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Technology Blogs by Indian Bloggers

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

PDA vs Cell Phones - Paul Allen perspective

Paul Allen,Internet Entrepreneur, writes, Providing applications and content for PDAs may be a viable business for a few companies; but imagine the opportunities in the mobile phone space, especially as the versatility, bandwidth, and storage capabilities of these devices continue to increase!
In the quarter ended June 30, 2.2 million PDAs were sold worldwide, slightly down from 2nd quarter 2003. Handheld market share leaders:
PalmOne (42%)
HP (39%)
Sony (7.8%)
Dell (4.6%)
Medion (4.1%)
Contrast that with the 164 million cell phones sold worldwide last quarter. Market share leaders:
Nokia (27.7%)
Motorola (14.7%)
Samsung (13.9%)
Siemens AG (6.4%)
Sony Ericsson (6.4%)
LG Electronics (6.1%)

Cell Phones have won the race hands down - cell phones need to manage to stay ahead in the "Push" tehcnology as well. Just wondering in the age of T-Mobiles and Blackberries and the rate at which convergence is happening, how do we differntiate between PDA's and Mobiles as dictinct units - Leaving aside the technical definitions, from a practical standpoint.
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Ericsson pulls plug on Bluetooth team

Ericsson is pulling the plug on its technology licensing unit, the wholly-owned subsidiary which invented Bluetooth wireless technology and became the driving force behind the company's Bluetooth initiative.Ericcson shall discontinue its design and development of new Bluetooth products for the semiconductor industry.Although Ericsson will continue its involvement in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group as a promoter of the technology, Johan Akesson, VP,Ericcson, said, "We will no longer develop new hardware or new IPs based on the Bluetooth specification." Ericsson also won't pursue new chip customers for Bluetooth technology licensing.Ericsson's decision comes as the Bluetooth standard has reached a mature state, and Bluetooth products are available in volume. "Even though large volumes are manufactured, we've found that the long-term business case for Ericsson Technology Licensing is not strong enough." I think that Bluetooth never reached any critical mass. The HP-IPAQ that I bought which uses Bluetooth looks like a little anachronastic to me in the Blackberry days.

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Intel Drives Moore's Law Forward with 65 Nanometer Process Technology

A significant milestone in developing next-generation chip manufacturing technology has been achieved by Intel Corporation. The company has built fully functional 70-megabit static random access memory (SRAM) chips with more than half a billion transistors using the world's most advanced 65 nanometer (nm) process technology. The achievement extends Intel's effort to drive the development of new manufacturing process technology every two years, in accordance with Moore's Law, claimed intel in a press release.The transistors in the new 65nm (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter) technology have gates (the switch that turns a transistor on and off) measuring 35nm, approximately 30 percent smaller than the gate lengths on the previous 90nm technology. For comparison, about 100 of these gates could fit inside the diameter of a human red blood cell.According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years, resulting in more features, increased performance and decreased cost per transistor. As transistors get smaller, increased power and heat dissipation issues develop. As a result, implementing new features, techniques and structures is imperative to continuing this progress. Intel has addressed these challenges by integrating power-saving features into its 65nm process technology. These features are critical to delivering power-efficient computing and communication products in the future. Intel's leading strained silicon technology, first implemented in its 90nm process technology, is further enhanced in the 65nm technology. The second generation of Intel strained silicon increases transistor performance by 10 to 15 percent without increasing leakage. Conversely, these transistors can cut leakage by four times at constant performance compared to 90nm transistors. As a result, the transistors on Intel's 65nm process have improved performance without significant increase in leakage (greater electrical current leakage results in greater heat generation.
Om Malik pointed out this press release. This shall be counted as a good acheievement by Intel, so long as Intel adheres to the product rollout schedule-Intel has had serious schedule slip-ups in its product rollouts this year.More information about the new advancements are available here.
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Cell Phones: Don't Count Linux Out via Bweek

Motorola announced the world's first handset built around the Linux operating system in early 2003and unveiled plans to use the populist software in consumer phones from then on. Pundits saw this as a slap at Symbian Ltd., the London software consortium Motorola co-founded five years earlier with Nokia Corp. (NOK ) and Ericsson to develop software for feature-rich smart phones. It was also a major lift for Linux, the grassroots operating system that until then was used mainly on servers. Today, every single mobile-phone maker is looking at Linux.Downsizing Linux to fit into mobile phones took longer than predicted, and the software has a ways to go before it equals the sophistication of Symbian's package or the mobile phone version of Microsoft Windows. Motorola nevertheless remains a believer and says that,"Linux is more flexible and opens up to the innovation of developers around the world".But only 1.1 million Linux-based phones are expected to ship this year, vs. 14 million using Symbian system, estimates researcher Strategy Analytics in London.Cellphone makers like Samsung, Datang and DoCoMo have actively embraced Linux.And Sunnyvale (Calif.)-based MontaVista Software Inc., which supplies the version of Linux used in most phones, says it has won 10 contracts for handsets using Linux, including several from European makers.Top-of-the-line smart phones that can replace a laptop PC and connect to corporate data systems will likely still use Symbian or Windows. But thanks to its lower cost, Linux could become the de facto standard for less-sophisticated "feature" phones that add cameras, games, and music -- a market that analyst Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities International Inc. (NMR ) in London pegs at 145 million units this year. Clearly, we are beginning to see substantial linux centered action in the mobile market and this is all set to intensify in the days to come.
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Monday, August 30, 2004

