My latest column in Business Standard:

I attended CommunicAsia in Singapore in mid-June. There was an excellent conference and a huge exhibition area. The focus of the conference was around the twin themes of mobility and broadband. What follows are some of my impressions about the emerging communications landscape and the implications for India.

The conference sessions were focused around the telecom scenario in Asia. They provided a fascinating glimpse of the region – with different countries at different stages in the evolution of their communications and services infrastructure. The leaders are undoubtedly Japan and South Korea, while the two biggest opportunities are China and India. Taiwan and Singapore are racing ahead to deploy broadband, 3G and wireless LANs. Hong Kong has the best IP-TV service. An interesting fact: last year, nearly a million new mobile users were added – every day. The world now has 1.8 billion mobile users.

Two words that were heard a lot at the conference were “convergence” and “ecosystem.” Convergence is finally becoming a reality as the next-generation networks with all-IP cores are making it possible to have triple play services (voice, data and video) flow over the same network. Convergence is also happening in terms of the fixed line and wireless worlds – in both the networks and handsets. Convergence technology drivers include SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and IMS (IP Multimedia System). There will be a time soon when our handsets will support WiFi and GSM/CDMA, such that in hotspots they would use WiFi to make and receive calls, while at other locations they would use the cellular networks.

Ecosystem is about the realization that there is no single company which has all the answers, and there is a web of relationships to deliver valuable services to consumers and enterprises. Operators control the networks (and the customer relationships), but they need a combination of cheaper access devices and compelling services to drive traffic and revenues. An ecosystem approach is about creating win-win scenarios for the entire value chain.

The three panel discussions identified the hot issues: content, 3G and VoIP. The biggest success stories in mobile value added services have been unexpected – SMS, ringtones and increasingly, ringback tones. But there are still plenty of opportunities in the content space to deliver useful services to consumers on their always-on, always-available, always-connected, personal devices, and over broadband networks. Operators have begun 3G rollouts across the region – but there is no clear business plan on how money will be made! WiMax looms as a possible threat – or opportunity. VoIP is hot and happening – it is clear that voice will just be another application on the IP network.

The vision for the future is simple, seamless and personal communications from wireline and wireless networks. Tomorrow’s world will be one where users will be able to communicate anytime, anywhere from the device of their choice. Users will be able to define their own experiences, and the network will become more intelligent to bring highly personalised services to users. All of this will bring about a significant lifestyle change for consumers and also enable the real-time enterprise.

The dream of this world of seamless mobility has been there for many years. But the work that has been happening in the background is now making it all possible. Parallel trends in digitisation are making a huge array of content available to us on any of the screens – TV, PC or the mobile. The focal point is now shifting from the network to the user. What people really want is to be connected, informed, entertained and do so in their own way. Whether one is at home or work, commuting or in public places, the networks will connect us to friends, family, colleagues at work, and our business information.

As Peter Vesterbacka, founder of HP Mobile E-Services Bazaar, puts it: “All people are mobile, even when they work. They have needs all the time, either private or professional. They need access to services and information all the time, wherever they are. The devices they will use to access these services can be wired or wireless – the people are mobile…Mobility is a natural state of being, not a niche market. The Internet is a subset of the mobile market.”

For us in India, we have a very good mobile infrastructure. What is needed is for the operators to alter their mindsets and open up their walled gardens to third-party content and applications developers – much like the way NTT Docomo did with i-mode in Japan when they launched in 1999. More than voice and person-to-person SMS, future growth will come from an array of lifestyle and business services – and for that the need is to build an ecosystem.

The broadband situation in India is nothing short of a disaster. Whereas countries like South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong talk of multi-megabit connectivity, we are stuck in the kilobit world. India needs cheap, reliable, high-speed, ubiquitous broadband access – for homes and businesses. (Anyone who thinks 256 Kbps at Rs 350 per month with download caps is “broadband” should visit to one of our Asian counterparts.)

This will spur our content and software developers to innovate and build services for the domestic market – and potentially extend them to others globally. South Korea did that very well – and the result is not just companies like LG and Samsung, but also online gaming innovators like NCSoft. India has the creative talents in both story-telling (Bollywood) and software. The combination is what can help build out the next-generation killer services.

The scale of India’s developmental challenge needs big, bold decisions. Technology can play a small but critical part in this process. State-of-the-art mobile and broadband networks can help India address the challenges of education, health and governance. Removing obstacles to their buildout should be a national priority.

A paper by Anikar M. Haseloff: "Using public Internet facilities in order to access information and communication technologies (ICT) is the main model of use after the more common models of home use (individual ownership) and access at work or at school/university. Especially in developing countries, public and shared facilities help to create desperately needed access and are a main strategy in several Internet access programs. In the context of public access, cybercafes play an important role as the most common Internet access model, especially in the urban areas of India. It is often argued that cybercafes could help bridge the digital divide, as they provide Internet access to people who cannot afford to have Internet connections at their homes or who need help in order to make use of ICT. The following article will take this assumption as a starting point and will present findings from empirical research on cybercafes in urban India. The research was conducted in order to explore the problems and potential of cybercafes as development tools for different urban communities. In order to examine these relationships, the reach of cybercafes, the users of cybercafes and the usage patterns have been examined. This study is part of a doctoral thesis and the following article presents some of the findings. The article has to be seen as a preliminary report on ongoing research, and it presents some of the data collected to date in order to help build understanding concerning this complex access model and its importance for urban India."

