Tech trends and business ideas

Adobe quits Apple pursuit

2010-04-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to preserve a relationship, you reach a point where it becomes clear the two of you have simply grown too far apart and it's time to cut your losses. After a long and unsuccessful campaign to persuade Apple to embrace the Flash multimedia platform on the iPhone, Adobe has finally found itself at that point, and it's goodbye Apple for Adobe now.

According to Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for Flash, the final straw was Apple's recent ban on apps built with unapproved tools and converted into an iPhone-compatible format.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa offered a big-picture view of Apple's developer restrictions: "From a developer perspective, the new legal language is bad news. The application development field is very diverse and many platforms are inherently layered with API's often stacked on top of one another as application platforms evolve. Apple's legal language seems to preclude even Apple evolving its own platform down the road when new languages or interfaces become more popular as computer science evolves. ... While this restriction can be seen in the prism of the Apple and Adobe relationship around Flash, this is not just about Adobe, but potentially a problem for every developer runtime or language that wants to hold on to developers and maintain its longevity. It is about programmers maintaining their livelihood. Probably even more importantly, it is about the flexibility to evolve computer science and software development."

Amen.

Converting an IT horizontal into an industry vertical

2010-04-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

Leveraging IT is not just for outsourcing vendors in India. Other Industries are fast catching up. I would say it's a fantastic opportunity for sectors that are not particularly doing well, Real Estate and Construction for example.

HCC is a Bombay based infrastructure and construction major in India. The industry is going thro some real rough weather but that doesn't seem to have influenced their business propensities. Though operational departments have been sagging, the IT department of the company has warmed up to the situation and is now pitching in with its own might of experience gained so far. It is trying to develop as an end-to-end IT solutions service provider for the infrastructure industry. According to Satish Pendse, CIO, initially, the services sought to be provided by the upstart could be SAP implementation, GPS-based tracking devices, multiple-packaged application implementations, and end-to-end services going forward.

Innovation does not just mean feature addition or product enhancement. It can also me converting a horizontal into a vertical.

Why I turned the Google Buzz off

2010-02-13T17:11:00.000-08:00

There are three separate issues, only one of which is the defaults:

1) Having an engineering culture drive a social product.... And I'm not just trying to be snarky. Social isn't a technical problem it's a people one and Google's culture doesn't seem geared that way.

2) Layering a social sharing product (explicit social) on top of a private communication product like email (implicit social). Why would anyone assume that I'd want to do this? I might email business partners, clients, doctors (mine), lovers... why would you ever assume that frequency of email connections maps to 'want to share with the world?"

3) The settings. I despair of `society' as an industry sometimes. Ever since the earliest concerns over privacy a decade ago, people insist on ignoring obvious things - you don't opt people in just to build an audience and force them to opt out. You don't auto-subscribe them to a bunch of followers then make them removed those people one by one. You don't suddenly violate customer trust by changing the nature of a familiar product to suit senior management. These aren't hard or obscure lessons... but time and again otherwise bright people screw up by ignoring them.

IT outsourcing vendors run for cover

2010-02-12T21:57:00.000-08:00

"In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS (now division of HP) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.

British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) had signed a £48 million outsourcing contract with EDS to build a customer service system in 2000, but terminated the deal early in 2002 after what it said was "woeful" performance by the IT service provider. SkyB alleged deceit, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract by EDS.

Although the total costs and damages will be determined at a later date, BskyB said it expects EDS will be liable to pay at least £200 million—more than four times the amount of the original contract."

Enough India's famed IT vendors? Now don't go promise the moon and hope customers would tolerate project failures like before. Though the U.K. court ruling was decided largely on the basis of facts from one person's statements as opposed to systematic failings of the outsourcer or outsourcing vendors as a whole, dissatisfied outsourcing customers may go digging through notes from the pre-contract courtship phase of their relationships to see if arguments around fraud can be made.

Tweak that Kindle, Jeff !

2009-07-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

Amazon Kindle gave me a lot of hope. I was looking forward to ever-fresh, non greying pages no matter how many times I read a book. I longed for bookmarking at the press of a button, no chopping woods for paper etc.etc. The Kindle, I was told was all that and more.

But it hardly seems to be the case.

Ok. There’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” . “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.”

I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in “The Terminal,” and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought “miss.” was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. (Cook books / Recipes will suck when you try a new dish to see if the outcome tallies with the intention) If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range—e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596-1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel “Tequila Truth.”

Read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all

The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion,

You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

And then you cut out the bad tobacco odor that you often get while opening books in a library.

The "Bing" outing

2009-05-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Ok. Microsoft is out with its own search engine, oops, they call it a decision engine – Bing.

There will be inevitable exploration of the meaning of the moniker. (Bing has a certain ring to it. It's much better, of course, than the boring "Live Search.") Plus there is the bigger question of whether Bing will make a dent in Google's dominance. But search for clues to another issue Bing brings up: Will it end the Microsoft-Yahoo search flirtation?

Anyways, Bing seems like it would be more useful than a Google or Yahoo search. If you're searching for something you'd like to buy, for example, Bing theoretically will serve up reviews, as well as places to buy the item and related accessories, laid out in a prettier and more organized way than just a simple vertical list of links. On a whole, a big positive for Microsoft: The depth of the searches seems to offer more opportunities for ad revenue.

Of course, people think simple is best, which is part of why Google's so successful. Early impressions suggest Bing will lure some people who want to achieve a specific goal when doing a search, but that users' trust in Google to bring them the most relevant results in the most basic of manners won't wane. The trick will be to get people to think of Bing, too, when they think they might want an enhanced search. Microsoft will be spending a lot of money on the Bing branding campaign, take CEO Steve Ballmer’s word.

So this brings us to what this means for the long-running Microsoft-Yahoo partnership possibility. Is it still going to happen? After all, would Microsoft invest so heavily in Bing if it really thought a deal with Yahoo was imminent?

My new find "Twitter search"

2009-02-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

What makes Silicon Valley so much fun? Nothing is invincible there forever.

The motto posted on Twitter’s search page is intriguing “See what's happening — right now." And many people do exactly that. During a live event or amid breaking news, a growing number of people are turning to Twitter search to follow the conversations among its users.Very quietly, one of Twitter's most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches. But the fact that Twitter's potential to disrupt the search market is being seriously discussed shows just how quickly the sands can shift under the feet of even a colossus like Google.

Typically, when such goliaths are slain, it's because they failed to recognize the threat and make the necessary changes until it was too late. So, it'll be interesting to see how Google — or even if Google — feels the need to throw some kind of counterpunch. In theory, Google has created a culture to keep it flexible and innovative. On the other hand, its track record of new products has been a bit lackluster.

There's always the chance, of course, that Google will quickly deploy real-time search and simply crush Twitter. But that's harder than it sounds. Twitter already has an estimated 6 million users and is growing rapidly. It would be hard to convince someone to switch to a new microblogging service at this point, and it might be just as tough to get users to search Twitter through Google when they can just do it through Twitter itself.

It might be tempting for Google to try to take some of those billions of dollars stuffed in its mattress and overwhelm Twitter and its investors with an offer that dwarfs the reported $500 million Facebook offered for the company. But such a move could also attract a healthy once-over from antitrust regulators. “Then again, I wonder how buying a zero-revenue company factors into antitrust rules” – exclaims Chris O’ Brien.

On Screen Protectionism?

2009-02-19T15:52:00.000-08:00

When devices and apps talk to each other, content owners balk even at the screen format. Or so it seems from the recent pullout of Hulu from Boxee application. The advance of The Great Media Convergence — the content you want, at the time you want, on the device you want — would seem to be inexorable, based on its universal appeal to the consuming audience and the evolution of the enabling technology. But getting past all the entrenched powers is going to be a long struggle, and the early adopters on the front lines will have the wounds to show for it. To see how this disruption is driving the entertainment overlords into defensive positions based on arbitrary distinctions, just look at the current contretemps between Hulu and Boxee.

What happened? Boxee is media center software that makes it easy to watch online content on your television via a connected computer or device like AppleTV. Hulu beams TV directly to your portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral-gelatinizing shows you want, any time, anywhere, for free. That, is how Hollywood wants to see online video — as a supplement to "real" TV, not, heaven forbid, as a free living-room alternative to paying for cable or satellite service. To Portable Computing Devices or FROM your TV and not TO your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that's how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To Your TV is something completely different, and from the content providers' point of view, completely wrong. ... I'd guess Hulu had a deal to show 'content' on computers, and the 'content providers' balked when those computers started talking to their precious televisions.

Of course, media-center computer owners can still watch Hulu's shows on the big screen — they just have to do it through a conventional Web browser instead of Boxee's cleaner interface. It's difficult to see how there's even a claim by the content providers at all. They put the content on Hulu so that anyone watching the content via the Internet on a computer within the geographic restrictions should be fine. Boxee is just an application on a computer. It's functionally identical to watching the content on your computer screen. The only real difference is that the 'screen' is a television instead of a monitor. But the mechanism is identical. It's difficult to see how the content providers can claim any right whatsoever to say that you can watch the content that they purposely put online only on a specific type of screen.

Convergence may indeed be inevitable, but this is just the type of annoying and arbitrary turf protection we'll continue to see until the entertainment industry figures out a way to make the future its friend.

Come out of the cocoon, Mr.Ellison

2009-01-30T19:01:00.000-08:00

Bob Evans of Information week in his open letter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to wind down its sinful 22% software maintenance cost –

“No one's asking you to slash the 22% fee irresponsibly and give away your ability to create great new products and support the ones your currently have. But the longer you dig in and tell CIOs that you're not interested in the wicked expense challenges they're facing, the longer they're going to remember that when the current recessionary climate fades and new alternatives gain strength. As Manjit Singh, CIO of Chiquita Brands, suggested to InformationWeek, what about some alternative tiers for which you charge less and in turn provide less? Singh proposed a 12% fee that would offer bug fixes but not upgrades -- is that not an idea worth considering? Or 12% for support 9-to-5 rather than 24 hours?

Or 15% with support delivered by a third-party network of Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)-authorized teams? Mr. Ellison, it's easy to see why you like the current system, where someone pays, for example, $4,000,000 for a software license and then pays you $880,000 every year for "maintenance." And maybe CIOs will continue to find that's a fair exchange of value. But maybe they won't -- as you know better than just about anyone, the IT industry is an archetype of creative destruction, where faster/better/cheaper alternatives relentlessly stalk, attack, and kill older/slower/more-expensive models. Perhaps the model you and Charles Phillips and the entire Oracle global team have built is so extraordinarily singular that it will endure forever and remain unassailable from the forces that have ground down every previous eternal model in the technology business. But may be not.”

Oracle is not immune to challenges of the times. No company is. Sooner they recognize and change, the better ! Hubris loses in the end, always.

When the going gets tough, the bad get going

2009-01-29T19:05:00.000-08:00

Former disgruntled Fannie Mae Employee and Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Makwana, 35 is not the kind to just pack up and leave quietly. After being fired from Fannie Mae, Makwana was apparently pissed off…very pissed off. Proving that you can be highly intelligent and still be stupid before packing off for one last time from his workstation, he proceeded to imbed malicious code on Fanny Mae servers, which had it kicked into action like it was supposed to on January 31, would have destroyed data on all Fannie Mae servers. The script was thankfully spotted by chance before it went off. For his little stunt he is now facing up to 10 years in prison, though currently out on a $100,000 bail. Well done genius.

In a recession, companies are often forced to take steps that leave a broad wake of unhappy and stressed workers, and according to a global survey, disgruntlement-driven damage is the No. 1 security worry of IT decision makers. The studies estimated that data theft and cybercrime breaches last year cost businesses worldwide more than $1 trillion in data loss and recovery expenses, and it warned that companies are more vulnerable now than ever. This could be a wake-up call because the current economic crisis is poised to create a global meltdown in vital information. Increased pressures on firms to reduce spending and cut staffing have led to more porous defenses and increased opportunity for crime. The economic downturn across the board is motivation enough for those who harbor hostility towards their ex-employers for their current sorry plight. It could be possibly on a lot of people's radar right now.

No. I don’t work for a IT security solution provider and have no vested interest other than to spread a word of caution.
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Does web content aggregation violate copyright laws?

2009-01-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

Content aggregation is not entirely risk free.

I am referring to the recent settlement between GateHouse Media, publisher of community newspapers and New York Times Co., parent company of The Boston Globe and Boston.com site. In context is a suit over the appearance of headlines and first paragraphs from GateHouse news publications on Boston.com's new hyper-local sites. In its lawsuit, GateHouse claims that Boston.com is building community-oriented sites that rely on the work of GateHouse reporters thereby violating its copyright and trademark laws by taking Gatehouse's newspaper headlines and lead sentences published on its home pages. GateHouse’s major worry is about the empowerment of Boston Globe’s readers that gain the ability to access GateHouse content while by-passing ads appearing in GateHouse home pages – and the extended fears of consequential loss of its ad revenues.

The settlement envisages GateHouse will set up technical barriers to prevent Boston.com's scraping spiders from automatically scarfing up its headlines and RSS feeds, and Boston.com will honor those barriers.

To me, on a first glance it's the perfect lose-lose solution. Boston.com readers lose an opportunity to be exposed to GateHouse stories, and GateHouse loses the traffic from those external links. And everyone loses if more sites take similar steps to restrict the entry points to their content. May be, the arrangement is not binding on others or it may not even set a legal precedent. But could it not persuade a Judge in another similar case to lean on the direction and terms of this verdict? Have web advertisers got on board without visualizing the extra mileage that linking freedom provides? To rephrase the question – would they have come to GateHouse Media if told that the extra ad mileage is snapped shut because of linking restrictions?

