The Mint writes, as part of a story on mobiles and religion: "Customers such as Christopher say their text messages are less about religion than about sharing a beautiful idea with friends. He signed up for the service through the website www.mytodaysms.com. The firm charges Rs2 to start and stop services and the SMS itself is free of cost, sponsored by churches and other religious organizations. Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which runs the site, declined to give details about its business model."

My company, Netcore Solutions, will be providing live ball-by-ball coverage of the Cricket World Cup on a mobile-friendly site at cricket.mytoday.com. The site also has extensive stats and scorecards of all ODIs and Tests played. Hope you like it!

The first match (Pak v WI) starts at 8 pm India time today. India's first match is against Bangladesh on Saturday.

I met with David Cowan of Bessemer Venture Partners recently. David had this to say on his blog: "The highlight of my week was meeting Rajesh Jain, founder of India World (the high-value acquisition that served as poster child of India's internet bubble). Rajesh is the Bill Gross of India, prolifically founding, funding or running startup after startup (get a sense for his metablosim and creativity on his blog). Among his more ambitious projects are a thin client service that promies to deliver India's households with computer, bandwidth and software for $10 per month."

Thanks for the gracious praise, David. Was a pleasure meeting with you, too!

We have launched a free SMS Greetings service from MyToday.com for Indian mobile users.

MyToday SMS Greetings allows you to send free greetings via SMS to any mobile in India. You can type 110 characters worth of message while the remaining 50 characters are used for MyToday ads.

Visit www.MyToday.com from either your phone’s or computer’s browser. Please check the cost of GPRS data with your operator, if you are using the on-phone browser. [You will need to register by sending an SMS from your phone, if you are not already registered with MyToday.]

Have a wonderful New Year!

ContentSutra has a story on Rajshri Media's launch of its broadband portal. [I am an investor in Rajshri Media.]

Rajshri Media, the digital media arm of bollywood production and distribution house Rajshri Productions, has launched a broadband portal Rajshri.com for entertainment and premium video content. The company owned by the Barjatyas is also premiering their home production VIVAH online. The movie will be available for download or live streaming from Friday 12 PM. This is the first time an Indian movie is premiering online - simultaneously being released in theatres and also online. VIVAH is available for $9.9 per download. And the DRM (Digital rights management) licence will expire after 72 hours.

The site is mainly targeted NRIs and non-Indians living abroad but interested in Indian entertainment content. Currently it has aggregated content worth 3,000 hours which include movies, music videos, historical videos and documentaries. Quite an amazing collection of broadband content, and it looks like Rajshri has a winner here. Besides, the Barjatyas are bollywood insiders and so they have a competitive advantage over others in aggregating the bollywood content at much better terms.

Rajshri Media has already aggregated more than 3,000 hours of premium Indian video content across multiple genres. Rajshri.com also features film and non-film music videos, concerts, humour clips, short films and documentaries licensed from the most respected individuals and organisations of their fields.

Commenting on the future plans, Barjatya said, “Going forward, Rajshri Media plans to aggressively build depth and breadth in each content category of rajshri.com, add exciting new features to the site on a regular basis, launch comprehensive sections on astrology, numerology, Indian food and spirituality besides others, add regional language content across multiple categories and integrate rich content repurposed for mobile phones, iPods and other digital devices.”

He added, “Rajshri’s aim is to reach out to the consumer through the four screens in his life – cinema, television, computer and mobile. We plan to create and develop original programming for new media and digital devices, which has the potential to spawn an entirely new digital entertainment revolution in the days to come.”

Knowledge@Wharton interviewed me recently. Here is the introduction they wrote:

Rajesh Jain has a lot in common with Marc Andreeson, co-founder of Netscape. Just as the Netscape IPO in 1995 is widely believed to have sparked the Internet boom in the U.S., Jain ignited a dot-com storm in India when his portal -- IndiaWorld -- was sold in November 1999 for $115 million to Sify, an Internet service provider. That deal signaled to millions in that country that the web was not just a passing techie fad and that entrepreneurs could make serious money from it.