Search for Tomorrow's advertisements via FC

The next generation of online ads promises the most targeted and trackable messages ever. Meet the future of advertising.In an advertising environment that has steadily weakened over the past three years, search marketing has breathed new life into online advertising by showing how powerful it can be when an advertiser catches a shopper's attention at that perfect moment when she is ready to buy.Advertisers rewarded the nascent industry by doubling its revenues in 2003 to the tune of $1.9 billion (a figure that is expected to jump again in 2004 to $2.8 billion dollars, says Forrester Research), or nearly one-third of all online advertising spending. And those hefty totals ring up in small increments: Expedia, for example, is the top bidder on Yahoo's service for "Miami vacation," paying 83 cents a lead.Three techniques are emerging that could push online ad revenues even higher: contextual ads, behavioral ads, and local ads.In pushing the envelope to make related text ads as ubiquitous as the 30-second TV spot, the search engines and the marketers that use them tap dance along a very fine line between what is helpful and what is obnoxious, what is exciting and what is simply in very poor taste.But contextual ads don't seem to target consumers as effectively as pure search ads.When you can select your target customer by geography, actual (not projected) buying patterns, and browsing behaviors -- and track the return on investment of each ad by following a customer from the time she is targeted to the time she makes the purchase -- it's hard to go back to fuzzy math and schmoozy ad salespeople. The technocrats will have the last laugh, even if it's at the marketers' expense.

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Sunday, August 29, 2004

India shall lose 45% of outsourcing market via Inquirer

Indian outsourcing pie being eaten.The Indian outsourcing giants are being shafted by operators in Eastern and Central Europe and the Far East.According to a Gartner report, Indian outsourcers are set to lose more than 45 per cent of their business because they can’t stay ahead of the competition.The country has more than 80 per cent of the global market and it stands to lose more than 45 per cent of that, claimed Gartner.The problem, according to Gartner,is that the Indian government and the industry had "suffered from the erroneous belief" the sector could match booming growth of its software and other mainstream information technology activities without devising a longterm plan. The US had flocked to India because of its vast educated English-speaking workforce and lower labour costs. But India has failed to realise is that the sort of outsourcing it provides can be done by any graduate without the technical skills needed for information technology and many emerging countries have English-speaking graduates.Unlike other emerging nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, Fiji, Mauritius, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland, Scotland, Rockall and South Africa, India has failed to draft a long-term plan to train workers for the industry.As a result,India will find these jobs replaced by cheaper workers in the Far East for the more mindless development work and companies in Eastern and Central Europe for the tougher stuff. The signals are clear - the journey ahead shall be really rough for Indian BPO majors.
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Google - Yahoo Search Results Comparison

Results of search in Google and Yahoo in the same page. Liked this - provides instant facility for comparing results from Google and Yahoo. In my preliminary trial, I found to my surprise two things - A. Yahoo throws out more results( quantitative). B. Yahoo crawls site much more frequently than Google. I have noticed in the past, Yahoo crawls my blogsite once in two days, Google takes almost 5/6 days to crawl my site.Google -Teoma search result comparison is available here.
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Built for America, Sold (Cheaply) to the World via NYTimes

Jennifer L. Schenher writes,"Billions of dollars worth of global telecommunications networks bought or built by United States investors now belong to Chinese, Indian and other non-American companies that have snapped them up for a fraction of their cost.The shift in ownership of the networks, which are used to carry much of the world's Internet traffic, comes less than four years after the telecommunications bubble burst. Asian companies in particular have taken advantage of the troubles at American companies, at a time when government monopolies on telecommunications in their countries are waning, access to capital is greater and consumer appetite for bandwidth is growing.In retrospect,American investors overpaid to set up the global networks and have ended up inadvertently financing them for foreign owners who bought at fire-sale prices when the companies fell on hard times.".Different comments about this go like this: "The United States, with its capital markets and openness to outside investors, eased the shift in control. Foreign companies like Asia Netcom adroitly purchased the remnants of the overbuilt infrastructure at prices that should insulate them from the large losses suffered by the original owners"."While the U.S. is still smarting from the telecoms catastrophe, it has awoken to find that it has significantly assisted everyone else, which was really sort of dumb"."Some $30 billion in international telecommunications infrastructure owned by United States companies was sold to foreign-owned entities from 2000 to 2004 for a total of about $4 billion"."Because it bankrolled the networks, "Wall Street has inadvertently financed more telecom infrastructure overseas than the World Bank and other international agencies.""The change in the balance of ownership may have political consequences. The international pieces of a nation's communications infrastructure, considered strategic and defensive holdings, can be controlled by some who may not share that nation's interests.The new profile of owners has changed the business. The smaller companies that sought for years to be treated as equals by American rivals can offer their customers global end-to-end services, including access to the biggest market - the United States - over their own networks or others owned by partners they are better able to negotiate with.
Future trends to watch:
A.When the Internet first began to gain traction, most traffic was routed through the United States. But with network-connecting exchanges in so many countries, that detour is no longer as necessary.
B.Selling global bandwidth capacity will never be the kind of high-margin business it was when carriers had monopolies, and many believe a shakeout of the remaining companies is coming.
C.The growing number of new applications that require more bandwidth - like movies - would ensure a respectable future for the industry.
D.The driver is the broadband market.Broadband is growing so I still see a future in this industry.