I think it’s time to dust up and endorse Russel Shaw’s (of ZD Net) earlier proposal to pass a “Freedom to Link” Act !

"Happy Birthday, spreadsheet"

2009-01-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

PC Mag columnist and tech critic John Dvorak on spread sheets.

"2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered.

For one thing, the spreadsheet created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything. Because of the spreadsheet we've been forced to "do the numbers" whenever possible; once the numbers are in the spreadsheet, the what-if process can begin.

In fact, the spreadsheet has resulted in the rise of the once-lowly accountant/bean counter to a position of influence—and often the executive suite. How often in years past—the pre-spreadsheet era, that is—did an accountant take over a company? When and why did the CFO become a title? These people, at best, were once known as comptrollers.

I don't blame any of these folks for taking advantage of the spreadsheet and the evolution of what-if. But why give them the keys to the car when you knew they couldn't drive? Look around and see what's happened. You can thank the spreadsheet for all of this junk. Happy birthday."

Well, putting an accountant in the driver's seat is certainly not advisible if the business seeks innovation $$ and relies a lot on open pipe R&D. They would never come to terms with something that yields return over the long term, something that is an exclusive preserve of the visionary. But guess who gets called in when you need those dollars to kick it in? Go to an investor and the first thing he would ask is "show me the RoI" ; and the bean counter is ushered in - that is to say, spread his sheet :-)

Google says "No, I don't pollute the planet enough"

2009-01-13T04:40:00.000-08:00

A recent report by a Harvard physicist estimates that a Google search generates about seven grams of carbon dioxide based on the electricity required to keep the company's servers running.

The headlines about the study quickly proliferated around the globe, with the UK's Inquirer chiding, "Googling pollutes the planet." Well, sure, but so does just about every other human activity. And it is in that context that Googling and Internet usage must be judged.

In short, the Google says it's not just me. Here is a good comparison of google choking with other gas guzzler - the boring automobile...

Cisco in your living room ?

2008-12-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

For several years, Cisco Systems, the leading provider of the routers and switches that handle Internet traffic on the way to your front door, has been looking for ways to get into the house. Looking at the increasing sophistication of home networks, Cisco sees a sweet spot for its expertise if it can just get consumers to start associating its name with Apple, Sonus, TiVo and others aiming to help people access video, audio and online content on an assortment of devices scattered around the house. A daunting task, but in the new year, the push will begin in earnest. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the New York Times reports, Cisco will introduce a line of entertainment products for the home, including its own wireless digital stereo.

The appeal of the residential market is obvious. With sales directly to consumers representing only 2 percent of Cisco's $40 billion total in the most recent fiscal year, the growth possibilities are tantalizing. And the company can leverage not only its own plumbing technology, but its acquisitions of cable-equipment supplier Scientific Atlanta and home networking company Linksys as well. Plus, whatever Cisco starts with now will serve as a beachhead on the way to the big prize -- bringing easy, high-definition video conferencing to the family room.

Is Amazon a solipsist...?

2008-12-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

Amazon claims 2008 holiday season has been its “best ever”.

It laid out some stat for support - The online retail giant said it sold more than 6.3 million items worldwide on its peak day, Dec. 15, or the equivalent of "a record-breaking 72.9 items per second." Last year, the company claimed it sold about 5.4 million units on its peak holiday shopping day, which in 2007 was Dec. 10.

Unclear is how a shortened holiday season affected Amazon's results. Because Thanksgiving fell on a later date this year, the shopping season was about five days shorter than a year ago, meaning consumers had to crunch more shopping into a smaller window of time. Amazon's statement came during an overall slump in holiday sales and global economic turmoil. Data released by MasterCard SpendingPulse unit showed total retail sales, excluding automobiles, fell from the year-earlier period by 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve.

Why does the word “solipsist” come to mind…?

The cleantech myth bashing

2008-11-24T16:29:00.000-08:00

Vinod Khosla at his buzzkill best. He is beginning to like “black swan solutions” that cause technology shock as he believes that many of the current concepts of cleantech investing are just "greenwashing" and not a solution to the climate issues. He’ll find a lot of backers from among the puritan VCs.

He finds photovoltaic panels in the booming $20 billion PV market are not scalable and not sustainable without subsidies. The Prius Hybrid cars? Not a solution to the energy or the climate problem nor did they meet the Chindia test - since they don’t seem to compete with the $2,500 Tata Nano. He calls hybrids "an inefficient carbon solution". Biodiesel, Clean Coal and Zero Emission Buildings are not the solutions either. Carbon capture and sequestration also do not serve the purpose as they are not economical. Solar PV, wind and biofuels are “little markets”.

Now wait a minute.... Can they deal with the financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time? Take the Big Three automakers in Detroit (or its users). Who will expect them to invest in fuel efficient engines as they fast slide into insolvency? Isn’t gas available at $2 a gallon now?

Makes no sense.How about the VCs that have sunk some real big money? Poor fellas’ they get killed often by the publicity they give themselves. They had better learn to swallow some wily pride. At least it’s non fattening!

The Yahoo! crystal gaze

2008-11-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

I can’t say this about fortunes of the company, but there is hardly a dull day at Yahoo!

Jerry Yang, founder and outgoing CEO said this earlier in a memo to the troops - "All of you know that I have always, and will always bleed purple. I will always do what I think is right for this great company. While this step will be an adjustment for all of us, I know it's the right one."

He exits not only bleeding, but battered into a stunning shade of aubergine after months of public pummeling for passing on a Microsoft buyout and failing to firm up a viable alternative strategy as the stock tanked. The initial burst of enthusiasm that sent the company's market cap up by about $2 billion in early trading reflected a consensus that this was a step that had to be taken before anything else could happen, and a later partial retreat showed those hopes tempered by the reality of the challenges that still face Yang's successor.

So now what? Attention has quickly turned to speculation on a successor, and the perception that Yahoo's problems are systemic bodes ill for any in-house candidates, like President Sue Decker. "The next hire has to be a statement; it can't be from inside the company," said Rick Munarriz, an analyst with the Motley Fool. "You don't need a Yahoo again. The first thing they should do with the new CEO is cut him open and if he bleeds purple they kick him out."

But then there is the big Carl (Icahn) pushing for someone -- anyone -- who will get the deal done so he can cash in and check out.

Why wouldn't they bitch it?

2008-11-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

For all those skeptics of Cloud computing economics, Nick Carr has a tell all with a NYT illustration. It’s a long post. I am pint sizing it here.

“The history of computing has been a history of falling prices (and consequently expanding uses). But the arrival of cloud computing - which transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications into utilities served up by central plants - marks a fundamental change in the economics of computing…

In late 2007, the New York Times faced a challenge. It wanted to make available over the web its entire archive of articles, 11 million in all, dating back to 1851….That's not a particularly complicated computing chore, but it's a large computing chore, requiring a whole lot of computer processing time….Fortunately, a software programmer at the Times, Derek Gottfrid, had been playing around with Amazon Web Services for a number of months, and he realized that Amazon's new computing utility, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), might offer a solution. Working alone, he uploaded the four terabytes of TIFF data into Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) utility, and he hacked together some code for EC2 that would, as he later described in a blog post, "pull all the parts that make up an article out of S3, generate a PDF from them and store the PDF back in S3." He then rented 100 virtual computers through EC2 and ran the data through them. In less than 24 hours, he had his 11 million PDFs, all stored neatly in S3 and ready to be served up to visitors to
the Times site.

The total cost for the computing job? …Gottfrid told me that the entire EC2 bill came to $240. (That's 10 cents per computer-hour times 100 computers times 24 hours; there were no bandwidth charges since all the data transfers took place within Amazon's system - from S3 to EC2 and back.)”

Amazing economics. Now why wouldn’t they (high cost, license based, on-premise enterprise s/w makers) bitch it?

Speculation time?

2008-10-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

When stock prices take the kind of beating that we're witnessing, the emergence of potential bargains always leads to a sort of fantasy league for takeover speculation, in which analysts and pundits play at making matches between the vulnerable and their possible suitors. These hypotheticals should always be taken well salted, but they still can make for interesting thought exercises.

The player is Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek, who gave fresh legs to a possibility -- that Microsoft might snap up RIM. The logic - Microsoft would have its own smartphones to compete with Apple's iPhone and the devices running on Google's Android platform.

Peter Misek feels RIM is a massive strategic fit for Microsoft and they have a standing offer to buy them at $50 (a share). RIM's shares traded at close to $150 just a few months ago, but stock price slides so fast lately and it's within a few bucks of that offer. The way things are going, that's hardly a stretch as it would make the deal worth just over $28 billion, and Microsoft is flush enough to pull it off without having to tap the credit markets. The question is whether MSFT really feels compelled to get into hardware wars or if it's satisfied to compete on the platform side with Windows Mobile. Neither company graced the speculation with a comment.

Meanwhile, up at RIM the folks I guess are trying to stay focused, getting the just unveiled iPhone competitor launched ("BlackBerry Storm") and as rumor has it, they are already working on the next two generations.

Googlogic

2008-10-10T21:16:00.000-07:00

Has Google lost the fine art of going to market?

Chris O’Brien of Mercury News asks whether Android is going the way of Google’s open social initiative (to counter Facebook). The challenge starts off way Android figures down the list of operating systems for smart-phones. At the top of the heap are BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, the iPhone and Symbian. This last one is produced by a consortium of the largest cell phone manufacturers in the world, including Ericsson and Nokia.

Given that Symbian will soon become open-source, Android’s pitch appeal – one of developer freedom, pales. Throw in the fact that a group called the LiMo Foundation is developing a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, and Android becomes just one of three open-source options after counting in the restricted freedom allowed to developers by Apple’s iPhone. And then came Chrome browser from Google stable. It turns out that even that will take a while before it becomes the choice browser in Android phones.

So why is Google doing this? Here’s how I can explain it.

Google sees everything as a media real estate. Be it the web pages where its ads are served up, the videos on youtube and now to operating systems and open source applications. It can’t have enough of walls to stick its bills. It is fearful that some day it will exhaust its relevance if web goes out of fashion and so it wants an upper hand on anything that remotely seems like competition. There you get it. Competition. Google feels it’s easier to chase than to lead. So up comes a feature rich product that the world loves, say iPhone, Google wants a slice of that. It goes ahead and develops Android – the open source operating system. Microsoft leads the browser market? Google wants a piece of action there. In comes Chrome browser. Google can’t afford to lose consumer mindshare. It just has to be there, at the core of people’s mind. Think media mileage, consumer outreach, think Google!

Didn’t we express shock when Google paid $3.1 billion for YouTube? Now we wonder the same way how Android or Chrome browser will make money. May be, we’re wrong. It’s advertisement for Google, the way Google builds its brand value. The money it makes the old fashioned way – by serving ads. And that’s not going to change anytime soon!!!

Except if a web equivalent of Wall Street meltdown threatens redefining the space…

I want my clear blue sky and unadorned wall back

2008-10-05T03:32:00.000-07:00

What had started out as simple TV advertising between programs have become so intrusive that almost every two minutes there is a commercial break. Consumers armed with remote controls zapped away commercials in snarky if not sadistic glee. So what do broadcasters do to ROI insistent advertisers?

They innovate by subtler intrusion. The Times Online reports that the boffins at ITV have come up with a new approach called "automatically placed overlay advertising" using technology from Keystream that can spot large "clear" areas in video content -- an empty blue sky, for instance, or an unadorned wall -- and superimpose a logo or message, embedding it into the programming.

And you thought set-top boxes that allow us to record programs and then jam the commercials mean that we’ll get uncontaminated content! As viewers get cleverer, broadcasters get smarter. Now it’s the turn of the viewers again to invent new ways to get back that clear blue sky and that unadorned wall on the screen ;-)

"I know what you did last time you were around"

2008-09-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

For those who value privacy over personalized pitches, opting out of online behavioral advertising is challenging enough. While shopping offline, you could get away wearing a ski mask. The customer analysis systems though, will know what to do when they see that.

It does nag to watch the growth in behavioral advertising online, the practice of tracking users in their Web travels in an effort to deliver more relevant ads. But things are getting out of hand – with the kind of high-tech targeting and profiling that's increasingly showing up in the brick-and-mortar retail world.

Get a load of system used by Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars. Next to the cash register is a digital display. If you order a coffee in the morning, it may pop up an ad for a croissant. Buy a sandwich at lunch, and the screen may suggest a beverage or dessert. What's more, the suggestions can be tied into inventory management; if croissants are running low, that coffee customer may see a muffin promo instead. In the outlets with the system installed, Aroma says, sales of desserts and beverages featured on the screens have increased as much as 68 percent.

Sounds harmless enough -- just an automated version of the sales clerk's usual upselling exercise. It doesn't start to get creepy until the next step. YCD Multimedia, an Israeli company that sells digital display systems, is starting to equip some of its point-of-sale systems with tiny cameras and facial analysis software that can determine a shopper's sex, race and approximate age and choose which ads to display accordingly. All of sudden you have software doing something we like to discourage among humans -- making gross assumptions about individuals based on crude observations and generalized data. Start extrapolating and you find yourself in the middle of another personalization vs. privacy mess. Wait until the systems are able to observe and analyze more of your characteristics as you stand at the register. At the fast-food outlet, when it sees a person of girth filling its viewfinder, will it suggest super-sizing or a salad? At the coffee shop, will an advanced expression analysis tool see that you are sleepy and recommend a double shot?

Sooner or later, retailers are going to want capture facial-recognition information, link it to a purchase history and have their digital display systems greet you by name and pitch you accordingly. Corporate partners start sharing, and the next thing you know large chunks of your personal information are floating around in another huge database.

No way out. Or is there?