In recent years, Jain, 39, has deliberately kept a low profile in the media, though he makes his views on technology issues widely known through his blog, emergic.org. Jain, who is now the CEO of Netcore, a Linux-based messaging software company, was a panelist earlier this year at the 2006 Supernova conference in San Francisco. He met with Knowledge@Wharton in his offices in Mumbai to discuss how mobile phones could hold the key to the Internet's evolution in India and other emerging economies.

I believe another dimension will define the future of the Internet in India, and that's going to be built around the mobile phone. Given the way that mobile phones have taken off in India during the past four to five years, I am convinced that more people in India will access the Internet through mobile phones than through computers linked to narrowband or broadband connections. We need to start thinking about the mobile Internet differently than we do about the PC Internet.

For me, three words help define the mobile Internet. They are: now, near and new. "Now" is about what is happening right now in real time. Wherever I am, I can find the latest cricket scores or the top news stories because my mobile phone is always with me. "Near" is about location -- it can be as small as a neighborhood or it could be a city. If I'm about to take a flight this evening, could I get an alert on my mobile phone if the flight is delayed? Some of this is starting to happen, but it needs to happen a lot more. It could make a real difference to people's lives. Finally, "new" is about new stuff in which I might be interested. Just as a search engine like Google is a good way to find material that has been published in the past, the mobile phone is a great way to keep in touch with future or incremental content. If there is a sale, it should be possible for my book store to send me an alert and suggest business books that I might find interesting.

Express Computer has a story on us and our bet on Linux:

From e-mail to VPN, firewalls to bandwidth management, virus protection to spam filtering, Netcore’s products are providing solutions to build the back-end infrastructure in large enterprises and small-and medium-sized businesses alike.

The company also offers products such as BlogStreet, India’s first portal on blogs providing analytics, search and directory services. Emergic CleanMail is a hosted anti-virus and anti-spam solution and messaging service that is used by organisations in the banking, logistics, finance and other industry verticals in India and other developing countries. Emergic FlexiMail is a mail hosting component where mail space can be offered to customers. The Emergic Mail Server, a new product, is a Linux-based messaging and security suite. It has a proxy server, mail server, firewall and anti-virus solution built into it.
...
Right from the IndiaWorld days, Netcore’s focus has been to develop and market affordable software solutions. The company has been providing Linux-based solutions. Rajesh Jain’s first endeavour, IndiaWorld, was an early user of Linux. Since then all the development of the company has been done on Linux.

Ramesh Jain writes about the launch of SEraja's website. I am an investor in SEraja, which is based in Bangalore.

For the first time, there is a place for people to go beyond the ‘calendar of events’ — and make events real experiences. And this is evolving into a web of events in which people will be able to immerse themselves and not only experience but also gain experiential insights.

Sadagopan writes abour our MyToday:

I particularly liked the horizontal and vertical partitions that are made available in the system – Months back, I have seen this system for sometime – backtracking from my visitor log – did not then know that it is product under beta(it looked good even then) and more than that did not know it is a Netcore product. Rajesh – over time you may consider to publish some analytical information about the frequency of blog updates as they get published – also the number of blogs that on average user subscribe to and read. Perhaps a view of common subscribers/taggers (like shown by bloglines/del.icio.us) and details like top50 subscribed feeds would make usage more attractive. I have also pointed out in the past about the near total domination by the US based enterprises on web 2.0 applications(I have no complaints about that - The US is the epicenter of the IT World). New Web2.0 applications like MyToday, R.L.Narain's TracBac,a visual project handling, digital white board, version tracking tool for the designers worldwide and others coming out of India make it interesting that much more interesting to watch.I am sure that in the near many more such applications would folow - looking forward to the day when the next riya.com, flickr.com or the next writely comimg out of india based enterprises. Congrats folks - you are setting an example to the several hundred thousand IT wannabe entrepreneurs out in India to take the plunge.

Dan Farber reports on my presentation at PC Forum.

At PC Forum Novatium Solutions demoed its $100 PC appliance (without keyboard or display, which adds about $75) for emerging markets. The Nova netPC and Nova netTV are based on thin client (server-based, zero administration for users) and mobile phone technology. "We have the guts of mobile phone and use the business model of phone industry," said Rajesh Jain, co-founder of the Mumbai, India-based company. "We reduce the price of the thin client by about 50 percent, moving away from the Intel architecture, and change the business model to suit emerging market customers." It's like a cell phone in square box and a bunch of I/O ports.

