Adam Rifkin, an entrepreneur in silicon valley writes,everything is intertwingled, an excellent article about how good associationship, partnership and community helps in creating and changing the world - outstanding compilation - must read for all in businesslife.
We recently covered Stephanie Stahl's perspective RFID at core of business processes and also covered -" Barely a day goes by that we don't hear about another application or service or middleware or chip reader that has come onto the market".Gene Alvarez,VP of technology research services at the Meta Group, writes about RFID adaption status and also discusses the approach towards RFID deployments.Excerpts with heavy edits and my comments added:
Many enterprises are standing on the sidelines amid concerns that RFID has been over-hyped. However selective progress is being made, meaning enterprises must keep pace with competitors while controlling investment costs with a technology that has many moving parts. RFID is not a technology that lends itself easily to a "fast follower" strategy, due to heavy infrastructure, as well as business process and application, requirements. A "Slap & Ship" model will remain the preferred model of compliance in the near future. Suppliers will deploy RFID internally as an enabler of process improvements and asset management based on knowledge gained from pilots to meet retailer mandates. Each enterprise's adoption rate and success will be a function of many variables, such as the percentage of R&D transformational spend within the IT budget, the types of products to be tagged, the enterprise's appetite for risk, mandate pressure or lack of mandate pressure. The impact on IT organizations created by current RFID case/pallet tagging schemes hits hard and at many levels of technology within enterprise IT portfolios. The initial entry into an RFID project requires IT organizations to support in-field pilots for setting objectives to test RFID tags, antennas and readers with pallets and cases to determine the impact to existing infrastructure and operational environments. IT teams should initially assess the impact of RFID to existing infrastructure that is used for barcode-based data capture and determine reusable components such as wireless networks and application servers. Concurrently, many layers in the enterprise technology stack will require RFID impact assessments. These assessments include activities such as environmental surveys at each location to weed out sources of interference and to determine how RFID will perform, from that specific location all the way to the back office and business intelligence applications that run the enterprise. It will take enterprises two to three years to take on all the issues within the technology stack. Issues they must deal with include installation of readers, gates, light sticks, device management, case/pallet configuration, application server and networking upgrades, and integration with enterprise applications. RFID pilots will touch in-store systems, warehouse management, and back office systems and require physical infrastructure requirements such as power and network connectivity. Application infrastructure components such as application servers will require upgrades. These upgrades will enable RFID data aggregation and filtering of events from non-events, as well as control of RFID components such as readers, both handheld and gates, light-sticks, and alarms.The technology impact to applications should be assessed early instead of focusing on the limited scope of the tag testing pilot and determine how to leverage RFID data for business intelligence and data warehousing applications.My Take:We have earlier written that RFID deployment brings within enormous amount of transactional data,the need for a balanced middleware solution, need for realigning business processes, IT backup,tracking and reporting needs - all these are mammoth tasks requiring careful planning and lengthy trials and co-ordination - its imperative all potential RFID users begin testing RFID atleast for pilot with a full blown perspective in mind and define a roadmap for implementation within the enterprise,solidify implementation plans with a proven methodology,draw out program plans , create a good governance structure and aggressively move-in. Being where they are currentlty, and by not pushing, they run the risk of rendering themselves uncompetitive.
Changethis has published 100 Ways to Help You Succeed/Make Money - 50 short, wonderfully sweet nuggets of advice. Easy to read,very unboring yet so much packed in so few words - Only Tom can do this. Excellent read and must read for all wanting to move up in life.
An interesting report from Jupiter Research on search finds, Vertical search is industry developing in much the same way as the media markets before it. The report finds that Paid search spending in the U.S. is highly concentrated. Just four categories - retail, financial services, media and entertainment and travel - accounted for 79% of the $2.6 billion spent on paid search in 2004. Each vertical provides a rich landscape of opportunity and a blueprint for how other categories will develop.In the search market overall, rapidly rising keyword prices on broad-based search engines will soon stabilize and industry growth will depend substantially on the incremental value provided by vertical search engines.
My Take: I think that the analog of television news channel evolution to major search engines is correct- the internet world shall also follow the rule of three eventually – the rule of three broadly says that in any industry there shall be three all purpose main players followed by several niche players. I am not sure whether to call niche search engines( I strongly beleive that they have a role and a future) them horizontals as Tom Evslin would like to call as or Fred calls as verticals and originally supported by Searchviews. But increasingly,I see myself beginning to use niche search engines more and more(though all niche search engine usage put together could be substantially less than any one general search engine usage). For example services with discovery mechanisms powered by specialized algorithms like Findory or Topix shall always find a special place in the internet world where the volume of digital content is swelling by the day.The view expressed in searchviews that"As advertising spending continues to swell in the search category, more and more marketers will diversify their "network" buys with small targeted placements on these specialized engines that potentially provide a better bang for the advertising buck".But the overall volume of business could be low but can provide with some significant stream of business. But Niche players need to provide more and more specialised offering and creating a new category of service that mainstream players may not be able to focus and provide - like Amex offering more than what traditional banks can offer -traveller's cheque convenience.
The rise of Google is a tale often told as a Silicon Valley classic. Excerpts from John Heilemann's brilliant writeup. Two precocious Stanford grad-student nerds swept up in the fever of the Internet boom invent technology that profoundly changes the experience of the Web; they drop out and start a company (in a garage) that achieves iconic status; they stage a historic public offering, achieving vast wealth and fame. But beneath these familiar surface details, the Google story is more nuanced and compelling. It’s a story about the clash between youth and experience, more a messy ensemble drama than a simple buddy flick—one whose main characters have persistently deviated from any script, resulting in unexpected twists and turns that haven’t come to light until now. Michael Moritz, the other venture capitalist behind Google,says,"Most people think that IPOs are the climax of a company’s story, but in fact they’re just the first chapter." He went on to say that a company’s genetic code gets set in its first eighteen months. "After that," he says, "companies are impossible to change; their cultures are hardwired in. If the DNA is right, you’re golden. If not, you’re screwed." Having repeatedly ignored the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley—inventing a search engine when everyone knew search was dead; building a business on Internet advertising when everyone knew it was impossible; antagonizing two revered VCs whose rings they should have been kissing—the boys have undoubtedly learned that conventional wisdom often isn’t wisdom at all. But salutary as that lesson is, there’s also a danger to it. As Excite founder Kraus puts it, "The risk is, they’ll think the hallmark of a good idea is that everyone says it’s dumb." Similarly, it would be easy for the boys to conclude that dissing Wall Street carries no penalty. In the IPO, they told investment bankers and investors to go pound sand—and they wound up happy billionaires. Today their message to shareholders remains: Trust us, or put your money elsewhere. We've followed Google for years, and have heard most of the stories about its evolution –This is the best thus far.
CBPP refers to any coordinated, (chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a unified intellectual work. CBPP covers many different types of intellectual output, from software to libraries of quantitative data to human-readable documents (manuals, books, encyclopedias, reviews, blogs, periodicals, and more).
Examples of successful CBPP efforts abound. The Linux kernel, the GNU suite of software applications, and the combined GNU/Linux system are prime examples of software CBPP. Slashdot.org is an important example of CBPP through submission of the news articles, and more importantly, the collaboratively-based comment filtering system. Kuro5hin.org is an example of a collaborative article and current-events essay blog, with an emphasis on technology and culture. Wikipedia is an example of a comprehensive encyclopedia.
Even commercial sites, such as Amazon.com, have significant CBPP elements nowadays. These manifest in Amazon as user-submitted reviews and ratings and interlinked favourites lists. The enabling dynamic of CBPP is that people are willing to volunteer a little bit of work and a large amount of knowledge to online community systems, and that when this force is properly harnessed, significant overall value can be created. Aaron postulates two laws about CBPP.
Law 1.) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.
Law 2.) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise. However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the rises are by large amounts.
We recently covered Software Will Determine The Success Of The Cell Processor echoing cringley's view that since processors do not drive applications, one does not find the announcement of a new processor all that simulating. Here's an update with missing piece of information governing IBM's strategy. IBM's Cell workstation (9 nanometer) prototypes are running both SUSE Linux and IBM's own AIX and represent IBM's post-Lenovo micro strategy – performance comparable to xeon processors - the dell price for xeon processors is 3000$ as against IBM’s 1000$. The IBM hardware strategy is to sell a box that contains no Microsoft code at all, and so requires no license payments to Microsoft and possibly no license payments to ANY company, including Intel. Any CIO / home user facing the forced upgrading of half or more of your PC-installed base immediately and probably the other half a year later, the opportunity to move away from Microsoft and toward IBM while saving money at the same time has to be compelling. Microsoft’s anti-virus and anti-spyware products are aimed solely at users of Windows XP SP2. This has very different effects on both the user base and the software industry. For users, it says that anyone still running Windows 98, ME, or 2000 has two alternatives - to upgrade to XP/SP2 or to rely on non-Microsoft anti-virus and anti-spyware products. This forces 100+ million-PC owners to upgrade which is $10 billion in additional revenue of which $9 billion is profit - all of it coming in the next 12 months..If the upgrade options to XP/SP2 are not availed – then we have to rely instead on third-party products to protect the system. Microsoft , has transferred their entire support obligation for these old products to companies like Symantec and Network Associates without transferring to those companies any revenue stream to make it worth their trouble. Third party supporters by not being able to provide free support shall force users into the same upgrade from which Microsoft gains all the revenue.Cringley writes,"The objective of any Microsoft product upgrade is to stimulate sales. There are two ways to stimulate sales"- forcing users to pay for software upgrades or forcing users to pay for hardware upgrades that carry software upgrades with them. It would have been nicer had they taken the course of improving Windows to make it less vulnerable - a course that itself would have stimulated sales. A large segment of users who see themselves as having to get new hardware might well consider abandoning Windows at the same time.Definitely thoughts to ponder - we need real choices in terms of usinf software in the desktop and if IBM's strategy helps it - all the more merrier.
Tokyo Consumers will soon be able to use their mobile phones for enabling travel related dealingson Japan's extensive railway network. Early next year,the East Japan Railway Company (JR East), is scheduled to launch a service named Mobile Suica, which will enable mobile phone users to conduct all ticket-related transactions such as reservations, purchases and fare collection. Moreover, Mobile Suica-ready phones can be used to pay for purchases in stores at JR East railway stations and other stores that support the service. Major Japanese mobile phone carriers — NTT Docomo Inc., KDDI Corp. and Vodafone Inc. plan to support the service with handsets equipped with Felica contactless IC card technology. Mobile Suica is rooted in Felicia technology Sony has been developing since the mid-1980s. JR East has been offering Suica cards as prepaid tickets and commuter passes since 2001. An electronic cash function was added in March 2003. The service does not use an actual card, but rather embeds the Felicia chip inside a handset, which functions as an extension of the Suica service.Until now, more than 12 million Suica cards have been issued.
DoCoMo's i-mode FeliCa service combines two advanced platforms: DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service for data communications on the go and Sony's FeliCa smart-card platform for rapid, secure data transmission. The handset is a powerful, multifunctional tool combining mobile communications with diverse functions ranging from financial transactions to opening electronic locks. More than 2 million i-mode FeliCa handsets have been sold so far, reports mobiletechnews. JR East said it is negotiating with other public transport companies, including subways, private train companies and bus companies, to join its mobile phone network.
John Udell writes, adding a little structure to HTML content elicits a knowledge management payoff. The reason that good Web searching that exploits structured content is not available can be attributed to non availability of easy-to-use writing tools to create well-formed XML content. So there aren’t many pools that can be plumbed with XML-aware search technology. Udell beleives,by implementing content-aware search against existing repositories, you can show people the tangible benefits of more expressive content. Mixing tags with free-text search can bring the promise of XML that much closer to reality.
In the early days of XML, smart search was often cited as a key benefit. Instead of just trawling for single-celled keywords in an ocean of undifferentiated text, the story went, we'd navigate islands of structure looking for more evolved creatures. While that vison has not materialized, a middle course between simple full-text search and of unwieldy tagging schemes and brittle ontologiesis beginning to emerge. The existing trend for tagging things - Flickr photos, del.icio.us, and Furl URLs - show that people are more likely to add structure to content. The pre-requisited for this would be: - First, tagging must be easy - Second, it must deliver both instant gratification and longer-term value to the person doing the tagging. - Third and most important, it must occur in a shared context so that network effects can kick in. Udell adds, some tags are implicitly woven into the fabric of our content.-like the tag for the recently concluded Demo event in Arizona. Blogosphere coverage of events, in future shall be dependent on the organisers picking a tag and promoting it.) John Udell writes about his own experience of using Mark Logic's XQuery-based XML database, Content Interaction Server, for pumping in the RSS feeds of all the blogs that he reads. Through a query that combines free-text search for items containing the strings "Demo" or "Demo@15" with structured search for items that contain links to demo.com. It yielded a nice list of Demo-related items that couldn't have built any other way. The service works by converting the HTML content of my feeds into well-formed XHTML, storing it in the Mark Logic database, and then using the XQuery engine to perform hybrid free-text and structured searches. Although the vocabulary of XHTML is not very rich, certain elements - notably links - carry a latent semantic payload. Work on indexing these ad hoc syntaxes be to collaboratively extendto work for the whole blogosphere, is the next area of research.Search is receiving fair amount of attention, seeing good researchfrom IBM's webfountain to individual efforts like above- with convergence technology pushing expectations- search will undergo radical transformations from what we are seeing currently.
Sadahiro Sato, GM of BB Phone Services, Softbank, makes an impressive presentation at the APRICOT 2005 annual meet, Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) is to provide a forum for those key Internet builders in the region to learn from their peers and other leaders in the Internet community from around the world, being help at Kyoto, Japan.Yahoo! BB has 4.4M subscribers now and 95% of the Yahoo! BB subscribers took up BB Phone services.Yahoo! BB has built a complete backbone – said to have been built through acquisition. Yahoo! B.B is planning to finally move into S.I.P . Yahoo is all set fo providing wi-fi services. Other key points highlighted:
- BB Phone offers very competitive pricing. - Owing to SBB’s Softswitch and IP Backbone technology, BB Phone is the first nation-wide IP based voice service that achieves comparable quality to the PSTN. - BB Phone is NOT "a Voice over the internet" Service. Rather, it is an enhanced voice service delivered over SBB’s IP-Based Broadband network. - Customers require no additional expense or behavior changes on the part of them. - BB Phone has Automatic Re-Routing Function to PSTN in the event of our network outage or CPE (Customers Premise Equipment) failure.
(Via Infoworld)On a recent tour of his company's new customer briefing center in Mountain View, California, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Azul Systems buzzed around rack after rack of his company's hardware, and demonstrated that no heat is getting dissipated. The system housed nearly 400 microprocessor cores. In the server world, this would normally generate enough heat to cook a meal. Azul plans to launch its first product, which is designed to speed up and simplify the processing of middleware applications. Azul shall be partnering with IBM, and it is also in discussions with Microsoft to bring the Azul technology to the .Net platform to bring the same sort of segmented virtual machine capabilities to the CLR (the .Net common language runtime) as in the Java world. The idea behind the Azul appliance is simple. Users install Azul's proxy software on servers running middleware products such as BEA Systems's WebLogic or IBM's WebSphere. The proxy software then transfers Java processing jobs away from the server that is running WebLogic or WebSphere and over to the Azul appliance. One appliance can work with a number of different applications at once. Azul envisions that the systems will be used to consolidate an entire data center's worth of application processing in one place, much in the same way that NAS (network attached storage) devices have consolidated file serving into one device. In addition, Azul's processor is designed to consume less power than conventional chips. "We run at a very modest megahertz range, not in the gigahertz," said DeWitt, CEO, Azul. Azul has custom-designed its own microprocessor - a chip with 24 processor cores that is built to run many Java operations, called threads, at once. And the company has integrated a number of new technologies into its systems designed to speed up thread processing and reduce the performance bottlenecksin Java applications. Azul's first appliances, also designed in-house, will hold between 4 and 16 of these chips, meaning that they will be able to run as many as 384 threads at once - more than the large SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) boxes on the market - and at a cost that will be lower than a cluster of commodity servers designed to run the same number of threads. One of the questions that EDS experimenting with Azul is trying to answer is how best to take advantage of optimizations that may be specific to a particular middleware vendor. A second concern is figuring out how to bill for the machine's use, when different departments or even different companies may be tapping into its processing power. Ultimately, the Azul appliance is one of a number of promising technologies that are reshaping the way that data centers are used, he said. "It's probably going to make the data center look like one big computer rather than a collection of various computers." .While the potential for Azul looks promising, we need to see some early demonstrable success. But the idea is a marketbeater and definitely full of potential and an important development to watch.
We covered recently that between China and India there may be billion mobile phone subscribers in the next 5/6 years.The World Bank reports, The "digital divide" between rich and poor nations is narrowing fast. In the U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),the World Bank said in a report that telecommunications services to poor countries were growing at an explosive rate. "The digital divide is rapidly closing," the report said. "People in the developing world are getting more access at an incredible rate - far faster than they got access to new technologies in the past." Half the world's population now enjoys access to a fixed-line telephone, the report said, and 77 percent to a mobile network - surpassing a WSIS campaign goal that calls for 50 percent access by 2015. Widening access within the developing world to technology such as mobile phones and the Internet will help eradicate poverty and build stable democracies. The telecoms industry has already leapt into action to feed demand in booming markets such as Africa, where mobile phone growth has leapfrogged fixed-line communications, to help offset falling customer growth in more mature markets.We recently covered Mckinsey view onTelco's need to aggressively automate services to survive in the US, Europe and Asian Markets. To help fuel fierce demand for communications in countries which lack fixed-line alternatives, U.S. mobile phone equipment maker Motorola Corp announced this month it planned to provide an ultra low-cost mobile phone for less than $40 - aimed at emerging markets. "Developing countries are catching up with the rich world in terms of access," the report said. "Africa is part of a worldwide trend of rapid rollout. This applies to countries rich and poor, reformed or not, African, Asian, European and Latin American."Surely mobile phenomenon shall change the world- decisively for ever!!
I met Kiran Mazumdar Shaw,(sometimes referred to as the richest woman in India)- CEO of Biocon,an India headquartered bio- technology firm in Singapore almost a fortnight back when she came to deliver the CEO series lecture under the auspices of India Club - In her well researched presentation, she was highlighting phenomenal opportunties for India in Biotech related outsourcing and she mentioned in the course of the talk based in trade industry trends related to purchase of some bio-tech chemicals for research, she felt that the activity in India exceeded that of China(both are anyway seeing huge growth in this area) in the last ten years. Andrew Pollack, writing for the New York Times, covers a trend in the biotech/pharma business that I believe will become pretty significant in the next couple of years - offshoring research and development to India. As with IT, you can hire biotech and pharma experts in India at significantly lower costs.
The life sciences industry, with its largely white-collar work force and its heavy reliance on scientific innovation, was long thought to be less vulnerable to the outsourcing trend. The industry, moreover, is viewed as an economic growth engine and the source of new jobs, particularly as growth slows in other sectors like information technology. While life sciences jobs may be less vulnerable to outsourcing than jobs in information technology, industry officials say many companies are looking at that option as pressures mount to control drug prices and cut development costs. Fueling the outsourcing trend are Indian and Chinese scientists who obtained graduate degrees and work experience in the United States and Europe and are now returning to their native countries. In that sense, what is going offshore might be called "back laboratory" work, somewhat equivalent to the back-office information technology functions that have moved in the past. But there are signs that the biotech migration will go beyond low-level work. The outsourcing of some life sciences jobs could be seen as evidence that American biotechnology companies, like their counterparts in other industries, are doing nothing more than building global connections that help make them more competitive around the world. There are some factors that suggest life science jobs will be slower to migrate offshore than those in information technology. For one thing, drug companies face less pressure to cut costs than, say, computer disk drive manufacturers because pharmaceuticals have relatively high profit margins. "We're not trying to eke out another percent of operating margin," said Kevin Sharer, chief executive of Amgen, the largest biotech company, which is based outside Los Angeles. Also, life sciences companies often prefer to be near the best university research, which, for now, is largely in the United States because of ample funding from the National Institutes of Health.