Regulate enterprise vendors first

2008-09-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

I can’t really hazard a guess on the coming regulatory overkill. It always does following a massive crisis as the one that is now blowing across the Wall Street and rapidly spilling across the world at large. It’s no longer an American crisis or developed markets crisis, it’s a global crisis now sweeping across economies and industries. Similarly credit tightening does not just entail a crisis of liquidity that folds up investment banks; it’s a business crisis that scuppers momentum out of every enterprise - big or small, global or local.

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If there is one breed that still feels a bit casual about it is that of software vendors. The large enterprise vendors like SAP, Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft all of them have developed software package applications for different verticals even as the industry itself has been evolving. SAP talks about being able to support 28 industries. It also suggests 100% solutions in each. Yet if you look at its solution maps, it has several "white spaces". It talks about extending them with its partner ISVs and SIs with NetWeaver platformed xApps or has future R&D plans for them. So where is it really? Who will watch them?

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How did they do that? Ask any investment banker about the logic behind a CDS, ABS, MBS, CDO, CLO or such alphabet soup, he will still be wringing hands. But the tech vendors seem to `get it’ all and boy they ran with it – screaming vertical capability! Why haven’t the earliest developer / functional analyst that studied the prototype of subprime mortgage and the excessive leverage blown the whistle on the wobbly nature of the foundation?

Answer lies in casualness of approach. To hell, with outcomes. They are concerned with operationalizing a functionality as advertised. So if they provide the plain vanilla financial, CRM, pay roll or HR package to an Investment bank, they claimed I-banking vertical capability. Business transformation – does it also mean driving a healthy business to bankruptcy in a matter of days? Or is it Paramedic filling in for surgeon? God save the patient.

Onward to enterprise collaboration

2008-09-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Too much noise on enterprise collaboration (EC) suite Beehive from Oracle Open World (OOW) in San Francisco.

The expression EC is indeed an oxymoron according to specialist Oliver Marks. Do people collaborate in any enterprise, really? Don’t they bitch one another? Have marketing ever been in love with production? Have the CFO ever appreciated salesman’s travails or ever bothered how sales bring up the topline numbers quarter over quarter? Nothing can be farther from reality.

But yet that’s what Beehive seeks to do – to extract the synergies of having people work more closely together saving money and be more efficient. Often large enterprises have no open editorial environment beyond just news being gathered from all around. At a price of $120 per user seat this is not a system for most small or medium sized businesses but rather a secure solution that can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructure. Should work well with office workflow systems since the design fits clients that ask for ‘collaboration that works within the structure of our existing business’. The new openness allows integration with SAP or other competitors, and a set of web services that will run on different server platforms - Solaris, Linux, Microsoft.

Oracle take great pains to point out that they are addressing existing customer needs in providing a system that reinforces regulatory needs. Mark Brown, Senior Director of Beehive Business Strategy, cited the recent leak of politician Sara Palin’s private email and increasing regulatory compliance of the financial industry as examples of the need for tighter infrastructure oversight.

Great. But as a true blue consultant, I worry about sales hurdle. How will the CIO get its budget past the CFO? C-level people are either too secretive or even paranoid to freely use collaboration suites that leave a trail. (They can’t say “this was not what I meant” or say “I told you so” later if the stuff sucks). They are more comfortable with over-the-phone-requests that come with in-built “that-wasn’t-me” flexibility. Will they let in a feature that they will never use at such an expense? ;-)

Accenture as Detroit parts supplier

2008-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

So we hear Chrysler suing Accenture for failure to deliver on $900 million in promised savings from a low-cost country sourcing initiative. We know Accenture more as a IT outsourcer and not anywhere near a supply chain strategist. Is there something called vendor due diligence or is it all about Detroit firms losing their minds over perpetually falling fortunes? According to the article, "Chrysler paid at least $7.7 million to Accenture for help buying parts in low-cost countries such as China and India. Chrysler thought doing so would save $900 million. Instead, Chrysler saw virtually no savings, court documents say."

Does anyone know what else Accenture is into? Fixing perils of globalization? Saving a crestfallen financial world up next?

Indian IT outsourcing vendors better watch out - might as well get into these new `horizontals' ;-)

"Let the economics deliver"

2008-09-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

By now your grandma will know that the one big cost component in setting up data center is power. Not for computing, for cooling the whirring machines. To get around this, companies have begun setting them up as far as Siberia, so that they can cool server farms by simply throwing open a few windows.

Now Google dips into its vast patent filings and executes a wonder – a floating data center. Yes, a data center that is powered by waves, cooled by water and no property tax to pay because there is no property. It uses a technology called Pelamis wave energy converter that generates electricity into a grid from offshore wave energy. The search giant filed for a patent in February that was approved Aug. 28. The patent outlines a concept that would not only be savvy engineering, but deliver great returns. Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge calls Google’s patent a “startling new take on data center engineering.” Larry Dignan says “I’d call it brilliant engineering, but the financial engineering could be even more impressive.”

Being a SaaS lover and a cheapskate, I would just wait for the economics to deliver ;)
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iPhone check

2008-08-24T01:05:00.000-07:00

Total strangers sidle up to the iPhone owner with a look of wonder and start asking questions about the gadget… Among friends and colleagues, the iPhone owner assumes the mien of a knowledgeable conjuror, wowing everyone with the neat tricks the gadget performs.

That’s not entirely surprising, given the extent of media coverage that the July 2008 global launch of the iPhone 3G has received in international media: stories of mile-long queues outside stores, across countries and continents, have routinely made headlines.
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But can it cook? check out this popcorn!

Like it for a colleague

2008-08-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

Students at Minho University in Portugal are working on developing better interaction between industrial robots and humans, and apparently the first step involves designing a machine that would likely become the first androidcide victim of workplace violence. Here's a video demo of the bot doing some assembly work in cooperation with a human partner, and as you'll see, it manages to embody all the qualities of the worst lab partner or cubicle mate you ever had: It points out your mistakes in a condescending and irritating voice, it's interminably slow at completing its own tasks, and at the end of the job, it offers insincere thanks. Understandably, there's a long way to go here. Maybe next they can get it to inject random political opinions and gossip about other robots.

IT sanctuaries

2008-08-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

India’s IT companies becoming sanctuaries for visually challenged. The initiatives are certainly charitable and let’s not go into IT vendors’ workaday compulsions arising from acute talent shortage, spiraling wage costs, dire predicaments resulting from high levels of attrition and a seemingly endless economic turbulence that urges them to cut corners to survive.

Just as an aside. Any let ups in SLA non-compliance by these IT vendors will now likely merit a compassionate review by clients, as well. Just kidding! Here is Michael Krigsmann listing out twelve early warning signs that signal IT project failure. You can see he is compassionate already :-)

Where Microsoft scores over Google...

2008-08-14T01:05:00.000-07:00

...it's a war !

If you wanna see how wartime Georgia looks, don't go to Google Maps, at least for now. At the moment, it is no more than a blank slate. When the war broke out, some folks noticed this for the first time and suspected that Google had removed the map data for some reason. Not so, says Product Manager Dave Barth. It's just that Google wasn't happy with the map data it could come up with and has been holding off until it gets something better. User feedback has now convinced the company that some data is better than no data, said Barth, and updates are in the works.

Microsoft's Live Search Maps is a much better bet, right now.

Have it in the cloud, will burst !

2008-08-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

When we rely so much on the internet for our daily dose of email and other web applications, we are exposing ourselves to its fallibilities also. For the web-obsessed amongst us relying way too much on email, blogs and wikis through the day, a couple hours of outage is indeed our idea of hell. Now imagine enterprises that expose themselves to the vagaries of cloud-based computing services? That clearly means loss of business. Apple's MobileMe service was down for a few hours yesterday, and access continues to be sketchy for some, representing the most unfortunate kind of consistency over the past month.

Google found itself apologizing for its Gmail outage yesterday: "Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this." And an online storage service called The Linkup (formerly MediaMax has closed up shop after losing an unspecified amount of customers' data.

That triggered another round of commentary from the blogosphere about how dicey a proposition it is to trust your data and services to the cloud, especially your business critical applications. But while trouble in the cloud carries the added annoyance of feeling powerless while someone else works on a fix, these outages are just a vaporous extension of what we know to expect with more tangible, earthbound systems, indeed with every device, appliance and service we use. Why don’t we just say, stuff breaks? Systems are going to go down, it’s a fact of life. What’s important is to be prepared when those systems go down which is a major reason that some kind of offline access should be built into systems like email. In theory we’ll reach a time when the cloud really is always on, but we’re not close and it may never happen Maybe it breaks less if you pay enough money, but it breaks. With that as a given, especially so with complex or newer technologies, any plans to use the cloud also require plans to do without it if need be. The advice from the Department of Redundancy still holds: back up. Because the alternative is on-premise enterprise software with its huge license fee, maintenance and hardware costs, frequent upgrades, revisions, consultants and system integrator fee besides long process breaks entailed by complex installation protocol.

Don’t you know there is a liquidity crisis crippling global business sentiment? Economics will win hands down anyday. Never mind the outage…

Strategic innovation at AMD - Go Fabless

2008-08-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Call it surrendering before the big brother Intel or just plain survival strategy, AMD is likely to outsource its chip making activities. After losing money for seven quarters, AMD needs a long-term strategy to keep pace with its deep-pocketed rival and to cut red ink. It will henceforth be just a chip designer saving enormous investments in inventory and maintenance of fabrication units, joining the league of the other Fabless smarts like Xilinx. AMD presently owns manufacturing plants in Dresden, Germany, and has an option to build a plant in New York. It already has experience with outsourcing. Its ATI graphics chips are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and it works with IBM at an IBM factory to develop future chip production technologies.

But will it work? Is it ok to expose chip making to outsourced chip makers? How reliable will the outcome be? What about impact of policy shifts? Too many pertinent questions. But when a brand new chip making plant will cost upwards of $3.5 billion and if the company is short by one half, it can’t have the luxury of choice. Not the least when the lead competitor- Intel - has 8 times free cash in its balance sheet.

Ok AMD, all that’s best… Here’s to your success - Go, get a life!

Swap Twitter for 12 seconds?

2008-08-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

So-called microblogging changes form. As Twitter(2006) gains traction amongst compulsive narcissists with bad writing skills and companies compelled to observe broadcast economics, technology abuse has become widespread. Without a care in the world, these tools allow that old war game called ruthless intrusion without notice. The excuse is you opted in. The receiver of a tweet message is bombarded with tons of silly nuggets and many subscribers opt out after a few hours. It has come as a boon to many a tribe that often contemplates committing suicide by reading a self-written passage; now they text a firm one-liner thro Twitter and put the blame squarely on the 140 character constraint enforced by the tool. They gave it a name “microblogging” – to give it part legitimacy of a blog. It covered plenty of ass.

Now what if you are bad at even that one-liner? Enter video version – 12 seconds, a San Francisco [Alpha] startup. The concept is borrowed from Twitter of course, but Soi Lipman the founder believes video is more engaging than text. Here is the best part that states its purpose "If I'm at the bar with my friends, I want to show us having fun at the bar, not just text it."

So there you go. But I like 12 seconds more because it’s time consuming for upload and download and not many will opt in. Intimate friends and family might be interested and that’s ok. That’s not inane broadcast of all things silly. That questions the moot point of its scalability as well. But if outside programmers are allowed to develop applications on its platform, it may have far better utility that drives commercial viability where Twitter tries hard to get.

Annuity contracts - are they safer outsourcing bets?

2008-08-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

Visible effect of slowdown or even recession proofing – India’s IT sector focusing on smaller clients (shedding their dependence on large contracts) and craving for annuity type (plain vanilla BPO) contracts.

“Indian IT firms would have been better off garnering more large traditional outsourcing type contracts. These would have provided annuity type revenue and therefore more resilience during a recession,”

explains Siddharth Pai, Partner and Managing Director, TPI India, an outsourcing consultancy.

Oh, really? Now that even the large banks write down billions of dollars in losses, how can an outsourcing vendor ensure a steady stream of revenues since the solvency of the client itself is questioned? And then the bigger question – hedging outcomes of IT vendors themselves against their receivables in foreign currency and the derivative bets and mark-to-market (MTM) thunderbolts. WIPRO getting hit by a Rs.934 crore ($250 million) whirlwind. TCS, Infosys, Satyam, HCL Tech have all borne the brunt as well.

Not so promising Cloud?

2008-07-25T03:53:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Nick Carr, I read Sarah Lacy’s take on why SaaS will drag.

Lacy says

“….On-demand software has turned out to be a brutal slog. Software sold "as a service" over the Web doesn't sell itself, even when it's cheaper and actually works. Each sale closed by these new Web-based software companies has a much smaller price tag. And vendors are continually tweaking their software, fixing bugs, and pushing out incremental improvements. Great news for the user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative massive upgrade every few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the software.”

Well, I have some questions to Lacy. Isn’t that gouging by licensed software vendors (charging fresh-off-the-oven rates even after years of amortization of developmental expenses) in the name of maintenance and support and upgrades and consultancy the reason why SaaS came into prominence? Now won’t the users that are victimized give a longer rope for SaaS vendors to perfect their art? SFDC did succeed after all, didn’t it, albeit in its own niche?

Lacy then asks “Why isn't Oracle a bigger player in on-demand software?” She seems to have some answers as well. But I would rather say - “Ellison just didn’t get it”! On-demand model has to be designed from scratch by some brain that has not been corrupted by the luxuries offered by the licensed software model. Ellison knew he won’t be able to figure it out ever. That’s why he smartly backed Marc Benioff of SFDC who had no such prejudices.

On the same lines, I also differ with Nick Carr as he says -

“The unsentimental Ellison will wait until the profits from traditional software begin to decay, and then will buy his way into the software-as-a-service business, cherry-picking attractive suppliers”.