The core processor is an AMD digital signal processor, rather than x86 architecture, used in cell phones, and works over LAN, Wi-Fi and broadband networks. (After the session an Intel representative was primed to talk to Jain.) The only client side processing is for the display and multimedia, and the maxiumun video display is 1024x768. The device also supports standard I/0 ports and outputs only 5 watts. A future edition could include DSL on the motherboard. Jain expects that the base price will remain steady over time as new features are added and as volume sales increase.

Software is provided at $10 per month, and supports Unix and Windows terminal services. The license for Windows software and terminal services has to be purchased separately, but an open source, Linux-based desktop stack is available for free. "There is a growing flexibility to look at monthly pricing cycles, including from Microsoft," Jain said. Since few people in many emerging markets pay for software, having server-based subscriptions could reduce piracy, he said.

Will do a more detailed write-up as part of Tech Talk next week on my PC Forum presentation.

I am at PC Forum in Carlsbad. Had always been keen on wanting to come for it -- been reading Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 for 5+ years.

Novatium is presenting (one of nine companies selected) Monday afternoon.

MyToday.com (created by us at Netcore) is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML. Check it out and let me know what you think of it, and of enhancements you'd like to see.

Ajax version: http://www.mytoday.com/
Mobile version: http://m.mytoday.com/

Here is how my colleague, Veer Bothra, describes the thinking behind MyToday.

Public versus Personal Aggregators
Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.

Source versus Stories
Aggregators like news.google.com, topix.net are story based. Their endeavor is to distill the most important stories at any point of time. MyToday’s selection is based on the quality of the source and not on the stories. Therefore the selection process when making a Daily is stringent to maintain the quality of content.

Micro-content Client
MyToday consists of a Micro-content client and an aggregation system. The micro-content client is built keeping in mind the nature of micro-content like blog posts and news stories. They are small in size, large in volume and more often than not, time sensitive. MyToday’s micro-content client makes it easier to consume lots of information quickly.

Aggregation System
MyToday’s underlying feed aggregation system claims to turnaround Dailies in 30 minutes. Give it an OPML of feeds and it can create a new Daily in 30 minutes which then auto-updates. Niche information / content verticals, available on both PC and mobile, can be created and served with low human intervention.

Personalisation
The reasoning behind public aggregators is that most users want to start with a choice made by the experts. But it is also true that most wouldn’t be satisfied with the default for long. They would want to tweak it a bit - add a thing and remove some. This is where personalisation comes in as the natural next phase of development. Keep watching.

This is what Jonathan Boutelle had to say after he saw it at BarCamp Delhi:

It seems to be a specialized AJAX homepage. It allows the quick creation of niche publications that aggregate and present rss data. The design is very slick, with geographic filtering. It also has very rich integration with phone (at sister site m.mytoday.com). It makes it very simple to great aggregated feeds. Check out mytoday.com/bcdelhi, which they built in an hour and which is consuming all the blogs, tagged photos, etc from barcamp delhi. Awesome!

The core insight of this approach seems to be that most "real people" won't build up an rss reader from scratch. But they'll be OK with deleting feeds from a pre-existing set.

Ramesh Jain writes about our vision in Seraja:

With ubiquitous presence of sensors, increasing storage, bandwidth, and processing power, it is increasing easier to capture detailed experience of events. These experiences include information associated with them. This is slowly changing how we get information and experiences and share those with others in our own circles as well as with all other people. The Web that is emerging is more multimedia, but more importantly it is the web of events are rather than documents.

Many calendar and map oriented techniques that are emerging are reminiscent of Gopher days of document-web when each document was independent and was perceived by us as a document. By creating a web of these documents trough referential links, the Web has now entered the Google age where we consider them related and use characteristics of the links among them in organizing, accessing, and evaluating information. Going forward, the links among events will be referential, spatial, temporal, causal, and contextual. Today we are in the Gopher age of EventWeb. Many challenges lie ahead to take us into the Google age of EventWeb.