I came across this article published in WSJ on customers starting to press software makers assume responsibility to pick up costs for underperformance. Excerpts with edits and my comments added: Major technology customers, due to mouting costs to fix problems caused by software flaws, are starting to press software makers to assume responsibility for the faults and pick up some of the costs. The moves are aimed at making tech companies rethink the way they write and sell software. Executives responsible for computer security at companies including General Motors Corp., AT&T Corp. and Alcoa Inc. say software vendors should begin to stand behind their products much as sellers of other products and services do. The word liability sends shudders through the software industry. Until now, most software makers have sold their products on the condition that they won't be held liable if flaws cause damage, be it from computer crashes or virus attacks that exploit the faults. The cost of repairing such flaws, or of reimbursing customers harmed by hacker attacks or viruses, could cost a vendor many millions of dollars. Customers are challenging the traditional exemption in the hope that increased liability will force vendors to deliver more secure and reliable software. GM, for example, is attempting to get software and computer-services vendors to agree to penalty provisions in new contracts that could hold the vendors liable if they fail to meet security requirements. Customer expectations relate to an engineered automobile with high reliability rolling out of the factory. Each time a software maker issues a "patch," or fix, to repair a flaw "is in a sense a recall," says Alan Levine, head of global information security for Alcoa. Mr. Levine suggests that software makers should cover customers' costs for installing these patches, "or at least assist us in paying for it. Other customers are seeking to add liability clauses to their "service level agreements" with outsourced technology providers, which specify performance requirements such as how many times a computer system may go down. losses, we may have some kind of liability. The push is part of a broader shift in the balance of power in the computer market, where slower spending and maturing technologies are increasingly giving buyers more power over tech vendors. Switching costs prohibit customers from acting against the vendors. My Take: While empathizing with the customers – we have to differentiate between desktop applications, utilities , managed services. I totally agree that in respect of desktop applications and utilities – the customers are suffering – in a month I almost lose –a –day for my administrator to fix issues in my laptop – I always tell my administrator that I sort of think that I am sitting on the tip of a volcano when routine upgrades/maintenance do not happen in time. Coupled with internal security administrative measures- administrators have to spend more and more time given the fact that upgrades happen so frequently. In fairness, some measures have been taken in the industry like auto updates and remote diagnostics but we are far off from virtually managing desktops and laptops to the user’s satisfaction. In respect of managed services, it is fair to say that service level agreements need to be in place with liability lock-ins. However in respect of enterprise software rollout, the issues are different. The enterprise software is much more complex and the success of implementation is really dependent on various factors – management commitment towards implementation and change management, degree of success that has been planned for in terms of dollars, resources, quality of program management, maturity of internal processes already in place, degree of preparedness of internal organization to absorb new technologies and processes, synchronous delay management, escalation management, responsibility distribution and monitoring – all play a role in the success of a enterprise software rollouts. I have seen double digit million dollar software solution rollouts suffer on the dimensions of time/cost/quality on account of these seemingly simplistic issues. Several times customer organisations seriously underestimate the amount of energy that may be needed in rolling out solutions across the enteprise. One area where definitely the product vendors need to be held responsible is their claims on "Out-Of-The-Box" rollouts - In my experience, many of these are certainly questionable - also when a customer says either they know all or when they say they do not know anything - and therefore initiative should be driven by consultants - alarm bell rings in my mind. I agree with Jeff Nolan when he says,"It's not like buying a toaster or an electric toothbrush and plugging it into the wall". Indemnification of the consulting company and product vendor would presuppose that the customer provides fair opportunity to roll out software in agreed upon manner that includes co-ordination of all activities in time in a qualitative manner – too often we witness that customers have a certain date in mind to roll out solutions and typically these get forced down – denying in the process opportunities to set solid things in place and too often consultants are forced to take a liberal view in terms of approvals not coming in time or the lack of it.several assumptions in respect of other systems that are in place getting busted and brain waves and flash thoughts of customer executives all infringe on the quality of the rollouts and the subsequent high cost of maintenance.
We recently covered in this blog New Scientist magazine theme issue India - The next knowledge superpower - Today & The Way Forward,we are seeing increased coverage of India and its growth all over the world - various media from various perspective. Starting with the article, High returns push global VCs to make a dash for desi shoresincreased VC interest to covering the perspective India Worth More Than Outsourcing provides a quick view of the changes happening in India. Recently Chris Andersen wrote about his trip to india which received very tough reviews . I think the best of coverage of India started with Thomas Friedman who wrote,this is the age of globalisation, and the countries that succeed best at globalisation are those that are best at ‘‘glocalisation’’ — taking the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding them with their own culture, so they don’t feel overwhelmedIndia has been naturally glocalising for thousands of years. Om Malik provided a well studied insight into the opportunties in india titled India-New Opportunity-It’s a global economy. Quite recently, we covered Eric Keller's view where India Inc growing twice as fast as Japan Incand also covered the Indian industries perspective as articulated by G.B.Prabhat in the piece Across every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India. David Kirkpatrick of Fortune magazine writes after a 9 day visit to India, The US and India are increasingly experiencing the consequences of full-time mutual virtual presence,thanks to the Internet. For U.S. companies, this has created the opportunity to have work performed remotely in that country. And for India, it has opened a wide window to the world, especially the U.S.. Kirkpatrick writes, "meeting young Indians who talked about their credit cards and computer foul-ups give some insight into how their society is changing in ways inconceivable even a few years ago. In the cities- Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Chennai (formerly Madras), and Bangalore—the presence and influence of the U.S. felt surprisingly strong. American brands were pervasive, indicating that India’s growing success will have lots of benefits for the US as well. Dell PCs, Ford Cars and were all over there& Citibank ATMs were almost as ubiquitous as in New York". An impressive willingness to work hard is one of the main things that distinguished Americans in the last century and in India, workers have a comparable willingness to strive to get ahead. In Mumbai, David finds the energy of the people on the street resembling that of Manhattan. Messengers hustled around, commuters crowded into trains, and construction workers were building new structures all over the city. The urge of Indians to better their condition, both individually and collectively, was palpable. One major negative for the Indian economy was its decaying and insufficient infrastructure. But right after thinking such thoughts, walk into an office filled with fresh-faced young people and be so struck by their energy and enthusiasm that there comes a feeling that the infrastructure problems could somehow be overcome. The will to succeed there is strong. Yet for wealthy travelers, everything that India offers seems accessible. People from abroad are starting to travel to high-quality Indian hospitals for complex medical procedures like joint surgery, because the prices are so much lower than in the U.S. and Europe. Prices will very gradually rise as do incomes, but this place will remain very inexpensive relative to prices in developed countries for a very long time. The Indian and American economies are going to become ever more intertwined, and that is probably a good thing. It helps that almost everyone in the country's commercial world speaks English. That makes it easier to get around in India than in places like China or Mexico, It’s possible to live an extremely comfortable life in India on relatively little money. David concludes by saying that his desire to retire in India while being connected with US remains a workable possibility
IT & telecom were the buzz words in the 80s & 90s.The begining of 21st century belongs to the retail industry. The supermarkets are getting bigger, malls are getting huge. Even the groccer around the corner is finding ways of storing more than just the veggies. Technology, experience economy and consumer spending is transforming the retail industry.Some believe that increasingly retail stores are beginning to look like electronic emporiums!. (Via Silicon.com) The advent of new technology from RFID to revamped voice and data networks could see their roles changed beyond all recognition forcing retail CIOs with the hardest job in the world. Ian Hannah, COO of BT Expedite, said that being the head of IT in a retail organization means facing up to a series of unique hardware and financial challenges. "The retail environment is one of the toughest for IT.. they don't upgrade their till for at least 10 years while we change our PCs every three years; you've got no capital expenditure budget; and you have legacy systems that are disparate and they've come from mergers and acquisitions anyway. "It's probably one of the toughest IT jobs on the planet." The job is set to change beyond recognition,as the high street aims to upgrade consumers to more and more high tech systems. Connectivity will be one of the key drivers for retail, with converged voice and data networks revamping retail IT in the same way as the advent of broadband has in the past, with mobile consumers expanding retail's remit ever further into the home. “The high street will have to change.- the current design our [geography] around cabling and infrastructure," he said. Soon pure voice networks would be a thing of the past for retailers. "By 2010,only data networks would exist - No more voice networks”. Already organizations are experimenting with a few retail technologies that it predicts will become the norm in the retail environment, including RFID smart shelves, shop kiosks with facial recognition, shop doors with Wi-Fi speakers and biometric log-ins for consumers to verify their identity when home shopping.RFID smart shelves and smart trolleys - which can act as a checkout or analyse and upsell from chipped items a consumer picks up - are gaining credence with retailers. Retailers ought to be factoring these developments into their roadmap.Some retailers have proved themselves willing to experiment with high-tech shopping. German retailer Metro Group is already trialling a smart shelf project in its Future Store, while one US supermarket now allows customers to pay by fingerprint. The expectations moving forward are that,"RFID technology will become so routine... this will come to the consumer en masse" and the reservation in mass adoption of RFID could be due to customers reluctance to submit to "Big Brother" technology holding back retail's high-tech rollover- but this situation is all set to change. Retail like telecom is massively embracing technology changes reaching the masses in large numbers.
Nokia, the world's biggest seller of mobile telephones, expects China to soon overtake the United States as the company's biggest market. Sales in China account for 10 percent of Nokia's revenue, second only to the United States at 13 percent, but rapid growth in the coming years is likely to push China beyond that, Jorma Ollila, the chief executive, said during a visit to Beijing. "I would not be surprised to see China take up the No. 1 position in the next three years," he said.China was likely to account for a quarter of new mobile phone users worldwide over the next five years as its subscribers grow from 330 million to 700 million.Nokia executives said that India was likely to follow China's trajectory of booming mobile phone use. India's says that Nokia, Ericsson and Alcatel would invest as much as $800 million in India this year, and the country's telecommunications regulator estimated that the number of mobile phone users might grow fourfold to as many as 200 million by the end of 2007. Analysts said that while Nokia was well-positioned to take advantage of China's appetite for mobile phones, the country's expected introduction of a new, "third generation" mobile phone network soon was unlikely to be the bonanza that some investors and phone manufacturers expect. Customers entering China's mobile phone shops encounter a gaudy blizzard of choices; there are about 56 phone makers in China selling about 700 models. Many of these are made by ambitious local companies like TCL Communications Technology and Ningbo Bird, but in recent years, multinationals like Nokia and Motorola have been edging out their smaller domestic competitors. Nokia's strategy is to capture new customers with cheap phones and then hold onto them as they become richer and more sophisticated..The ultimate goal of Nokia and its rivals is to capture customers as they buy new phones for China's third-generation network.
The telecom sector is one of the most exciting sectors to watch - partly because this changes so much and so visiby - very rarely, we see technology changing so dramatically as in telecom affecting so huge a population. we recently covered in this blog, Bweek perpectiveThe old phone companies are artifacts, and the new telecoms will look more like their counterparts in cable and computers Consumers and business will increasingly have their pick of new services from a bunch of providers that are fighting hard to win their business.But as that era fades,another is dawning. "This is the end of World War I - the Bells vs. AT&T and MCI,Now, World War II, among the phone, cable, and tech companies",is about to begin, as quoted therein. Mckinsey quarterly has come with an impressive article, on the need for telcos to embrace automated self services. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
In 2003, one major airline saved $200 million by selling more than half of its tickets over the Web, which for airlines is 90 percent cheaper than phones. Amazon.com has built a business model based on its customers' willingness to buy goods and to ask—and receive answers to—most service questions online. Surveys show customers prefer the convenience of Internet banking, e-retailing, wireless brokerage transactions, and online government license renewals. Telecom sector's pricing and margins have been under great pressure for a decade, while revenues for traditional voice services are expected to decline further amid intensifying competition between telcos and cable companies. Some telcos will need to cut as much as 20 or 30 percent of their current operating costs over the next four years to stay competitive. They can achieve up to 50 percent of the savings by e-enabling their sales and service functions.
Telcos who play a key role in e-enabling companies in other sectors have on the whole been slow to e-enable their sales and service. Most telcos have Web sites but don't leverage them aggressively; only a few have started to streamline and automate their back-office processes. A number of organizational impediments have slowed down progress in this area. Some telecom executives resist change because they still think that automated sales channels won't generate as much revenue as traditional labor-intensive ones do. Difficult organizational changes are needed because the costs and the benefits of e-enablement accrue to different parts of a company.Customers complain that they can't get full information without phoning a call center or visiting a retail outlet resulting in only about 10 percent of this sector's sales and service traffic going online in contrast to , consumers buying 30 percent of all airline tickets through this channel. For many telcos, customer calls trigger 85 percent of all incremental revenues. Whether the call is about a bill, service to a new address, a complaint, or an inquiry about new services, it becomes a sales opening; the call-center employee takes the opportunity to sell additional services, such as wireless, DSL, and even, in some cases, satellite television. One out of four calls leads to increased revenue for the company. Telco executives know what some banks have achieved by automating up to 75 percent of all service transactions and simultaneously raising customer satisfaction. Yet they fear tinkering with the sector's lifeline—the direct call—despite knowing that it is an expensive way to sell. A typical call-center transaction costs $8 to $10; the same transaction online costs $0.15 to $0.80. Printed bills cost four times as much as e-bills, and customers can be served online 24 hours a day without significant additional costs. E-enabling sales and service involves comparatively small investments for companies that typically spend $1 billion or so each year on IT.But returns can be quite high – some , 300 percent in certain sectors. Organizational and managerial obstacles come in the way - only a committed and able executive can help a company overcome them. Given the complexities involved no single person can push these mega e-enablement initiatives, given the involvement of different functions: call centers, the network, billing centers, the Web site – this becomes the direct CIO leadership responsibility. Telcos – both landline and wirelss all over the world can no longer afford a business model where customers pick up the telephone and talk with call-center sales and service staffs using old and inefficient systems. Customers dislike the slow, confusing, labor-intensive processes put in place in telecom companies. Telecommunications companies soon won't have the margins to support the current inefficiencies, in any case. To reduce costs and simultaneously improve service, these companies must persuade their customers to move to far more cost-efficient automated channels—the Web, automated telephone systems, or wireless transactions—and streamline their internal sales and support operations.
AMRResearch announces 2005 Innovation Award Winners. The winners designed to honor breakthrough ideas by small, midsize, and large companies are:
- Salesforce.com,(more than $100M): (Citation :"The ease of use and short implementation time is changing the game in the hosted CRM market..") - TrenStar,($10M to $100M): (Citation:"First company to offer this combination of technology and services to support pooling of common, nonstrategic containers and other mobile assets...") - T3Ci,(under $10M) (Citation:"The first vendor to provide RFID analytics" and - IBM,(Citation:"Last year, IBM received 3,248 patents by the U.S. Patent Office and has topped the list for the most patents 12 years in a row..")
AMR says winners were selected from 150 based on criteria: -Has a sustainable competitive advantage -Is unique -Addresses a key business issue -Spurred new business for the company -Has referenceable accounts
While, Trenstar and Salesforce.com are well known and I have been watching these two companies, I first read about T3Ci when Jeff Nolan wrote about the company's new wesbsite with information about RFID analytics recently. Jeff - you have backed the right horse- RFID analytics would be a key linkage in any business ecosystem- particularly when during implementation of RFID - very high volume data gets processed and increasingly all transactional data relating to material atleast may eventually be "RFIDed" and T3ci offering fits in very well in meeting emerging enterprise requirements.The analytics value gets amplified considerable as the technology canbe deployed among trading partners.. The concept is a surefire winner...
ABI Research says, the number of opportunities to use your cell phone and other small objects to make payments will grow rapidly this year and will keep growing in future years. Often called "contactless payments," the technology involves swiping an enabled cell phone, key ring or other small item near a point-of-sale terminal. The capabilities, which use RFID-like near-field wireless technology, are starting to gain momentum in Japan and are undergoing tests in the U.S. and Europe. Credit card companies have endorsed the technology. As consumers continue to use card-based transactions for smaller, traditionally cash-based purchases, "contactless payment capabilities make more sense, especially for card issuers looking to increase customer loyalty and convenience," Erik Michielsen, ABI's director of RFID and ubiquitous wireless research, said in a statement. While the technology has been around for a while and used in a small number of cases such as ExxonMobile's SpeedPass payment system, it will start to catch on big-time this year, Michielsen said. That's because those previous efforts didn't have the support of credit card vendors. "What's lifting this to the next level is the expansion of contactless payment from these closed, branded systems, to open systems tied to bank accounts and major credit card issuers," Michielsen said. "These financial institutions now want a bigger share of what was in the past the cash-based economy." Michielsen predicted that merchants that typically have low-cost transactions, such as fast-food restaurants, will be among the first to switch to the system. McDonald's restaurants are expected to adopt the system in North America this year.
Increasingly the cell phone is beginning to act as your quick medical monitor, identification device and may be your electronic wallet!!May be we will soon see petro stations/airlines offering complementary cellphones with loyalty program.. Amex, Visa. Master, Star alliance .. rush to distribute cell phones!!
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are enterprise-led initiatives that over time represent the next generation transforamtion of IT in the endeavour to reduce cost, enhance business flexibility and improve ability to leverage human and technology resources. John Hagel in this OPED piece published for Sandhill,on SOA observes,"while there is pull from business to embrace SOA, the push from established vendors need more thrust and result orientation". Services-oriented architecture is re-defining the entire enterprise software business,from products to sales strategies to vendor positioning, everything would be influencedand states most of todays software vendors have not taken the necessary steps to remain relevant in the coming era of SOA-driven enterprise computing. Surprisingly, web services adoption is being driven by non-technology line business executives across a broad range of industries.
Hagel rightly notes,in the absence of architectural leadership - SOAs look more like fragmented adoption of Web service technology & SOA "architectural vision to reality" is handicapped by the absence of a solidified migration path and notes that the power of SOA is amplified where an outside-in approach is brought in.The real challenge & opportunity - is to help bridge the gap that currently exists between the I.T. departments struggling to define a pragmatic migration path for SOA deployments and business executives seeking to harness the near-term business value of Web services technology. The new generation of software service providers like Salesforce.com in the CRM space are targeting major enterprise applications with a service model built on an SOA platform, in contrast to an earlier generation of Application Solution Providers that were trying to build service businesses with more hard-wired software technologies. While promising new companies like Talaris and E2open are targeting one of the most promising arenas for SOAs: Inter-enterprise collaboration. Talaris focuses on helping enterprises coordinate third party employee business services - everything from travel services to package shipping. E2open concentrates on helping companies in the high tech arena to coordinate multi-tier supply chain operations on a global scale. New generation vendors are focused on selling to business with good business cases as against selling to IT departments. While the vendor landscape may appear to remain unchanged,Hagel expects to see a few large companies focused on defining and managing federation frameworks to effectively mobilize a much broader range of specialized service providers. The real sweet spots in the SOA landscape will involve specialized business policy repository and mediation businesses, third party auditing and reputation engines and collaboration hubs focused on supporting process collaboration across extended enterprises. These offer the potential for significant concentration and scale, and the resultant possibility exist to build and operate very large-scale enterprise software businesses, but they will operate with fundamentally different economic and organizational models.The future SOA vendorworld shall unfold based on actions taken by the vendors with end benefits in mindand not necessarily by existing marketand financial status.
My Take:John Hagel's analysis is brilliant to the core- he has assessed the transformations that may be needed by vendors to be ready to provide business value- while this is agreeable, I feel that lasting value for business shall come out of enabling entirely new sets of business models- those that can be configured on the fly,( for example integrating all eBay related operators in multiple ways),enabling lean,mean & efficient best in class processes with well designed performance measures,and also by enhancing the ability of the business enterprise in leveraging emerging technologies like grid computing,applistructures,powerful convergence technologies- many of the solutions today are aligned to delivering solutions in the conventional way but these may change.In future, businesses may be measured by how quickly their models of operationand processes can be configured and reconfigured, SOA architecture need to provide for this dynamic builds and rebuilds.For now though, SOA is a recognizable and mostly virtual plumbing exercise. Most likely, vendors will draw their strategy from the experience of customers, and will adjust accordingly. Not to overlook the fact that though the vendor community is trying hard to improve their SOA maturity,evolving standards and entrenched infrastructure mean more pilots and lab environments and more & more scope for innovations as adoption tends to improve..
We recently covered in the post Extracting Value from Digital Content knowledge@wharton's perspective on the effect of digital content and new technology on the entertainment and media industries as: a) a devastating body blow; b) a profit-spewing bonanza; c) the creation of a promising market in its infancy. depending on whether you are talking about the beleaguered music industry, the fortunate movie industry or the cable business's hopes for digital cable.As the convergence and changing technology are making sweeping changes, Businessweek writes,with AT&T and MCI going, the Bells will compete with cable and tech companies.
The takeovers of AT&T and MCI officially usher in the long-heralded Internet era.The old phone companies are artifacts, and the new telecoms will look more like their counterparts in cable and computers. Consumers and business will increasingly have their pick of new services from a bunch of providers that are fighting hard to win their business.But as that era fades,another is dawning. "This is the end of World War I - the Bells vs. AT&T and MCI," says Scott C. Cleland, a telecom analyst at Precursor Group in Washington. "Now, World War II, among the phone, cable, and tech companies, is about to begin." As the SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI takeovers go forward, they will be just the beginning of a massive transformation sweeping the telecom industry as the shift to digital technology gains speed. That's rapidly eroding the barriers between phone companies, cable providers, and other tech companies. The Bells are moving from the residential phone market they've dominated into a new set of digital ventures in wireless, data, video, and corporate services. Phone calls delivered over wires are becoming a commodity service that is under assault from wireless calling, e-mail, and Internet phoning over cable operators' wiresforcing the Bells to seek fresh markets.