Very significant things are happening in telecommunications - one of the most important industry of the present and the future.



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An assessment of feed search by Joesph Scott

A good overview of all feedsearch sites like feedster, pusub, technorati etc..and feed indexing mechanisms of these sites. Feed search is a relatively new phenomenon and is still yet to find an established powerful model. This article is noteworthy for what it presents as well as for the fact that most of the feedsearch principals have tried to respond to this piece. Jeremy zawodny offers his perspective on feedsearch here.
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Saturday, August 28, 2004

Giving the Battery, That Stalwart, a Fuel-Cell Challenge via NYTimes

Every time engineers who develop rechargeable batteries come up with a new trick to extend the time between charges, the electronics industry introduces new features in portable gadgets that have the opposite effect."The battery has become the laggard in new technology," said William P. Acker, president and chief executive of MTI Micro Fuel Cells, a miniature-fuel-cell developer based in Albany.Unlike the fuel cells that are being touted as a way to power cars and trucks, the smaller versions do not use hydrogen gas as a fuel. Hydrogen is explosive, and using it with small devices would pose storage and safety problems. If nothing else, security concerns would probably make it impossible for airline passengers to carry, say, an MP3 player with even a small cylinder of hydrogen attached.Instead, the fuel of choice in small fuel cells is methanol, an alcohol that is most commonly produced from natural gas, although it can be produced using coal or even the foul-smelling gas from landfills. Inside the cell, the methanol combines with water to make carbon dioxide, hydrogen ions and electrons.The edge hydrogen holds over the various chemicals used in rechargeable batteries is its ability to store much more potential electricity in any amount of space. Dr. Acker said that methanol has 20 to 30 times the "energy density" of materials currently used to make, say, cellphone batteries, although he acknowledged that the figure represented theoretical limits.The battery as we see today may cease to exist in the same form in the near future.
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Clayton Christensen explains disruptive & sustaining innovation Via Gartner

In the Gartner fellow interview, the reigning guru of innovation explains disruptive and sustaining innovation with well studied examples. Clayton christensen elegantly differentiates between these two forms of innovation, "Sustaining innovation is an innovation that brings to market a product or service that a company in the market could sell for higher margins to its best customers. In other words, sustaining innovation brings a better product into the market. Some sustaining innovations are simple, incremental, year-to-year improvements. Others are dramatic, breakthrough technologies the transition, in telecommunications, from analog to digital, and digital to optical. They were a real technological tour de force, but their affect on the service was to bring a better product into the existing market that could be sold for higher margins to the best customers of the leaders. The odds overwhelmingly favor the incumbent leaders of the industry in battles of sustaining innovation — whether they are simple, incremental innovations or breakthroughs. . A disruptive innovation brings to market a product not as good as the products in the current market, and so it cannot be sold to the mainstream customers. But it is simple and it is more affordable. It takes root in an undemanding portion of the market, then improves from that simple beginning to intercept with the needs of customers in the mainstream later.Examples of disruptive innovations - Minicomputers over Mainframes ,Blackberries, IPAQ against Laptop computers. This clayton christensen presentation , my favourite as well expands these ideas very well.
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From OPEC to OGEC via Economist

Energy firms and their investors are becoming increasingly excited about its likeliest replacement: not wind nor wave nor solar power, but gas—or, to be precise, gas that is frozen and transported as liquefied natural gas (LNG). This is expected to become as ubiquitous and crucial to the global economy as petroleum is today.Scenario planners at Royal Dutch/Shell think that gas may surpass oil as the world's most important energy source by 2025.While oil became increasingly important during the past century, for much of that period natural gas was seen as its ugly stepsister: burnt off or “stranded” when discovered by accident, and rarely sought after.Gas is, by definition, gaseous at room temperature; oil is a liquid that can easily be transported. Gas traditionally needed elaborate systems of pipelines to get it from the wellhead to the customer. That meant it was typically used fairly close to where it was produced, shipped at great expense via pipeline—or, more often, simply wasted.The rise of LNG promises to change that. Put simply, gas can be frozen into liquid form near its source, shipped to market in refrigerated tankers, warmed back into gaseous form on foreign shores and injected into the local pipeline system. Thanks to this technological advance, gas has the potential to be a fungible, global commodity like oil.
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Executives' Views On IT Hurts Spending via Forbes