Given the way software business and user patterns evolve, both licensed model and on-demand model will have to co-exist for a long time until other issues around connectivity, hosted service quality, data storage and security, WiMax spectrum availability are resolved globally. If profits from traditional software begin to decay, chances are that it will be replaced by a more economical enterprise application and not necessarily by a SaaS app. Transition of all things on-premise to everything on-demand may not happen at all. But the economics will tempt a lot of rethink and it is that scenario which might drive some sense into enterprise vendors to stop gouging customers and get real.

So don’t hurry to bitch SaaS. For every believer in enterprise hegemony, there could be ten others that swear by SaaS economics.

Can we cope?

2008-07-17T00:40:00.000-07:00

“In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualization” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere” – says the Economist.

Nick Carr says the journey of the itinerant computer has just started. Any more, I have doubts whether we could cope.

Can't crack your code - make it simple

2008-07-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

The noise over advanced encryption technology used by RIM refuses to die down.

Indian officials had put pressure on RIM to provide security agencies with a way around its encryption demanding either a "master key" into data and e-mails sent from RIM’s BlackBerry devices or that RIM set up servers that could be monitored by Indian security agencies. But during a presentation to India's Department of Telecommunications, RIM pointed to four other mobile e-mail systems in the country -- Windows Mobile ActiveSync, Nokia Intellisync, Motorola's Good, and Seven Networks -- that utilize similar encryption. RIM contends that the government would have to also take actions against those companies and not just RIM.

Data on RIM's network utilizes the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard. The Department of Telecommunications has said it wants RIM to reduce this to a 40-bit encryption.

Now I ask – Just because you are going on a long vacation, would the authorities want you to leave your apartment keys to them? How safe are our properties with an easily corruptible Govt. official?

By making the encryption crackable, they enable corporate espionage, spying and all kinds of gamesmanship. Why even an obsessed individual can hunt down anyone. Crime rings can have a field day. That's what we all need, more crime.

What’s the big deal about 256 bit encryption anyway? Is it not crackable? Satellites use 1024 bit encryption – do they want them to be downgraded too?

Every bit of encryption is just a complex algorithm that masks data. It can be outwitted by another stroke of ingenuity. It’s like picking locks. For every intricate lock, there is a smart locksmith that can pick it. By asking to limit the level of encryption, lawmakers expose their own strategic myopia. Next what? Will they want all locks to be pickable and make it easy for burglers? Asking for a master key to peep into every e-mail or seeking localized servers serves hardly a purpose. If they want to intercept communications, they should rather allow for the best encryption technology to prevail and then invest in innovative counter-cryption technologies or code-cracking initiatives that can break every code lock. That’s where we want a national policy – innovation investments as a part of counter espionage initiatives.

Yet another aspect worth exploring is when technology levitates more and more services from the desktop to the computing cloud or the internet. When SaaS service providers allow users to have unique encryption keys, will they classify such information as being held in the location of the server or where the key is held? I am not sure the data woven with advanced encryption protocol will cease to be in public domain that the security agencies cannot intercept. Nobody is asking for an intrusion free data haven as yet. We just want our data - say money in the bank - available for our exclusive use and not for any random hack to rob every last dime. But the Government in asking for lower encryption standards from RIM is exactly setting a trend in that direction.

Would they still ask for the cloud servers or their massive data centers to be located inside the Capitol Hill or the Parliament House? How much can they geotarget? Have they ever imagined what it takes monitor such a high volume data? Now the big question – how hard is it to bribe the security official that has access to the master key? Bite what you can chew folks!

Did you say e-privacy...?

2008-07-04T03:35:00.000-07:00

As part of the discovery process in Viacom's billion-dollar copyright-infringement suit against Google's YouTube, U.S. District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton on Wednesday ordered the search sovereign to hand over every record of every video watched by YouTube visitors, including user names and IP addresses --.terabyte upon terabyte of data. Viacom contends it needs the information to demonstrate how YouTube enjoys the fruits of illegally posted video clips. Google's argument that such a release would represent a massive violation of user privacy was waved away by the judge. "Defendants cite no authority barring them from disclosing such information in civil discovery proceedings, and their privacy concerns are speculative," Stanton wrote in his opinion. The judge also pooh-poohed the idea that the logging data was sufficient to be personally identifiable, despite examples to the contrary.

This decision, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seems to fly in the face of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which applies, quaintly but sufficiently broadly, to "prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials" and strictly limits disclosure of "information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services." "The Court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube," the EFF concluded. "We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.

Unless you take special and inconvenient precautions, you leave a clear set of footprints as you travel through the digital world. Between your charges and debits, your cell phone and your GPS, your messaging and your browsing, a set of data points emerge that, if viewed from the right height, can chart your interests, your activities and your path like you were little Billy in "Family Circus." Most of us deal with this exposure the same way we deal with other uncomfortable realities -- shrug and apply some combination of trust, faith and hope that we won't get hurt. But like the occasional temblors that remind us here that we're living in earthquake country, news comes along periodically to remind us that our privacy is also on very shaky ground.

The cynic is right

2008-06-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

I had almost given up on the prospect of social networks ever making money. Targeted ads? Hardly work, so long as it doesn't exactly settle the question of whether targeting, even if it avoids the worst of users' privacy concerns, will ever be able to punch through the attention barrier. Now I get an endorsement from Technology Review.

“Advertising on Google works because visitors come to Google looking for specific information. If a user who types "scooter" in the site's search field is hoping to buy a scooter, the keyword ads that appear at the right of the search results can be more useful than the results themselves. In social networks, on the other hand, users show up to find friends; ads are, at best, irrelevant to that goal. The click-through rates on social-networking sites bear this out. While around 2 percent of Google users actually click on a given ad (and the number is much higher when users are conducting searches for purchasing reasons), [less] than .04 percent of Facebook users do….”

Call me a cynic. Still it doesn’t stop me from letting you in on some consensus. Before we see sophisticated databases that are applying social mapping to ad display and selection, we'll see something much more basic, like funneling people into channels that advertisers already understand how to buy. Not many advertisers want to be up on user-generated sites, because it's not where they want their brands to be. Sites like MySpace and Facebook have made progress with some advertisers by the sheer magnitude of their traffic and audience. But it's a work in progress, given advertisers' reluctance to associate their brands with sometimes-inappropriate user material.

Google smashing foundation

2008-06-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

Looks like finally here’s something that could give Google a taste of what it has been giving to others by rote – competition. Nokia announced it was acquiring 52% outstanding shares in an all cash deal ($410 mn) in the Symbian software platform, bunching all versions into one, and turning that over to a foundation for free, open-source release.

The move certainly has ramifications across the smartphone landscape. Strategically, the formation of the Symbian Foundation and the opening of the Symbian platform is an aggressive pre-emptive strike against Google, its Open Handset Alliance and its open-source Android mobile platform. Perfectly timed too, since Android seems to be falling behind schedule.

Om Malik sees the move as part of the industry's adjusting to a new set of realities, chief among them the need for speed -- in churning out new handsets fast enough for fickle fashion and in allowing developers to keep pace without the burdens of multiple proprietary platforms. Now the question is just how much openness the carriers will agree to.

Your Indian mobile bill is a rip off

2008-06-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

So now you know why Vodafone bade $13 billion for HutchEssar and how Telcos make money – thro pure rip off. The Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) claims that STD calls can be offered at 15 paise/minute and local calls can be free on the same network, if the government permits unrestricted domestic internet telephony. ISD call rates can further come down to 50 paise per minute on same IP network, and in other IP network 75 paise. And if you want to call on a mobile or fixed line from an IP phone, STD call rates can be offered at 50 paise per minute, claims ISPAI.

Currently, STD call rates on mobile networks are about Re 1 per minute while local rates range from 80 paise to Rs 1. Operators such as Airtel and Vodafone charge Re 1.50 and Re 2.75 per minute for a STD call whereas a call from India to the US or UK costs cheaper at 95 paise per minute, or lower through the internet protocol (IP) telephony. The same call to the US or UK through a mobile cost Rs 6.40.

Interestingly, many telecom operators currently route their domestic calls through the IP network. Says ISPAI president Rajesh Charria, “As admitted by many operators, they are routing the call through the IP networks and still charging exorbitant call rates.” Global giants such as Google, AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft and Nortel are backing the ISPs in their demand for allowing unrestricted IP Telephony.

Even with all the experimentation is going on in mobile communications, we don’t see customer benefiting in the near term. The handset landscape is starting to look like "The Island of Doctor Moreau," murky territory where industries interbreed in ways not seen before. Search companies working on handsets, handset companies working on social networking. All this may give you feature richness and the handset makers some reason to charge a higher cost for the handset, the calling costs will remain so high for customers -- it's just not natural, I tell ya.

Check this out for yourself –

a) Google, trying to herd a crowd of developers, manufacturers and carriers toward deployment of handsets based on its open source Android platform, is getting a quick lesson on the benefits of absolute monarchy over messy democracy when it comes to efficiency.

b) Nokia is working on its own transformation, from a simple handset manufacturer to a device maker that also serves as a hub for all manner of mobile communications and entertainment. Through its Ovi gateway, Nokia is integrating photo and video sharing, music services, mapping, and now, with the buyout of Germany's Plazes, location-based social networking.

c) Google is being slowed by the need to juggle all the individual requirements and schedules of a horde of stakeholders, and as a result, the launch of the first Android phones will slide toward the end of the year. So is Sprint Nextel’s efforts to get an Android phone being set back and that of China mobile having to push back its launch plans.
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You might as well see that IP telephony in most developed markets such as the US, Singapore is unregulated, resulting in drastic fall in call rates. For instance, a $2.5 (Rs 100) calling card offers a 30 minute call to India from US which comes to a per minute rate of Rs 3.33 for an ISD call from US to India. Whereas in India, the mobile operators offer the same call at double the price for a call to the US. Some others offer India calling at 4.2 cents per minute or Rs 1.60 per minute, almost one-sixth the ISD rate offered by operators in India.

Like rats from a sinking ship

2008-06-18T23:49:00.000-07:00

Being burrow dwellers by nature, rats live in the deepest recesses of the ship, in the bilge. This area is so low as to be almost inaccessible to the sailors. Thus the rats become aware of water entering the ship some time before the crew is alerted. As their nesting places are flooded, the rodents are impelled to flee the ship. Their continuous shrill cries of alarm quickly summon the rest of the rats from the hold. They build up into a large, frightened mass of rodents making a panicky exodus. This is, of course, a final calamity for the rats, since they will try to swim to eternity and usually do.

It is quite natural that a sight such as this would incite the passengers and crew to an equally hasty, harried departure but one that ends less disastrously. So when a series of high profile desertions happen in a company as big as Yahoo, you know what to make of it.

Microsoft, thwarted in its efforts to acquire all or part of Yahoo, would likely be happy to talk with any such big-name defectors, but in seeking to catch the overflow from the Yahoo brain drain, it's putting out the welcome mat for any of the discouraged rank and file, particularly those involved in search. It runs ads that scream "There are now very few companies that remain truly committed to defining the future of search and online advertising," the ad reads. "Microsoft is one of them. Come join a company with the resources, engineering expertise, R&D, partnerships and competitive spirit to make it happen."

Mmm, nothing like a big meal of poached Yahoo :)

"The goddamn thing should be zippy and relevant"

2008-06-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

In a column about Nick Carr’s Atlantic article in the Sunday Times (London), Andrew Sullivan draws on his personal experience as a prolific blogger to describe what the Web has given and what it has taken away. He avers the online culture and web utilities like email, IM, Google search, linking etc., is making him highly intolerant and seeking instant nirvana.

“When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on....

....Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes – and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.”

I don’t think so. I think it saves me a lot of junk read. It cuts down a lot of clutter and takes us to the real `it’. I am quickly up to what I want and get back to work. In the process, I get entertained and don’t overshoot and waste time. A lot of stuff that we used to read was random, had not always been out of choice; we did that because we were seeking something specific that we didn’t know where to find. But today, I know and I stay informed in split second. My craving for quick answers could deprive me of the empty stage needed for honest discovery. They say the new knowledge can't be reached if our minds don't pass through the "not-knowing" stages. So, what’s wrong? Ok. You be the radical and use your inner search field, I’d be the incremental using Google search and bringing up pill-sized solutions because I may be wired that way.

If I feel I want to immerse myself in a literary soup, I can always reach for a book. But the goddamn thing will have to be zippy and relevant – just like the google search ;) It's got to be a call to writers than a cautioning of readers...

Hey AP, come on, get me!

2008-06-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

Associated Press (AP) hates linking. As a blogger, I love it. Why? It drives traffic, keeps my context live and my post relevant. And, I don’t even write for profit. I just want my opinion to be published and read and reacted upon. AP does it for a living. It needs numbers and if readers like what comes along from AP, they might be its future subscribers and patrons. So it has all the more reason why it should love or at least, not object to linking. But last week it did the unthinkable – it went ahead and complained against Drudge Retort with a take-down request under DMCA.

Nobody gets away messing with blogosphere. AP learnt it the hard way getting thumped down. There were rebuffs, retorts and more fulminations. After getting righteously ripped across the blogosphere for demanding that the satire site Drudge Retort remove seven brief excerpts of AP stories, the organization decided that its letter was ham-fisted and that it would rethink its policy on bloggers and links.

As I see it, the fair-use exceptions have been established by law and judicial interpretation; individual copyright holders don't get to create a custom version. AP is welcome to go through the exercise, but in the end, it would have to convince a judge that headline-and-blurb links back to its content and its clients causes it financial damage, an argument that is both dubious and counterintuitive. Let's say it again, though we shouldn't have to. Reposting full text of copyright material is a Bad Thing. Posting a link to copyright material and enough of an excerpt to encourage a click-through is a Good Thing. It drives traffic, raises visibility and weaves the source material into an ongoing conversation. Getting linked is what you want to happen to your content.