The December issue of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 is on When 2.0. "Time is all we've got. Our challenge is allocating that time, intersecting our time with that of others, managing the disposition over time of the resources we control. Time itself is abstract, but it takes on value as a measure of unique, un-tradable things: Juan's presence, the use of Alice's spare apartment, the time of a particular doctor or the attention of a specific audience. But computers know nothing of this, even though time is intrinsic to their operation and they can measure it with precision. They don't understand how people value time, nor how time changes value - both its own value, and the value of the things it measures. Now at last we're getting better tools to help us manage and allocate our valuable time."

It also has a write-up on Seraja (which I have co-founded with Ramesh Jain, with Arun Katiyar as CEO).

So far, [Ramesh] Jain points out, most calendars are devoted to planning.He wants to use the calendar as a high-level index and create something he compares to Pensieve in the Harry Potter books: “You take out someone’s memory, put it into Pensieve and everyone can share it.”

The idea is to index and display content by time and place – i.e. to index events.And then – here’s the magic – EventWeb will process the content it finds or gets from users using the sorts of pattern- and object-recognition tools that characterize much of Jain’s previous work.What makes it interesting is that it will can process video objects as well as text-based event information. The service relies on indexing, classification and recognition algorithms. . .and people. As a service, it will both host its own content and object recognition, annotation and editing tools, and let users use the tools to manage and host both shared and their own content, with links to EventWeb. Imagine Wikipedia-style collaboration to generate metadata for any event-related content anyone can find.

The latest issue of Business Today (Westbridge team on cover) has a one-page write-up on the Emergic Ecosystem (page 28). I declined to be interviewed for the story, so the article uses material from the blog. Here is how the article starts off:

Rajesh Jain's Ecosystem
The entrepreneur is tech's weathervane

One way to find out which way technology is headed is to keep an eye on Rajesh Jain. The man has been there (ahead of time, actually), done that. He built a cluster of sites, such as samachar.com, khel.com and khoj.com in the very early days of the internet (1994) and sold them to Sify for $115 million (Rs.499 crore at the then exchange rate) in 1999. Jain hasn't been sitting back and taking it easy since (although he has managed to keep a low profile). He has been ideating, investing and launching new ventures.

Today, there are seven such, each of which is a bet on tech's next big thing. Jain likes to call this the Emergic ecosystem. Emergic is the man's term for disruptive innovations in computing that can bridge the digital divide.

We have added some new features to Emergic CleanMail, our anti-spam and anti-virus protection:

Netcore is creating a utility computing platform to enable affordable and manageable computing, as part of our vision for tomorrow's world. We believe that this platform will be the way computing will be made available to the next billion users.

We are growing our Emergic Grid development team which is building this centralised computing platform. We need people with a strong computer science academic background. Industry experience is a must. Positions are available at any of our four offices in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai.

We are working on research and development of cluster and grid products and associated cluster and high availability and manageability infrastructure tools. Our team is responsible for research, design, development of state of the art high availability and manageability infrastructures, that makes applications easy to deploy and diagnose, provide continuous availability and ease-of-use. We work on challenging problems, in the areas of distributed services, high availability, configuration, grid management, workload management, and monitoring and supporting single system image.

Tech Leads (3)

Technical lead, who could work well in a team, define new projects, provide direction and mentor others. BS or MS degree and significant software design and development experience in one or more of the following areas--operating systems cluster and distributed systems, distributed file systems, storage systems, Linux kernel, high availability systems. A minimum of seven years of software engineering or related experience required. Must have system level programming skills in C and C++. Must have good communication skills and must be fluent in English. Proven track record to define, build and ship products in a timely manner Good communication and teamwork skills, good understanding of grid computing and knowledge of existing clustering and high availability products, and Networking are required.

Project / Product Manager (1)

Job Description:

A number of friends and readers have pointed to Slashdot and the article by Mike on Why Microsoft Should Fear Bandwidth. Mike writes:

At present, we find ourselves in a situation unprecedented in all history – the average person, in charge of a machine of such complexity that it can calculate anything he or she would want to know in mere seconds. This is almost an untenable situation; this average person often has no idea how to fix the computer when it breaks, and no idea even how to perform the most basic maintenance on it to prevent such breakage. It’s also vulnerable to hackers, phishing schemes, and hosts of other plagues.

With caching, smart usage of bandwidth, latency reduction strategies, etc., most users would hardly notice the difference between an application being provided remotely over a high-bandwidth connection and being provided locally by a spyware- and virus-infested home PC with inadequate memory.