A new study by the white-shoe consultancy Bain & Co. finds that, while 70% of senior executives at large corporations agree that information technology is relevant to growth, 60% say IT is actually inhibiting their growth efforts. Further, the perception is affecting tech spending.The problem, according to Bain, is that many companies are simply not aligned in a way that makes it possible to use IT as a growth driver. Companies fail to coordinate their business and IT goals. Two-thirds of respondents said their existing technologies either didn't deliver as promised or were underexploited. Others said so-called "legacy" technology lacks the flexibility to keep up with current business and tech trends. David Shpilberg, head of Bain's global IT practice, was not surprised by the results. He says the root of the "broken dialogue" between IT and business executives goes back several decades, when companies used technology to report and analyze what had already happened. Technology decisions are business decisions, and need to be made by business people who understand technology and how it can drive growth. But Bain's study found that business executives are not getting enough literacy about technology.The problem is that not many tech companies have that expertise. The major players will have to become business consultants as much as they are technologists. The article concludes by expressing doubt whether the major IT consulting enterprises are ready for this change.


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Friday, August 27, 2004

Guy Kawasaki's - Art of the Start manifesto via Change This

This manifesto is an excerpt from Guy Kawasaki's book - "Art of the Start". Guy has written this book for aspiring entrepreneurs and has woven this book in an excellent tapestry of powerful ideas and structured formatting embellished with very rich examples. Guy Kawasaki's book/manifesto has very powerful ideas. He typically wants aspiring entrepreneurs to start thinking in the GIST (Great Ideas For Starting Business)format and lists five themes: A. Make a meaning. B. Make Mantra. C. Get Going. D. Define Business Model E. Weave a Mat. Please read my earlier related post on this - Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the Start". Guy has expanded on these themes admirably. For instance he writes at length about creating a "Mantra" instead of mission for the enterprise.In his own inimitable way,he expands this with some real examples. Nike -"Authentic Athletic Experience", Disney -"Fun, Family and Entertainment", Starbucks - "Rewarding Everyday Moments", IBM -"Think", Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers -" Winning Is Everything".An excellent read and highly recommended for all aspiring entrepreneurs.
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Thursday, August 26, 2004

Microsoft.com's Makeover via Microsoft Monitor Weblog

Microsoft.com has a fresh new look, which is consistent with other changes focused on new product evangelism.The previous home page focused much more on products, with big icons and related links for Windows, Office System and Server System, among six broad categories. Microsoft has shifted the focus to people. A high level review of Microsoft.com makeover.
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Where the Fantastic Meets the Future via Bweek

Cherry Murray of Bell Labs talks about nanotechnology, "network convergence," the pace at which theories becomes fact.In the past 20 years, large companies have become global and are no longer only focused on one market. Also, R&D around the globe was not possible when communication was only directly from person to person. The pace of R&D has gone up dramatically [with the advent of] the Internet Cheery Murray expands his thoughts,"Today research and development occurs simultaneously. There's no opportunity anymore to do research first and develop the technology gradually [for a number of reasons]: It is possible to communicate, the markets are fluctuating, there is global competition, and prices are coming down dramatically. So now, we may be developing some product and discover that we want to add another feature, so we would do concurrent scientific research and development. Also, small companies spring up very quickly now because of venture capital. So corporations are not isolated anymore from the science and technology environment". Global corporate research calls for more innovation and more diversity, result focussed and labs compressing time would be the leaders of tommorow.
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Four Practices for Great Performance via HBSWK

The interplay between managerial expectations and employee performance is more complex than these commonsense maxims suggest. To be sure, expectations exert a powerful impact on an individual's performance. Yet managers who believe that they've done their job merely by defining and declaring high expectations—without involving employees in the process—will likely get the same poor results that bosses with low expectations receive.Experts and executives agree that successful fulfillment of individuals' performance expectations hinges on managers' ability to apply four practices:
1. Involve employees
2. Focus on achievability
3. Build measures that help meet goals
4. Tap into employees' deepest motivations
Expecting the best from employees doesn’t always deliver results. Instead, managers must involve workers in setting goals that are achievable, measurable, and tap into motivation.