The best take for me was that of Michael Arrington - "Here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them [and] we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet." This, of course, will have about the same impact as those periodic calls for a gas boycott, but still, it's a message AP really needs to get its head around as it works on the next write-through.

If AP finds runways slippery, it should abort landing or takeoff to avoid runway overshoots. Not all excursions could be easy. [Yikes! I linked to AP through Yahoo again!... now come on, get me:)]

I would fire Ballmer for a different reason

2008-06-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

So with Gates out of the gate, let’s fire Ballmer?

Bill Gates was a geek when he started out. He went on to build a monster. Now by the end of this month, he is about to call it quits handing over the reins to Steve Ballmer, a salesman at heart. Where is Microsoft headed?

Remember how he won the browser war upstaging Netscape and the way he got Windows Media Player chew up Real Media and other competitors? Courts may have caught up with him eventually, but by then others were smashed to pulp. May be Microsoft is not yet fully out of the woods on those counts; but what is an occasional billion dollar fine when you're making multiple billions in profit every quarter? It’s just another cost of doing business.

Can Ballmer execute it with that clinical precision? We know what happened to Vista under Ballmer. Ballmer is fat and Microsoft is already gasping for breath under his dead weight. He’s now working hard and that is all the more reason why they should worry more as shareholders and we as its customers (if at all).

“Ballmer can't do the job. If I were in charge of Microsoft, I'd fire Ballmer” – says Steven J. Vaughan. I would second that for a different reason though – for even thinking of buying Yahoo for $47 billion. A company that will come a lot cheap a few years down the line with a clueless Jerry Yang and a hawkish Carl Icahn - who can't spell WEB even if you spot a W and an E for him - at the top.

Simplicity sells; only when packaged right

2008-06-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

Even in fields such as the computer industry that celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial. New chips are an easy sell. The idea of reinventing the computer case from the ground up is a harder one. Hyperlink was invented in 1960 and the mouse in 1964, but to get enterprises to mass produce, it took almost three decades more. The lesson - for early adoption, give customers change in the mode they understand.

I was reading this NYT piece about Jay Harman, an Australian naturalist who relies on fluid dynamics to improve the design of everything from simple fans and pumps to hydroelectric dams and aircraft.

Mr. Harman is a practitioner of *biomimicry*, a growing movement of the industrial-design field. Eleven years ago, he established Pax Scientific to commercialize his ideas, thinking that it would take only a couple of years to convince companies that they could increase efficiency, lower noise or create entirely new categories of products by following his approach. But customers aren’t cutting checks yet. In March, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made a significant investment in Pax Streamline, founded to pursue a new generation of wind turbines and air-conditioning systems. Enterprises that build out huge data centers, take note (they spend more on utility bills to keep their servers cool than for data storage/processing). It’s far better than setting up data centers in Siberia where you expect to keep it cool by throwing open a few windows.

Innovation has always faced adoption hurdles. Harman didn’t have to look farther than his own advisors to realize that. Paul Saffo, one of his advisers and a Silicon Valley technology analyst often strums up this simple dictum: “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

Need I say more about customers that pay?

Despite Bill Thompson I love the cloud

2008-05-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing – the technology that connects large groups of servers that often use low-cost consumer PC technology, to spread complex data-processing chores across them. Google's search engine and productivity applications are among the early products of efforts to locate processing power on vast banks of computer servers, rather than on desktop PCs. Microsoft has released online software called Windows Live for photo-sharing, file storage, and other applications served from new data centers. Yahoo has taken similar steps. IBM has devoted 200 researchers to its cloud computing project. And Amazon recently broadened access for software developers to its EC3 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service, which lets small software companies pay for processing power streamed from Amazon's data centers.

While estimates are hard to find, the potential uses are widespread. Rather than serve a relatively small group of highly skilled users, cloud computing aims to make supercomputing available to the masses. Reed, who's moving to Microsoft from the University of North Carolina, says the technology could be used to analyze conversations at meetings, then anticipate what data workers might need to view next, for example. Google, Microsoft, and others are also building online services designed to give consumers greater access to information to help manage their health care.

Enough stuff that makes for hype? Yes and it did raise a lot of dust. Bill Thompson of BBC cuts through some clutter.

“Because behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the 'cloud' is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and the every network interaction connects two locations in the real world…It is often useful to conceptualize online activities as cyberspace, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today….Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.”

Well, data protection concerns always remain when you host anything in the cloud. But how about the reduced costs of cloud computing v. licensed software that loads the customer with a 22% maintenance, cost of upgrades, consultants fee and running after patches just to stay live?
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When IT got boring

2008-05-25T23:32:00.000-07:00

IT managers cutting across verticals and accepting even non-IT challenges. We know about Finance, Infrastructure and even entertainment businesses vying with IT for top talent. Earlier it was IT that lured people away from these sectors. Now IT companies themselves are letting their people migrate to other sectors, if possible within their own enterprise. WIPRO seems to be best positioned to pull the trigger with its diversified portfolio that has an equally aggressive posture (besides IT/ITES) in growing all its diversified interests—consumer care, lighting, technology, infrastructure, engineering and its professionals see strategic roles in emerging sectors. While IT is still the big daddy in terms of revenue or hiring numbers, quite a few functional leaders have made a comfortable switch to Wipro’s other businesses.

I would raise my glass to that. Why? It will eventually lead them to get some real business insights, think more in terms of `uncool’ old world terms like profitability and cost control. So far in IT they’d been kept well insulated from all that because of paucity of talent. If you've had a MCA/CS tag, can write a few lines of code and put on a couple years of experience, you make the cut. Now when they move into other realms where they have to deal with tough customers, competition, margin pressures (at the executive level, so far only the shareholders felt those pains) that threaten their very survival, they’ll earn their spurs.

Hope that will power them when their IT parent gears into consulting domain, where IT faces a test of its ultimate utility. Where it helps to cut down costs, reduces complexity of operations, helps minimize wastage, improves supply chain and delivers on ROI badly sought by clients. So far it has been only a standard covenant in SLAs signed by outsourcing vendors where they routinely promise cost savings and ROI without ever delivering on them (getting away with penalties). They’ve often been excused by many a client because (a) they can’t do it themselves at that cost; (b) the realization that when you get a first world job done by a third world, this is what to expect. They mostly resign to their fate until they bring back the work in-house or find a better vendor – not often easy. A few that built captives to get around this malady, paid heavily when wage inflation and attrition peaked and destroyed the edifice forcing them to put it up for sale.

It could also be that the IT managers don’t see much glamour if not future in pureplay IT any longer; or is it that they’ve just gotten bored - with no get-rich-quick stock option programs and a stagnant innovation in IT that gave it the early lusture ?

Beethoven symphony by car mileage

2008-05-22T23:15:00.000-07:00

Woof… A car giving 250 km/litre of petrol? Innovation by a bunch of young smart kids from Ropar in Punjab.

Seven engineering students from Rayat Institute of Engineering and Information Technology, Ropar today claimed to have developed a concept car with an amazing mileage of 250 km per litre after putting in five months of hard work. They hope to display at the World Super Mileage competition being held at Michigan in USA from June 5 to 6 where contestants from 35 countries including USA, UK and Bahrain will present their exhibits. They say the car has a 92 cc engine with TCI ignition system. The frame of the 65 kg car has been developed by using special grade aluminum 6063 T6.

I wish them lots of luck. With crude at $135 per barrel, the news (and the kind of mileage) is Beethoven symphony to my ears. But when I told this to my daughter, she asks me to check whether the car runs with a dysfunctional odometer :)

Bringing in Ron Reagan. "Trust – but verify!"

Microsoft is too fidgety with all that cash

2008-05-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

Now that Microsoft has backed off from $47 billion yahoo bid, it squirms and fidgets with all that cash hoard. It has to find another better way to squander the dough. So why not give it away? Not to shareholders, that's boring straight. New idea – pay people that search through Microsoft live and complete a transaction.

Despite Redmond's best efforts, Microsoft Live Search remains mired in a distant third place, behind Google and Yahoo, as the reference of choice on Web, and not content to pin its hopes for growth on increased relevance or innovation, Microsoft is resorting to the most basic of incentives: money. Today the company introduced "Live Search Cashback,"

You certainly don’t cast off Single Era Conjecture, do you…?

Dump a captive - necessity or smart strategy?

2008-05-21T01:08:00.000-07:00

Companies set up captives – wholly owned subsidiaries set up to provide services only to the parent company – when they feel a need to isolate non-core, back office services (like primary research, data analytics, product research, IT Maintenance and support, after sales service etc.) to focus on their core revenue earning activities. Besides there are a host of other reasons too –

a) Lack of mature service providers;
b) Desire for direct control / concern over IP protection;
c) Regulatory restrictions (especially in financial services);
d) Risk mitigation;
e) Service delivery cost;
f) Scale of operations;
g) Corporate culture.

Of late, the parent companies are realizing that the captive models are cracking. Rampant inflation in emerging markets drive up wages in offshore destinations, high attrition, lack of talented manpower, poaching by mainstream service providers that makes it impossible for running a stable captive operation. So they want to get rid of them. There are several mainstream outsourcing vendors that are interested in buying these struggling captives as they help build their book. But when more and more parents divest captive outfits, there is also a speculation whether it is a pre-planned strategy – outsourcing by another name, in the process the parent making some money as well!

I think the speculation is well founded. In the normal outsourcing scenario, the parent company comes in as a client of the service provider. In this case, the parent company is the “seller” and the outsourcing vendor is a “buyer”. It’s like *buying* an order (for a price), not taking it.

But on second thoughts, it’s not so simple as it seems.

It takes a lot of time, effort and cost to set up a captive. Recruitment, training and maintaining a bench is hell as outsourcing vendors acknowledge. Finally when the operations go on stream, people leave, processes come unstuck, projects get delayed and blame game starts - when the regular fire fighting begins. The very purpose for setting up captives, to have an in-house, efficient service provider that frees up a lot of quality time for management to focus on core operations of the parent company remains an illusion because now they also have to manage the captive from a distance. Being a wholly owned sub, their financials are to be integrated into the parent company balance sheet as well - its losses tarnish the parent company performance as well.

So in the end parent company has more trouble to deal with. That makes it divest the captive to a mainstream service provider if not the captive desires to go out on its own. Who will compensate the parent for developing a functional business model and transferring it out of its inventory? It bore the pain for so long. Imagine the level of information they carry. SLA compliance headaches will be fewer since the parent knows what to expect from a former captive. In fact, it can be trusted better because there is a quid pro quo between the parent and the captive for long term associations. Then make other benefits by way of tax savings from carried forward losses of captives available for set offs against the profits of buyer count as well.

I think it’s a good strategy for both buyer to buy and seller to divest a captive than to outsource directly, where the outsourcing vendor will have to outbid the competition by squeezing its own margins. In a sellout, the seller deals with a known devil, the buyer gets the benefit of "a bunch of former buddies" that call the decision makers of the client by first names. Then if the buyer is smart enough, it can soon morph the captive into its mainstream (low) SG&A format and flog it at will.

Now isn't that a viable proposition...? I guess so.

Hat Tip : Basab Pradhan’s post. Read my comments under that.

Single Era Conjecture and the shareholder

2008-05-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

Randal Stross stresses on the “Single Era Conjecture” – a putative law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras.

Stross talks about the gradual decline of Microsoft’s fortunes and puts across some supporting statistics, particularly in its online businesses that have lately been doing worse than ever. He narrates in detail about the IBM era upstaged by Microsoft outwitted by Yahoo done in by Google now. Somehow he leaves out much on other enterprise software firms like Oracle, SAP and of course the IT outsourcing vendors that consume hardware, software and the networks. But let’s presume all are included under the broad umbrella of “companies in computer business”, nobody escapes the single era conjecture.

I am in India, a shareholder in one of India’s leading outsourcing firms and nothing matters to me more than the fortunes of Indian vendors. Now the question how to foresee the coming terminal illness? I saw one when IBM, Accenture and EDS set up their outfits in Indian shores and started mass hiring armies of Indian coders. They scaled up pretty fast and even cornered hundred million $$ plus outsourcing contracts from Indian companies like Bharti marching over smug Indian IT vendors that were looking westward. Later when dollar took a drubbing, our IT vendors realized their folly. By then it was too late but they are somehow coping.

I scan the ability of software majors to scale up in areas other than ADM - to sustain the momentum logged in new service offerings — such as infrastructure management, testing, engineering services and business process management and consulting. Here is where they could be victims of IBM, Accenture roadkills. May be they are trying, trying hard, but I don’t see it in their balance sheets that I receive annually. Neither do I see their seriousness by way of increased R&D spends.

Anyway, I am not here to evangelize or promote Indian vendors. Why only IT, any business that is arrogant enough to neglect the need for change or stupid enough not to have recognized it deserves to die. Future descends equally on everyone and the ones that survive will be those that keep striving hard and pushing the limits. My interest is in capital appreciation and shareholder returns that they give. Single Era Conjecture or not, if my holdings don’t appreciate, I will press sell. So will most other shareholders – including some founders, like that of Infosys who just hold under 14% now after cleverly diluting their stakes in the guise of boosting liquidity in Nasdaq thro successive sponsored ADS offerings.

Yahoo syndrome?

2008-05-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

The lust for internet deals, it seems got rekindled after Microsoft’s recent tryst with Yahoo. Otherwise why am I reading Jana Partners lusting for CNET that owns a few cult portals with too many visitors and not as much revenue? And further CBS racing on to stage a $15 billion (yes Billion it is!) rescue even in these hard times for liquidity and cheap credit. Geez….