Verizon and SBC have already announced ambitious plans to offer TV service over superfast fiber networks in residential neighborhoods. Now the purchases of AT&T and MCI help them accelerate selling phone and data services to corporations - beyond their traditional consumer market. Selling to corporations, which are less likely to change providers than fickle consumers, is seen as a source of potential growth and a hedge against the high-stakes play for residential video and other services via fiber. As Verizon CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg told Wall Street analysts on Feb. 14: "If we don't change, we'll be caught repricing old products."
The Bells are still building the fiber networks over which their TV services will run and lack the programming expertise that is part of cable execs' DNA. Verizon, which spent $1 billion to serve 1 million homes last year, plans to cover an additional 2 million homes this year. And SBC is spending $5 billion to reach 18 million homes in major markets within its 13-state territory by 2007. The cable industry,already has the ability to deliver TV, broadband, and phone service to 99 million households. Indeed, some smart money is getting behind cable. Over the past six months, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has doubled its stake in Comcast, to 10 million shares, now valued at $328 million. And late last year, George Soros made an initial investment of $51 million in Time Warner, according to government filings.
Competition in residential broadband will become even more vital as the telecoms and cable operators plan to sell more services on top of that basic fast Web link. Both want to move up the food chain to reap more revenues per subscriber, potentially putting them in conflict with others that need access to the same broadband pipes. Vonage Holdings Corp., for instance, is selling voice-over-Internet phone service over cable just as cable operators are entering that business, too. Regulators will need to provide safeguards so the phone and cable giants that control the broadband networks don't discriminate against service providers that they compete with.
Engadget writes,Australian developer Glen Murphy has created a GPS plug-in for the recently released Google Maps service. The tool currently requires Windows XP or 2000 (which means, of course, you need a full-size laptop hooked up to your GPS),it can be easily envisioned in future versions support for Palm or Pocket PC PDA. While this may never take the place of dedicated mapping software, the idea of getting your GPS to interface with the Web has its appeal; we’d like to be able to go a step further and be able to, say, run a search on Moviefone.com and have our GPS transparently plot a route to the theater without us having to punch in the address. My Take: Wonderful idea to have it work on mobile devices, like Pocket PCs and Smartphones, but it will never work until the browsers on those devices support enough javascript and DHTML to be able to use Google Maps, which they curently don't.Realtime traffic update and routing – this may appear a little more tricky given the communication hassles and also we have the issue of browser compatibility - Pocket PCs and Smartphones, may not adequately support enough javascript and DHTML to be able to use Google Maps.
(Via Brad Feld). Tom Evslin writes about The Flattening of Almost Everything in organisations. Tom writes, "We used to need hierarchies because we had only primitive communication and information processing capability. Computers,electronic communication, and particularly the Internet have made it possible to flatten almost everything. Flat organizations, are necessary to deal with accelerating change.Large organization used to need to be hierarchical in order to accomplish the dissemination of orders and the collection of information. The more people there were at the base of any organization, the more levels of hierarchy were needed". In today's age even conventional communication like school sending to parensts can be done through school’s web site or an RSS feed or a mass email or a mass text message on their cell phones (or the kids’ cell phones) or something like that. The Key issue as Tom sees is that hierarchy had plenty of drawbacks. Excessively hierarchical authority usually evolves with hierarchical command flow. Each layer in the hierarchy distorts directions and information going down and filters information and questions going up.A defective node can unleash catastrophe or make the communication ineffective.Horizontal communication outside of a local group is nearly impossible in an hierarchical organization because that communication needs to flow up and down the chain of command. Technology ensures that we do not need to be dependent on hierarchies for information anymore. Information flow generally follows the hierarchy and could be impeding. Tom argues, The frequency of disruptive technical change is increasing. Markets and competition are also changing rapidly. Flat organizations with non-hierarchical information flow are better able to survive or even thrive on change. Direct communication between individuals is both quicker and more accurate than nodal information flow.There is inevitable confusion of purpose between protecting the hierarchy and protecting the organization. Tom concludes by saying, to say that change is a constant is a gross understatement. Change is a fractal that only the flattest possible organizations with the best information flow can deal with. In a related posting, Tom writes on Complex Ecosystems and the End of the Dinosaurs saying the the dinosaurs disappeared as they were too successful for too long. Disruptive mechanisms like technology tests the strength of any ecosystem and the reality is the more complex and perfectly adapted the ecosystem was to the former environment, the more difficult it will be for it to adapt to the new environment. It isn’t just individual businesses that were threatened by steam power, by the railroads, by the automobile, the semiconductor, software, the Internet, whatever – it’s entire business ecosystems! It happened to the hand-loom ecosystem, to the horse ecosystem, to the monolithic computer ecosystem, and to the old telecommunications ecosystem. It wasn’t just phone companies which defaulted on massive amounts of debt, laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, and erased zillions in stock market value; the same thing happened to the manufacturers who supplied the service companies. The unions which supplied the workers are shadow of their former powerful selves.Any successful business MUST adapt to the ecosystem which exists or is forming – at the time. The pace of technological change – unlike the frequency of comet crashes – is increasing exponentially. Disruptive technologies like once in every couple of centuries earlier- but nowthey happen every couple of years. And the only thing which is predictable is the certainty that there WILL be a technology that disrupts whatever you earn your living at. You can predict that something will happen but you can’t predict what. Tom concludes brilliantly by saying that the only guidance that can be given is the gamblers adage "you gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em." It also turns out that some generalized skills like curiosity, perseverance, and the ability to work hard are useful in moving from one ecosystem to its successor. Brilliant Tom -disruprive technologies,processes and globalisation unleash a new wave of competition that had been unimagined in the past - every decade the fortune 100 list see churns - newer line of business, fresh business models, better marketcaps for more innovative and dynamic companies, easier flow of capital and global capital availability, changing demographics,rising asia all are interlocked to bring in a new sense of heightened competition - as Tom Peters says often -"Its not your father's world anymore" and the idea behind Jack Welch's famous statement -"The rate of change inside an organisation should always be greater than the rate of change in the ecosystem that it thrives on to remain successful" is becoming more and more relevant and true.
Jesse James Garrett has an interesting article on what Adaptive Path are calling AJAX, essentially the model that uses DOM and standards to provide richer internet applications (think Gmail, Google maps, Google suggest - think Google,.) among other things through state retention.
Ajax essentially serves as an intermediary between the browser and the server, and while we typically assume that addition of this intermediate layer may make things take longer, here, it's just the opposite. Ajax sends stuff to the server on demand and much of the time it can handle the request locally itself, providing for more immediate interactions and feedback that are so integral to the current web applications. On top of this based on the context and need when Ajax determines that it needs to engage the server for data/processing, this is effected in a non destructive way not affecting the flow of the user's experience.
Howard Anderson, is the well known technology expert and founder of the Yankee Group, a respected Boston forecasting firm, and Battery Ventures, the Wellesley venture capital partnership that backed Akamai Technologies and Nextel. These days, he is the managing director of YankeeTek Ventures, a Cambridge firm that makes early investments in start-up companies from a $60 million fund, Anderson has decided to opt out of raising a second fund for Yankee Tek Ventures. He acknowledges that the fund-raising climate for venture capital firms isn't great,but says his decision not to raise a new YankeeTek fund is "more about there being no good investments" in software and networking, two areas he has long specialized in. Anderson's bearish on the prospects for RFID and nanotech start-ups, and while he's optimistic about life sciences, but says that's an area where he has limited insight.
There may be a little more than beliefs governing the decision: - In 1999, Anderson collected $60 million from several other venture capital firms, including Battery, Advent International, and Bain Capital, as well as a group of big tech companies like Novell, 3Com, and Nortel Networks. His objective was to invest in promising New England companies that made software, chips, and networking equipment.YankeeTek's track record hasn't been spectacular. Several early investments disappeared without a trace, like Lydstrom Inc., which was developing a home server for digital music, and a company called Global Electronic Markets. Anderson backed three companies started by Ric Fulop, a Babson College dropout with a powerful entrepreneurial drive. (Only one of Fulop's companies, Watertown-based A123 Systems, which is developing a new kind of battery, is still alive.)Another group of YankeeTek companies were sold off for undisclosed sums. The only two deals with dollar figures attached don't sound too sweet. One was Momentix, a start-up that made software that helped run trade shows. After YankeeTek and two other firms had invested $3.5 million, the company was sold for $100,000. AltaWorks of New Hampshire sucked in $35 million from firms including Prism Venture Partners and YankeeTek; it was sold for $3.5 million in October.YankeeTek's top prospect is Egenera, a Marlboro manufacturer of modular ''blade" servers that filed to go public in June but hasn't yet made its debut. It's one thing to be brilliant and clairvoyant, its another thing to be consistently successful - but there is nothing to be criticised here- after all enteprising attitude and the guts to dare drives the venture capial industry. I do not agree with the view that funding options are narrow in the software field - though challenging, opportunities continue to exist - in web services, grid computing, utility computing, RFID,Nanotechnology, Embedded Systems, Mobile applications etc..
Jonathan Schwartz writes, Java is continuing to grow, and accelerate - on both the devices (and SIM cards embedded within them), and in the network infrastructure and points out to several interesting facts. There are now over 500,000,000 Java enabled phones in the world, and more than 60% of all new phones will ship, from the factory, Java enabled. The rush of new developers we're adding to the nearly 5 million Java developers are J2ME developers, folks creating the services (from commercial to social) through which the majority of the world will experience the internet. The majority of the world will first experience the internet through their mobile phones(Am not sure - may be more would access from the mobile). 10 times as many people bought handsets last year as PC's. There were a BILLION wireless devices sold last year, and around 100 million PC's.
Broadcast broadband content on mobile phone may become more prevalent than on the PC - and now that Nokia (and their peers) are the world's largest camera manufacturers the odds are far higher you'll even create broadband content on your handset. The CEO of Oberthur, predicts we'll see 1 GigaBYTE SIM cards by years end - that's right, a Gig on an interchangeable SIM card. What happens when a significant portion of that memory is executable? That's a mighty small computer. The net of all this - bubbles precede the buildout. And the buildout's clearly underway with mobile operators chasing revenue and value. With operators beginning to see a market driven by services and content, as seen in deals like Verizon and Discovery TV tieup, wherein,the Discovery Network shall act as a content partner for verizon's upcoming "FiOS " FTTP TV service. we recently covered mobile revolution is next only to PC revolution and Jonathan here says that the mobile revolution is all set to surpass the PC revolution quite comprehensively. With consolidation happening in the mobile service provider market - things can only look up in the mobile application space. We recently covered that mobile market shall begin to see chinese manufacturers making headway in mobile infrastructure and strong india headquartered software companies providing solutions in the mobile application space - we may even begin to see indian software players gearing to roll out mobile application products and with content being the king in the mobile internet world, avalanche of opportunities open up for content service providers and if there is any phenomenon, where we can see multiplier effect clearly - it is in the mobile market - virtually every facet of digital world needs to get ready - from hardware to process huge tranche of data, communication capacity providers, intermediation, DRM, content providers,Gaming applications, all service providers in digital and physical world( to gear up for offering services in the mobile),digital lifestyle players, on demand service providers - well the list is endless providing infinite set of possibilities and opportunities.
(Via Businessweek) Forrester Research CEO George Colony deflates outsourcing, predicts Net links for billions of products, and sees GM's CIO as a pioneer. Here's George sharing his insightful perspective.
- The biggest growth area in technology right now is the physical-to-digital connection. The difference between 1994 and 2004 is that in that 10-year period, a piece of wire was created from every company to every customer - the World Wide Web. From 2004 to 2014, a piece of wire will be created from every company to every product they've ever made. Forrester predicts that we're going from 750 million devices connected to the Internet today to 14 billion by the end of this decade. RFID is a small sideshow in that whole trend. Wal-Mart is pushing ahead fast. Today the car, actually, has two tags in it- A toll tag, and also OnStar. With OnStar, GM has tagged 10 million or 15 million vehicles. When you have OnStar, GM knows every gauge in your car real-time. They know what CD you're playing, and they know what CD track you're playing. And, of course, your location and speed, how much gas is in your tank, et cetera. They aren't doing anything with it because they haven't figured out how to monetize it.
Trends in corporate IT - "Organic IT,"is the idea of cutting costs in the back end, using cheap back-end systems and servers, and then pushing the funds over onto the front end. Because a lot of companies haven't touched their Web site in three years -- it's just horrendous. This is a highly deflationary trend for Sun and HP. Sun and HP’s server business is having so much trouble due to this organic IT. George goes on to predict, “Fifty percent of US companies would not outsource” That's for security reasons, for regulatory reasons. And observes that it takes about 24 months from the point of decision for most companies to actually execute on offshore
And George thinks - Ralph Szygenda has done at General Motors as he has said:- forget the technology, there are only business processes at GM, saying, GM finance cars, does R&D, manufacture cars, ship cars,retail cars. Those are all the processes of GM. So he's not a typical CIO - he's organized his IT in process and not in technology. This is the "Process Revolution." Actually,it can be called "Ralph Revolution."These words of George are full of insights -must read for all concerned about future.
Biosensors evoke images of tiny chips and wireless technology, but the next generation of biosensors may be: holograms costing only fractions of a cent, and the technology could usher in an era of "smart labels" that show when food is spoiled or when body glucose and alcohol levels are too high.Prototypes developed include contact lenses that monitor glucose levels, thin badges that detect alcohol levels, and sticks that can tell, instantly, if milk has spoiled or become contaminated. The technology promises to be quicker and cheaper than tests used today and can be deployed with minimal training.. A test showing that fuel has been contaminated with trace amounts of water reads "dry" or "wet." In a breath alcohol test intended for police offices, suspects breathe onto tiny cards that either show a green automobile or a red X, establishing whether a person is sober enough to drive. The holograms can detect pH to four decimal places and chemical concentrations of hormones and other biologically important substances. The samples tested do not need to be pure: The holograms can work in milk or even in stool samples from newborns, said Chris Lowe, a professor at Cambridge University. The image that appears on the hologram is caused by silver particles on a "smart polymer," a lightweight material similar to everyday plastic. These polymers can be designed to change shape in different chemical environments. This shape change moves bands of silver particles, and patterns of silver particles control the brightness and color of the hologram. Thus, the hologram can be used to display a message, a numerical scale or other readout. Here is a related article explaining usage of hologram with laser diode.
We recently covered about Glittering Samsung wherein we also covered Chinese enterprises are neither globally competitive nor technically superior and extended our coverage with another article titled Consumer electronics : china way behind.we also covered recent economist artile on Samsung saying it been a remarkable year for Samsung Electronics. Samsung was one of the stars at the giant consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas,concluded a few weeks back, where it unveiled a glittering array of new products. Among them was a notable first: a mobile phone that uses voice-recognition technology to convert speech into text messages, offering respite to people who find typing messages on their mobile's tiny keyboard frustrating.We also covered Businessweek's coverage on LG, another rising korean star. We also wrote threin,South Korean story itself is very inspiring. Like most other modern cities in Asia, I had been to Seoul and Busan several times and only find the Koreans becoming more and more competitive - at the moment the Korean economy is a little dull, but shall pick up shortly. For those who think that the chinese would dominate all sorts of manufaturing, my answer is a BIG NO..Korean enteprises amidst others shall be the key players that china should be wary off. Park Mun Hwa is president and chief executive of Mobile Communications, a division of LG Electronics, in Seoul talks about LG’s global ambitions in mobile handset markets.Often compared to Samsung, its bigger rival, LG has already come on strong outside of Asia in the sales of advanced, third-generation handsets. Mr.park provides his perspective on growth( Via IHT): On competition with 3G vendors: In both 2G and 3G, the product comes first. The main reason our company has sold a lot of 3G handsets in Europe is because of our technology leadership: Our longer battery life and the handsets' small size. We will carry the full line of 3G this year as well, entry-level phones to high-end products, to target all of our customers, from the small end-user to the business customer.
On how LG shall become No.3 globally next: LG has already achieved global No.1 status in CDMA phones [the dominant standard in the United States]. In GSM phones [predominant in Europe and Asia], we entered the market only in 2001, relatively late compared to our competitors. LG Electronics has the core competency to make a great business in handsets.LG has already made business for many years in a broad range of multimedia products, including LED, LCD, OLED, based on our electronics business Mr.Park outlines three strategies that LG telecom would pursue:
- LG would definitely attain product leadership first. That means LG is going to develop new models including multimedia functions: 3G phones, game phones, navigation phones, DMB radio phones, music phones, camera phones. - The second strategy is to satisfy our customers, the carriers, with customization and country adaptation in the local market. LG has established its overseas R&D laboratory in France in October 2004. The target is 150 engineers this year from the local work force because they know the local requirements. - The third strategy is to strengthen our operational excellence.LG recently combined our two separate manufacturing facilities in Korea into one to add some factory automation and lower the cost. LG can make a jump up based on that because of supply chain management and quality control. Every available sign indiactes that LG shall get stronger in the mobile handset market.
Ed Sim writes referring to Jonathan Schwartz's article about the nature of developers,&why building a relationship with them is key to creating opportunities. Ed Sim writes,referring to a friend's conversation Developers don't buy things, they join things and adds,"The key, however, for any small company is to do this economically and efficiently". Many companies selling into enterprises end up going through some "pilot" or "beta" period where a sales prospect's developers and technologists get to use the software and deploy it on a trial basis. When a chief executive looks at a sales pipeline, he would always want to know who in the organization the company is selling into and why.More often than not it is seen that a number of early stage companies selling into enterprises but not selling high enough to the people with budget. The vendor spends an inordinate amount of time reaching out to the developer or technologist to set up a pilot and then leaves with no defined criteria on when the pilot ends and how it automatically converts into a sale.. The developer uses the product,uses lot of time and resources, and moves on to the next new technology. Ed writes with the advent of opensource technology ,"try before you buy" approach may work if users can download the software for free either on a trial basis, say 90 days, or if you open source a version of your product and build a real community
My Take: Ed Sim's post is too broad and wide regarding open source as a method to increase product acceptance. While it is agreed that developers are important for selling certain types of mundane software like utilities, dev tools, app servers, etc, are they important part of the sales process for enterprise applications?.The answer is a definite NO. The question is - should an enterprise product open-source their products to allow for developers install , configure and try with it? No. Enterprise products are sold based on vale propositions that would cover amongst other things – stability and maturity of product, product fit to adapt to various business processes, pricing and TCO etc. Business improvements matter a lot more when the product has become mature with a number of installations and good support framework in place. The idea for opensource may be good for desktop related software or some maintenance related software, entertainment software like games, utility tools like anti-spyware, messaging software and infrastructure software like- app server, database servers, email servers, messaging middleware. These are all product types where a developer could influence a small deal at any enterprise – small or large. Sales and Account management should focus on continually mapping the account – mapping influencers, buyers, naysayers, decision shy ditherers.
Darlene Fichter writes about, keeping fresh content for Library Web Site with Really Simple Syndication (RSS). "Keeping a library web site up to date with fresh content is a challenge for any webmaster.Standard procedures are available to publish, merge and format RSS feeds into instant web content. Libraries have made specialized pages featuring article titles of new journal issues, new library acquisitions, book and movie reviews, and much more and Darlene points to a list of sites that allow anyone to simply cut, paste and publish RSS content to their site in seconds." She concludes the maturity and advancements made in this sector as, highly evolved and today the availability is assured in terms of:
a. Lots of tools b. Right tool for programmer types and push button publishers c. Lots of opportunity d. Start to think in Technicolor e. What if facilities
About.com's knowledge of natural search will bring to the Times tremendous value and with the judicious application of some SEO optimization and the creation of new landing pages that brings some content outside the archive's walls, the Times can kick some butt and do some major traffic acquisition, vastly boosting their revenue from sports, entertainment, financial, and even local advertising (think about adding the NYTimes ad targeting skill for rich media to the About.com SEO mix). The acquisition can also bring halo effect for satellite Times properties - Right now Boston.com has the second Red Sox result on Google--but when you type in "Red Sox Guide" about.com's page comes up as #4--and it's about the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry.
Ronald E. Quirk, Jr. and Stacia J. Borrello have come out with a well researched articleon RFID deployment and regulatory conformance requirements. The key ideas covered include:
RFID deployment is expected to be substantial. Many market research firms estimate that there will be nearly a tenfold increase in supply chain RFID use over the next five years. The total global market for all RFID systems is expected to roughly double in size in just three years, growing from $1.1 billion in 2003 to $2.1 billion by the end of 2005. RFID patents are rapidly being granted. By the end of 2003, approximately 4,300 RFID-related patents were granted, with more than three-fourths of them granted since 1999. While the indicators show rapid implementation of the technology, there are some regulatory matters of which RFID manufacturers, designers, and operators should be aware.Key RFID regulatory issues include compliance with the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) rules and regulations, and the probability of multiplying state privacy laws.Ignorance of the law could impede deployment of even the most efficient and well-designed RFID systems.As the industry and government mandate timetables requiring RFID tags on individual items grow near, privacy laws are likely to be implemented. Companies utilizing RFID would be well advised to stay current on the state of RFID privacy laws and be prepared to implement business plans that will be able to handle the legal mandates of those laws.