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Wireless Grids: Distributed Resource Sharing : IEEE internet computing

via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends Grid computing lets devices connected to the Internet, overlay peer-to-peer networks, and the nascent wired computational grid dynamically share network-connected resources. The wireless grid extends this sharing potential to mobile, nomadic, or fixed-location devices temporarily connected via ad hoc wireless networks.In some ways, wireless grids resemble networks already found in connection with agricultural, military, transportation, air-quality, environmental, health, emergency, and security systems. A range of institutions, from the largest governments to very small enterprises, will own and at least partially control wireless grids. Following Metcalfe’s law, grid-based resources become more valuable as the number of devices and users increases. The wireless grid makes it easier to extend grid computing to large numbers of devices that would otherwise be unable to participate and share resources. While grid computing attracts much research, resource sharing across small, ad hoc, mobile, and nomadic grids draws much less.The wireless grid application may be classified as three mutually non -inclusive classes:
Class 1: Applications aggregating information from the range of input/output interfaces found in nomadic devices.
Class 2: Applications leveraging the locations and contexts in which the devices exist.
Class 3: Applications leveraging the mesh network capabilities of groups of nomadic devices. Wireless grids offer a wide variety of possible applications. They can reach both geographic locations and social settings that computers have not traditionally penetrated. Wireless grids present three novel elements: new resources,new places of use, and new institutional ownership and control patterns. Wireless devices bring new resources to distributed computing. In addition to typical computational resources such as processor power, disk space, and applications, wireless devices increasingly employ cameras, microphones, GPS receivers, and accelerometers, as well as an assortment of network interfaces (cell, radio, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth). The article concludes with an excellent perspective,"The emergence of wireless grids parallels the historical trend that has seen computing shift from a hierarchical structure—in which computing was an organizationally controlled activity—to a situation in which the only guarantee is that individual users will follow their strategic interests.Application developers have an opportunity to draw on the new resources, interfaces, and locations that wireless devices provide".The original article can be foundhere. An excellent article in recent times talking about possibilities that can have profound impact in its application and can bring huge impact to computing benefits.
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Measuring Entrepreneurial Success : Dave Pollard

Dave Pollard writes,"Enterprises today have a dizzying selection of performance measurements to choose from. While at one time measuring financial profitability, growth and asset management effectiveness were considered enough, businesses are now told that they need broader metrics to avoid the landmines that may not show up in a simple financial report card.How does an entrepreneur decide which measures to use? The decision ultimately comes down to which measures best reflect and assess the achievement of the enterprise's objectives". The article, twelth instalment of the upcoming book "Natural Enterprise" makes very interesting reading. It's been said that "what gets measured, gets done", and there is some truth to that. But nowhere in business is the 'conventional wisdom' so likely to lead you astray than in business measurement. Dave's brilliant insights into business, entrepreneurship and organisational dyamics makes this article a compelling and enriching read. A must read for all entreprenuers and aspirants alike.
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Scobelezier - the corporate weblog manifesto

Robert Scoble publishes the corporate weblog manifesto - covering all phases of the weblog publishing cycle - from conceptualisation to implementation and enhancement Robert Scoble, one of the best known bloggers in the world, here details out activities in blogging cycle and some very insightful good practices as relevant at various blog stages. Scoble has brought out in a simple and direct document, a very good collection of principles that should govern the corporate weblog. A must read for all bloggers and corporate executives planning to blog.
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Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Collabaration software compared via Sharedspaces

An excellent paper on "Collaboration Software Clients: Email, IM, Presence, RSS & Collaborative Workspaces Should Be Integrated for Business Communication" is a good comparison between those collaboration tools. Could be useful to, for example, your internal discussion on how to use blogs and wikis in relation to existing tools. Corporateblogging referred this excellent paper wherein an elegant comparison of the collabarative client tools is avaialable. Too often the collabarative tools are viewed as one in place of another, but the real value would come out of ability to leverage multiple tools effectively. Must read for all business managers implementing collabarative solutions.
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Snapshots of excellence in unstable times by Tom Peters

Tom Peters, the famous business writer here comes with 60 This -I-Beleive list of things needed to be practised in pursuit of excellence in modern business. Tom's unique insights into business trends, unmatchable ability to present these in a succint manner, breadth of ideas and usage of powerful expressions and catchy expressions make this an excellent document. Must read for all business leaders and the list looks definitely actionable.
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The Art Of The Start:The Art Of Starting by Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki of Apple Fame and author of various bestsellers,talks here about five big ideas that should be considered and thought through as part of starting a business. Here he gives a big picture view of his new book titled.The Art of the Start. This article was referred by Kathleen in her blog. I liked Guy's format of articulating his thoughts as five lessons :-
Lesson 1: Make Meaning,
Lesson 2: Make A Mantra,
Lesson 3: Get Going,
Lesson 4: Define A Business Model,
Lesson 5: Weave A MAT.
The examples that Guy has used to amplify his thoughts are very educative and well thought. A must read for all business leaders and would be entrepreneurs.
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Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse via Wired