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In the end, it all leaves me dazed. Extend the Yahoo metaphor further. Could CNET be suffering from Yahoo Syndrome – an affliction characterized by an inability to convert healthy traffic into nutritious profits? If so why would corporate raiders want a piece of a laggard? Do they see a pattern in starting up a proxy war and cashing out handsomely?

Lastly, has Les Moonves of CBS gone mad? When you know how to make $15 billion, then not knowing how to keep it is a sure sign of insanity.

"Mr.Jerry Yang, call up Ballmer before you run out of luck"

2008-05-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

Yahoo’s troubles seem far from over. It’s getting knocked all over the place. If Steve Ballmer and team destroyed Jerry Yang’s peace for over the last few months, now it’s the turn of his investors training his guns on him for screwing the deal. Carl Icahn is throwing in his might as well.

And now the latest. Imeem has taken over Yahoo's throne by becoming the No. 1 streaming music site in the United States. In what could become another blow to Yahoo, imeem has opened its massive media catalog to third parties with an API that allows outside developers to create music apps that access its library. It's said to be expanding its relationships with music blogs over the next several months. Yahoo, which had acquired large music sites like Broadcast, Launch Media and Musicmatch in order to become the top-ranked music-streaming site in the country, has slipped into second place behind imeem in Compete's list of the top 20 U.S. streaming music sites for March.

I say this to poor Jerry. “Mr.Yang, I suggest you call up Steve Ballmer and ask him to cut that check for $47 billion. You could use some luck if he hasn’t changed his mind completely”.

Know why? By the time this is all over, we may just see Jerry Yang run weeping into the embrace of Steve Ballmer like he was a long-lost brother. Dealing with Carl Icahn, the corporate world's most annoying back-seat driver, can change a man, make him do things he wouldn't ordinarily do. And now that Icahn has piled up $1.3 billion in Yahoo stock and is seeking FTC clearance to double that, CEO Yang and his brain trust are facing an opponent who makes Microsoft's Ballmer look warm and fuzzy. Jerry Yang will look better in bed with Ballmer than with Icahn.

I wish him good luck.

Spot Zuckerberg, keep Rs.10,000

2008-05-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

Here is the announcement by Techgoss. Techgoss will offer Indian Rs. 5000 for the first, exclusive photos of Mark Zuckerberg in India. Another Rs. 5000 for a detailed story on his stay in India. No questions asked. Anonymity guaranteed.

Now what the hell is Zuckerberg doing in India? Seeking some peace after the flutter amongst the Facebook pigeons created by entry of ex-Google fat cat Sheryl Sandberg? Has she begun thinning the ranks at Facebook? Heard that co-founder and CTO Adam D’Angelo, a long time pal of Zuckerberg is leaving the company. For the record, D’Angelo is feeling tired and burned out and wants to take some time off. Oh, really? You hardly take time off when you are in your twenties. Not from the company that relocated itself from Boston to Palo Alto just because D’Angelo was studying computer science in Caltech.

Now is this a sign of good or bad times for FB? Ask Zuckerberg when you spot him around some Bangalore tech alley.

IT has local grounds to cover

2008-05-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Ever noticed the long gaps (yeah, more than a day is long enough) between posts in this blog? I started this blog to write about latest tech trends and potential business ideas. But the pace of innovation in technology itself has become too slow to write anything about. All one could find is incremental innovation – nothing generic or earth shaking. So I chose not to fill cyberspace with mundane muck. Not for me all that Microsoft-Yahoo soap opera that stuffs every tech blog.

I’ve been writing about the need for Indian IT vendors to focus on local customers. The Rupee appreciation has made it all the more necessary and some vendors at least threw open some divisions as well. But there has been no customer survey or market size assessment done officially. Now I found one here. There is no new business idea. But certainly it’s a kicker for IT CMOs that are not so sanguine about local markets.

It says “The use of information technology (IT) by businesses increases profits by 30 per cent and profitability by 3 per cent, says a study by the India Development Fund (IDF), Microsoft and LexisNexis Butterworths India…..Despite India's IT export prowess, there is an alarmingly low internal consumption of technology. A case in point is that about 80 per cent of software produced in the country is towards export. We have discovered that despite documented evidence proving the benefits of technology, investment in manufacturing and domestic businesses still have low adoption rates.”

Now with dollar demand going up because of fatter oil bills, the Rupee has slipped to new lows (Rs.40.98 to the $$). Time for India’s IT vendors to boost their revenues from domestic market. Hope their priorities are in right alignment - their pricing, in particular. You can't expect to sell well-worn packaged software, depreciated over decades for $300 to an Indian SME. [Good that Microsoft is one of the sponsors of that study]. Here they won't pay more than $15 for such stuff because they have a better choice - turn to an assembler and get it all preloaded :)

Why not switch to open source innovation?

2008-04-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

Just as I was wondering a Joint Innovation Model (JIM), I found this analogous post by Nick Carr in a Linux context. He says

“Of the many thousands of changes that have been made to the Linux kernel over he past three years, fully 73.2% came from employees working on behalf of their companies. (Three companies - Red Hat, Novell, and IBM - accounted for 28.4% of all the changes.) Only 13.9% of the changes came from volunteers without a corporate affiliation, and the remaining 12.9% of changes came from developers whose affiliation is unknown”.

Part of the reason is understandably, loss of control. But the fact remains companies are in denial about the value of open R&D collaborations and stick with in-house innovation models. Indoor initiatives don’t attract creative visionaries and passionate teams. However as R&D budgets come under increasing pressure the cost of control and proprietary development will become unacceptable.

Open initiatives not just facilitate knowledge gathering and application, it helps knowledge brokering. This feature is clearly not available in the traditional silo model. While deep understanding remains valuable, it’s utility is multiplied when blended with information and achievements from outside. It saves a lot of R&D $ since they don’t try to boil the ocean. Just do the incremental bit and bingo, you’re there !

For IP vendors of course, a move in this direction could mean unspeakable nightmare :)
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Will iPhone replace blackberry?

2008-04-26T23:37:00.000-07:00

Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers. An industry once characterized by brain-numbing acronyms and droning discussions about enterprise security is now defined by buzz around handset design, video games and mobile social networks.

R.I.M.’s greatest challenge in a consumer-driven smartphone industry may simply be creating devices that people admire and covet as much as the iPhone. Despite the faithfulness of its flock, R.I.M. is not there yet.

Why are they missing the point? iPhone has so many apps on its face that if the user uses it to slowly thumb-type an email, he’s locking himself out of other terrific features that iPhone has to offer. RIM Blackberry all the while, is an alternative dispatch outfit.

What say you?

Consensus on outsourced infrastructure

2008-04-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

With outsourced processing and storage (Amazon S3 and EC2, Google App Engine) getting cheaper by the day, IT startups have a lot going for them. Low startup capital for one.

The question is, will that shrink VC capital available to startups? Not likely seems to be the consensus.

Ask me. I would settle for less certainly. Just what I need to feed my staff, some essential marketing spend and early customer visits. Go for everything that helps dilute less and less stake. Any day. I have Ed Roberts, founder and chair of MIT Entrepreneurship Center for company who says "More startups may, however, get funded by angels or angel groups who have less money than the venture capitalists".

It's Google. Super cool.

2008-04-19T02:09:00.000-07:00

Google may or may not be evil. But God loves Google. So don’t bitch it.

Ask comScore. Google’s first quarter earnings call didn’t have much in the way of theatrics, but a serious brush back pitch was delivered to Comscore.

The brass at comScore and others are working hard today to explain how the implications of its initial report were given a distorted reading in the first place and that apples are being compared to oranges and such, but again, the market hears the headlines and jumps. While Google stock is in the process of posting a one-day gain of about 20 percent, its biggest ever, comScore shares, rightly or wrongly, are taking a credibility penalty in the form of a 2 percent dip.

Nobody crosses Google. Nobody.

Can social media alter customer behavior?

2008-04-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

Does social media (blogs, wikis, podcasts and other UGC) alter customer behavior? Can marketers frame a strategy around such expectations?

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch once said, “The purpose of marketing… should be geared to changing and reinforcing customer actions rather than customer attitude.” Paul Dunay recently revisited this quote and "feel it still holds true. But in the age of social media, it is likely to come under siege." Traditional media is being seen as interruptive, irrelevant or just plain clutter.

I found some interesting comments -

Tom Baker - I think that the day of identifying segments, targeting those segments, and positioning a product offering for a segment are about over as this process is a "from us, to you" sort of process. I see a change where successful companies of the future will be that which listen to their consumers and quickly adapt their offerings to match what they want. Perhaps a dawning of the "true" age of marketing rather than the age of promotion we have been stuck in for the past few decades.
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Elaine Fogel - It sounds great in an ideal situation, where those companies that can turn on a dime can benefit. It's much harder for product manufacturers and importers that need lead time to change their offerings. They would need to do the due diligence and research ahead of time to gain a pulse on what their customers want - within reason, within their product lines, and with the ability to make a profit.
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Vigyan Verma - The key is to make the brand communication relevant to the life of the consumer without sounding overbearing.

Interesting nuggets, all. I wonder why they take customers lightly. Influence of social media can be strong only if it is driven by mass adoption. Except in say US or Western Europe, most people use internet for very basic stuff like checking email, make online reservations or search for jobs. Assuming social media has the power to alter customer behavior and expecting companies to adapt to the new wave is a bit presumptuous if not incorrect - at least not immediately. What say you?

IBM's Racetrack memory

2008-04-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

I like IBM for its old fashioned steady slogging ways. Not for it the glamorous proxy wars, wasting tons of money to buy dying assets. Let Microsoft waste its time and energy to buyout an indecisive Yahoo, forgetting its own enterprise software expertise and in the process ceding some precious market share as well.

IBM has its priorities cut out - like new tech research. This is ultimate digital storage revolution. Imagine how expensive data storage used to be just a few short decades ago? In a few years, the volume of digital entertainment we'll carry in our pocket will start taxing our capability to consume it. But that's the promise of a new digital storage technology - "racetrack" memory - being developed by IBM. It uses the spin of electrons to store data in a system that's much faster, cheaper, consumes far less power and more reliable than today's flash memory. An iPod or similar device powered by racetrack memory would likely hold a half-million songs or 3,500 feature-length films, while holding charge for over a week.

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"The promise of racetrack memory -- for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket -- could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet," said Stuart Parkin, the IBM fellow who led the research. IBM says the technology should be out in about 10 years, so start assembling that monster media collection :-)

When Cool means useless

2008-04-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

Ok. So you will kill and mow down people to get that ultra cool gadget. But how much of it you ever come to use? And why are those basic stuff that you need missing?

Mike Elgan has a go at it. I quote –

“Flashy new technology always gets attention. But after the chatter fades, users are often left with frustration over products' failure to do basic, common-sense functions.

I was reminded of this widespread phenomenon this week when Toshiba's digital products division announced what it calls "sleep-and-charge USB ports." Basically, Toshiba will sell laptops that charge your USB gadgets while the laptops are in sleep or hibernate mode.

Wow! What a spectacularly unspectacular-but-welcome feature! Toshiba actually noticed that travelers often need to charge cell phones and other devices all night, but they don't want to leave their laptops running. Why didn't USB charging work like this from the get-go? And why are so many high-visibility products missing seemingly simple and basic features?”

I look up the number of buttons in my MS-Word application. I may not have used 90% of it, ever. Still repeat versions do carry all of those and consume my precious storage.

The Chinese ringtone

2008-04-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

Move over Nortel, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens and Alcatel. It’s Huawei, ZTE from China storming into Indian telecom equipment market.

Their bargaining chip? No marks for guessing - a 10 to 20 per cent price advantage over European and American competitors and growing engineering capabilities. Huawei sold equipment worth $700 million last year and expects to more than double the revenues from India to $1.5 billion this year. The company has bagged a $500-million order for GSM mobile equipment from Reliance Communications (RCom), the country’s largest CDMA player that is shortly rolling out GSM services.

Hey, what about national security issues? Shut up. For now, it’s pricing power. Everything crumbles before economics, silly! That’s the Chinese trump card.

Here’s the famous line from competition - “[Chinese] have serious issues on servicing their network, plus as they increase their service support staff, their costs will go up. You can’t continue to dump prices and sell for long,” said a senior executive of one of the largest European telecom equipment-makers.

"So, what's the discount?" - No answer.

Virtualization gets "sticky"

2008-04-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

Virtualisation likely will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.

It “is hardly a new concept; storage has already been virtualized — albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures — and so is networking. However, as both server and PC virtualisation become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT” – says Gartner vice-president Philip Dawson.

MokaFive, a desktop virtualization company, will make its formal debut today by offering a virtual OS on Windows, Mac OS and Linux that can be embedded on a USB key and run in an offline mode. It enables remote and guest workers to gain access to applications and/or the corporate network without compromising security. With MokaFive, you can easily create secure virtual desktops that isolate your network and applications from the threats of any unmanaged, third-party computers. Besides it helps disaster recovery, sandboxing, testing and in setting up a virtual mobile workforce.

An entire desktop in a USB stick ! Did you say “mobility”?

Mixed future for Indian outsourcing

2008-04-07T04:40:00.000-07:00

The general feeling amongst the IT and BPO industry is that growth may slowdown but will not stop altogether.

Reflecting gentle buoyancy amidst widespread gloom, Adventity, the BPO/KPO outfit which presently has seven centers in India, plans to foray into two Tier II cities over the next 8-12 months with an investment of 2.5 million dollars each.

TCS, a major IT outsourcing vendor has recently inked a multi-year contract with Chrysler.