As RFID continues its rapid growth in the global marketplace, opportunities to capitalize on this technology abound. While high-profile compliance mandates by retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target and federal agencies such as the DoD fuel the implementation of RFID, countless numbers of businesses across all market sectors are investigating the cost-saving capabilities of RFID. However, with rapid deployment of RFID on the horizon, it will be critically important to know how to navigate within the regulatory environment. RFID manufacturers, vendors, and users should be aware of, and develop programs to ensure compliance with, the myriad of current and future regulations.
Cisco is majorly into pushing Linux desktops inside the company says Craig Manning, an IT manager at Cisco Systems who manages Cisco's internal network. as per this slashdotted article from LinuxWorld magazine. Cisco has already converted more than 2,000 of its engineers to Linux desktops, with plans to move many laptop users to the platform over the next few years. Manning says the driver for Linux on the desktop is not cost savings, but easier support. "On the desktop, you're not going to save that much money by replacing Windows with Linux," says Manning, who is also chairman of the Open Source Development Lab's (OSDL) Desktop Linux Steering Committee. Factors that even out the Linux/Windows desktop costs include - retraining employees, - installing applications that support Windows applications on Linux, and - support subscription fees from Linux vendors such as Red Hat, which are necessary for software updates and patches.
The advantage of Linux on the desktop is the ease of administration, provided by some of the built-in tools and properties of Linux. Such tools include Secure Shell (SSH), which can allow a remote administrator to easily access and trouble shoot a desktop. Also, the ability to hide and partition underlying system files and OS underpinnings from users on Linux is helpful. "You don't get people going into their registry or other areas of Windows and tweaking things," Manning says. Manning estimates that it takes a company approximately one desktop administrator to support 40 Windows PCs, while one administrator can support between 200 and 400 Linux desktops. Manning is skeptical of the notion that Linux is the cure for buggy Windows desktops, which are vulnerable to attack. Manninf says, CISCO is not going to get everyone onto Linux," and is targeting to get 70 percent of the company. I agree with Manning's hesitancy to declare Linux as more resistant to viruses and network attacks, saying "Windows has 95% of the market, and it gets slammed because it's so prevalent. When Linux has 95 percent or the market, it will be interesting to see how much it gets attacked."
WiMax,wireless broadband is gearing to compete with DSL and cable modem services and without the need for heavy regulation will have a significant impact on the telecoms industry. According to In-Stat, low network investment costs, and non-line-of-sight operation over licensed or non-licensed radio spectrum makes WiMax an attractive technology.The success of WiMax, which supports point to multi-point broadband wireless access rates up to 2Mbps over a coverage area of three to five miles, remains uncertain.In-Stat's report stated that, by 2009, approximately 8.5 million worldwide, will be using WiMax-based broadband wireless access services. Nearly 4.5 million of these will also subscribe to Voice over WiMax services, according to the study. The analyst firm predicted that a maximum 15 per cent market share is likely available to broadband wireless access operators in metropolitan areas.Emerging country markets typically have antiquated technology and limited public network capacity, making WiMax particularly attractive.The emergence of standards-based wireless interoperability for WiMax wide area broadband microwave access equipment will "lift wireless communications to new heights",goes the prediction.Frost & Sullivan research suggests,WiMax is likely to become the third most widely used high-speed internet access technology following its competitors DSL and cable modem.. WiMax could even upstage DSL, particularly in the rural areas of Asia and eastern Europe where it is extremely expensive to deploy cable or DSL. "Customers are more confident about accepting a specifications and standards-based product and this is tilting the balance in favour of WiMax," said Frost & Sullivan. Lower costs, continuous product evolution, and flexibility in switching suppliers are driving uptake of WiMax-based products, according to the analyst. Success in several mass markets, coupled with the increase in the number of technology providers, is also making the technology more accessible and affordable. Products are expected to be announced second quarter of 2005. As of 2004, major cities such as Seattle in the U.S.,and Dalian and Chengdu in China are already implementing WiMax.A first pilot program will be expected to deploy in the summer of 2005 in Montreal in the festivital zones (Place des Arts and Complexe Desjardins) or at the Old Port of Montreal. Oakland County, Michigan has announced plans to cover the entire 910 square miles of the county with free WiMAX service beginning in late 2005 via its Wireless Oakland Initiative. "Given its non-line of sight, Voice over IP, and interoperability capabilities, WiMax holds the potential to coexist with, if not upstage, current technologies.For example, a combination of Wi-Fi and WiMax capabilities for mobile phones, laptops and PDAs is an emerging trend, the reported stated. This hybrid would provide user access through Wi-Fi and backhaul by means of WiMax
We recently covered The effect of digital content and new technology on the entertainment and media industries is: a) a devastating body blow; b) a profit-spewing bonanza or c) the creation of a promising market in its infancy. The answer is all three, depending on whether you are talking about the beleaguered music industry, the fortunate movie industry or the cable business's hopes for digital cable. The implications of cheap storage and cheap bandwidth shall make timeshifting as a well pronounced mechanism in the digital lifestyle world. TV-watching habits are poised to change in a big way. Advances in technology providing reliable and economical data storage accelarate the transformation - cheap and ditributed data centers getting into peta- and exabyte levels of storage isn't farfetched. As kantor writes, Inexpensive storage also means more-secure storage, as data can be mirrored in several locations; if one site is "lost," the others take up the slack. Kantor adds, "Many broadband providers (typically cable companies) are offering 4 and 5 Mbps connections as their low-tier products. Backbones are being upgraded in response to the greater bandwidth to homes and businesses. Fiber-optic lines are being laid, WiMAX towers are being built, and other broadband data paths are being contemplated. And that has extraordinary implications for Blockbuster, for DVD players, and for television networks and advertisers. Cable TV companies like Time Warner, Cox, and Comcast have a lot of data on their hands, and it's not on reels of celluloid in a basement - a lot of it is on hard drives. That means it's in a form that's easy to deliver to users over those nice, big data pipes". Pay-per-view movies and the limited video on demand we see now are just the tip of the looming iceberg. The shift is already underway from a television that shows what they want to one that shows what you want.In future, more and more movies will make it to video-on-demand libraries as cable and media companies start storing every movie and television show ever made on those massive, distributed hard drives. Television, too, will change,as the cable company shall act as the library. The idea of a network's schedule will fade away as people access their favorite shows when they want to via TiVo or more commonly, their cable or satellite provider's database. Looking way far ahead, it can be imagined that the decline of the television network in favor of the studios that actually create the shows. looking way far ahead. The digitalization of content is giving us a lot more flexibility than could have been dreamt.
We recently covered the launch of the cell processor unveiled together by IBM, Sony and Toshiba We covered therein, the chip contains eight processing units that can work simultaneously on different tasks and will run at a speed of 4 gigahertz, at least ten times faster than the best chips available at the moment, according to IBM.Described as a "supercomputer on a chip", the features of the new device show that single microprocessors are giving way to a new, "multi-core" design. This allows chips to run more efficiently, using less power and generating less heat. IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard already produce high-end computers that use multi-core chips. The success of a chip depends on the software application that runs on it. Bob Cringley amplifies this perspective when he writes,On pure bandwidth alone the Cell appears to beat the heck out of just about every other processor - a true supercomputer on a chip. Cringley quotes his friend as saying,"No product has even been unsuccessful in the marketplace because the designer chose the wrong (or right) processor. In the times when processors were slow and memory precious, you could want something you couldn't make, but I doubt seriously that anyone suffers from such a problem today. You might not be able to battery power the portable critter, but at least you can design it." "The X86 architecture didn't succeed because it was good (or bad) but because the Microsoft OS worked. If DOS/Windows had been written for the Motorola 68000, the world might be a very different place. The X86 architecture has survived several challenges from Apple/Moto/IBM, primarily. The key is, where the Microsoft OS is required, the X86 owns. Where the Microsoft OS is not required, and Real-Time applications are high on that list (can you imagine Windows controlling your car's power brakes as an example?!) the X86 slugs it out, often unsuccessfully.""Since processors do not drive applications, one does not find the announcement of a new processor all that simulating."
(Via Bloomberg) Health care for foreign patients will deliver 2.3 billion USD a year to India’s hospitals by 2012, according to a report by New York–based consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and the New Delhi–based Confederation of Indian Industry, the nation’s biggest business group. The market in 2003 was $333 million according to the Gurgaon-based India Brand Equity Foundation, a partnership between the CII and India’s Ministry of Commerce.
India competes for foreign patients with Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand and offers less in some areas, says Guy Ellena, director of the health and education department at Washington-based International Finance Corp., the private lending unit of the World Bank. He says Thailand’s airports and roads are in better shape than India’s because Thailand is a major vacation destination. In 2003, 10 million tourists traveled there, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s Web site. That was more than triple the number for India that year.
Just as Indian software companies started with small programming jobs and expanded to become a $16 billion global industry, India’s international health care initiative is in its early stages. For patients and profits to increase, India must remedy negative first impressions and persuade doubters that millions of the country’s poor and ailing won’t be left behind. As Indian hospitals are gearing up to provide global comfort standards - India Inc should try to be world leaders in these promising areas - which means - global scale investments in hard and soft assets, cultural shift in mindset (already there is proof that this is happening), improve all linkages in the sector from research to commercialisation, open up the sector for foreign investment , strengthen the academic instituitions much better and improve the infrastructure from airports to roads to utilities and transport.
- Web services and a service-oriented architecture are two different things. SOA encompasses the design and architectural concepts for building systems that is, the content. Web Services are just one particular set of protocols for application-to-application communication that is, how to connect that service. Message-Oriented Middleware and CORBA are alternatives to Web services.
- Services define business units of work. To design a good service, you have to understand the business processes in which it's involved. That compels IT to understand the business. IT hasn't done well at that. If you pursue Web services, it forces a deeper business connection, which forces a deeper combination of business and technical skills into the IT organization. That's the biggest change in service-oriented IT organizations; they have to be more cognizant of the business and gain expertise in its processes. IT becomes driven by the creation of two deliverables: services and ways to access those services, whether through call-center applications, Web services, or business-to-business connections.The big change in IT now is assembling applications from groups of existing services, and there are new roles in IT because of it.This related paper from IBM provides a good approach in creating solutions that can provide the business with identified benefits.
- On Biz-IT alignment - The difference is subtle. It relates in one way to how IT has been measuring itself. Is it delivering code on time, on spec, and on budget? These can be done well and yet, not deliver a business improvement. But if you go toward measuring what IT does by the business impact, using specific process metrics and designing within that context, it forces IT to know business processes as well as the businesspeople do. There's much more of a collaborative dimension with smart IT folks focused on service design and bringing business and technical knowledge together.The lingua franca between business and IT is no longer bits and bytes; it's functions for the business.
New Scientist writes,there's a revolution afoot in India. Unlike any other developing nation, India is using brainpower rather than cheap physical labour or natural resources to leapfrog into the league of technologically advanced nations. Every high tech company, from Intel to Google, is coming to India to find innovators. But the revolution is not confined to IT. Crop scientists are passionately pursuing GM crops to help feed India's poor. Some intrepid molecular biologists are pioneering stem-cell cures for blindness,while others have beaten the odds to produce vaccines for pennies. And the country is getting wired up as never before. Mobile phone networks have nearly blanketed the country and the internet is even reaching remote villages. Looking skyward, India's unique space programme has fought international sanctions to emerge as key player in India's development. Meanwhile, India's nuclear industry is boldly building cutting-edge fast-breeder reactors.
However, there are dramatic problems of poverty and infrastructure. To transform the nation, Indians will have to change their way of thinking about science and technology, take risks in research,and deal with the issues of education.
When compared to china, the indian government spends only $6 billion a year on research and it still has fewer scientists per head of population than China or South Korea.India's greatest rival has always been its giant neighbour to the north. While IT and services are helping India log 6 per cent year-on-year increases in GDP, China's vast manufacturing base is raising its GDP by around 9 per cent a year. Even in India's strong suit of knowledge-based industries, China could still steal the march on it, not least because its Communist government can command change, while in India the democratic government can only guide national development.
Bruce Schneirer points to a technical report from Microsoft describing a clever prototype - called GhostBuster - developed for detecting arbitrary persistent and stealthy software, such as rootkits,Trojans, and software keyloggers. It's a really elegent idea, based on a simple observation: the rootkit must exist on disk to be persistent, but must lie to programs running within the infected OS in order to hide. The GhostBuster program runs from CD drive from within the (possibly corrupted) OS, the checker program runs: stopping all other user programs, flushing the caches, and then doing a complete checksum of all files on the disk and a scan of any registry keys that could autostart the system, writing out the results to a file on the hard drive.Then the user is instructed to press the reset button, the CD boots its own OS, and the scan is repeated. Any differences indicate a rootkit or other stealth software, without the need for knowing what particular rootkits are or the proper checksums for the programs installed on disk. In order to fool GhostBuster, the rootkit must 1) detect that such a checking program is running and either not lie to it or change the output as it's written to disk (in the limit this becomes the halting problem for the rootkit designer), 2) integrate into the BIOS rather than the OS (tricky, platform specific, and not always possible), or 3) give up on either being persistent or stealthy. Thus this doesn't eliminate rootkits entirely, but is a pretty mortal blow to persistent rootkits. Bruce thinks this is a great idea, but points to a problem. GhostBuster is only a research prototype, and , Microsoft has no plans to turn it into a commercial tool. This is too good an idea to abandon. Microsoft, if you're listening, you should release this tool to the world. Make it public domain. Make it open source, even.
(Via Telecom Asia) The emergence of VoIP apps like Skype isn’t just bothering fixed-line telcos – the prospect of VoIP over wireless LANs is making cellcos nervous too. Some see it as a threat, some as an opportunity, but many see it as inevitable and something that can’t be ignored. "VoIP is a huge threat, but it’s one that’s coming from outside of the constraints of the mobile environment," said Mike Mulica, president and CEO of BridgePort Networks. "Skype and these converged voice/data models are providing a low-cost alternative to voice substitution for in-building minutes of use that allows you to go to a low-cost model."Swisscom Mobile CEO Carsten Schloter, however, was more upbeat, seeing VoIP as an opportunity for the mobile sector as well as the customer. "The ability to integrate these services, fixed, wireless, broadband, home networks over WLAN, that’s an opportunity for the customer. It’s a fact that IP will open the value chain and the margins will come down. Ignore it, and you will move behind the market." There was some debate over what VoIP – and in particular Skype, with its free software and free calls to other Skype users – will mean to the mobile industry’s top line.The mobile business is becoming more about lowest-cost services over IP for future services. Overall, it’s incumbent on the mobile industry to make the mobile number and services profile the prime service that customers want to use on either fixed or mobile networks or both, and they need to do it soon if they want to avoid erosion of MoU and revenues.. John O'Connell (CEO of Kineto Wireless)concludes by saying "I think that within three to five years, everyone in this room will have a Wi-Fi enabled handset. During that time, there’ll be a lot of things happening to drive it along the lines of Skype and Vonage. If you sit and do nothing, that’s probably a mistake."
Phil Lempert writes, technology can help the smart independent retailer play on the same field with the industry giants. Tom Zaucha, President and CEO of the National Grocers Association, says,technology is very much part of the business plan for the successful independent grocer. A lot of independents have pretty big stores. Maybe not compared to the Aholds, Safeways and Wal-Marts. That’s something that's changed significantly in the grocery industry over the past 10 years. A decade ago, companies that might have been considered large, are, by today’s standards, much smaller. But as a result, technology can become the great equalizer." By sharing information and pooling resources, today’s small- to mid-sized retailer can certainly compete in the technology marketplace. "There are opportunities for aggregation, for buying, for sharing of information among smaller companies, in terms of equipment and software," says Zaucha. "In a competitive sense technology will continue to become one of the great equalizers in the ability of this industry to maintain a diverse marketplace." With the dizzying advances made by technology in the past few years alone, virtually every successful retailer initiative – technology included – will be consumer-driven, providing the shopper with more information, creating a more exciting shopping environment and a more efficient shopping experience. "In terms of comparative advantage,community-based supermarket companies already are very much consumer focused," and now with the various technologies and innovations available, there’s opportunity for those same companies to grow even closer to their customers.
Another key for making technology effective and affordable is for partnerships to be forged between mid-sized retailers and their distributors. Private label companies are also potential partners. "Ultimately, the retailer and wholesaler must learn to work more as a virtual chain. It’s important to take advantage of the synergies that exist between a group of retailers in conjunction with a distributor in doing things in a more efficient cost-effective manner." At checkout, more efficient payment systems are in the offing. Frequent shopper cards tied to checking accounts are one means of simultaneously speeding up the checkout process and holding down costs for the retailer. So are speed-pass units that are already being used by gas companies and some brick-and-mortar retailers. Technology also offers the retailer a means of providing more information to consumers. Kiosks are currently focused on recipes "but that will evolve into nutritional information. Access to flat-panel TV screens will mean a more efficient, convenient and effective means of communicating with the shopper interactively. There are companies beginning to look into shopping carts that download the shopping list, and alert customers when they pass products on their shopping list. They can also place orders to the deli counter or the bakery or the seafood counter and other specialty counters while they’re shopping." The receiving dock and back room are also prime areas for independent grocers to be able to upgrade their technology systems through partnerships with suppliers.
Some of the processes already in effect are category business planning, enhanced information from product movement, integrated accounting, integrated human resources and management information systems, synchronized data with trading partners, electronic billing, pharmacy systems, warehouse management systems, fresh-items management systems, and the list goes on.We are moving not just to a next generation, but probably to a new millennium in terms of gathering information through RFID as opposed to the old UPC bar codes. The fact that this technology allows you to read not only items, but also case loads and pallet loads, offers an incredible amount of new methods of doing business,the amount of data that is accessible on an RFID tag provides new methods of doing business. Everything from shrink to preventing out-of-stocks to a more efficient ordering system – all represent enhancements to our system of distribution today.
- One will be the shifting of functionality from hardware to software. As more and more digital assets get integrated to products, it becomes intrinsically more and more easy to add new additional functionality to products. The mobile phone and personal computer industries are at the forefront of this trend: no two digital systems procured at different times – say computers, mobiles, even automobiles are really identical. Some of the difference is a matter of the product's physical history; some of it comes from programming; and a lot of it is user-created content. - The next driver is pressure on companies to make electronics greener. This no longer means just bringing down energy consumption. The epicenter of green design involves two things: eliminating toxic materials like lead and benzene from electronics and packaging, and designing products to be easier to recycle or reuse. The Seattle Times recently reported that Panasonic designers now "conduct a 40-step review that, among other things, looks at the ability to recycle materials used in their prototypes, and how quickly products can be taken apart for recycling." As a result, a Panasonic TV used to have 13 types of plastic, and require over two minutes to disassemble; now they have two kinds of plastic, and can be taken apart in half the time. - A third driver is the shift many companies are trying to make from being manufacturers and purveyors of physical goods, to being service providers. The mobile phone industry is following this strategy, giving away phones in exchange for service contracts. An even more interesting example is… carpets. A few years ago, Armstrong carpets made a determined effort to make their carpets more environmentally friendly (many industrial fibers are tiny hazardous waste sites); they also put a phone number on the underside of the carpet, to schedule pickup of an old carpet. (This also made sense because, once they had changed the chemistry of their textiles, Armstrong could recycle a larger proportion of their old carpets.) Finally, they realized that they had backed into a new business model: customers were no longer buying carpet, they were buying the use of the carpet.While this example may look little far fetched, the underlying message is definitely true - utility computing, apps on taps - on demand, elance economy are all broad signs of the emerging world with digital footprints therein.
(Via Adam Thierer) Michael A. Einhorn and Bill Rosenblatt have come with an excellent paper outlining many innovative business models and technological solutions already being deployed in the marketplace demonstrating,a well-functioning marketplace is currently at work.The term "peer to peer" (P2P) refers generally to software that enables a computer to locate a content file on another networked device and copy the encoded data to its own hard drive. P2P technology often attracts people who use it to reproduce or distribute copyrighted music and movies without authorization of rights owners and this has been one of constant controversy and calls by many in the content industry to regulate or even ban P2P-based networks or software. Copyright owners often use digital rights management (DRM) techniques to encrypt content or otherwise restrict access.Depending on the access or compensation arrangement, content owners may differentiate prices and limit use by the number of plays, duration of access, temporary or partial uses, lending rights, and the number of devices on which the file may be accessed. The potential level of use control may go beyond the expectations of consumers accustomed to a broader range of uses enabled by analog technology. Many consumer advocates now contend that DRM is harmful to consumers because it tilts the balance of control in favor of copyright holders.Rights owners respond that DRM merely offsets grave dangers made possible by digitization and Internet distribution. This study argues that the basic functions of DRM and P2P can be quite complementary and that innovative market mechanisms that can help alleviate many copyright concerns are currently blossoming. Free markets should determine potential synergies, responses, and outcomes that tap different P2P and DRM business models. In particular, market operations are greatly preferable to government technology controls. The full report is available here.