A new genetically engineered mouse shows huge promise for the research.With no previous running experience, most mice can run about 900 meters before exhaustion. But the genetically altered mice can run 1800 meters (more than a mile) before running out of steam, and keep it up for two and a half hours -- an hour longer than unaltered mice can run.Previously, the only known way to increase endurance was through training.To perform the genetic enhancement on the mice, researchers injected a human version of a protein called PPAR-delta attached to a short DNA sequence. The injection permanently incorporated enhanced PPAR-delta production into the mice' genomes. The change is transgenic, meaning the mice will pass down the trait to future generations. Most physiologists believe that enhancing performance is a complicated process during which several genes coordinate changes throughout the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, and the muscle itself. But this single change seems to have rewired the entire system. That could be good news for people who are confined to a wheelchair or suffer from muscle-wasting diseases like AIDS or muscular dystrophy. The discovery could also lead to treatments for diabetes and obesity, because the mice also had lower levels of intramuscular triglycerides, which are associated with insulin resistance and diabetes in obese people.While mice are much easier to genetically alter than humans, if genetic modification is perfected in humans, this could lead to an easy way to enhance sports performance. Already several ethical questions are beginning to get heard centered around Human Genetics..



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Technorati gets fed VC dollars via Gigaom

Om Malik confirms that Technoratihas indeed received VC funding.This is the second RSS related company to get big VC dollars.Congrats to Sifry and team. Technorati deserves to be funded well and hope Dave is able to take technorati to greater heights. Truly blog movement requires sich attention from VC's at this take off juncture.

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Fantasy Leagues Attract Money From Advertisers via NYTimes

Advertisers have uncovered a world of young men with plenty of time on their hands and money to spend - a highly coveted demographic - in an unlikely place. The young men are on the Internet, paying money to play fantasy sports games.Fantasy baseball, football, basketball and hockey leagues, like the ones that are offered on Sportsline.com were among the first services to prove that consumers were willing to pay for online content. But now, free or low-cost services from AOL, NFL.com and even Best Buy are attracting advertising dollars and, potentially, driving down the price of content for everyone. Most of the online revenues shall be coming from services extended online and not mere content. Two trends to watch - the online world is slowly starting to understand online customers and beginning to evolve winnable working models. Secondly, it is getting clearer that offering online services is the way to create sustainable and profitable online enterprises - this can not be achieved by merely providing content online - Look at several high profile online content providers going belly up in the last 12 months.
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Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Corporates pursuing cheapware via Forbes

Corporate customers are fed up with high software prices and are convinced they're getting less for more. Some are switching to cheapie alternatives. A lot more of them are threatening to do so.The trend is so powerful that,the future will be dreadful for software vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Customers will balk at ever-escalating prices for mainstream products and will opt whenever they can for bargain-basement software based on freely available code such as MySQL or the Linux operating system.The chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings, which runs the world's largest airfare and ticketing network, Craig Murphy has spent millions of dollars on database and other software from companies like Oracle. But last year, when Sabre was building a new computer system for online shoppers, Murphy took a flyer on a database program from a little-known company in Sweden that charges only $495 per server computer, versus a $160,000 list price for Oracle. Guess what? The Swedish stuff works great. Fired up, Murphy is hunting for other places to use the cheaper software, called MySQL."We're just not going to pay license fees for those databases like we used to. We'll download free stuff off the Internet before we do that," Murphy says that "this is the future of computing." Software is not rocket science. It's a commodity. The business has been overglorified for 20 years says MySQL executives.Venture investors are pumping millions into new low-cost providers, encouraged by the success of cheapware pioneers like Salesforce.com and Linux distributor Red Hat, which boast market values of $1 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively. Software now claims a fifth of the $960 billion the world spends annually on computer systems, up from one-tenth of a $464 billion pie in 1990, according to IDC, a market researcher. Hardware sales dropped from $460 billion five years ago to an estimated $365 billion this year as hardware suffered commoditization and ruthless price-cutting from suppliers like Dell. Now it may be software's turn for some pricing pressure Other big corproate names that have recently embraced cheapware include,FedEx, Ingram Entertainment, Lufthansa, NASA, Omaha Steaks, Sony, Suzuki and UPS. Clearly, cheapware trend is out to explode in a big way in the days to come.


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Outsourcing Pays Off at Home(US) by Rich Smith via Fool.com

