Novatium Video

Michael Kanellos of News.com interviewed Vinod Gopinath of Novatium.

I will be presenting Novatium's NovaPC at PC Forum in Carlsbad, San Diego (Mar 12-14).

Web Services and Devices

Fred Wilson writes:

Can consumers figure out how to mix and match web services and devices or must they be served up a complete solution by a single vendor?

I think we all hope that a truly open environment will prevail where devices and services can play together and best of breed will win out on both fronts. But that is not where we are today and we have a lot of ground to cover in order to see that vision realized. And the powers that be don’t want it to happen. The businesses whose margins depend on their continued control over a distribution channel – carriers, media companies, and consumer electronic manufacturers - will find it hard to embrace innovation that potentially undermines their margins.

But if the experience of the personal computer and the interenet is a guide, open architectures where many players compete in a decentralized ecosystem do accelerate innovation. When web services integrate with devices in a open architecture, we believe that the consumers' interest in innovation and integration will trump the vendors' interest in preserving control over limited proprietary channels.

Office Live

Rangarajan thinks it is a good start. "The real opportunity for Microsoft is in managed business applications for fee - much like Salesforce.com. Office Live Essentials is the first step in that direction."

Motorola's M-Wallet

Promo Magazine writes:

A customer walks into Wal-Mart and buys a set of dishes by swiping their cell phone — which has been loaded with the shopper's credit or debit card information — past the checkout scanner. A day later, a text message arrives: a coupon for $20 off a new set of silverware redeemable at Wal-Mart.

Sound like something out of Back to the Future? No so, if Motorola has anything to say about it.

The company is developing a new service, called M-Wallet, that will allow cell phones to double as credit or debit cards. Credit information, downloaded to subscriber's phones, will let people make purchases with their mobile phones.

Motorola says the technology will offer two main benefits to consumers: financial and lifestyle capabilities.

As for financial benefits, users can pay bills, manage their finances, transfer money to friends and make purchases.

Blog Analytics

Brad Feld recommends tools for bloggers:

* FeedBurner: Core RSS feed, page view metrics, item views, reach, and email stats
* BlogBeat: Core page view metrics (plus feed data via integration with FeedBurner API)
* Google Analytics: Page views
* Amazon: Online purchase metrics
* MyBlogLog: Outbound link tracking
* Technorati: More link tracking

TECH TALK: The Value of Vision: A Personal View

I was not a believer in vision when I started my career as an entrepreneur in early 1992. At that time, I just wanted to go out and do something quickly. But a series of setbacks over the next two years made me realise that a random set of moves is not going to get me anywhere. It was then that I read CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s “Competing for the Future.” It was that book which convinced me of the importance, power and necessity of envisioning the future. Since those two days in 1994 when I read the book, I have always kept these words from that book in mind:

Competition for the future is competition to create and dominate emerging opportunities - to stake out new competitive space. Creating the future is more challenging than playing catch up, in that you have to create your own road map. The goal is to develop an independent point of view about tomorrow's opportunities and how to exploit them. Pathbreaking is a lot more rewarding than benchmarking. One doesn't get to the future first by letting someone else blaze the trail.

There is not one future but hundreds. Getting to the future first is not just about outrunning competitors bent on reaching the same prize. It is also about having one's view of what the prize is. There can be as many prizes as runners; imagination is the only limiting factor. In business, as in art, what distinguishes leaders from laggards, and greatness from mediocrity, is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be.

In that context, a comment I made in a Tech Talk long ago still holds true: “Other people and companies may have more resources, more money, more everything, but what you have as an entrepreneur is your vision, your imagination, your passion. Define what will be, define tomorrow, envision the future. And then make others play according to the rules you set.”

I have been wrong more times than I have been right! But I view each failure as a very important input into the vision. Most of the time, it is not that I was wrong about what I had thought, but that I was too early. So, it is not about discarding the vision but ensuring that one takes steps to shorten the path to that future. I view experimenting (and at times, failing) more important than armchair thinking in enhancing vision. One doesn’t set out to fail. But recognising that one has failed is important in the development of the vision.

My penchant is for competing in markets where competition doesn’t exist. In other words, I like to create marketspaces. For this, I like to look at unmet needs and today’s non-consumers. A book I am currently reading, “Blue Ocean Strategy”, captures this nicely. Here is a blurb from a Harvard Business Review article by the book’s authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne: “Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue twenty-two-fold over the last 10 years by reinventing the circus. Rather than competing within the confines of the existing industry or trying to steal customers from rivals, Cirque developed uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. Cirque created what the authors call a blue ocean--a previously unknown market space. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In red oceans--that is, in all the industries already existing--companies compete by grabbing for a greater share of limited demand. As the market space gets more crowded, prospects for profits and growth decline. Products turn into commodities, and increasing competition turns the water bloody. There are two ways to create blue oceans. One is to launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions. But it's much more common for a blue ocean to be created from within a red ocean when a company expands the boundaries of an existing industry.”

Tomorrow: Blue Ocean Strategy

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Value of Vision: Thinking Vision [March 10, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Value of Vision: Blue Ocean Strategy [March 9, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Value of Vision: Mental Models [March 7, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Value of Vision: Envisioning the Future [March 6, 2006]