India's Tech Renaissance

News.com has a 3-part special report on India's emergence as a tech powerhouse.

Once fairly anonymous organizations hired to run support desks and develop server applications for large multinational corporations, Indian companies are raising their profile as brand name suppliers in hardware design, software development, consulting services and virtually anything else in technology. Infused with new blood from a young tech-savvy work force, the new movement is a major advance toward economic independence that carries broad ramifications for a country whose past includes colonial rule, experiments in socialism and devastating poverty.

There are a few quotes by me in the report. Michael Kanellos had met with me about a month ago, thanks to an introduction by VIA's Ravi Pradhan.

Not surprisingly, optimism is running high as younger generations come of age. The national exuberance has inspired many entrepreneurs, including Rajesh Jain, who sold an Indian-based Web portal, IndiaWorld, for around $100 million in 2000 and who is now incubating companies that he expects will bring computing to the masses in his country.

"For the first time," he said, "there is confidence that tomorrow will be better than today."
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2005: Entrepreneur Rajesh Jain begins to promote thin clients costing $100 to $150 as computers for the mass population. "It's not that we need just cheaper solutions. We need the newest technology, but at fundamentally lower price points," Jain has said.
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One of the critical ingredients for the $100 computer is probably in your garage.

In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard "thin clients" of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices. Adding a monitor doubles the price to $150, but the company will offer used displays to keep the cost down.

"If you want to reach the $100 to $120 price point, you need to use old monitors," said Novatium founder and board member Rajesh Jain, a local entrepreneur who sold the IndiaWorld portal for $115 million in cash in 2000 and has started a host of companies since. "Monitors have a lifetime of seven to eight years."

It is this kind of entrepreneurial thinking that has made Jain the latest visionary to seek out today's Holy Grail of home computing: a desktop that will start to bring the Internet to the more than 5 billion people around the world who aren't on it yet.
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"Just because we are an emerging market doesn't mean we want an inferior product," said Jain of Novatium. The engineering behind his company's base model illustrates his point.

Instead of a microprocessor, it will contain a digital signal processor that compresses and decompresses music and video files. In addition to lowering costs, the technology is designed to provide access to the full range of the Internet without bogging down the machine's operations. (Novatium would not disclose which chip brand it would use, but one of its investors is also the chairman of digital signal processor designer Analog Devices.)

Using Linux applications and software from Jain's Netcore Solutions, these machines will be tweaked so that multiple people can use them. This would reduce the cost of memory in the server that does the bulk of the computing work for the Novatium thin clients on its network.

Jain will also try to establish "operator grids," local businesses that run the servers while acting as an Internet service provider. Eventually, instead of buying their machines, he said customers could have the option of paying a grid operator $15 to $20 a month for all hardware, software and storage needs.

While acknowledging the risks inherent in any start-up venture, Jain speaks eagerly of what he calls the phenomenon of the black swan--a rare, but not impossible, event.

"Google was a black swan," he said. "No one expects the next Microsoft or Intel or Cisco to come out of India, but I believe it is entirely possible."

Overall, the story is a big positive for India and reflects its coming of age. Now, if we can only get more Indian entrepreneurs to start thinking about building out tomorrow's world, the renaissance will lead to domination. What is needed is a mix of entrepreneurial passion, cutting-edge innovation, and big thinking. We also need to leverage our domestic market -- solving the needs of the consumers and SMEs in India can provide Indian companies the right platform to extend the solutions to other emerging markets also. And perhaps, ensure innovation blowback (as John Hagel says) to the developed markets.

France Telecom's Nice Problem

WSJ has a brief report on France Telecom, which "is expected to generate an estimated €29 billion ($34.92 billion) in cash over the next 3 ½ years. The question is, what to do with it?"

After three years of selling assets and integrating units helped France Telecom cut net debt by nearly €30 billion under French accounting standards, the company's focus has shifted to exploiting sharp growth in broadband and the convergence of fixed-line and wireless services, and paying higher dividends. How France Telecom will balance sharing its cash with investors and spending on future growth has become the subject of much industry speculation.

France Telecom declined to comment.

Europe's incumbent telecom operators have cleaned up their balance sheets against a backdrop of accelerating technological change, which is allowing them to offer more services than ever before. The buzzword is convergence: selling mobile and fixed-line services that include television, Internet, games and music along with calls. Yet no single model is proven, and operators are scattered across the globe.

Mobile Content Development

The Feature writes:

i-mode Strategy reports on a common complaint from mobile developers: that operators demanding mobile content to sell to their users have very little interest in subsidizing its development. Television companies pay production companies to produce pilots of new shows; record labels pay for recording and other costs. But as things stand in the mobile content world, operators want developers to assume essentially all the risk of developing new content, then want to take a cut of any sales. So, if things stay this way, it's hard to see mobile content moving beyond repurposed (ie already-paid-for) content adapted for mobile devices.

Some operators like NTT DoCoMo are putting money into technology development by investing in companies doing technical research. But at the same time, DoCoMo says it's delaying its HSDPA launch because there's no content to make use of the high-speed connections. So, if DoCoMo is to be believed, the fast network is ready; the content is not. So why increase technology spending, but not throw content developers some cash?

Seeding developers with some monetary support is a solid first step, if it's doled out VC-style, or via advances. Another is to make phones and networks "more hackable", that is to simplify development for them, not just for commercial developers, but for people to explore unimagined uses and applications. Yet another is to empower lead users to lead the way on innovation. In any case, it's hard to see mobile content move forward very quickly without more -- and better -- operator support.