Rich writes," Outsourcing is here to stay. It's not just a fad. It's a historical fact. Outsourcing and its economic philosophical daughters, competitive advantage and comparative advantage, have been with us since before Adam Smith first regaled us with the parable of the pin maker. What's more, outsourcing is good for America.According to CNET, for the first five months of 2004 the average price of a DVD player made in China was $40.80. The average cost to produce it, including operating costs, was $39.80. (Just five years ago, it cost at least $500 to purchase one in the U.S., guaranteeing huge profits to its manufacturers. Clearly, the profit margins to manufacture a DVD player have fallen dramatically.)In those same five months, China manufactured 41 million DVD players on outsourcing orders from a variety of firms, such as Sony, Philips, and Matsushita Electric Industrial Company's Panasonic.But notice that none of these companies, which outsource production to China, are American. Chinese DVD player manufacturers aren't threatening American jobs because the American electronics industry lost its trade war with Japan long ago. Which puts USA in the interesting situation today."Rich argues that outsourcing creates more jobs. He says,"To meet increased demand, firms that sell, store, or transport a product (which now costs less) have to hire workers. The lower the price of a Chinese-made DVD player falls, the more customer service reps, website techies, and accountants Amazon.com must hire to keep up with the buyer traffic on its site. The more sales people and warehouse workers Best Buy needs to employ to stock and sell its goods. The more drivers get jobs at FedEx to move the goods around the country. In fact, by increasing the number of goods in circulation, outsourcing even stimulates the hiring of manufacturing employees at companies such as packaging maker Sonoco.The domino effect - Lowering the price of goods through outsourcing spurs job creation in related industries, too and offers the example: The more DVD players come down in price, the more people can afford them. And the more people can afford DVD players, the more people will want to buy DVDs. Think moviemaker Pixar here. Think Netflix, disc provider to the masses. When you add up all the jobs gained from lowering costs through outsourcing, there can be little doubt that they outweigh the few that are lost. So the next time some one says that outsourcing is bad for America, don't accept the easy answer".
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New York set for citywide wireless via BBC

New York City is on the verge of going fully wireless, according to a deal being finalised this month between authorities and a group of six technology companies.In exchange for being able to mount up to 18,000 new lamp post-based antennas, to strengthen coverage around the five boroughs, the companies will pay the city government around $25m each year. The antennas shall be aesthetically placed. Some criticism about using wireless technology so extensively are beginning to get heard - most of the criticism is centered on health grounds. One protester said,"Nobody runs a microwave 24 hours a day, seven days a week, outside their bedroom door when they are sleeping... That's why it's important we study this." With Big Apple, showing the way in embracing wireless extensively, other cities around the globe shall follow soon - clearly sign of things to come.
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Utility Computing's Perfect Storm via ITULP

Richard Greenman, Cassatt corp.says,"We see a series of trends that create a perfect storm driving the deployment of these service-based systems, whether it is the modernization of hardware, which is inevitable with Moore's Law, and pricing, or it is the need to build more scalable, less brittle, highly available and redundant systems. There are a whole lot of things happening in the marketplace that you can see crystalizing for scalable grid architectures built on increasingly commoditized platforms. The players [more likely to succeed] in my point of view are the independent vendors that are able to deploy heterogeneous solutions. I think none of the big names players will be well positioned in the future". Richard adds,"There are basic concepts that people will need to wrap their heads around and then we can work backwards into the current timeframe being service level agreements and utility computing. The concepts embodied in those two ideas really will drive how businesses get architected. Today you own a specific piece of hardware, and on that hardware runs this or these applications. And department X is paying for those services running on that hardware and application. Those physical bindings of money, hardware, apps and service are really going to become virtualized: where there is going to be a collection of physical hardware out there, there is going to be a set of services necessary to run the business and somehow the IT department is going to have to deal with very dynamic allocation and billing of this virtual hardware infrastructure to fufill the needs of a purchaser of IT services. So the attractions of virtualization that are embodied in SLAs and utility computing are the concepts that people must get their heads around in separating the virtual and physical world".Richard, who was heading the Solaris OS group while at Sun offers his perspective on open source and utility computing as,"Open source per se is not the driving force for autonomic computing. There are two dominant forces in the OS platform " Linux and Windows IT organizations rely on each to build their distributed systems and both in fact to build their distributed systems and autonomic solutions. We are going to focus on each or both to make sure we can provide solutions for what IT needs. Each has values and strengths and brings a different sets of virtues".
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Monday, August 23, 2004

DNA technique and anti-spamming via New Scientist

A technique originally designed to analyse DNA sequences is the latest weapon in the war against spam. An algorithm named Chung-Kwei (after a feng-shui talisman that protects the home against evil spirits) can catch nearly 97 per cent of spam.Chung-Kwei is based on the Teiresias algorithm, developed by the bioinformatics research group at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York, US. Teiresias was designed to search different DNA and amino acid sequences for recurring patterns, which often indicate genetic structures that have an important role.Instead of chains of characters representing DNA sequences, the research group fed the algorithm 65,000 examples of known spam. Each email was treated as a long, DNA-like chain of characters.IBM intends to include Chung-Kwei in its commercial product, SpamGuru. Justin Mason, who developed SpamAssassin, one of the most popular open-source anti-spam filters, says that Chung-Kwei looks promising."I think there is still a lot of work to be done. But what is exciting is not the particular algorithm, but the fact that IBM has shown there is the entire field of bioinformatics techniques to explore in the fight against spam." The complete technical paperThis paper explains the application of this technique with more examples and points out to the future direction of research and application of this technique.
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Phil Greenspun's Japan Trip Report(s)

Philip Greenspun's very insightful and informative trip reports to Japan- extremely well articulated and well researched.Philip's attention to detail is amazing. Philip has once again beaten all expectations in terms of how much informative and insightful can a travel article be. Well done Philip. What is outstanding about the Japanese are how much they seem to have forgotten the world war and got on with business even at persoanl level.A few things would make this report more rounded.