In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn’t matter, and there’s no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopoly, and the consumer wins. This is why bandwidth should scare Microsoft more than any other foe out there right now – for once bandwidth increases beyond a certain level, remote application provision is inevitable, and then Microsoft is on very shaky ground, indeed.

I’m not asserting that every client will be some dumb terminal straight out of 1973. We have far too much processing power and storage capability for that to make much sense. It makes sense to distribute it, though, and allow something more manageable for users and companies. Both glean benefits from a more-centralized, less complex approach.

The users can handle what they are good at – keeping track of their data, storing files locally, deciding what software they want. And companies can handle what they are good at– keeping their networks spam-free, virus-free, firewalled, backed up and provide secure, constantly-updated applications. Most users don’t care all about security, or learning anything about it. This more-centralized system opens up a measure of control for corporations that I, and many other people, are not comfortable with, but it has many advantages, as John points out – especially if it is marketed correctly.

Interestingly, Slashdot has another pointer to an eWeek (speculative) article on Microsoft's distributed computing efforts under the codename BigTop, "which is designed to allow developers to create a set of loosely coupled, distributed operating-systems components in a relatively rapid way."

I have written extensively about the opportunity to reinvent computing in a world where communications exists. This is one revolution which will begin not in the developed markets but in the emerging markets. It will also integrate computing and communications. Our Emergic vision is about making it happen, and bringing in the next billion users to services built around a centralised "commPuting" platform.

- Tomorrow's World (Nov 2004)
- CommPuting Grid (Nov 2004)
- Massputers, Redux (Oct 2004)
- The Network Computer (Oct 2004)
- Reinventing Computing (Aug 2004)
- The Next Billion (Sep 2003)
- The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem (Jan 2003)

I was part of the panel on on-demand computing at TiE Bangalore's event. This is the presentation I made: PPT - PDF.

My colleague, Atanu Dey, writes:

Stand-alone computing a la PCs delivering "services" is fine for those who can afford that luxury, but is definitely a show-stopper for those who have very little disposable income and yet can make use of those services that PCs deliver. I remind myself repeatedly that people do not want a PC -- what they actually want are the services that a PC delivers. As long as we focus on the fact that it is services -- and not the hardware nor the software -- that matter to people, we will not end up putting the cart before the horse. So if a firm were to deliver those set of services at an affordable price, it is immaterial to the consumer whether the consumer (of those services) uses a PC or some other device.

We know that low costs translate into low prices. How does one reduce costs? If there are economies of scale in production, then centralizing the production is the obvious answer. A pertinent example is that of electric power production. Each consumer could have a generator at home. But it is much cheaper if a centralized facility generated the power at a much lower cost per unit due to scale economies and distributed the power to the consumers on an as-needed basis.

Here is a thumbnail description of a utility computing platform. The central server forms the core where you have a very wide range of software applications, plus a massive collection of rich content (audio, video, text, and graphics) and storage. The server is accessed over a local area network (LAN) using access devices that are inexpensive and easy to manage. The access devices are sometimes refered to as "thin clients" -- a device that hangs off the LAN and is connected to a display, keyboard, and a mouse. The TCs do not have local storage. Centralizing the production of computing services on the server has numerous advantages, most notably that of taking the management of the hardware/software resources required for the user services out of the hands of the users.

There is hardly anyone who has ever used a connected PC and not been frustrated by problems such as viruses, spam, spyware, the need to frequently upgrade hardware and software, and so on. Users have come to expect that these problems are a necessary part of using computers. It need not be so. It is a bit of a mystery why people put up with the bother and inconvenience of using computers. Imagine if you had to open up the hood every few days and tinker around the car's innards trying to fix some problem or the other. You would quickly dump that sort of car for something that works without you getting your hands dirty.

If using computing services were to become more like the telecommunications services model, then more people would be able to use them. You sign up for the service, and you pay every month for your usage. You let the firm supplying your the service to fix things if things break.

You may ask, how is utility computing relevant to India's development. I will tell you. The future of India depends on education. India will not develop unless we can educate the hundreds of millions that need it. Resources are limited and one of the best ways of leveraging limited resources is to use information and communications technology (ICT) tools. Schools and colleges which cannot afford the PC-centric solution need utility computing services.