Smartly outwitting the local vendors that are focused westwards, IBM is experiencing “strong double-digit growth” in India, with the SMB segment generating about $500 million in revenue, accounting for half of its top line - making India the fastest-growing SMB market globally for IBM. Though its marquee clients include Bharti Airtel, DLF and Idea Cellular, it is keen on projecting an image that it is not just focused on serving large Indian companies.

So it’s not totally hopeless for India’s IT vendors. But gone are the days of 45% growth and labor arbitrage. Now it’s time they move on to VAS, improved efficiency, get far less dollar dependent and think of geographic spread of services to save their margins going forward. It’s time they start challenging IT architecture orthodoxies and begin to bet on everything – virtualization, change management, data centers and utility computing. But they better be quick before nimble startups upstage them.

Way to go, Satyam!

2008-04-02T05:08:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog must be pretty much used to my beating up India’s SWITCH (Satyam, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL Tech) outsourcing vendors. Aligning IT with business strategy has, once again, become a top issue for companies worldwide. Despite the SLA requirements that IT outsourcing vendors will help clients develop IT strategies that deliver measurable business outcomes, clients don’t get to see much on the ground in terms of process/productivity improvements or LOB consulting insights.

But there seems to be a subtle shift happening. Or it could well be the beginning.

Hyderabad-based IT outsourcing vendor Satyam has signed up with Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology (CIPET), an autonomous training and application research institute under the ministry of chemicals and fertilizers, for developing new engineering plastic materials through an industry-institute collaborative approach. The collaboration is part of Satyam's strategic initiative of developing a global ecosystem of alliances to provide total engineering solutions to its customers.

This is getting closer to the “end-to-end” services that most vendors profess they offer. Vendors should complement their rich portfolio of assets and processes with new services that provide greater insight into business performance. This is becoming particularly important as companies face new challenges in a variety of areas. IT vendors’ longevity depends on the quantum of load they take off the back of clients and upon themselves, acquiring capabilities on the run. In that we get new vendor efficiency metric – a combination of speed and magnitude of such offtake that ends with faster and effective post-process delivery with visible productivity improvements the client by itself couldn’t have hoped to achieve.

"We need just Information; Vendors can keep the Tech"

2008-03-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

Michael Krigsman predicts end of IT –

“Since the days of punch cards, IT has believed itself to be guardian of precious computing resources against attacks from non-technical barbarians known as “users.” This arrogant attitude, born of once-practical necessity in the era of early data centers, reflects inability to adapt to present-day realities. Such attitudes, combined with recent technological and social changes, are pushing IT to share the fate of long-extinct dinosaurs.”

Yes. Complexity can no longer ensure CIO’s job security and worse, he has to make way for user onslaught.

To that, Vinnie Mirchandani brings out a stellar insight –

"I am amazed how arrogant the category of social software really is. Why does it feel the need to boil the ocean, change the enterprise? It has its role particularly in collaboration - but along side not instead of CRM, SCM, ERP, security, telecom and a bunch of other software categories. It needs to do its job well, not worry about the rest of the enterprise.

When it hones its focus and shows appropriate payback, it will find the CIO or IT is not the enemy. Just a bunch of folks trying to juggle a wide range of competing technology initiatives."

I agree with both. But I have this user perspective –

Enterprise IT faces extinction if it does not progressively busy itself with envisioning where a company is going and take over its IT complexities. Clients have just Information needs; spare them the pain of Technology. Enterprise IT vendors can very well keep it.

Here are some more areas where Enterprise could play a larger role. Think of Master Data Management, Meta Data integration, App streaming and moving from process centric to information centric architecture. In effect, transform Business Intelligence to much wider Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that yields the big picture. In that I see the end of licensing model as we know it. Transition to significantly more flexible memory based pricing or even by the no. of virtual cores.

Darwin said "extinction presages evolution" and in all this, they sure will be doing Darwin a lot proud :)

Is it R.I.P for IT security vendors?

2008-03-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Fear is the key driver that sells insurance and - security software. So I don’t bother to read further if I see headlines like this. “Phishing attacks on banks rise six-fold: Symantec.” To me, it means Symantec badly needs to scale up revenues. Here is the sales talk in that report –

“The Symantec lab monitors the complete threat spectrum and malware activity all across the world. It provides support in 14 languages against phishers who are extensively using sophisticated methods to install spyware, Trojans, worms and viruses.”

All hogwash. Go read this. Trend Micro is another security vendor like Symantec and its own site is hacked ! When security vendors can’t protect their own sites from hackers, how will they secure others? It's embarrassing when security vendors fall victim to the attacks they are supposed to prevent and Trend Micro is not the lone ranger. It just ran out of luck and got reported :)

Time to short all IT security vendors…?

Microhoo deal is very much on

2008-03-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

So, what’s happening to the Microsoft-Yahoo (Microhoo) deal? I don’t get to hear much on that. Meanwhile MSFT acquisition engine has not slackened its pace. Here it adds to its Bay area presence by acquiring Rapt, a software and consulting services provider that helps online publishers optimally price and package their display space.

Now I have no illusions of MSFT dropping off on Yahoo acquisition. If anything it means it is even more serious in taking on Google and become an online advertising heavyweight. With Yahoo gone, online application developers were a worried lot. They lost a major acquirer of their businesses. Now they should be breathing a lot easy with Microsoft picking up the slack.

Upgrade upgrade

2008-03-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

So Oracle Database 11g is here. How do users view upgrades? I ask.

Most of Oracle database users haven’t yet started using all features in their existing versions. It’s like the new car full of new knobs that you may seldom turn. Given an option, I would say *no* to those premium features if that means lower priced pack. But I get no option if it comes as part of the basic version, ex-works. In the enterprise software world, users get no choice on their first buy even as they could make do with far less features. Visualize the downtime for installation of the new version, you would swear by SaaS models. The new database environments of 11g may be chic, more automated and may even free up a lot of DBA resources, but the pricing rankles. DBAs in charge of the earlier versions come comparably a lot cheaper.

Customers see frequent across-the-board upgrades (except where new applications warrant them) as candid confessions by vendors that their older releases suck. Over the years, vendors have carved a lifeline along that business model. It just means they gave crappy database environments earlier, right?

How about some refunds, Mr.Ellison…? Your friend Steve Jobs did that with his iPhone recently.

CA, Symonds - learn from Steve Ballmer, folks !

2008-03-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

The Monkey word. It means different things to different people. Symonds and Cricket Australia (CA) took offense, but Steve Ballmer has no issues with Guy Kawasaki. Ha ! He even says the G-word again and again, again and again. But he's not so benign with Guy’s McBook Air. Here he tosses it down on the carpet and tries to break it. Says it doesn’t have a DVD drive :)

I must say Guy kissed a lot of Ballmer ass in that chat. I got this vibe that MSFT seems to be dabbling in a new vertical now - image makeover. From what I’ve found in his blog, Guy normally has some deep drill question sets for most of his interviewees and here he hardly had any. May be he got scared of Ballmer's huge frame! The questions – Yahoo bid, Vista bugs and Google threat – have all been so frosty and predictable and he was unusually docile in letting Ballmer steal the show. So unlike Guy. Sounded all too stage managed by Microsoft PR team to project a cool image of the company and of Ballmer himself (aimed at rattled Yahoo employees?). Ballmer was in full glow throughout; he even leaked his email ID to the open audience.

Good friend Vinnie Mirchandani has his set of questions for Ballmer on MS enterprise initiatives that Guy didn’t cover. If Ballmer’s mood at that sitcom were for real, he may well be getting some honest answers too. Not the Ballmer we thought he is… Watch it, folks. Don’t miss out !

Muffle all chatter and squirm...

2008-03-04T04:58:00.000-08:00

So what happens to humans in the absence of all auditory stimulation? You’ll likely experience "audio hallucinations," only they aren't, at all. Turns out, you actually do start to pick up on the nuances of your own body at work. The sound of the blood in the vessels of your inner ear suddenly becomes apparent. After a minute or so, you can even hear your own heart beat. You also get dizzy.

You’ve just entered the International HQ for Microsoft Research. It's in this room that Microsoft researchers conduct various sound experiments to improve teleconferencing and various auditory recognition technologies. By effectively simulating complete silence, researchers can accurately measure spatial sound patterns without having to deal with echoes and reverberations that are a part of our normal day-to-day existence.

The one concession designers did make was to incorporate specially designed air ducts that pump air into the room. While they do produce a minute level of noise, they can also be shut off, effectively cutting off all air flow for "perfect silence," as one Microsoft researcher put it.

I’d rather have some chatter….

No fun in monopolies

2008-02-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is running into trouble with EU yet again.

"Talk," says the EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, "is cheap. Flouting the rules is expensive." How expensive? Well, several years of flouting and talking are going to cost Microsoft a record fine of 899 million euros, or about $1.35 billion if the dollar doesn't keep dropping.

On top of previous fines stemming from the same judgment, Microsoft's EU tab stands at about $2.6 billion. Tell me, is there any fun in running monopolies?

"Giv'em more Jammers instead"

2008-02-26T23:25:00.000-08:00

David Talbot is happy for US soldiers in Iraq. Here’s what he has to say -

“…the days of patrol leaders operating half-blind on the deadly streets of Iraq are drawing to a close. After a two-year rush program by the Pentagon's research arm, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, troops are now getting what might be described as Google Maps for the Iraq counterinsurgency. There is nothing cutting-edge about the underlying technology: software that runs on PCs and taps multiple distributed databases. But the trove of information the system [the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR] delivers is of central importance in the daily lives of soldiers…”

I am happy too. But if it is as open-source, low on tech and as popular as Google maps, I’d better be worried. For all you know, the militants would be pinging pentagon already using something like it or better still, powered by reliable ground intelligence and real time data on troop movements (they speak the language too mind you!). GPS is cookie cutter in this day and age.

Give them more Jammers, instead…!

Staring down the wrong barrel, Ballmer?

2008-02-24T20:34:00.000-08:00

So here you’ve got an interesting twist in the boringly slow Microsoft-Yahoo (mis)match. Randall Stross of NYT echoes the sentiments expressed by MIT professor Michael Cusumano in goading MSFT to “go stalk SAP” instead of Yahoo!

As far as the reasons go, Cusumano says it’s useless to pursue an outmoded, declining internet asset at a premium. MSFT could do well to focus on enterprise software segment where it has a major presence. He points to Oracle’s strategic acquisitions and its impressively regular, prudent use of capital to “roll up firms with similar products and customers to its own.” All of its 13, 13 and 11 acquisitions made by Oracle in 2005, `06 and `07 have been linear to its own LOB and at reasonable valuations. But he acknowledges that it’s hard not to be distracted by the buzz surrounding the internet crowd across the street and goes on to admire Oracle all the more for that. The Cusumano gospel wraps it up in a one-line strategy checklist for MSFT - to find the best acquisition strategy, ask, “What would Larry [Ellison] do?” The Stross warning follows – “If Microsoft tries to fight Google with wobbly legs, scared witless, it will lose”.

But then Dan Farber and Larry Dignan differ.

My money sense suggests Ballmer would be better off if he dumps all acquisition ideas in Ether and heads to the real (estate) world. He’ll get it for a lot less now. $44.6 billion is a lot of cash and he can use it to buy foreclosed real estate across Sacramento, CA or an entire Slavic village in Cleveland, Ohio on the cheap. The bet is much safer.

Behind that mask, hides the monster?

2008-02-21T21:04:00.000-08:00

I don’t believe this. Could this be Microsoft? The same Company that threatened lawsuits to deter customers from using Linux? But then As Marey Jo Foley says, Microsoft’s OSS strategy makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It’s another way for Microsoft to try to make Linux obsolete, and not look as obviously ruthless doing so. And for OSS vendors who are selling a lot of their software on Windows.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

But then as Om Malik says, Ray Ozzie is talking about software partners, APIs, web services and the need for Microsoft to change [the way] it does business, and become open and interoperable. Between the lines you can read, Microsoft is worried, scratch that, very worried about developers leaving them in the cold. Om quotes analysts while suspecting MSFT is worried about the EU and the Justice Department creating problems when it comes to the pending Yahoo bid and the Danger deal.

At first blush looks like the leopard is changing its spots. Is it? Let you know soon.

The merger effect

2008-02-21T20:38:00.000-08:00

In the software industry, M&A are known to the fastest way to ramp up customer & product stack portfolio. It occasionally creates shareholder value too, though not guaranteed. But hardly does anyone concern how the customer sees it. Agreed, making predictions is a tricky business to begin with. But in the case of the business intelligence (BI) market, recent consolidation has made the task even more difficult than usual and left industry experts largely at odds.

Within the last year, Oracle has acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects and IBM acquired Cognos. The only agreement is that until "mega-vendors" SAP, IBM and Oracle announce integration strategies for their recently acquired BI technologies -- expected to happen sometime in the next six to 12 months -- customers have little more to rely on than their wits when making BI buying decisions. Even then, the only sure bet is that they will have to make some difficult choices. The toughest decisions will fall to customers of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, whose IT infrastructures are not based on the technology of the acquiring vendor -- SAP, IBM and Oracle, respectively.

Exactly why I say it makes sense for open source BI companies like Pentaho to come up with expansion plans to take on the significant consolidation in the estimated $6.25 billion business intelligence industry. Hopefully, it will tempt the big enterprise players not to raise prices for upgrades and maintenance.

But then in their post-merger avatars, will they remain the darling of SMB’s…? What do you think…?

As IT begins to dim

2008-02-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

A recession spares none. Here I read Indian IT vendors are likely to cut the onsite allowances of employees at clients’ offices abroad by 25 to 30 per cent from April 1, 2008.

I can see CEOs of many other Indian companies smile. Those needing Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Automobiles, Chemical engineering talent were totally deprived since all roads led to IT in the past. The low margins of these businesses could’ve hardly afforded the lavish $$ denominated allowance structure offered by IT vendors.