A. Japanese work style -Long hours and culture of meetings and consensus.
B. How Japanese are fighting/planning to fight ageing population.
C.Japanese views about Korean competition in High-tech and China in Manufacturing. D. Views of young Japanese about Japan's competitiveness and business culture vis-a-vis the US.
E. Japan's insular cuture in terms of language and business style- I read recently that as a turnaround strategy, a leading Japanese bank decided to operate ATM's 24 hours.
F.Japan's fragile political system and issues centered on the Japanese monarchy.
G. Failing Japanese marriage and family lives.
P.S - I do not agree with Philip's recommendations about the best hotel room in Tokyo - I think that the Gand Hyatt in Tokyo near the Roppongi district would score better than Akasaka.

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Sunday, August 22, 2004

Fourteen Layers of security for individual desktop usage via Scobleizer

Scobelizer, the famous microsoft employee and leading Internet blogger writes that computer system requires multiple layers of security and highlights why this is needed and how he is personally enforcing multiple layers of security( Fourteen to be precise) in his perosnal machine..,"How much security is good enough? Let's get out of the computer world. Let's talk about heirloom jewelry. My wife, Maryam, has a bit of jewelry. Does she store it here in the house? No. Why not? It's not secure enough. Where does she store it? In a safe deposit box in a bank. Let's talk about a bank's security and how many layers it has.
1) The jewelry is stored in a safe deposit box with a lock.
2) There's a camera on the box area, so if something goes missing they can verify what happened later.
3) Each box is alarmed. So, if you try to break into someone else's box, an alarm will cry out.
4) The safe deposit boxes are stored inside the bank vault. Three feet of concrete and steel with a very sophisticated lock on the door.
5) Video cameras on the vault door to verify who goes in and out.
6) The vault is behind a counter and you aren't allowed to go near it unless an employee lets you in.
7) The vault is in a building that's designed to be difficult to break into. Alarms. Heavy duty doors. Lighting that makes it easy to see in.
I'm sure there's more layers too that I'm not even aware of. But, let's not dwell on this. The point is that there's multiple layers of security all to protect my wife's jewelry. Let's say any one of these layers failed. Her jewelry would still be safe. It would take multiple failures for a criminal to be able to steal her jewelry.
So, what's my point? Well, when it comes to computer security you should have multiple layers as well. If you have multiple layers of security, then any one layer -- even if it's not well designed -- will prove sufficient in keeping criminals away from the digital equivilent of your jewelry.The fouteen layers of security is very important and needs to be definitely followed
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Saturday, August 21, 2004

Profits and poverty -C.K.Prahalad via Economist

C.K. Prahalad thinks there can be a win-win relationship between business and the poor. C.K.Prahalad's views in a nutshell are,"IF WE stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognising them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.” That “simple proposition” begins a controversial new management book that seems destined to be read not just in boardrooms but also in government offices. “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Eradicating Poverty Through Profits” (Wharton School Publishing), is essentially a rallying cry for big business to put serving the world's 5 billion or so poorest people at the heart of their profit-making strategies. It has already been praised by everyone from Bill Gates—“a blueprint for fighting poverty”—to a former American secretary of state, Madeleine Albright—“if you are looking for fresh thinking about emerging markets, your search is ended.”"C.K.Prahalad is a fierce critic of traditional top-down thinking on aid, by governments and non-governmental organisations alike. They tend to see the poor as victims to be helped, he says, not as people who can be part of the solution—and so their help often creates dependency. Nor does he pin much hope on the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) programmes of many large companies. If you want serious commitment from a firm, he says, its involvement with the poor “can't be based on philanthropy or CSR”. The involvement of big business is crucial to eradicating poverty, he believes, but BOP markets must “become integral to the success of the firm in order to command senior management attention and sustained resource allocation.” Mr Prahalad reckons that there are huge potential profits to be made from serving the 4 billion-5 billion people on under $2 a day—an economic opportunity he values globally at $13 trillion a year. The win for the poor of being served by big business includes, he says, being empowered by choice and being freed from having to pay the currently widespread “poverty penalty”. In shanty towns near Mumbai, for example, the poor pay a premium on everything from rice to credit—often five to 25 times what the rich pay for the same services. Driving down these premiums can make serving the BOP more profitable than serving the top, he argues, and points to a growing number of leading firms—from Unilever in India to Cemex in Mexico and Casas Bahia in Brazil—that are profiting by doing precisely that.
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