(Via PCWorld)Intel researchers have developed a method of generating a continuous laser with a silicon device,one of the first steps toward introducing optical interconnects in future processors, servers, and PCs. Exploiting Raman effect and using standard chip-manufacturing techniques,Intel built a transistor-like device that can produce a continuous beam of light.Those light waves can carry data at faster speeds than copper, the current standard for chip interconnects. Companies such as Intel and IBM are working on ways to boost chip performance as chip components shrink to the size of individual atoms, a point at which the decades-long practice of diminishing the size of transistors becomes exceedingly difficult. One way to improve the performance of chips, servers, and networking devices is by replacing the electrical charges that carry data today with light particles (also known as photons). This discipline, called photonics, is well under way in the networking industry, where fiber-optic materials are replacing older copper wire as the preferred means of transmitting signals over long-haul communications networks. Unfortunately, fiber-optic materials are expensive and complex. Using silicon materials to generate light waves would solve many of the cost issues, but silicon does not naturally emit light. On the other hand, existing silicon devices can be used as channels for laser beams capable of carrying data signals. The Raman effect is extremely pronounced in silicon, though it isn't in fiber materials. One-kilometer lengths of fiber are needed to produce a laser beam of the same strength that mere centimeters of silicon can generate. Silicon is naturally transparent to infrared light waves, so photons passing through it usually have no effect. But on occasion, two photons may strike the same silicon atom at the same time and knock electrons out of that atom. This decreases the strength of the laser as electrons build up and start to absorb photons from the amplified laser beam. To get around this problem, Intel built what it calls a PIN device, consisting of a sandwich of positively charged silicon, intrinsic or neutrally charged silicon, and negatively charged silicon. The electrical field generated by the opposing charges sweeps the loose electrons out of the waveguide, or the intrinsic silicon layer, This produces a steady laser beam at the other end that doesn't lose its strength. The new laser technology could be used in everything from chip components to portable medical devices and researchers must test and further develop before it can be used in chip-to-chip or motherboard-to-motherboard connections.
We recently covered From The Information Age To Conceptual Age Courtesy - Asia, Automation & Abundance published in Wired magazine originally. Naomi Moneypenny writes about ManyWorldsCEO Steve Flinn's assessment based on discussions with Michael Schrage on the topic of what could be the technical areas that will have the most impact on businesses over the next few years, and yet are currently very under-recognized. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
Three ideas stood out: 1. Massive parallelism in information acquisition: The reduction of scarcity in the computing world has already transformed myriad processes - we no longer worry about conserving scarce memory, storage, bandwidth, etc. Just a decade or two ago those were big bottlenecks - Cycle times are dramatically reduced when the marginal cost of formerly scarce resources plummet.In other words, waste makes haste! Now this same philosophy is being applied to experimentation. Massive parallelism of experiments, or more broadly,information gathering, has already had a profound impact on the biosciences, and now is poised to revolutionize materials science in general. While nano-tech gets all the buzz, 'waste makes haste' is the revolution that will hit first.
2. Inferencing from massive information:The amount of information that is being generated from commercial transactions, market data, etc. is growing exponentially. Making inferences from this data remains a challenge. New inferencing techniques, most notably statistical learning models, that have just been mathematically established in the past five years or so would become important in solving this issue. Some of these models are based on the biggest advance in the predictive modelling arena in 500 years! The Greeks gave us deduction, the Renaissance brought us induction, and now statistical learning theory brings us transduction. These new techniques promise insights from data that were previously inaccessible.
3. Adaptive systems and processes:By tracking our system and process usage behaviors, along with those of others to whom we have an affinity, systems can learn to become more and more effective. This approach was tried a number of years ago under the umbrella of 'intelligent agents', but the data gathered was too sparse, and the means of behavioral information capture too obtrusive to be effective.Now those barriers are rapidly falling, and application of statistical learning approaches will ensure adaptive systems and processes will become the norm. Each of these areas is significant in its own right, but they will tend to reinforce one another - amplifying their impact.Transformational,yet non-obvious, technologies such as these three big ideas are the ones that end up driving the transformation of industries,and making or breaking businesses.We are actually seeing these making an impact in the sense of hightened sense of importance in creating Real Time Enterprises,focus on newer areas like Master Data Management.
Halsey Minor founded CNET Networks and several other companies like Vignette, an Internet software maker, and the Internet portal site Snap. Businessweek writes,his latest company is Grand Central, a Web-services outfit that acts like a virtual train station, making sure various online offerings by companies like Salesforce.com (CRM ) and security specialist Oblix can work together. Excerpts from his interesting interview with edits and comments added:
- If the world is going to look like a bunch of Salesforce.coms, where applications are not being run inside a company but outside of it, there will be a need for a service that ties and integrates all those services together. Now the problem is: The Salesforce.coms of the world had to get traction before there was a need for a service like grandcentral.
- This is the year that there will be some real traction around Web services. We've actually entered the practical phase of Web services. The first phase was a bunch of people designing a whole bunch of standards - primarily those were a bunch of computer scientists. Now people are getting practical about what a Web service can and cannot solve.His predictions for web services success this year - "By and large you're going to see the technologies around Web services solve some real problems this year" .
- The number one problem companies have - they cannot get the systems integrated that they've purchased. As a simple example, it's very difficult for them when a salesperson sells something to get that sale recorded in the financial system. What we do is provide a very low-cost, low-risk way for companies to interconnect these systems without having to buy any hardware or software.
- We turn the Internet into an integration platform, so any application can talk to any application without requiring the complexity of hardware and software. Most importantly, what drives our business right now is our lack of complexity, and one of the great advantages of our model is we take away a significant amount of the risk.
The idea behind Grandcentral is very powerful and certainly looks promising - using internet as the integration platform is the ultimate proef of web services in action. Halsey as fOunder of CNet, Vignette, Snap.com definitely spots trends ahead and more importantly has tremendous insigths about building high volume internet centric business models and capabale of executing the model by building scalable infrastructure,powerful tools/applications/platforms - Surely grandcentral is an enterprise to watch.
we recently covered The rate at which the features are expanding in the mobile phone is really phenomenal where we wrote that the mobile revolution should be rated next only to the internet revolution. Apart from ubiquity of usage, increasing features, the future potential of the mobile technology makes it all the more attractive technology to watch in the future. A survey says, Global PC sales will slow in 2005 as customers wind down their replacement cycles, Gartner said, but growth will still be close to double-digits over last year. 2005 should see a 9 percent growth in the number of PCs shipped. That's slightly lower than the 11.6 percent increase in 2004 over 2003. The driving form factor will continue to be mobile PCs, said Gartner analyst George Shiffler. Laptop sales, for instance, are expected to surge by 17.4 percent in 2005, while desktops will grow by a relatively measly 6.1 percent. Mobile PC unit growth should outpace desk-based growth considerably again. "There are a number of reasons, including rapidly falling system prices, enhanced wireless, and expanded multimedia functionality."
(Via Thefeature) The western mobile industry typically thinks of India and China in terms of opportunity - but the reality is that they are an increasing threat as well. With a combined population of up to 3 billion and rapid predicted growth in mobile usage,much of the talk at 3GSM is about the opportunity in India and China. In the Chinese handset market, domestic vendors now claim over 50% of the market. Excerpts with edits: There are four main reasons why the Indian and Chinese vendors are looking to export.
- One, government initiatives exist in both countries to create global players. As is widely known, both China and India have clear long-term IT growth plans. - Two, they are using the expertise created in the country, partly by the joint ventures with Western vendors, to create export opportunities. In China, this is known as the "inside-out" strategy: building up a strong domestic player and then moving into international markets. These domestic players have already become strong, as shown by their ability to lead joint ventures - Three, they are looking to escape increasingly intense domestic competition. It is not just Western vendors who have faced margin and market share pressure, particularly in China, over the last several years. Domestic vendors also want to grow and diversify. - Four, the Chinese and Indian vendors see demand from international markets. It is falsely assumed this is always at the low-end and low-cost part of the market, although this is sometimes a starting point. Sometimes it is in similar markets, which are either at comparable stages of development or are close geographically and culturally. - Three of China's largest infrastructure players. Huawei, UTStarcom and ZTE earned around 1% of their revenues outside China in 2000; in 2004, the figure is expected to be around 33%. Chinese researchers Norson Consulting expect this proportion to rise to 70% for Huawei, and 80% for both UTStarcom and ZTE by 2008. The majority of international sales for Huawei and ZTE are in mobile infrastructure.
There are three specific areas in which Indian vendors are likely to become international and global players. - The first is the development of mobile applications and software by Indian software and outsourcing titans such as Wipro, Satyam and Infosys. These companies already have a global presence and will use demand in India as a basis for international expansion.
- The second is in specific mobile applications areas where Indian companies believe they an edge. Two examples are gaming and mobile Linux.
- The third area are national and governmental awards and campaigns to foster the development of global players from India.
Western vendors still tend to be somewhat arrogant about the potential threat from Chinese and Indian vendors. Looking specifically at the threat from Chinese infrastructure vendors, they assume they will lose only business in emerging markets, where the deal is so cheap that they would not want the business, and where the infrastructure is not critical. The first assumption is becoming less true, as it is emerging markets where the Western vendors expect to see growth in 2005 and beyond. The threat from Chinese and Indian vendors varies by market sector and by region, but it is growing, and will be a major competitive factor in the global mobile sector in many markets within the next several years.The mobile market shall definitely see the emergence of chinese/indian giants.
Wolfgang Gentzsch founded Gridware that was snapped up by Sun in 1999. After the acquisition,Gentzsch went on to lead Sun's grid offering that, after several name changes, is referred to today as Sun's N1 Grid Engine. Gentzsch says, "there are basically four different types of applications that can run on grids":Excerpts with edits and comments:
- The first and perhaps simplest type of grid application is the one that most closely resembles dynamic provisioning, where you dynamically realign system configurations based on the priorities of certain business objectives. For example, a retail giant might deprioritize certain jobs to make room for the holiday transaction crunch. This is mostly a dating service. With today's grid software, you can match user requirements to underlying available resources. The broker will look around and find the machine that's best suited to the job. In this first type of grid application, the jobs are independent. For example, jobs aren't interacting with another or waiting for other jobs to complete before they can get on with their tasks.
- The second type of application concerns array jobs. Multiple machines are working on the same problem, but with independently processable chunks of data. The individual results aren't nearly as meaningful as the bigger picture to which they're contributing. "Let's say you want to run crash simulations and for each simulation, you want to run with a slightly modified car geometry," says Gentzsch. "Altering a car's geometry could involve changing one or more of the thousands of individual parameters that ultimately affect how that car responds to an impact. An applicable enterprise application for this type of grid might be Web serving. Web servers such as Apache respond to increased workloads isn't all that different from the way this second type of grid application responds. As the load of simultaneous transactions (such as an HTTP requests) goes up, the server spawns more processes (known as daemons) to keep up with the load.whereas a dedicated cluster is often designed to match a peak load (which in turn can translate into wasteful underutilization), grids are more suited to the idea that increasing loads should be serviced in on-demand style - much the same way we get our electricity on the electric grid.
- The third type of grid application is very similar to the second except for the fact that timing and interdependency enter the equation- one where a cloud of systems on the network looks to application like one massive processor that can change in size in order to guarantee quick response. Not only might processes depend on each other to complete in a certain amount of time, but their completion might very well depend on some mid-process sharing of information with each other. "The ways that some climate simulations work,are examples of this type of grid application. A weather model or climate model of the earth might get cut into 360 pieces and the simulation for each piece has to talk to its neighbors. Weather is moving over the planet and as certain data is gathered and goes through your process #37, the results go to process #38, and process #38 is working with its neighbor process #39 that has some information about the earth's surface that's relevant to process #37. You cut your problem into 360 pieces on 360 processors.
- The fourth type of grid application actually isn't a grid application yet. Like the PC application that hasn't been rewritten to take advantages of the parallelism offered by today's processors and operating systems, these are the massively giant applications that have to run on big vector processors like the Fujitsu's VP500 supercomputer, but that haven't yet been rewritten to take advantage of the third type of grid type discussed. Researchers are trying to run these applications on grids, and the applications are breaking because they're just not well-enabled for that sort of distributed processing. What does this stratification of grid types mean for enterprises? It will be very long time before you have no more than a handful of Dell servers running your entire business and, every time they need more gas for the applications they're running, they can just magically go out to the Internet and find it. Even less likely is the scenario where the Internet will serve as a sort of open exchange whereby enterprises can trade computing cycles like commodities on a public grid.
(Via Sriram) Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc looks like have lost some ground with customers, as the two Internet giants struggle to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, while also expanding product lines to generate more sales, a recent study shows. Amazon.com's American Customer Satisfaction Index fell this year by 4.5 percent to 84 from 88 last year. EBay's ACSI fell 4.7 percent to 80 from 84. The ASCI is a national indicator of customer evaluations of the quality of products and services. The overall ASCI for e-commerce, which include the retail, auction, brokerage and travel categories, fell 2.7 percent from last year to 78.6, indicating that companies, in general, are struggling with their own growing pains. "This business has been a victim of its own success," Claes Fornell, a University of Michigan business professor and founder of the CFI Group, said. "The online folks have suffered from the influx of more business, which they haven't been totally prepared to handle." In retail, for example, consumers last year spent a record $117 billion online, a 26 percent increase over the $93.2 billion spent in 2003, according to ComScore Networks. During the holiday shopping season alone, spending increased 28 percent to $23.6 billion from $18.3 billion. In the case of Amazon.com, the e-retail giant has grown from a seller of books and music CDs to an online department store offering products that range from clothes and electronics to jewelry and gourmet food. While offering more products increases sales, it also makes it more difficult to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. "It's going to become more and more challenging, to say the least," Fornell said. "They're going to have to find the balance between adding more and more products, and maintaining the level of service that customers are use to." Amazon.com is confronting mounting competitive pressure from traditional retailers that can offer more customer-service options, such as store returns for online purchases, and store pickups for online orders. This kind of competition between a pure online retailer and traditional retailers expanding to the web has never happened before. EBay is confronting the same paradox of having to increase services to boost revenues, which also makes it more difficult to please customers and maintain loyalty. The auction giant has grown from maintaining a community of individual buyers and sellers to more of a marketplace where a variety of small businesses can sell their wares. As EBay expands into retail, it's starting to compete with Amazon.com and traditional retailers, while also facing stiffer competition on the auction side from companies like Overstock.com. "When you expand, you enter someone else's territory, and they're not going to just sit there." Despite the drops in the ASCI, Amazon.com and EBay still provide solid customer services, Claes said. The question is whether they can get back on track and move the scores up. "We don't know if this is a stumble, or the beginning of a trend," Claes said.
Dave Pollard is at his best again - he writes about a specialist group called the the self management group known for its three stage turnkey recruitment process: - a pre-screening for capabilities, by which candidates use an online SMG profiling questionnaire to acknowledge whether they do or do not have the essential competencies needed for the job, - a structured interview to assess candidates' competencies and work-habits, and - an unstructured interview to assess candidates' fit with the organization's culture and precise requirements of the position. Dave says behind this recruitment process, lay a complete model of alignment between individuals' and employing organizations' performance objectives, and a philosophy that espouses self-management as a means of optimizing, sustaining and improving that alignment.
This model appeals,in different ways, to both liberal and conservative worldviews of the relationship between employers and employees. -To the liberal, this model allows each individual to take personal responsibility for managing their own life-long career and developing their own skills - abilities that are portable as employees move from company to company or create their own enterprise. - To the conservative, this model allows employers to offload much of the responsibility for employee performance from management and corporate trainers to employees themselves, and also puts the onus on employees to optimize their attitude and energies, for the betterment of both themselves and their employees.
It's a very libertarian approach to professional development and personal productivity.The model says that people should be evaluated and rewarded on performance, not on results. Results are absolute outcomes that can be influenced by many uncontrollable factors and hence may have little to do with an employee's own efforts. By contrast, performance is success relative to potential, and is a process that is fully controllable by the individual and largely a function of effort.
The model is: Performance = Competency (i.e. Talent + Skills) x Applied Effort (i.e. Commitment + Energy) x Environment (i.e. Position Fit + Cultural Fit)
What you get done is a function of ( - (1) your natural talents and learned skills, - (2) the focus and energy with which you apply those talents and skills, and - (3) the amenability of the organization, both as a result of your position and the overall organizational culture (structure, style, systems, and modus operandi), to provide the opportunity for that effort to be effective. (What you get done) = (What you have) x (What you do with it) x (Where and how you do it). The self-management process is: 1. Set your own goals, performance objectives, and challenging but realistic expectations 2. Figure out what you need to do: Concrete, measurable, (self-)manageable steps 3. Make a personal commitment to do them, keep that commitment, and give yourself credit for keeping it 4. Evaluate your own performance (using the above formula) and its results 5. Reward yourself for high personal performance (and ignore external, purely results-based rewards unless there is a sustained and pronounced disconnect between these external rewards and your self-assessed performance). Dave concludes,"All of this is consistent with what Tom Peters called 'businessing' your own job, being the CEO and sole proprietor of your own enterprise offering services to your employer, and setting and following your own Business Plan."
We had been covering Microsoft's commendable advances in the consumer electronics sector.After a prolonged stance of fighting, stumbling and for brief appearing directionless and vulnerable, Nokia has now decided to embrace and license Microsoft's ActiveSync and WMArather than try to fight it. Microsoft has strategised brilliantly and are executing well and are are seen to be miles ahead in these areas. The WMA, standard is becoming the Lingua Franca that all non - apple players in the consumer electronics sector are veering towards for convergence in the consumer electronics sector. Microsoft said they are working directly with Flextronics to start creating inexpensive smart phones.As key smartphone "manufacturers" use Flextronics as does Microsoft, is Microsoft getting ready to be a manufacturer is the question getting raised.The impact should be felt by the mobile and smartphone market. Microsoft can change the rules of the game by opening its cash chest to flood markets with economical but attractive features embedded mobile phones and all other players may have to follow. The key thing to watch could be how quickly Microsoft is able to rush things to the market - given the fact, Nokia is well geared to rollout a series of models this year. Joe Wilcox writes, Microsoft rightly recognizes that despite Apple's early lead, the digital music market is still fairly new. Excerpts with edits and comments: Microsoft-Nokia agreement, where the phone maker would support Windows Media DRM 10 and Media Transport Protocol, is an important momentum win for the software giant. Microsoft and its music player partners haven't done all that well against Apple's iTunes/iPod. So Microsoft is taking a broader, long-term approach of ubiquity--and that's a strategy no one should underestimate. Digital downloads and subscription services account for just a fraction of overall U.S. music spending Ubiquity plays to Microsoft's strength (the huge Windows market) and Apple's weakness (protected content largely confined to iPod). Right now, MP3 is the consumer format of choice But going forward, as consumers buy more "protected" music content and look to have the same ubiqitious access available with MP3, non-compatible DRM formats will create problems Choice--in this case access to WMA DRM content from just about any device--is a good approach. The report "Integrated Handsets: Balancing Device Functionality with Consumer Desires," says,about a quarter of U.S. consumers would be interested in listening to music on their portable device. Music is one of those.Nokia isn't just supporting WMA DRM 10 but also MTP, which is Microsoft's supposedly easy device-to-PC synchronization protocol. The direction in which the technology is pushing indicate Cell phone as a viable music player. 1) Apple is putting big marketing muscle behind iPod Shuffle, which capacity is 512MB or 1GB. If, with a mini SD card, the cell phone has the same capacity and interface limitations of iPod Shuffle, the mobile could become a reasonable alternative-particularly if the consumer already owns the device? 2) Nokia plans on releasing a big bunch of cell phones this year. The emphasis is on lifestyle, which could resonate very well with music. 3) The high-volume mobile refresh rate appears to be much higher than many other products consumers regularly use. The situation creates opportunity for rapid release of new features - assuming they don’t sack telephony and meet common contextual scenarios -into a market with great reach. Given cell phone popularity, Microsoft would want its technologies there.
In an insightful comment, Joyce Wycoff writes, Any company can innovate - few can sustain innovation. Over the past twenty years, management literature has featured a constantly changing kaleidoscope of "hot" companies, including Enron which was voted most innovative company for seven years before imploding under a dog-eat-dog competitive system that fostered the worst possible behaviors,as well as some of the best. It's relatively easy to develop the next new thing - once.It takes a completely different approach to develop a long-term innovation engine.It starts with a mindset that seems to be outside the norm in today's business climate where SBC would rather buy AT&T and risk billions than develop the internal competency needed to create the future of the company. US companies now have over a trillion dollars in cash, so, once again, they are trying to buy growth rather than develop an innovation competency.All of this money spent in spite of the fact that more than half of all corporate mergers fail to create substantial returns for shareholders according to a study by A. T. Kearney, Inc. And, innovation guru, Gary Hamel, calls this the mating of dinosaurs and finds no correlation between size and profitability. "You don't get a gazelle by breeding dinosaurs," he concludes. An article in "Strategy & Leadership" by Woodside Institute authors conclude that "a strategy of developing a competency of innovation is more effective than acquisitions and mergers over the long-term.Though sometimes effective in the short term, this strategy of innovation through acquisition usually fails because the acquiring corporation overestimates the value of synergies and underestimates the post-merger integration difficulties".