Search Booming

Search Engine Guide has comments by Safa Rashtchy on the reasons:

Rashtchy feels there are a number of revenue drivers fueling the growth:

A second wave of small business just discovering search
The international growth of search
Discovery of the branding value of search
The growth of contextual search, with local search perhaps poised to take over

In addition, he sees four immediate and fundamental drivers of search growth. He collectively refers to them as T.C.P.C.

Traffic - More people doing more searches, especially commercial searches
Coverage - Expansion of keyword baskets, monetizing more search terms
Price - Increasing prices per click
Conversion - As we get better at converting clicks to buyers, advertisers are willing to bid more

Rashtchy summed up with five conclusions that state the future potential of search in no uncertain terms:

* Search is likely to become the most successful marketing method for all businesses
* Local search is a huge force that could change the dynamics of search for online-only merchants, putting them at a big disadvantage
* Concepts like broad match could make search an effective soft sell, suggestive advertising mechanism
* Merchants should focus on customer conversion and extending the customer life cycles
* Search providers should focus more on merchant conversion rates and offer lower charges for broad match and contextual search. They should also focus heavily on local and international expansion.

RSS-only Blog?

Russell Beattie writes:

Has anyone started an RSS-Only blog yet? I mean a blog where there's no HTML version, just all RSS.

I have two types of readers: I have my subscribers who read my blog, come and comment regularly and occasionally link to me giving me decent search engine rankings. I have the other set of readers, those who find me via search engines and click on my advertisements and pay for my monthly alotment of gadgets. It'd be neat if these readers were one and the same, but they're not. My brief experiment with RSS advertising showed two orders of magnitude less money generated for that month with RSS ads: $10 vs $1000. We'll see if the new Google RSS ads generate any more money for their publishers, but I doubt it. People who use aggregators are also the people who use ad-blockers and know how to block images in Firefox.

Okay, that said - imagine if I got sick of the random people showing up at my blog leaving derisive comments and disappearing forever (even if they do pay for it). What if I just wanted my blog published to a community of people who felt that they liked what I was saying enough to add it to their aggregators and see it daily? Well, I could have a page that just said "Welcome to Russell's RSS Blog." and underneath there was an orange XML icon and that's it. Those who get it would subscribe, the rest wouldn't.

Now, here's a problem: Permalinks. How are people going to link to and follow permalinks? I'm not sure - maybe there'd be a public aggregator out there where you could refer to the unique ID of the post? Or maybe you just link back to the site, which gives you an RSS "snippet", i.e. a channel with just one item in it, but with an XSL transform at the top to make it readable to regular web browsers.

A blog like this would be ideal for mobile phones.

TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: Advice for Life (Part 2)

Dear Abhishek,

Learn to Learn

To make big plans, you will need the capacity to learn to learn. Let me explain. We are learning a lot when we are growing, and in school and college. But sometime later, as we start our work life, for many, this learning stops. Time freezes around us. Today becomes like yesterday, and yesterday was just like the day before. We lose the will, yearning and capability to learn. We become content to go through the rest of our lives as if on auto-pilot. We attribute it to the needs of family, our children, or whatever. In doing so, we lose the ability to learn. That becomes a very sad day. Unfortunately, few ever realise this – until it is very late.

The ability to “learn to learn” is perhaps the most important that you should possess. Behind these simple phrase is a much deeper inner discipline that you need to develop. It is something that you will probably have to develop on your own. Our education system may not necessarily impart that to you! In fact, many times what the education system will be in dissonance with building out this “learn to learn” capability.

What do I mean when I say you need to “learn to learn?” Learning to learn means having a fundamental understanding of a latticework of concepts which will allow you to build and refine your mental models of the world around. It means having an openness which does not hesitate to question (or be questioned) on what one knows. It means looking around and thinking about what is happening, and placing the event in perspective. To build this rich model, you will need to read widely and think deeply. Keep these words from Charlie Munger in mind:

I've long believed that a certain system – which almost any person can learn – works way better than the systems that most people use. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And you hang your actual experience and your vicarious experience (that you get from reading and so forth) on this latticework of powerful models. And with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition.

And you need the models – not just from one or two disciplines, but from all the important disciplines. You need the best 100 or so models from microeconomics, physiology, psychology particularly, elementary mathematics, hard science and engineering [and so on].

You don't have to be a huge expert in any of those worlds. All you've got to do is to take the really big ideas and learn them early and well.

If there is one regret that I have, it is that I did not understand the importance of this until very recently. Our narrow education inhibits us. The world around does not necessarily encourage us to delve deeper. After all, there is stuff to do and there’s only so much time. Where’s the time to contemplate? This is where many of us go wrong.

When you are young, you will have few cares in the world. And that is the best time to learn to learn. In my childhood, one such companion for me was the BBC World Service. I would spend hours everyday listening to their various programmes on radio. Close my eyes, and let the imagination run free. Choose as companions some of the world’s great writers and explore the world that we live in and how we got here with them. Learning about our past along multiple dimensions will give you a perspective to build the world of tomorrow. Done right, this ability will stand you in good stead through your life.

Tomorrow: Advice for Life (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: Advice for Life (Part 5) [July 1, 2005]
TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: Advice for Life (Part 4) [June 30, 2005]
TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: Advice for Life (Part 3) [June 29, 2005]
TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: Advice for Life [June 27, 2005]
TECH TALK: Letter to a 2005 Baby: 10 Big Ideas (Part 5) [June 24, 2005]