of blogging wears off. With the decline of me-too bloggers, advertising-driven blogging sites will start to see a decline in growth rate. The absolute number of bloggers will still see a sharp increase over 2005 (the number of blogs could possibly reach 150 million)
5. Resurgence of newspapers: 2006 will be the year newspapers make a big comeback. This comeback will be led by a few simple but powerful trends. Firstly, newspapers will increasingly recruit subject specialist bloggers and hyperlocal bloggers over more generalist journalists. This will allow them to replace boring newspeak with much more insightful articles from writers whom people already know and trust. Secondly, a readership already weary with the tedium of keeping track of too many blogs will return to the relative comfort of reading newspapers (albeit online). Whether newspapers can successfully monetize this new interest will be the next big question.
6. Consumer storage will be hot: As the average consumer continues to amass gigabytes of data, the storage, backup and disaster recovery problem will be hot. 2006 will see several technologies that were hitherto reserved for mission-critical IT networks retargetted towards individual users and small businesses.
7. Major breakthrough in the attention problem: As companies and individuals slowly start to realize that they are losing productivity because of too many interrupts (email, IM, phone calls, ...), a major breakthrough technology will alleviate the problem to a large extent.
8. Content will become more valuable: Due to several factors (such as Google’s algorithm-driven approach to ranking relevancy and the Web2.0 bubble), content in 2005 is being treated as a mere commodity. 2006 will start to see a reversal of this trend, as content creators (e.g. bloggers, photographers and musicians) get a more equitable share of online advertising revenues. This trend will be driven by a simple consumer behavior – consumers prefer better content over better technology or delivery mechanisms. This inherently means that content needs to be valued higher than it currently is.
9. U.S. real-estate slowdown will have global consequences: Interest rates, U.S. bond prices, U.S. consumer confidence, dollar exchange rates (and hence the offshoring business), combined with the huge (and increasing) U.S. trade deficit are all pieces of a fragile domino game. This game could easily turn ugly if the U.S. real estate market accelerates its slowdown, or even worse, turns out to be a bubble. Bad news in the U.S. housing market could trigger a global recession.
10. Uncertainty in China will cause investors to hedge bets: The risk of social unrest will weigh on the minds of investors in China. The heavy handed approach of the Chinese government might provide stability in the short term, but it still risks the chaos of a possible widespread unrest in the medium term. Whether India will gain from this is unclear. Investors might look at even safer bets such as eastern europe, south america and south africa.
Predictions can never be objective – they are heavily biased by an individual’s perspective, his network of advisors and his mental model of the world around him. I’d love to get your feedback on these predictions.
Lastly, thanks to Alok Mittal for inviting me to post on VentureWoods.
How to come up with breakthrough ideas
Filed under Innovation in India on Dec 1, 2005 Add comment
Fantastic article on how to organize your mind for coming up with breakthrough ideas for your business – a tool for disruptive innovation.
The big point is this: trying to compete with existing products, services, or ideas by tuning the SAME set of sliders everyone else uses is a painful path. The breathrough ideas usually come from adding new sliders! There are exceptions, though—if you tune an existing slider in a dramatic or counterintuitive way, you might end up with a breakthrough edge, at least temporarily.
[Creating Passionate Users: How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas]
Rural Internet in India
Filed under Innovation in India on Dec 1, 2005 Add comment
I have previously written about the need for do-it-yourself rural development.
n-logue is doing exactly this:
n-Logue was established to serve the information and communications needs of people living in small towns and rural areas of India. To rapidly scale its operations, the company employs a three-tiered business model based on the belief that delivery and management of Internet services should devolve to the level of the supply chain that comes closest to the user of the service. This decentralised model of operation draws, in large part, from the success of cable TV operations in India.
At the top level is n-Logue, which provides equipment, training and support to the LSPs and kiosks, and also takes care of regulatory and connectivity issues. At the second level, n-Logue identifies and partners with a local entrepreneur (also called a Local Service Provider or LSP) in every area it wishes to operate. These LSPs find subscribers, provide services and collect payments. At the bottom level are the village kiosks, which provide services and information aimed at the rural market. With the help of n-Logue, the LSPs recruits the local entrepreneurs who set up the kiosks.
Thus there are up to three business entities involved in the operation – n-Logue, the LSP and a kiosk operator. All three must thrive for the operation to succeed.
[n-Logue Communications Pvt Ltd.]