(Via Washington Post)Many other music-biz insiders agree that, in the next decade or so, the CD will very likely be surpassed as the album format of choice. "The new format is no format," predicted Petersen, a 24-year industry veteran who also owns a record label, a recording studio and a music-publishing company. "What the consumer would buy is a data file, and you could create whatever you need. If you want to make an MP3, you make an MP3. If you want a DVD-Audio surround disc, you make that." "We're moving beyond the media stage to the delivery stage," agreed Mitch Gallagher, 41-year-old editor of EQ, a San Mateo, Calif.-based magazine for music producers. At some point, he said, "you won't have something to hold in your hand" until you transfer a data file to a blank disc or tape. "We can make our own plastic," Petersen said. "I've been thinking this is what should happen for years, but it's actually the way we're going anyway." Record executives devote a lot of thought to the future of the product they've long manufactured. "Five years from now, absolutely there will be CDs. Ten years from now, though, there will be fewer," compared with other digital music options, said Larry Miller, the 47-year-old CEO of the Or Music label, a Sony Corp. offshoot that gained notoriety this year for its biggest act, Los Lonely Boys, the Tex-Mex trio nominated for four Grammys. "As far as another [physical format], if it exists, I haven't heard about it. When I look three to five years in the future, I believe that 20 to 25 percent of music purchased will be downloaded." Sitting at your laptop, pressing a few buttons and cueing up Bob Dylan may not seem very rock-and-roll. Will air-guitaring give way to air-mousing? And with each listener compiling his own version of an album, will there even be "albums" anymore? Are we looking at a mixed-up, mix-tape future?
( Via The Future of Music, Media & Entertainment) A recent Pew Internet survey of artists and musicians in the US has revealed that a large majority have embraced the Internet and consider it to be a helpful tool to their careers. - 32+ million Americans consider themselves artists and about 10 million of them get some kind of compensation for their creations and performances; American artists have embraced the Internet as a creative and inspiration - enhancing workspace where they can communicate, collaborate, and promote their work; - Artists are divided, but not deeply concerned about the file sharing that happens online; They want control over their creations, but most do not say Internet piracy is a big threat; - Artists think unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing should be illegal, and most would go after the companies, rather than individual file-sharers; - Online artists are also active consumers of media content online. But those who download files say if they get content for free, they usually support the artist or author in other ways.
(Via Anil Dash) Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a sports fan, and, most famously, the author of the red-hot 2000 bestseller The Tipping Point.Blink, his latest book, is subtitled, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,is No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Gladwell is a master at linking sociological and psychological studies with the everyday and mundane, and has an uncanny ability to make connections between new ideas and old, seemingly insolvable problems. Gladwell in an e-mail chat with Jeff Merron talking about how some of the ideas in "Blink" relate to sports. Excerpts with edits and comments:
- The Warren Harding Error is what happens when our first impressions are so powerful that they cloud our better judgment. I always think about this when I hear basketball people talking about how high a player can jump. Key is how you shoot and not how you jump.
- Tennis coach Vic Braden, says, "We haven't found a single (tennis) player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does." -Braden would ask, say, a world-class tennis player to describe precisely how they would hit a topspin forehand, and they would invariably say that they rolled their wrist at the moment of impact with the ball. And then he'd do a digital analysis of videotape of them actually hitting a topspin forehand and find out that at the moment of impact with the ball their wrist was rock solid. They didn't roll it at all. The expertise of a world-class tennis player, in other words, is instinctive, which means that the knowledge behind their actions is buried in the corners of their brain. They hit a ball unconsciously.
- Top athletes so often make bad coaches or general managers. They often don't really know why they were as good as they were. They can't describe it, which means that they can't teach it and they quickly become frustrated at their inability to lift others up to their own level. Mediocre players - or non-athletes - tend to make better coaches because their knowledge isn't unconscious. It's the same thing with writing. I know very little about science. But I think I write about science more clearly than many scientists, because I have to go over every step, carefully and deliberately.
- What I'd love to do is to put eye-tracking goggles on key players. Cognitive psychologists use these a lot: they are special glasses that track exactly what your eyes are focusing on at any given moment - to an incredible level of detail. When you read the word "mediocre" in my previous sentence, for instance, did you start at the 'e' and work backwards, or zero in on the middle "m" or just look at the first 'm' and then skip to the last 'e'? The answer would tell me how you "read" a sentence.
- I'd love to know, on this same level of detail, how Manning "reads" a defense. Does he spend a extra fraction of a second on the linebacker, or the safety? When he's playing the Ravens, does he look to Ray Lewis first, or last, or does he do something completely unexpected like not looking at Lewis at all? Are there certain schemes that he takes longer to understand? If so, what are they? And so on. Manning, for instance, probably picks up blitzes better than anyone else in football. Wouldn't you love to know what he's doing, in the face of a blitz, that - say – a competitor isn't?
- It is only through repeated exposures to genuine stress that our body learns how to function effectively under that kind of pressure. I think its time we realized that a quarterback needs the same kind of exhaustive preparation for combat that we give bodyguards and soldiers.
- The worst thing about the Super Bowl is the two-week layoff. I think teams get over-coached in the second week. In "Blink," I talk about how we can turn ER doctors from terrible decision-makers when it comes to diagnosing chest pain into great decision makers simply by limiting the amount of information they are given about a patient. Load them down with every conceivable piece of data, and they have real difficulty distinguishing patients with heartburn from patients who are experiencing a real heart attack. Limit them to three or four crucial pieces of data, though, and they do a great job.
-The point of thin-slicing -- the art of making accurate predictions from very "thin-slices" of experience, is that it's something that only experts can do. I talk about a guy, in "Blink," who can listen to a couple have a random conversation with each other for 15 minutes and - on the basis of that "thin-slice" - predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will be together or divorce seven years down the road. Almost all the ideas and anecdotes in "Blink" can connect cleanly with problems and challenges facing sports organizations, teams, and athletes .
SusanMernit writes, Yahoo's potential to own a huge piece of the blogosphere via distribution, tool sets and content acquisition is well known to all.Yahoo has blended personalization and RSS to form the most widely used aggregator on the planet. Vast majority of traffic goes through a handful of portals (and an oligopoly of carriers) and mainstream attention follows the power-law. Most users do not enjoy the diversity or serendipity that blog readers do. Blog writers who want to make impressionistic returns will feed off of major portals. Personalization is supposed to be the answer for how industrial era print media evolves into the information age. A shift from media companies broadcasting to the world to the media With search, you narrowcast what you are looking for and get ads that supposedly could be helpful along the way. For now, there is no memory of your queries and profiling for others, but it will happen as a personalized search is a useful engine. Corporate personalization is also a bargain of consummate efficiency. The value proposition of enterprises portals is reducing the time spent looking for information..the criticisms of personalization as an instrument of control are not new. Yahoo! is actually taking personalization into new directions by emphasizing user programmability. But its important to realize that Personalization is not a world of ends and the means of the trend ensnare us just as before. Very shortly,every major portal will have personalized aggregation of RSS. Older media will apply traditional editorship to suggest the best feeds according to expert judgment. Newer media will suggest feeds based on what we like. Both approaches will provide limited differentiation, but even more limited utility - because finding feeds is not a significant problem when most posts in a feed provide their links A corporate portal may provide information required for process, but will fail to inform decisions when exceptions happen and hinder my ability to form relationships that help resolve them. Worse, without a diversity of input and the socialization of information, saving time looking for information is pointless when the information isn't shared in the first place. The basic problem with Personalization is that tailoring information to you limits social discovery. Users contribute value to the database only for them and the service provider, not for each other. People design algorithms outside social context, and error arises in profiling, categorization and filtering. Narrowcasting creates micro-silos as it limits a user's view from more diverse and otherwise peripheral information compared to modes of browsing and searching. By contrast, social software enables people to create their own networks. Groups form, information is shared and implicit and explicit relationships are fostered. Profiles, ties, posts, links and tags provide dimensions to explore. Spam happens as a consequence of openness, but as social networks become the new filters, it is a minor problem and yields benefits of connecting people. The appeal of personalization is sheer convenience. Today social software fails, with a few exceptions, to deliver the same level of convenience at scale, but give it time, concludes the article. Unfortunately not right – as user wants things that work – personalization has improved on multiple dimensions over a period of time and is almost steadily available as against a wish in the case of social software.
I first heard about Graham Glass after his company was bought over by webMethods.Graham Glass, whom I met in webMethods integrationworld last year is the CTO of webMethods currently.Graham in his blog writes about steps involved in software product development leading to producing good software.In four parts graham covers quite comprehensively various aspects of software product development tha he was involved in before joining webMethods.
In Part IV he describes the activities that took place in the first few months of development. For each product,he says he had a good idea of the differentiators that would allow it to gain popularity in the marketplace. In every case, ease of use was always the main differentiator, but there were generally one or two other things that were almost as important, such as performance or portability. Before staffing a team and incurring the associated expense, prototype of a skeleton version of the product that proved that the main differentiators could be achieved. The prototype phase generally lasted between one and three weeks and was always incredibly good fun; it is hard to beat the feeling of building something quickly.
In Part III, he lists the criteria used for deciding which products to create - One factor was that each company was founded with a small amount of cash and we wanted to avoid having to raise early angel or VC money. This meant that the products had to be prototyped quickly by just one developer and brought to market quickly by a small team (1-6) of ace developers. In addition, we wanted each product to act as a natural springboard to something bigger and better. Last but not least, the interest has always been in software that is general purpose, high volume, and fundamental in nature
In Part II he lists all the products that were developed using this outline - most of which has been systems-level software targeted at the developer community. -Compuclinic: medical analysis -COMAL Compiler: a compiler for the COMAL language -Pascal Environment: interactive Pascal system -ObjectSystems: C++ toolkit for systems programmers -STL, portable C++ collections library -Systems: portable C++ systems library -JGL: Java collections library -Voyager: Multi-protocol Java object request broker -Electric XML: Toolkit for parsing and manipulating XML -Glue: Web services platform for Java developers -Gaia: Grid services platform
In Part Ihe begins his experience of developing software products covering:-methodology -tools -building a team -release cycles -testing -support
Anand of .NET From India has been kind enough to send me a typepad subscription - being the sponsor for the prize of indibloggies - science/technology category winner. Thanks Anand - my thanks also go to Debashish and Jurors and Readers. Pankaj has been mailing me repeatedly to move into typepad immediately. I had been travelling a lot - was in different cities in east and north asia last week - came to singapore yesterday and am off to india sunday evening - hopefully should initiate the transition when am back in singapore by mid of next week. Pankaj - am counting on your promised help in this transition.In the meanwhile - request regular readers with some feedback about expectations that can be potentially addressed when the transition happens. Please do mail me with feedback and suggestions to may mailID - sadagopan@gmail.com.
Michael S.Malone writes,"Business reporters, analysts and venture capitalists - develop over time a set of diagnostic tools for analyzing the relative health of companies. Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind.He points out that Apple is having better mindshare,opensource is getting stronger and Microsoft is just busy patching and plugging holes. Even MSN and the new search recently launched by Microsoft have not created waves. Microsoft has always had trouble with stand-alone applications,but in its core business it has always had good track record in rolling out in time. Now the company seems to have trouble executing even the one task that should take precedence over everything else: getting "Longhorn," its Windows replacement, to market. Longhorn is now two years late. That would be disastrous for a product like the Macintosh, but for a product that is universally reviled as a necessary, but foul-tasting, medicine, this verges on criminal insanity. Or, more likely, organizational paralysis. In the mid-90s Gates shrugged off the claims that Microsoft was unstoppable by noting that the electronics industry was so cyclical that no company ever stayed on top for long. In that light, Microsoft had a longer run than most. It is still a well-run company, which argues that its fade will be long and slow, like DEC, rather than a sudden death like Wang. And it may yet come back - there may already be something revolutionary under way in a back lab - but, like Yahoo! and Apple before it, Microsoft may have to die in order to be reborn. Scobeliizer provides a spirited defence and writes about new MS initiatives that are getting ready and writes quite insightfully "the next big idea in our industry is going to be a small idea. Something that we all ignore. For a while at least. Blogging was sorta that, wasn't it? Heck, even I didn't think it was important enough to put on the CNET Builder.com Live conference schedule back in 2000. There were only a few hundred people doing it back then. Who knew that just five years later we'd be seeing 40,000 new blogs per day? Apple started as a small idea. Woz's bosses at HP and Atari thought it was so small that they told him to go away. Google? Small idea. AltaVista thought they had a monopoly in search all sewn up. eBay? Small idea. Which brings me back to Michael's article. The crux of his argument is that we're not doing the small things well anymore. We're not seeing small things. We're not investing in small things. We're not executing on the small things.Michael is at least partly correct and it's a cautionary tale for Microsoft.It's the small things that will kill you. It's the small memory-leaking bug that'll lose you customers in droves, for instance. It's the lack of investing in small ideas and small companies that'll kill your product pipeline. Today's tiny idea is tomorrow's Google".
Mark Morford asks ,why are we still tolerating windows? infested with so much of spyware etc..raising key concerns about using windows. In a separate piece,the CTO of opera ridicules MS initiative about interoperability in the piece titled - "Get real about interoperability". Truly tough times ahead for Microsoft - to be fair they are also trying to execute well in new areas like digital lifestyle market - but they defintiely have a challenging time in core computing areas- where they currently dominate - which means exciting opportunties ahead for all other players!
M.R. Rangaswami,Co-founder & Managing Director,Sand Hill Group writes,it seems every software company leader feels he or she is doing everything possible to engineer transition and to manage for the future. Technologies have come and gone, but one thing hasn’t changed: software vendors’ reputation as unresponsive and inflexible. M.R.R adds, four years of recession has drained the coffers of many enterprises – and their vendors. Poorly managed vendors disappeared. Sandhill group's CEO Outlook 2005examines software company leaders’ opinions of the coming year for the industry as well as their companies. The big guys are figuring out their next move. Review this checklist: 1. Business model changes? How has your business model changed in the past year? Two years? If there are no changes going on, your company is not reacting to new market realities. 2. Customer monitoring? How does your company evaluate customer satisfaction? If informally, institute a customer satisfaction monitoring process which will monitor progress over time. 3.New technologies? What plans does your firm have for open source? Web services? Mobile technology? Enterprise customers are rapidly integrating these emerging technologies into their strategies and vendors need to incorporate them too. 4.New processes? What portion of your operations is outsourced? Offshored? How are you dealing with the predicted year of growth ahead? Re-energize your business model with new thinking and strategies by working with outside vendors. 5.Performance benchmarks? How does your company compare itself to the industry or to past performance? Every company must have a set of metrics to manage it which are watched over time and acted upon in case of diversion.
M.R.R writes, the industry is in a period of transition. There will be many more experiments before it settles on a course. And there will certainly be new variables on the horizon which will shake things up yet again. It will take some time to reach the right model – much longer than anticipated. But many longtime software industry followers will applaud today’s CEOs for taking steps in the right direction. My Take: M.R.Rangaswami is absolutely correct. I have closely worked with for business dealings with atleast 40 key ebusiness technology companies for the past four-five years and I have witnessed from close quarters as to how these companies shape their thoughts, products and service offerings. I have also seen most of them getting into a downward spiral and a few of them surviving and getting into shape. M.R.R's recommended healthcheck definitely an impressive and a significant checklist. P.S: I have not read the complete report but M.R.R's summary and outline of approach looks so impressive - it resonates well with current issues grappling the technology industry.
Rich Karlgaard comes with an excellent insight about sins of Carly Fiorina leading to her downfall. Excerpts with edits and comments: 1. Acting like a rock star: In the U.S., only entrepreneurs get to act as rock stars. Hired executives do not. Carly Fiorina failed to grasp this distinction. Here, we celebrate Gates, Buffett, Dell, Ellison, Jobs, Schultz, Fred Smith. Etc. 2. Failing to see the cheap revolution: Carly allowed HP to drift onto the wrong side of the defining divide in the global economy. The cheap revolution has two elements: plummeting hardware costs combined with the Web-mediated ability to run world-class operations from anywhere. Dell is on the right side of the cheap revolution divide. It sells powerful servers for under $5,000 and keeps overhead low. HP sells servers for tens of thousands and keeps high overhead 3. Failing to see the consumer revolution: A huge shift has occurred in the last five years. we recently covered rick's view on three trends - digital rulesThe coolest tech products now go straight into the consumer market. Until a few years ago, most got a footing in the business market first: Copiers, PCs and cellphones were expensive products that only became cheap riding the Moore's Law curve over time. Today, the most transformative products and services go straight for the consumer: Blackberry, Apple iPod, eBay, Orbitz, Google, WiFi and so on. Carly has ineffectively maneuvered HP into this consumer field. 4. Obsession with size over flexibility: Carly is blamed for ignoring a tech truism that large mergers never work. Maybe we need to go deeper and challenge the very premise of these mergers: that large scale is a requirement of success in the global economy. The opposite is true - that speed and flexibility now trump scale. The cheap revolution has armed startups and small companies with powerful, cheap technology and access to global labor pools. You don't need a large organizational unit to manage your outsourcing initiative. 5. Letting talent go: Walter Wriston wrote,In an era of freely flowing information, "capital will always go where it is welcome and stay where it is well-treated." By capital, he meant money and human capital. Carly chased away talent, from Michael Capellas on down. For high-IQ tech companies, talent loss may be the greater sin. The most dynamic - Microsoft and Oracle during the '80s and '90s, and Google now - have always been obsessed with recruiting and keeping talent. Carly didn't stop talent movin out. 6. Not tolerating strength in others: Peter Drucker said about the study of what makes an effective executive. And that the good ones tolerate strength in others; the bad ones don't. Gates has Steve Ballmer. Michael Dell has Kevin Rollins. Larry Ellison has Jeff Henley. Carly had no one like that. 7. Lack of focus: Drucker's other great insight - Effective CEOs pick two tasks and devote their energies there. When those tasks are done, they don't go to #3. They make a new list. One overlooked trick to maintaining focus, Drucker told is to cut travel. " Carly, globe-hopping in her Gulfstream, worked 100-hour weeks. But she was focused on too many tasks. Which is no focus at all. My Take: No doubt, Carly failed to take HP to leadership in any of the areas where HP operated, under Carly HP was never the innovator, HP was never the technology leader, market leader or mindshare leader - HP all along had an identity crisis - no body is clear what this company stands for today- it may be better to spin off profitable ink and printers divisions and other divisions into separate companies and unlock value, provide these divisions woth necessary compulsions and incentives to innovate and grow.
( Via Sethgodin) Two attractive terms - 4GWebStrategy"above the web" and "below the web". Excellently organized. Imagine dividing up your world this way. Worth a thought says seth godin - can't agree more.
Below the website -Digital Assets -Content Management System -Profiled User Database -Tracking And Reporting
Above The Website -Analysis & Optimization -Blogs -Lead Generation -Tactical Campaigns -Publishing Tools -Micro Sites The blown up picture is available here.
The Economist has an interesting article about Scobeleizer calling him Chief humanising officer in Microsoft. Excerpts with edits and comments: Scoble known in the blogosphere as "the Scobleizer",is a phenomenon not just because he has had an unusually strange career of late,but because his example might mark the beginning of the end of "corporate communications" as we know it. Mr Scoble is, first, a blogger—ie, somebody who keeps an online journal (called a "weblog") to which he posts thoughts and web links several times a day. Scoble,also an employee of microsoft, where he holds the official title of "technical evangelist". Those two roles are intertwined. It was his blogging prowess that led to his job, and much of the job consists of blogging. Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note. Mr Scoble is at his best when he opines ruthlessly on Microsoft's technology. When Google or Apple or anybody else makes a better product, he blogs it. "I've been pretty harsh on Microsoft over the years," he says. This gives him credibility, and thus power. If somebody somewhere takes a swipe at Microsoft that is unfair, Mr Scoble can cry foul and actually have his readers concede the point.Inspired in part by Mr Scoble's success, executives at other companies—so far, mostly in tech—are starting their own blogs. Scobelizer stands out - I think amongst other reasons - A. He is regular in the bloging circuit. B.He picks up right issues. C. He tries to be comprehensive in trying to cover a range of issues and as I had mentioned elsewhere in this blog, not every other blogger can be as effective as he is - definitely he stands out as an individual for his efforts and passion for blogging.