Dana Blankenhorn writes:

What is Deep Commerce? It's doing everything you can to drive sales for your commercial partners. Back in the day it meant performing research on your subscriber list, sharing the results and insights with advertisers.

Today it should mean much more. That should start with an attitude and a promise to your prospective partners. You will see new sales directly attributable to my efforts, and you will pay me based on those sales.

Some 99% of online sales are being lost by car dealers today because they don't know how to deal with online responses. Help them do that. Train them. Do the pre-qualification work yourself. You will be earning the dealer money and becoming their commerce partner. A real estate listing can be worth thousands of dollars to the agent who gets it. If you're helping them get it, each one of those listings could be worth hundreds of dollars to you.

What does this have to do with content? Everything. Publishers create content in order to create and define audiences who will support their advertisers. You're doing the same thing, only you're not talking here about advertisers, but commerce partners. And you're not necessarily talking about content, either, but conversations.

Can this model work? It's proven to work in politics. Political Web sites have directed literally millions of dollars to favored candidates and causes. They are a good model for what you're trying to do on the editorial side, create compelling conversations that build loyalty, and make those people likely to support those partners you bring to them.

3G Portal has a white paper on increasing mobile penetration in emerging markets:

In brief, the challenge is to accelerate the adoption of wireless services in ways that are both affordable to the end user and profitable for the operator.

An industry observer based in the Asia region described this approach of lowering the cost for subscribers and operators as a “dual-market” approach to the emerging market scene.

Edmund Tee writing for Asia Tele.com said “This approach is, in a nutshell, a focus on enabling an operator to turn a profit selling voice airtime to low-income consumers in rural areas, while still providing an infrastructure that can scale up to data services in the city centres” – where the higher spending subscribers reside.

This “Dual Market” strategy therefore recognises that in one emerging country, there are two markets that need to be served. The high-income users with a high ARPU but accounting for a small minority of the country’s population and the populous low spending customers where mobile penetration is usually tiny.

However with a successful strategy to serve this latter half of the Dual Market, the low-ARPU consumer represents the biggest opportunity to grow the mobile phone user base exponentially within that market.

The Pondering Primate writes:

Most companies will soon target multiple, smaller pools of consumers—on TV, on the Web, over cell phones and, yes, even in hotel rooms. The key will be finding audiences that are interested in the product to begin with.

How is this done? How does a brand know when a consumer is showing interest in an ad? Is there a way to measure this? Yes.

It will be known as physical world analytics. Just like there are companies that measure web traffic, and TV viewing volume, there will be an industry that measures the "traffic" physical world ads generate.

Unlike web analytic companies that can decipher what IP address and zipcode a user is from when visiting a site, this physical world analytic company will be able to provide the cell phone number and location of user.

When the industry realizes they can have direct access to their targeted audience through physical advertising, the dollars will shift to ANOTHER medium. The reason the Google/Yahoo's are getting so many advertising dollars is because advertisers haven't been exposed to anything else.

When advertisers are able to directly interact with the consumer via every print ad and packaged good, watch what happens to shift in advertising dollars. It will be the first place advertisers turn to.

Dear Abhishek,

Inculcate Personal Discipline

It has taken me the better part of my life so far to realise the value of personal discipline. I always thought of discipline in the strict sense of the word – a kind of mix of rigour and regimen, which one needed to rebel against! A few months ago, a friend used the word “discipline” in describing my lifestyle. It was only then that I started thinking about it more.

The dictionary definition of discipline is a good place to start. This is from answers.com:

1. Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement.
2. Controlled behavior resulting from disciplinary training; self-control.
3. a. Control obtained by enforcing compliance or order.
b. A systematic method to obtain obedience: a military discipline.
c. A state of order based on submission to rules and authority: a teacher who demanded discipline in the classroom.
4. Punishment intended to correct or train.

Discipline, to me, is now about evolving a specific set of ways to do things, and following them closely. Think of it as six sigma for oneself! While there is a definite need for variety and change, there are many things that we do during a day which can benefit from discipline. For example, until your birth (which still continues since you are currently with your mummy’s parents till June-end!), I had the following regimen for the early mornings (except Sundays and when I am travelling):

5:00: wake-up (I set 2 alarms 5 minutes apart to make sure I wake up!)
5:30: Listen to the BBC News on Radio as I am sitting in the balcony and thinking/reading
6:30-7:45: Walk/Yoga
7:30-9:00: Update Blog, Bath (cold water), Breakfast, Read Newspapers, Leave for office, temple visit en route

Sunday mornings are spent writing the Tech Talk for the week, and evenings are spent reading blogs and creating blog posts for the week. (I take a nap for about 1.5 hours in the afternoon.) Reading blog posts at a stretch is helpful because it allows me to better capture trends. Also, by slotting tasks at specific times make me much more efficient.

(Of course, some of this discipline will go out of the window as your mother and I take care of you while you grow up in the coming months – and develop your own daily discipline!)

More seriously, I have found that I can be much more productive by following a discipline for some aspects of life. In fact, this discipline helps me think better. It also helps me get more things done.

Among other things that I do: carry the notebook (or a small pocket diary) wherever I go so I can make notes, keep two pens (so that if one stops working I have a backup), write down things that I need to do so I don’t have to clutter the brain trying to remember stuff, eat at fixed times (whenever possible), limit eating outside food, check weight every few days so that I don’t exceed the 65-kg limit that I have set for myself, make sure one is always punctual for meetings, and so on. You get the idea. The right kind of discipline is a great platform to build life on.

Tomorrow: Advice for Life (continued)