This is going to be big. Local is the new global.
U.S. foreign student enrollments decline
Filed under U.S. on Nov 14, 2005 Add comment
The number of foreign students enrolled in American universities declined slightly in the 2004-5 academic year, according to a survey to be released today, suggesting that a more significant drop that took place in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001 might be abating.
About 565,000 students from foreign countries were studying in undergraduate and graduate programs at American universities, a decline of 1 percent from the previous academic year, according to an annual survey by the Institute of International Education that was financed by the State Department.
A survey released by the organization last year showed that foreign student enrollment had declined by 2.4 percent in the 2003-4 academic year, the first decrease in foreign students in three decades.
[Foreign Student Enrollment Drops – New York Times]
Who would have thought this possible in the 90s ?
Hiring in India
Filed under Innovation in India, Software on Nov 12, 2005 Add comment
Gaurav Bhatnagar describes his approach to hiring:
A practical guide to screening resumes and hiring technical people in India
1. Don’t be hung up on which college somebody went to. If somebody went to IIT or one of the RECs, it means they are smart. But the reverse is not true at all. If they didn’t goto IIT, they can still be plenty smart. So I rarely care about which college a candidate attended.
2. Check what they scored in class 10th and 12th. College grades can vary a lot and it is impossible to compare grades from two different colleges. But everybody wrote the class 12 school leaving exam. Really low score in class 12 (by really low, I mean less than a 1st division – 65%) is a red flag for me and can indicate a lack of aptitude. Yes, I agree this is not universally true. But when you have got a few hundred resumes to sift thru in a couple of hours, watcha gonna do?
3. Does their list of skill sets look like a kitchen sink? Some people have every single programming language, technology, platform and hardware listed on their resume. You know what that means, right?
4. Be very suspicious of “MCA”s. This is a much abused degree that I think is as easy to obtain as pirated software in Palika Bazar. Don’t get me wrong. There are several genuine MCA programs also. But there many distance learning programs which I suspect confer the degree merely for signing up. So, I always double check on MCA degrees.
5. Dump the grass hoppers. Its amazing how frequently some people switch jobs in the tech. industry. If the number of jobs somebody has been in is greater than their number of years of experience, then that’s a problem. There will always be greener pastures for them no matter how great your compensation or work environment might be.
[New Delhi Times: A practical guide to screening resumes and hiring technical people in India]
Just one addition – see how the candidate answers the question “why do you want to join a startup?” – there is no correct answer of course, but their approach reveals a lot about their approach to their career, and ultimately how well they are going to fit into your organization. If this question is asked when the candidate is relaxed and has his guard down, it can actually reveal everything you need to know
National (Government) Portal of India
Filed under Innovation in India on Nov 11, 2005 Add comment
This is the National Portal of the India, developed with an objective to enable a single window access to information and services being provided by the various Indian Government entities. The content in this Portal is the result of a collaborative effort of various Indian Government Ministries and Departments, at the Central/State/District level. This Portal is Mission Mode Project under the National E-Governance Plan.
[National Portal of India]
The portal looks impressive, and brings together a very wide variety of e-government services under one website.
It is a great start, but ultimate success depends on how well it is maintained and evolved. Too many initiatives have failed or have been abandoned in the past.
How to become a big brand
Filed under Innovation in India on Nov 10, 2005 1 comment
Dana Blankenhorn writes up a fantastic manifesto:
[How To Be A Big Time 21st Century Brand. Moore’s Lore:]
- One thing. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) must be simple, powerful, easily understood by everyone you do business with—employees, suppliers, customers.
- Fulfill the promise. Do what you say you will do, always, Any failure to meet your USP can be fatal. But failures will happen. Meet them with kindness, and redemptive behavior. Think of the result as customer make-up sex.
- Don’t lie. This starts with no lieing to yourself. Delusion is the first temptation of success. Always keep someone close who will tell you the truth about yourself, and let them. It’s going to come out, whatever it is. The rule is not, don’t let it. The rule is, don’t do it.
- Identify with your customer. It’s not just, the customer is always right. It’s, you’re the customer. Your interests are their interests.
- We’re all publishers now. Your job is to organize and advocate a community or lifestyle. That’s your business. Organize what your customers want into one place, and be an advocate for their interests.
- Keep it simple. Don’t let the complexity of a growing business tear you away from a simple, coherent message. Some profits aren’t worth chasing. Stay in your niche.