India's aerospace industry aims to take a page out of the IT sector's book by promoting itself as a potential offshoring base for foreign companies,-There is tremendous scope for outsourcing from India in areas where the companies are competitive. State owned HAL now makes aircraft doors for Airbus, part of Europe's EADS, and is set to produce 44 of the 66 Hawk trainer jets New Delhi is buying from Britain's BAE Systems under a joint programme. BAE also has a software joint venture with HAL. India had the capability to make advanced alloys, process technologies and aircraft equipment,and the industry was considering diversifying into making civil aircraft. Lockheed Martin Corp signed on Wednesday a technical agreement with HAL to share data on its P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft. India is considering buying F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. "We are confident that integration of Indian industry such as HAL into our worldwide supplier base will enhance the attractiveness of our products to the government of India," said Dennys Plessas, regional vice-president in Lockheed's aeronautics unit. On Tuesday, Boeing signed up Indian software firm HCL Technologies to develop a hosting platform for the flight test system for its new 787 Dreamliner aircraft. France's Snecma, set to be taken over by Sagem, said it planned a 50-50 joint venture with HAL to make engine parts, investing an initial 300 million rupees ($7 million
We recently covered in our blog AMRResearch's India Inc growing twice as fast as Japan Inc wherein we also covered G.B.Prabhat's view Across every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India. We also covered recently India Inc.’s Future:More High-Value Services Beyond Technology Roots wherein we referred to AMRresearch saying India Inc. is aggressively expanding its higher-value services—proof points exist in business application innovations,product development, and BPO. Not content to rely on the package of services currently offered to fuel future growth, the Indian outsourcing companies are expanding existing customer relationships by adding higher value services. The examples seen span innovative business application development, product engineering, and professional BPO services. -HCL Technologies developed FDA-compliant systems for a medical diagnostic device manufacturer. HCL is also providing hardware and software to the Boeing 787. -Infosys developed the embedded systems used to control an on-car navigation and entertainment system. The system is deployed in cars built by a North American OEM. -Satyam developed the embedded system that controls automobile steering systems for a Tier 1 automotive supplier. The system is used in cars manufactured by leading German OEMs. -TCS developed a modeling package used by an aircraft component manufacturer to test the strength of composite materials. The package was used to reduce the weight of the component by 20%.
No doubt services - atleast low end - tehcnology and processes are moving towards getting developed in India - only a trickle has started as we noted only two Indian offshore providers to receive multiple mentions as strong application development and integration brands. No offshore provider received more than one mention as a preferredprovider, while 44.7 percent of participants indicated they maintained a preferred provider list for application development and integration. Further Gartner's data show that the leader of the pack IBM has a marketshare less than 8% marketshare in the entire IT services market and that the marketshare of India headquartered vendors at )2003 data)like Infosys stood at 0.8%,TCS at 0.7% and Wipro, Satyam and Cognizant hovering between 0.5% to 0.6%. This makes Ed Frauenheim'sargumentlook specious and reminds Indian IT industry remind itself that there is humongous opportunity and market to be captured.
(Via knowledge@wharton)VoIP has grown into a more reliable product offered at rates as much as 50% lower than traditional phone service.Such savings are cause for concern among state officials who worry that as consumers drop highly taxed and regulated landline service for VoIP, they will no longer contribute to tax and surcharge revenues that the states rely upon to meet important social needs. Social obligations - supported by required contributions to the Universal Service Fund - are a collection of subsidy programs for telecommunications services in rural and high-cost areas, including, for example, broadband connections for schools and libraries as well as 911 emergency calling. The Universal Service Fund is supported partially by surcharges on certain communications services and partially by fees embedded in the rates companies pay each other to exchange telephone traffic. "VoIP promises to be pretty scary for anybody invested in traditional wireline phone," such as the state regulatory commissions, says Gerald Faulhaber There's a lot of money here, about $5 billion to $8 billion sloshing around," part of which has always gone to the states. Fear of losing this revenue source has mobilized more than two dozen states in the US to regulate VoIP. A ruling in November by the FCC only heightened states' concern when the federal agency declared that Internet telephony service "is not subject to traditional state public utility regulation" and that the FCC "has the power to preempt state regulations that thwart or impede federal authority over interstate communications." VoIP services terminate on the public switch network and they don't pay the same rates as other carriers, they are being subsidized by those other carriers. VoIP [customers] are also being subsidized by those who use the traditional phone carriers." The goal of any state regulator, as per some states, "is to let market forces work." The idea of enhanced services in a totally unregulated space became an arbitrage opportunity, for example, for people to develop Internet telephony completely outside the realm of traditional telephone regulation," says Faulhaber. "The states are saying, 'This is a local telephone service, and we are the local telephone regulators.'" The issue of jurisdiction aside, the prospect of taxing VoIP suddenly looms larger The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation states that taxing voice services, but not data and Internet services, creates an "economic distortion." The most aggressive proposal that could affect VoIP suggests taxing all voice and data services because the two are becoming "interchangeable and integrated parts of modern communications." While the number of VoIP subscribers is minuscule compared to residential phone lines subscribers, VoIP's growth is likely to accelerate, driven largely by lower prices that are the direct result of light regulation. Forecasters expect the number of VoIP subscribers to increase from about one million subscribers in the U.S. now to 18 million by 2008. Leading VoIP providers - including Vonage, cable operators like Comcast,and some regional bells - face a threat from players using innovative technologies that skirt the need for telephones or telecommunications networks at all. Services like Skype and Free World Dialup allow consumers to use software for free to connect to others over peer-to-peer networks. The companies hope to generate revenue by charging for added services, like video conferencing or calls placed to traditional phone numbers.Another nascent technology is even further out on the fringes of VoIP but carries an enviable pedigree because its creator, Jeff Pulver's new Bellster Network,however, is not yet ready for prime time due to technical installation difficulties that currently limit its general appeal. Whether any of these forms of VoIP can out-muscle traditional landline services remains doubtful largely because of the technical restrictions on Internet telephony. After all, to place a telephone call over the Internet, consumers must first have a computer connected to the Internet via a broadband connection. "I think VoIP will get a sizable piece of the market, but I don't think it will become dominant," says Faulhaber. "If anything is going to [displace] traditional wireline, it is going to be wireless because that technology is not limited to homes that have broadband." Telecom - being a trillion dollar industry always has so many lobbies working at loggerheads - added to the fact technological changes are among the fastest to be adopted by this industry and significant volume of services are targetted mostly at commoners and the impact is widely felt.
The word technology,once inspired so much passion, turned sour for many business leaders after the pop of the Internet bubble and the botched installations of major information systems. Business investment in technology slowed to a crawl as CEOs became far more skeptical about new technology projects, chief information officers and technology vendors. Judging from a roundtable discussion on the subject, sponsored by Manugistics, it appears that top executives are warming to technology once again. But this time around, CEOs will better manage the IT function. And they hope that, rather than wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, their companies will extract far more value from technology than ever before. As General Motors North America President Gary Cowger put it, "The power, the speed, the bandwidth—they’re all allowing us to deliver what we’ve been fascinated with since the 1980s." Technology decision-making was done in isolation of business decision-making. To better integrate technology decisions into the strategy of the business, more CEOs are installing CIOs who have real business experience as opposed to being pure technocrats. And they are exposing them more directly and over a sustained period of time to leaders of their business units. Companies also are putting heavy pressure on vendors to ensure their software pays off. "The approach where you go out and buy all this software and then you go pay for a bunch of services that you’re buying by the hour, and you’re taking all that risk before you even get a payback—is that really the right business model?" posed John Forsyth, CEO of Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Iowa and South Dakota. "I sense that people are wanting to see the vendors be more involved and help in guaranteeing the return on that investment." Vivek Paul, CEO of the large Indian outsourcing software firm Wipro, said: “You’ve got to be able to completely focus on taking costs out of everything that’s supporting your day-to-day processes, and focusing very hard on the things that give you that extra competitive advantage. If you’re not looking at both things with equal passion, you’re missing something.” Of course, farming out technology is what butters Wipro’s bread. Even when it’s clear what stays in-house, the customize-or-standardize question comes up. Standard packages can be cheaper, training may be more widely available, and software may be more scalable and integrate better with existing systems. "We would argue you need more standardization, you need more open standards, because technology is going to change even quicker in the future. You’ve got to be able to plug in technology, take it out and replace it with new technologies," said Saul Berman of IBM Business Consulting Services. "It’s what we call a ‘spaghetti mess.’ But the more you don’t have to customize, and the more you can componentize it, then you have more flexibility as technology changes."As technology spending picks up in 2005, as all indicators suggest, the overall U.S. economy could get a lift because this wave of spending will be more tightly linked to real business objectives. Less spending will be of the ephemeral flash-in-the-pan variety. All of which is good news indeed.
Most architects intuitively understand the value of building a SOA ,but they are struggling with how to associate the business value of building a SOA, and explaining that to the business managers who control the budgets and provide funding for such initiatives. While there doesn’t seem to be one good answer that fits everyone, the various discussions seem to reduce it down to these main points: -Enterprises need the business agility to react to ever-changing business requirements, and continually implement new programs to attract and retain customers. -In support of this, business processes need to be automated, streamlined, refined, and measured. -The underlying IT infrastructure which supports those business processes need to be flexible and capable of adapting to change. Continued measurement of success means that the change needs to happen in real time and results need to be measured in real time. -IT systems contain lots of existing functionality in the form of in-house business logic that represents domain expertise that is germane to the particular business you are in. Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) applications contain business logic that automates common business functions. Most installations of these systems represent heavy investments in licensing, installation, consulting, and custom tailoring to meets the individual needs of an organization. -The key to realizing the business benefits of building a SOA is to recognize the ability for a SOA to be able to leverage existing application assets, and expose them using service level abstractions that are loosely coupled, and standards based. New automated business processes can be built more rapidly by stitching together composite applications that invoke these services and combine them with new business logic that is also exposed through service level interfaces. This is what forms the basis of a SOA. Its not so much about how to extract business value from SOA, its more about how to extract value from the assets that you have in place. A SOA can be the architectural approach to help make that happen.
Tom Peters writes, Hummingbird hums saying, Hummingbird spends 19.6% of gross on R & D- Cool! Tom writes in the comments section -" wish more people were commenting on this. It's a "simple" post--but I think of the utmost importantance. (More worthy than the Carly flap)". I agree - here's my take:
This is an absoutely impressive reinvestment into building future business - I do not think that there are many companies comparable in size to Hummingbird investing this high a percentage in R&D. It would be more insightful if we get to know the absolute no - as a minimum threshold anyway needs to be spent and what is classified as R&D ,the distribution of this amount - in terms of what goes to maintain existing product line and what goes for future rollouts- a good indicator would be to understand how many new rollouts have happened in the past 3/4 years and how much business new version/products/service are getting as a percentage of existing business -That way we can related the effect of lead indicator like r&d expense to lag indicators like sale % of new product offerings.
It is generally beleived that the fight between enteprises are essentially fight between respective business models - all other things being equal. In the emerging entertainment industry there are unrelated business strategies being pursued by Apple and Napster. John M. Moran writes about interesting comparison between napster and iTunes business model.
On one side was Apple's iTunes digital music service, far and away the most popular place to buy songs over the Internet. Pay 99 cents for a song and then download it to your personal computer or iPod portable music device. Apple is promoting iTunes by teaming up with Pepsi to give away thousands of free songs. What makes the contest between iTunes and Napster truly fascinating is the different approaches to selling music online that they represent.Napster takes a radically different approach that essentially says: Why buy a little music when you can rent much more of it instead?Consider that it costs about $15 for 15 iTunes downloads. But that same $15 would buy a month's worth of unlimited access to Napster's giant music collection. In short, for the cost of a single audio CD, Napster gives you access to thousands. But unlike iTunes, you can't burn these songs to a CD and they will play only as long as your Napster subscription remains active.
And with its "Napster To Go" service, Napster has managed to offer digital music lovers the same kind of portability that has made the iPod a household word. The question now is whether consumers are ready to shift their way of thinking about how music is acquired and used.The iTunes approach - pay for the music and it's yours forever. But the vision promoted by Napster argues that if you love music, really love music, you're better off leasing it. And there's some pretty compelling logic to support that view. Even if you buy a new CD every month, in five years you will still only have a modest collection of 60 CDs. That's hardly enough to satisfy even casual listeners, much less hard-core music lovers.For that same expenditure, Napster says, you could have one of the biggest music collections in the world. Thousands of titles by hundreds of artists, all just a mouse-click away. Such a collection would cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy, putting it out of the reach of all but the most dedicated - and richest - music fans. At $15 a month, it's affordable by almost anyone. The buy-vs.-rent calculation only leans in favor of people who listen to a lot of different music. Music fanatics, families with diverse and changing musical tastes, and even people who just want hassle-free variety might decide that renting music beats owning it after all.
The overwhelming story is that everyone is growing, and that growth is based on new customers sending work offshore and existing customers sending more work offshore. According to NASSCOM, the IT industry grew 34% last year to $21.5B, which now accounts for 4.1% of India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). IT services and software is 60% of the market ($13B), and BPO now accounts for 18% ($4B). Growth is expected to remain above 30% in 2005.Not content to rely on the package of services currently offered to fuel future growth, the Indian outsourcing companies are expanding existing customer relationships by adding higher value services. The examples we have seen span innovative business application development, product engineering, and professional BPO services.Build in India rather than buy a packaged application- Services being offered from India are changing the dynamics of the application build versus buy debate. Several of the companies are investing in building their own Intellectual Property (IP) and creating “frameworks” or “point solutions.” The service provider starts with its prebuilt, domain-specific offering, and then customizes and completes the application as part of a services contract. The customer benefits by getting a better quality system faster than if the service provider started from scratch, and the service provider gets to leverage the IP investment over multiple customers.
India Inc. has grown well beyond its technology-focused roots. The leading services are growing their business domain expertise through hiring, acquisition, and training. Taking advantage of these services requires skills in working with an offshore outsourcing company and an established, trusted relationship with one or more offshore services companies. The leap of faith required to be a leading user of the new services is shrinking, but traditional application development or maintenance projects are still the best way to get started.
Am updating from changi airport - more details later tonight.
(Via Economist)IBM, Sony and Toshiba have unveiled a new sort of microprocessor. The chip contains eight processing units that can work simultaneously on different tasksand will run at a speed of 4 gigahertz, at least ten times faster than the best chips available at the moment, according to IBM.Described as a "supercomputer on a chip", the features of the new device show that single microprocessors are giving way to a new, "multi-core" design. This allows chips to run more efficiently, using less power and generating less heat. IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard already produce high-end computers that use multi-core chips. But no competitor has yet produced a chip as cheap, powerful and versatile as the new Cell chip.That the chip is initially intended for a computer game may strike some as underplaying the technological advance.Microsoft is set to ditch Intel’s Pentium chip from its Xbox in favour of a processor from IBM (though not one as advanced as the Cell chip). And AMD is now perceived to have a technological edge over its much bigger rival.Many analysts think Intel should stick to maintaining its dominance of the PC market, though that too will prove difficult if the claims made for the Cell chip prove true.We are seeing in the internet world, search market, desktop market, enterprise application market, in the chip market- significant advances and are witnessing severe competition for the marketleaders - this adds to vibrancy of the industry and heralds key changes that are likely to happen in the information technology industry.
While the service industry is a dominant user of IT, a resurgence is seen in IT investments in the manufacturing sector - typically investments in manufacturing sector are larger and are generally aimes at getting steady solutions rather than trying something radical - from that perspective,it makes an interesting reading to understand trends of IT investment in the manufacturing sector. Information technology has transformed much of the manufacturing industry, and its impact will only increase as more manufacturers update supply chains with proven applications, step up data-synchronization efforts, and use software to ensure compliance, IDC analyst Bob Parker says.Parker's top 10 predictions :
• Smart companies will combine lean-manufacturing techniques, Six Sigma or process-control measurement, and IT investment oversight to transform processes and provide common governance. "The CIO must serve as the custodian, the compliance czar, and the change agent,"
• There will be a renewed interest in supply-chain applications, and manufacturers will look at traditional application categories to create a solution. These categories include global manufacturing execution, supply-chain event management and visibility, and supplier-relationship management.
• Demand information management will emerge as a high priority. like synchronization of product data across the value chain will be a high priority in several industries, not just consumer goods, and interest in customer-relationship management will return.
• Companies will have to do more with less in their new product-development processes. A market will emerge for product-life-cycle-management analytics, led by product portfolio management.
• RFID hype will implode. Many retailers will focus on leveraging current technologies that will deliver immediate results. "What you'll see this year is Wal-Mart keeping a very stiff upper lip, but other retailers will begin to lose interest in RFID," Parker says. "Companies are getting fed up with the efficacy of the [RFID] technology and are concerned about next-generation standards coming out." Retailers will shift their resources to other initiatives and will invest in other technologies, such as wireless terminals, kiosks on the retail floor, and better tools for sales associates, to improve efficiencies at the store level,
• Wall Street will begin to ask for more detailed numbers for sales activity in China, and products branded by Chinese manufacturers will begin to have an impact in certain markets in North America and Western Europe.
• The compliance burden will increase. Therefore, smart approaches will involve looking beyond just compliance and creating opportunities for cost management and higher-quality products.
• Lean Sigma enterprise initiatives will grow. IT spending will shift to projects that add business functions. Leading manufacturers will have more than 75% of their internal developers on new business-function projects.
• Vendors with specific point solutions will begin to talk about being compliant with SAP or Oracle applications. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are the key influencers in manufacturing and represent a significant portion of the IT budget in manufacturing, Parker says. "If you're not one of those vendors, it's going to be very important to have some sort of relationship with one of them if you want to sell into the manufacturing industry."
We had covered in the past about HP's travails and also covered two major pieces that WSJ and Businessweek had on Carly and HP. Despite her being defiant, it was clear all along that she was losing ground and her refusal to share power and responsibility saying strategy and execution can't be delinked and things were not happening in the marketplace for HP as well.There had been calls to split the company and spin off the printer division separately. HP lost leadership or just managed to retain what it had in several of its product offerings. Om Malik asks,"why isn’t the board being asked to leave" when they had by and large supported her decisions in the past.While many have covered carly's exit, I found this coverage very balanced.
Jagdish Sheth, the Charles H. Kellstadt professor of marketing at the Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, says that the life expectancy of American companies is declining, and that even some of America’s most respected firms are susceptible to failure. Sheth discussed why success too often breeds failure. His most recent book— The Rule of Three: Surviving and Thriving in Competitive Markets, co-authored by Rajendra Sisodia, altered the current notions on competition in business. In an interview with Knowledge@emory, Jagdish Sheth elaborates on this theme Excerpts with edits and comments added:
- The life expectancy of companies was declining. That was very surprising. Institutions were supposed to be immortal and humans were mortal. Today, we are living longer and the company’s life expectancy is dropping. For example, a corporation’s life expectancy is only about 14 ½ yrs and declining, because of mergers and acquisitions or Chapter 11 protection.
- The six externalities that bring about a change. They are regulation, capital markets, competition, technology, globalization and customers. When any of these external contexts changes radically and the company is either unable or unwilling to change, it often results in failure. The fastest moving externalities are regulation, competition, and capital markets, while the slowest moving ones are technology, customers, and, globalization. Regulation, in particular, is the most influential. With the stroke of a pen, you can change a whole industry’s nature.
- Most companies come into existence by being opportunistic—call it entrepreneurial opportunity. They take all the credit, but it’s partly the environment and partly the individual. Company success is very much like human behavior—a result of nature and nurture. They succeed as long as the environment doesn’t change. The underlying theory is that many people in business succeed by accident and not by plan.
- When you succeed by accident, you often latch on to your belief system much more than before. You become superstitious in a way. Next to baseball players, the most superstitious people in the world are entrepreneurs. They get locked into one paradigm or one way of life, like Digital, for example. The founder destroyed the company himself since he was bent on his belief in the continued success of the mini computer. He held on to that belief even when the personal computer became the standard, and he destroyed the company in the process. Similarly, many airlines failed after rapid deregulation in the late seventies because they could not change fast enough to meet or resist competition. Examples include Pan Am, TWA and Eastern Airlines.
- Change management is most effective when the company is in crisis. it is, just like in our daily life. The best wake up call is often after a mild heart attack or discovery of a chronic disease, such as diabetes.
- There are three dimensions to change management.
-The first is mindset change. This is usually accomplished by leadership programs, such as the famous "workout" program at General Electric.
-The second is some form of reorganization. This includes eliminating or restructuring leadership’s responsibilities and restructuring the organization. HP went from a country-by-country profit & loss organization to, for example, global product management reorganization.
- Finally, the most critical change is the reward system. I am on the compensation committees of several public company boards, and I am amazed at how much the CEO and his direct reports are obsessed with compensation issues: we all are! For successful change management, it is important that these three dimensions of change are coordinated and executed in parallel.
My Take: Ever since I read his book,based on recommendation by colleague Mohan Srinivasan,I had been a fan of Jagdish Sheth - while his findings are backed up by impressive analysis and backed by facts - these seem applicable to all industry - except IT professional services industry - As we noted in this posting the marketshare of IBM in IT consulting hovers around 8% and there are several players and this is not a new industry either - the industry has been affected by all the factors that Dr.Sheth lists down -from regulation to technology -but fragmentation does not change - may be it is because of very high growth the industry is undergoing - more of this later. But otherwise Dr.Sheth is always a pleasure to read - excellent assessments backed by very incisive inferences.
(Via Pegasus News) If you ever wondered how great companies and great leaders got into tough and derailing situations, Dave Wheeler presents the Life Cycle of Rules. Dave writes,"I find it an interesting analogy to think of rules as signposts or trees in the forest that help keep you on the right path. Of course if there are too many trees or the signposts turn into fences, then you will lose sight of new opportunities".Rules were't much of a problem until the SPEED of business and the speed of change increased (aided by technology –particularly information technology and communications and rising global free trade). In the past enterprises got away with this for ages after their rules ceased to be relevant and even stayed somewhat profitable and assumed they were competitive and relevant.
It is indeed paradoxical that the more sophisticated that technology becomes, conventional values like sharing become more and more better pronounced. Economist magazine writes about economics of sharing and raises the question can sharing be extended to the non technical world while mapping the sharing that is happening in the technology world. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
The "open source" movement,is a way of making software (and increasingly, other things as well),which relies on the individual contributions of thousands of programmers. The resulting programs are owned by no one and are free for all to use. The software is copyrighted only to ensure it remains free to use and enhance. In essence, therefore, open source involves two things: putting spare capacity (geeks' surplus time and skill) into economic production; and sharing. Co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source,- the reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, and they find it funny.
The characteristics of information—be it software, text or even biotech research—make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: there are network( Metcalfe!) effects: ie, the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user. Internet makes the costs of sharing are remarkably low. The cost of distribution is negligible, and co-ordination is easy because people can easily find others with similar goals and can contribute when convenient. Where open source was about sharing information by way of the internet, what is happening now, is sharing of the tangible tools of technology themselves, like computing power and bandwidth. This is because they are widely distributed among individuals, and sold in such a way that there is inherent (and abundant) unused capacity.
The world's most powerful supercomputer is not owned by NEC or IBM, but is a volunteer project called SETI@home that aggregates the spare processing power of around 4m computers. When an individual's PC is idle, a screen-saver application that users have downloaded kicks in and harnesses the computer's processor to decode radio signals in search of extra-terrestrial life. Through "peer-to-peer"systems, people exchange digital copies of music over the internet, sharing not only songs but, more important, the physical memory of their PCs. Tens of millions of people have used peer-to-peer systems, which account for more than half of all internet traffic. Around the world, regulators have granted licences, giving mobile-phone companies the rights to use a specific band of the airwaves,for a price. Spectrum is parcelled out in this way under the assumption that more than one signal on the same frequency results in interference. This has been true until recently, but today radios with cheap microprocessors can pick out competing signals intelligently,the result is that new technology has made the sharing of spectrum possible—radio waves could be a non-rivalrous good—if only this were legally permitted and engineered into the software that runs the wireless devices. Regulators have changed their approaches slightly by allowing secondary markets in spectrum, but this still presumes exclusive, not shared, use. In physical world,other than car pooling – no other practical example exists that demonstrate the principle of sharing so well.
Update: I finished publishing this and noticed Barry Brigg's views on this wherein he says open source projects lack real innovation and adds,Look at the Linux's: they're just third-rate knockoffs of Windows. Can you point to a single thing a Linux machine can do that Windows can't. Sure, there are lots of knockoffs of leading apps like Photoshop and Acrobat and so on. And when Microsoft or Adobe or Macromedia or Apple invest heavily and come out with a cool new feature, rest assured someone will copy it. This is a powerful argument - if we overlook who really innovates all these innovations that Barry talks about - no doubt innovation and speed to market are better fostered and acheived by competitive pressures
The worlwide IT services market estimated at 439billion USD in 2003 is expected to touch $569 billion in 2008. It is widely expected that there would be a significant change in the composition of the players in the services market with India headquartered companies making significant headway in the global IT services market.we covered the rise of offshore players in our coverage India Inc is growing twice as fast as Japan Inc where we covered the indian IT industry view as articulated by G.B.Prabhat of Satyam wherein he wroteAcross every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India.
I just finished reading a gartner report titled -"Market Focus: Brand Awareness in Consulting and Development and Integration Services" written by Christine Adams, a gartner analyst. The Key findings in the report are:
This brand awareness study reinforced what consulting, as well as development and integration service providers know only too well — the market is crowded with hundreds of brands competing for "mind share", customer loyalty and a spot on customer shortlists. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. Further, the market seems unusually able to absorb all the clutter. Despite the dominance of powerful global brands, such as IBM, Accenture and Cisco, among others, buyers can still call to mind niche players. The market can be categorised as:
- Business consulting services — Advisory services that influence the adoption of IT. Business consulting includes corporate strategy, review of business plans, business process analysis or re-engineering, and business requirements analysis, as well as change management and organizational consulting pertaining to the adoption of IT solutions.
- IT consulting services — IT consulting services are advisory services that help clients assess different technology strategies and, in doing so, align their technology strategy with their business or process strategy. These services support customers' IT initiatives by providing strategic, architectural, operational and implementation planning.
- Application development services — These services create new functionality for custom-developed or packaged applications. They may include conversion applications to run on different platforms or architectures.
- Integration services — These are detailed design, implementation and management services to link applications (custom or prepackaged) to each other or with the established or planned IT infrastructure. Specific activities might include project planning, project management, detailed design and implementation of application programming interfaces.
- Deployment services — Deployment services support the implementation and rollout of new applications and infrastructure. Activities may include hardware and software procurement, configuration, tuning, staging, installation and interoperability testing.
Across these categories, distinct groups of competitors — IT hardware and software providers, consulting and system integration pure plays, and Big Four accounting firms — commanded the greatest brand awareness and perceived brand strength. IBM, which dominated all three services categories, might well be a group unto itself.
Brand associations were much more fragmented than expected. Remarkably, all of the Big Four accounting firms received multiple mentions in the IT consulting category, even though Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC spun out their IT consulting divisions several years ago. Of equal interest, Dell ranked among the top 10 in first-to-mind and total unaided awareness, outpacing Oracle and BearingPoint, among others. Tata Consulting Services was the only Indian offshore brand to receive multiple mentions.
The report writes, "We expected the Indian offshore vendors would be top of mind in application development and integration.Tata, however, was the only offshore vendor to receive multiple mentions for total unaided awareness.The brand halo effect benefited the Big Four accountancies in this category, with E &Y and PwC receiving multiple mentions,even though application development and integration are no longer part of their businesses".
Infosys and Tata were the only two Indian offshore providers to receive multiple mentions as strong application development and integration brands. No offshore provider received more than one mention as a preferredprovider, while 44.7 percent of participants indicated they maintained a preferred provider list for application development and integration. Further Gartner's data show that the leader of the pack IBM has a marketshare less than 8% marketshare in the entire IT services market and that the marketshare of India headquartered vendors at )2003 data)like Infosys stood at 0.8%,TCS at 0.7% and Wipro, Satyam and Cognizant hovering between 0.5% to 0.6%. In the next part of the article we shall cover how these companies perceive the markets to evolve and how these companies are gearing to face competition. An assessment from an inside out perspective comes from G.B.Prabhat, where he writes,IT industry — Indian firm clicks as well as MNC and compares the maturity and competitiveness between Indian headquartered conmpanies and global MNC'salong the dimensions of developing offshore workforce,delivery processes,leadership,relationship management,diversity, secular trends.Tomorrow, in the second part on this topic, we shall do an analysis of the emerging trends, challenges and opportunities for the professional service firms.
Mark Fletcher,CEO, Bloglines says Bloglines had an organic growth policy since its lauch.Fletcher writes, Ask Jeeves was different than the other investors that approached us. They wanted us to continue to run Bloglines as a stand-alone property, and also integrate Bloglines into their other properties where it made sense. And they were willing to commit a lot of resources to Bloglines to help us expand our features and capabilities. Just as important, it was clear from day one that the Ask team understood us, and our service. we thought they had much more of the start-up/fast moving mentality than any of the other companies we talked with, and that approach made them feel like the right partner for us.
Jim Lanzone wrote,First and most importantly,our primary focus will be on building the Bloglines service to fulfill Mark’s vision for it, adding resources to their toolbox to get there faster and better. There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren't already on their roadmap. We will take our time determining the optimal business model for the service. As part of a bigger company there will be more options for Bloglines - from indirect monetization (through increased usage of our other brands) to direct if there is a model that makes sense for everyone. In terms of integration with Ask Jeeves, one of our first priorities will be to pair the Bloglines team with our Teoma search technology team to build world-class blog search. We'll also help distribute Bloglines to a broader audience, from MyJeeves to the portal properties owned by askjeeves..
Gartner writes,With Ask Jeeves' purchase of Bloglines, battle lines between the various media titans begin to take shape for dominance of the blogosphere the battle shall heat up considerably in 2005. If 2004 was the year of the blog, then 2005 is the year of the blogosphere. A blogosphere is a creation-distribution platform that allow consumers to create, share and manage blogs, podcasts and Vblogs extensions to "traditional" blogging. Given the complexities of adding multimedia content to the Web, advanced blogospheres will need to provide consumers an intuitive solution to add audio and video to their blogs. Given the bandwidth constraints of multimedia content, these advanced blogospheres will also need to tackle issues such as file compression and digital rights management. By the end of 2005, each major portal (MSN, Yahoo!,Google and Ask Jeeves) will need to have robust blogospheres in place to remain competitive.
Each major portal has at least one element in place and will be on the hunt for acquisitions and partners.Microsoft has Spaces, a blog-like offering, and emerging content management capabilities with its search products and My MSN, but will need a more open and cohesive strategy to lead this space. To compete on the big stage, Microsoft will need to offer a less-proprietary platform that encourages Web users at large to participate.Google has the popular Blogger blog creation tool but lacks an RSS aggregation product. Blogger also will need to be more podcast- and Vblog-friendly.Yahoo has added considerable content management power to its My Yahoo service but currently lacks a blog creation tool. we earlier covered yahoo may acquire six apart.Self contained blog platforms like Tucows, Drupal could also be in limelight. Significant action is taking place in the blogsphere - commensurate with the phenomenal growth in the number of blogs. Business models with monetization schemes would begin to emerge.
Christine Mohan, associate director of product management for NYTimes.com, confirms the growing importance of RSS feeds in building site traffic: "NYTimes.com's RSS feeds generated 4.5 million page-views on the site in January. RSS is an efficient traffic driver that complements other distribution deals we have with top portals, ISPs, and aggregators like Moreover Technologies. RSS users also represent a news-hungry, influential audience for NYTimes.com." It's an interesting way of combining an open and a closed system.
FT points out to the collapse of chinese internet stocks.The latest lucrative wheeze dreamed up by the country's three big internet portals - sending horoscopes to mobile phone subscribers via text message - has suddenly fallen foul of the authorities.Sina.com, the market leader, now forecasts a 24 per cent decline in sequential revenues for the current quarter. Its shares went down a fifth in after-hours trading on Monday. Sohu.com, where revenues and profits are already falling, and Netease, which has yet to report results, are also on the slide. As the latest episode shows, they can still be blindsided by regulatory change and bullied by semi-monopolies like China Mobile. The rewards of operating in China's unfettered market can be great, but the risks are commensurate. David Jackson points to Mary Meeker's slides titled "The China Internet Presentation" where she states: "Lots of opportunity with lots and lots of risk". She was certainly correct in her assessment about the risk.
(Via Artstechnica ) Eric Bangeman writes RIIA's prosecution mechanism looks hilarious. There is lack of diligence in targeting the right people for prosecution for violations and adds, unfortunately, their history does little to inspire such hopes and RIAA( Recording Industry Association of America) does not mind being thought of as a laughingstock!!.
Like platform players competing in the enteprise application business, the internet economy is heavily dominated by a few players, and their dominance is all set to grow in the near future. In this context it is interesting to make an assessment of EBay vs. Google to find out who's controlling the Web today. Bambi Francisco ( Via marketwatch)writes while seven-year-old Google is worth $54 billion- EBay's worth $4 billion less because by the end of this year, for the first time, Google's cash flow is projected to trump that of eBay's. Excerpts :
Last year,eBay delivered slightly more cash flow. Google delivered cash flow of $1.2 billion last year while eBay's was $1.3 billion, But as the dollars are projected to flow in favor of Google this year, it begs the question: Will search advertising ultimately become a better mousetrap for sellers? Or to what extent will search advertising take away the potential dollars that were once expected to flow onto eBay's marketplace? Or, are advertising dollars being thrown to search engines without people really knowing the return on investment (much like what happened in the bubble years), meaning the pendulum will swing back in eBay's favor? If price hikes are any indication, then search engine marketing is beginning to look like a compelling, alternative mousetrap to capture buyers. On the flipside, eBay - which has the biggest pool of potential buyers on the Web lowered listing fees on items starting at 99 cents, which many sellers believe is just a token gesture, and hardly helpful.) One reason customers are able to entertain new avenues like Google today is that they're far savvier about the resources on the Internet.
eBay attracts mostly buyers and not a whole host of other people looking for knowledge or to be entertained, Google and Yahoo attract a larger audience than eBay. In December, Yahoo had 119 million unique visitors while Google had 71.6 million and eBay had 66.5 million, according to comScore Networks. But if more than half of Yahoo's traffic and more than 90 percent of Google's audience are potential buyers, then eBay sellers would be in front of just as many potential customers.
Assuming a seller can be in front of the same number of buyers, Google also looks like a good alternative to eBay because of the premium a seller can ask for. A seller would likely get higher prices on Google than eBay. eBay is still one of the best places, if not the best place to set up shop. That's largely due to conversion rates. At search engines, there's hardly a conversion rate attached to the spending. A seller may still have to pay for clicks without knowing if those clicks are worth anything. EBay is cheaper, unless a merchant can get a better than 4 to 5 percent conversion rate on clicks from search engines as against current average of 2% to 3%Final assessment is that eBay isn't going to lose customers to Google. But the advent of search as an alternative will take away the potential eBay once had. Moreover, the search engines are making it harder for eBay, and other commerce companies like Amazon.com to make a living because they rely on search engines for traffic. What's happening is that Google is controlling the distribution on the Internet.For eBay - The source of its traffic is the same source that is putting a damper on its ability to raise prices, or make money. Sure, there's cooperation and competition everywhere, and eBay has been relying on traffic through its keyword purchase from search engines for years. But the cost of eBay's traffic is rising faster than what it can charge its customer - This is the challenge at eBay.
We recently covered Negroponte's initiative to make the laptops to become more common than mobile phones but conceded this was ambitious. "Nokia make 200 million cell phones a year, so for us to claim we're going to make 200 million laptops is a big number, but we're not talking about doing it in three or five years, we're talking about months." Telecocalypse adds, given a bit of cheap connectivity,there can be 200m VoIP terminals. Sitty-talkies instead of walkie-talkies. windowsitpro reports Commercial providers may be ready to pay for an icon in the desktop. The more smart nodes at the network edge, the better.Given falling sales and margins, PC makers need all the money they can get, and adding icons for third-party applications and utilities might prove to be a simple way to improve earnings per PC. Metcalfe,increased internet usage and broadband penetration shall ensure that there is a multiplier effect that would be felt on account of this address the bottom of the pyramid segment with so much focus.
Peter Seebach writes that while Computers are getting faster all the time,the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. (Via kurzweilai.net) About 10 years ago people complained that Microsoft Word was too slow on the Mac. You could type faster than the processor handled input on such a large application. The same thing still holds true. Similarly,computer with a hard drive loaded a small command-line utility in under a second and a large graphics program in perhaps half a minute. They haven't changed much in the past 15 years?So the question is, where is all the CPU power going? How is it possible that a machine with a full gigabyte of memory can run out of room to run applications just as quickly as a machine with six megabytes of memory did 15 years ago?
Modern CPUs do a lot of things differently from older CPUs: for instance, they can execute multiple instructions simultaneously What's fascinating is that, for most users, performance isn't noticeably any better today than it was 15 years ago. Computers are, in fact, doing more than they used to. A lot of the things computers do are fairly subtle, happening beneath the radar of a user's perception. Many functions are automatic. Many modern systems use antialiasing to render text. This makes text easier to read and can substantially improve the usability of low-resolution monitors and LCD displays. On the downside, antialiasing sucks up a lot of processing power. Visual effects like drop shadows behind windows and menus, transparent menus and effects, and real-time effects also consume a lot of processing power. Older systems used bitmap fonts, which rendered quickly at the provided size but looked ugly at any other size. Most modern systems render outline fonts in real time, which users are now used to. Even with some caching involved, font rendering adds one more layer of processor overhead - but no vendor would dare release an interface with bitmap fonts today. The current Mac operating system gets around some graphical overhead by having the rendering hardware of video cards do additional work. The video card essentially becomes a second processor, which cuts down on the graphics processing time.
Most users feel a little put out when they can type faster than a word processor can process words. The worst days of this trend seems to be behind us now: most word processing programs started to keep up with even good typists somewhere around the 1-Ghz clock-speed mark. These days, it's the automatic features on these programs that can slow down your system. Automatic checking is a default behavior on most word processing applications. Some simply underline misspelled words and questionable grammar while others automatically correct as you type. Not only are these corrections occasionally inaccurate (many writers turn this feature off), but the behavior also requires a lot of additional processing. A certain amount of system's processing power goes to improved safety and security features for your applications. Many of these features come in the form of critical security patches, since the original code was written without enough attention to sanity checking. The problem with patches is that they add up over time, meaning that individual ones only marginally affect performance, but taken together they can amount to a decent time sink.Virus scanners are a more serious power hog than patches. Most virus scanners update themselves regularly, which makes for a small, but noticeable, amount of background activity. They also scan a lot more files than they once did.
All this scanning chews up a lot of processing time, which affects every program running on a system. For instance, a video game that uses a lot of graphical files and loads them on the fly could require the same 20 MB file to be scanned a dozen times during an hour's play. Security is a worthy and necessary use of processing power, and the alternatives are worse: spyware and viruses can consume incredible amounts of time. Another common cause of slow computers, at least for Windows users, is an accumulation of any number of programs that snoop on traffic, pop up advertisements, or otherwise make themselves indispensable to a marketer somewhere.
Program complexity is probably the biggest culprit when speedy processor still runs slow. As applications become more complex, a certain amount of their code (and thus your processing power) goes into making them more manageable. This code, which I'll call support code, actually makes programs easier for developers to write. A very large program might incorporate nested layers of support code. For instance, a Linux build of Mozilla might link to 30 or so different pieces of support code - including support code for the support code that Mozilla uses directly. The code itself is typically very efficient for its task, and it does make the job of developing large-scale applications much easier. But the code that enables all these small pieces of code to interact in a predictable manner adds a small runtime cost. Once again, a small cost repeated many times adds up to a significant performance hit.
A few of the programs on Windows run special programs at system startup. Each of these programs pre-loads its own shared libraries, which in turn allows the program to launch more quickly later. Worse yet, the bloat introduced by a second-system design is often preserved in future revisions to preserve compatibility.
Luckily, the worst is probably over. Around the time when 800-Mhz processors came out, users stopped the driving need to upgrade constantly. Most users today can complete their work without waiting hours for the computer to perform its tasks.
Web services are poised to revolutionize the way content sites get their goods to the folks who want them. Businessweek writes,this is a major change –It was thought of Web services as something that could only make business transactions easier. Last year just 4% of Web-services-related spending went to information dissemination and retrieval, Now the biggest forces behind informational Web services are information sites themselves. Hundreds such as Technorati have begun publishing their application program interfaces (API). They're letting the programmers from other sites know the easiest way to link up their news feeds. The result is a community of interrelated programmers and Web sites. Since Flickr, a Web site through which people can share photos, made its APIs available last summer, more than 600 developers from other sites have made use of them, says co-founder Stewart Butterfield.
Think of the site that has created as a virtual news fetcher, bringing all the relevant info right to your PC. No more need to surf around the Internet or plow through wordy government sites. It all comes to one spot, the personal Web site. Such Web-service sites are just starting to catch on, thanks to technologies such as the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is sort of a lingua franca for Net programmers, and Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds, which make it possible for sites to easily share data. It's not a stretch to say they could revolutionize the way content is delivered. "In the past, Web sites were data roach motels," says David Sifry, CEO of the search engine Technorati, which sends information to Govtrack via a Web service. "Your data comes in, but doesn't come out. Now it does. And Web sites are able to create services that are better than the sum of their parts." These new sites, built with the combined resources of lots of their pint-size brethren, are expected to gain on traditional ones in the coming year. Ad and subscription revenues are likely to follow. Mappr.com uses Web-services technologies to sift through photos posted by more than 300,000 Flickr.com customers and transposes them against a map of the U.S. All those photos essentially become a digital photo guide to America. Today, the question isn't "if?" It's "how much?" Ten years from now, savvy business folks will be asking the same of informational Web services.