Every dog has its day. But years of code writing sitting in a cube farm sure would've corrupted their acumen. Do you think they'll be competent enough…? Think of having to live in buildings built by bunch of ex bug fixers…? Hmmm.... Scary.

Live by the Cloud, Die by the Cloud

2008-02-16T04:32:00.000-08:00

All that jazzed about SaaS suffered a rude jolt when Amazon web services (EC2, S3) had its outage this morning. We had suffered Skype outage before but that was free VOIP calls and you had a fallback. But this could ruin many a small business – especially if they’d put it up in the Amazon cloud. Twitter for one.

The retail to digital media to web services giant has made a lot of progress persuading small and midsize businesses to use its enterprise infrastructure for all their data storage and server needs. The cloud computing proposition sounds plenty compelling: Focus on building your business and leave the driving to us.

But all it takes is a bad crash to give people second thoughts. For the quality of infrastructure and the resultant cost savings that S3 offers, how many would really crow about one outage every two years…? Larry Dignan says you won’t recognize it in the next decade.

Meanwhile I had a look at Amazon’s 2007 numbers and some analysis. Coffee or tech? Looks like coffee isn’t a bad business. Amazon makes $207million on $5.67billion($0.48 earnings, $74.21 stock per share), or Starbucks $208million on $2.8billion($0.23earnings, $19.22 stock per share). Which look like a better business to you?

So, stay put? Nothing to worry? Live by the Cloud, die by the Cloud, I say.

I've got my new phone... Can I have a holster please?

2008-02-12T20:46:00.000-08:00

There is a certain suspicion that someone have quietly slipped in a generous dose of steroid into Redmond water supply. Close on the heels of its hostile bid to swallow Yahoo, MSFT quietly bought Danger, a Palo Alto company best-known for creating the technology behind T-Mobile's chic Sidekick smart phones, for $500 M.

X-box, Zune and now sidekick… Is MSFT getting serious about hardware? Well, with a competitor like Apple around (now that the CEOs share the same first name), it ain’t got no choice. RIM has its Blackberry, Palm has its Treo, Apple has its iPhone, but Microsoft had nothing before. Now it's got this… But as Erick schonfeld says “mobile handsets business can be brutal” and he points to Motorola.

I agree. Tell me something… with so many features loaded into a cell phone, why not someone design a holster?

Can't beat'em? Join'em...

2008-02-09T23:54:00.001-08:00

If this happens, the enterprise IT universe is sure to be disrupted. Very violently perhaps. Will Oracle bite it?

If it doesn't, SAP / Microsoft / HP will be more than happy to - even if it takes cannibalizing their own in-house initiatives to turn on-demand from on-premise models.

When in doubt, whip up bidding frenzy...

2008-02-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

OK. So Yahoo has help at hand. Microsoft can’t have it easy if there’s gonna be a bidding war, especially with Google in the fray.

This puts us, users - officially in the spin zone, where the air gets cloudy with FUD. VC Fred Wilson says “Consolidation of ownership of web services is not a good thing for the Internet. If you think about the Internet, it's a huge distributed network of loosely connected services owned and operated by literally millions.”

Fred quotes several analysts outlining the way forward for Yahoo –

Outsource search to Google. That will provide at 25% boost to cash flow according to Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. I have heard that this is worth about $10/share in Yahoo!'s stock price.
.
Dividend out to shareholders the interests in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba. They are worth $12/share according to this WSJ article.

Split up the remaining company into several businesses which can be independent public or private companies. I would put Yahoo! home page, search, MyYahoo, and email into one company and let that be new Yahoo! The other assets could be sold off or assembled into additional private or public companies.

Being a prolific user of the Web, I loath any one player dominating this universal medium. While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has a checkered history. It frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets. On those lines, the acquisition of Yahoo will allow Microsoft to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet. That’s a bit scary.

That was my perspective as a user of search. Now come to think like a Yahoo stock owner. When pressed between a rock and a hard place and with no clear growth strategy that Yahoo has now, it’s better to sell and cash out. There are a lot better things that one can do with the kind of money MSFT or any rival bidder might offer. With America looking into that deep pit of a recession, the next boom could be a few years away. So I prefer cash in hand so that I can buy some assets on the cheap. There could be several foreclosed houses coming at bargain prices.

I have no illusions of Yahoo climbing up the ladder on its own, not at least as long as Google is around. So why not gradually swap it for some Google stock itself – at $544 a share, I’d say it’s not bad. Or to take a slightly contrarian view (if you have some guts, that is) go stock up on a Citigroup or Merrill Lynch that come dead cheap now thanks to the mortgage meltdown. The tide would soon turn since SWFs are bailing them out and they’ll be right back at their prime, may be with different owners. Meanwhile Yahoo board can order a re-valuation of its shares in the interest of its shareholders, to give them a better idea of their stock’s worth and pray for the time lag to whip up some bidding frenzy as a bonus… Get me Larry Ellison, please - will ya...!

Tell me, how do you like my little spin…?

Will they say Woof...?

2008-02-01T23:56:00.000-08:00

Steve Ballmer could not have timed his offer better. Yahoo’s Q4 earnings have lagged and Google momentum is clearly slowing.

In Q4 2007, Microsoft had online revenue of $863 million, compared with $4.8 billion at Google. Yahoo and Microsoft together had more than $2.6 billion in revenue, still trailing well behind Google but in a far stronger competitive position. In effect, this deal is a clear admission by MSFT that its online strategies have failed to work.

MSFT has grown solidly for years, but investors give it little credit. Its stock price has long been stagnant, despite the company’s extremely profitable businesses. The Office division alone had quarterly revenue of $4.8 billion — equal to Google — and an astronomical $3.2 billion in operating profits. The Windows unit is even more profitable. But it has not shaken things up as it used to for quite a while.

It’s a risky strategy for both trying to take on the leader by going to bed with strangers. Never mind so long as they don’t say Woof…

The Quarter Massacre

2008-01-30T03:46:00.000-08:00

Investors can be an unforgiving lot – that makes the stock market a fickle, frustrating space. Last August, VMware, maker of virtualization software, went public in the most anticipated tech IPO in years, immediately climbed from an opening price of $ 29 a share past $50, going up to $80-100 by the year end. Yesterday, it came out with excellent set of numbers with Q4 revenues up 80% and projected 50% growth in coming years. Not too shabby at all.

But the same crowd of nervous investors that pummeled Apple – for flattening iPod sales - after its great quarter thought 50 percent growth sounded like too quick a drop-off from 70-80 percent rate VMware had been posting. The reasoning that the growth rate is slowing because the company is much larger now went unheeded, and by the time the last knife was put away, the share was down 35% to $28, its debut price - investors had lost close to $10b in market cap.

Now you see the power – or is it a curse – of quarterly numbers. Time for Private Equity funds to move in for the kill and take it private?

Ah, that brings me to the Forbes Midas list of VCs that got released. Here you go. John Doerr, Michael Moritz, Ram Shriram… and so it reads.

IBM reveals its ugly underbelly

2008-01-23T22:30:00.000-08:00

Back in 2006, IBM had responded to a lawsuit accusing it of withholding overtime (OT) of its employees by agreeing to pay them $65 million. Now it wants to make that up by shaving off 15% base pay of those employees.

It’s a constant outcry from clients that Indian IT outsourcing vendors charge very high margins even as IBM and others make do with far less. If this is how they do it, it’s pretty ugly.

Virtualization roadblocks

2008-01-22T23:29:00.000-08:00

Increased adoption of virtualization means better business for system security vendors. Larry Dignan elaborates.

But I just wonder. Why would virtualization majors don’t take up the task on their own? When you release a product, you can fix a bug in it better than any external security vendor. You know where you’d gone wrong and what needs to be patched up. Why would you leave a lifeline to someone else?

I agree with Larry as he says “If anything, virtualization will be in place before anyone notices the security issues. There’s something about saving so much on hardware, easy server provisioning and more IT flexibility that overshadows any security worries.”

It’s a bit like parenting, I suppose. You can sire kids. You just can’t mend them :)

Prince's poison is Pandit's meat

2008-01-15T21:07:00.000-08:00

And you thought Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup is in the hot seat because of this. I say the man is in an enviable position of sorts. By taking over the mantle of Citigroup after the former CEO Chuck Prince quit over subprime excesses, he enjoys a free rein. He wields enormous power now and can do whatever he pleases to fix the mess; and if the outcome isn’t as expected, none would point a finger at him given the depth of the hole. He literally has a carte blanche – to write down billions of $$ of marked down assets, power to re-price risks, restate income sheets, declare massive layoffs, cut down dividends or what have you. On top of that, even a dollar in profit next year by the group could come to his credit. You know why, things can’t get any worse.

Outsourcing vendors in India should see opportunity here. There will be no backlash if Citigroup outsources even the basic functions to off-shore vendors like the SWITCH conclave or even to IBM, Accenture or EDS outfits in India – despite this being an election year in the US.

I'd rather be offline inside the Dreamliner

2008-01-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore" goes French historian and novelist Andre Malraux – motivating people to take risks, innovate and grow. But it seems designers at Boeing took that *oceanic discovery* bit a trifle too seriously while working on its 787 Dreamliner. In their eagerness to go one up on competitor Airbus industrie, they chose to let nerdy passengers hook up to the Net while airborne. Nothing wrong with that feature addition, had they not been so very generous to let cyber crawlers mess with the aircraft's control and navigation systems compromising flight safety. Excerpts from the Wired article -

"An FAA document published in the Federal Register (mirrored at Cryptome.org) says, the vulnerability exists because the plane's computer systems connect the passenger network with the flight-safety, control and navigation network...."

"....Boeing spokeswoman Lori Gunter said the wording of the FAA document is misleading, and that the plane's networks don't completely connect. Gunter wouldn't go into detail about how Boeing is tackling the issue but says it is employing a combination of solutions that involves some physical separation of the networks, known as "air gaps," and software firewalls."

Buckle up, log in and crash? Enough to give nightmares... I picture Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri smiling at each other in their caves. Could they have asked for more....?

This is one innovation I'd rather Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing not push too hard. Jim should know that the ultimate in customer service in his line of business is to deliver fail proof equipment systems that allow pilots to guide the airplane to a safe, smooth touch down on the tarmac, on all its wheels. Giving online comforts to nerdy creeps can wait. I am certainly not a fan of belly landing U-boat style adventures..... Scares the shit outta' me...!

Did you say `trained personnel'...?

2007-12-21T19:46:00.000-08:00

Look who’s inviting India’s IT and BPO moghuls. Beachy Sri Lanka. They are calling Indian ITES and BPO companies to invest in the island nation claiming that the country would provide competitive edge with its large talent pool of trained personnel available at lower costs.

Here’s what its minister for export development and international trade G L Peiris has to say at a FICCI conference in Chennai. “Indian companies can invest in Sri Lanka to oursource their projects here. We have a large talent pool of trained personnel avilable at lower costs. Outsouring of projects here will significantly help Indian companies reduce operational costs as well as offset the effect of rupee appreciation against the dollar”.

Hey, wait a minute. Did he say a large talent pool of `trained’ personnel…? Parse the word `training' and see where he allots real estate for your BPO. If it is in Jaffna or Mullaitheevu, you’ll save money on security guards. The word `training’ means something entirely different there. In that part of Sri Lanka, they train differently. At age 3, you handle a pistol. At 6, you know how to hurl a grenade. At 7, you launch a missile from your shoulder. Every call center guy you hire could as well be your security guard. The upside…? You can give those `other’ guys a run for their money if they ever try to blow you up.

Cloud fails to capture

2007-12-19T17:04:00.000-08:00

Cloud computing may be the in-thing, but if early fanfare is to go by, don't play the requiem music for enterprise software just yet. Those folks with their heads in the clouds about online productivity tools doing serious damage to Microsoft's Office got a reality check recently -- some stats showing just how far away that may be.

A sampling of U.S. PC users by research outfit NPD found that 73% had never even heard of Google Docs, the search sovereign's collaborative word-processing tool, or any other manifestations of cloud computing. An additional 21 percent had heard of such things, but never tried them. And by the time you get down to those who use the online tools often and to the exclusion of a desktop suite, you have to squint to see the 0.3 percent.

Those numbers tempted some to rush out a declaration that the concept of Web 2.0 office suite was DOA. "The scant adoption makes some sense of Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, which went into broad beta last week. The service clearly is designed to be an adjunct to Office desktop software rather than a Web-based alternative," writes Joe Wilcox. "If NPD's numbers are indicative of real-world usage, Microsoft hasn't much to worry from Google Docs and Spreadsheets or other online alternatives. Maybe too many people make too much about the Web 2.0 threat to Office."

Or maybe too many people made too much of it too early. "We're in the early stages of the 'hybrid phase' of personal productivity applications, when most people will use Web apps to extend rather than replace their old Office apps," writes Nick Carr. "This phase will play out over a number of years as the Web technologies mature, at which point it will become natural to use purely Web-based apps (with, probably, continued local caching of data and program code). ... Once people get used to using the online apps at home or at school, they may well find the idea of buying an expensive piece of software, installing it on their hard drive, and regularly patching and updating it to be awfully old-fashioned. That's the scenario that should be of greatest immediate concern to Microsoft, and it's a scenario that is beginning to play out, even if the numbers aren't yet huge."

But can Enterprise suites get smug and choose to be un-sexy…? Hardly. Here’s to their tomorrow.

Not so soon, dude....

2007-12-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the largest Indian outsource consulting firms, with $4.3 billion in revenue, has released new IT failure research, based on survey results of 800 middle and senior IT managers from large companies.

According to the study findings:

a) 62% of organizations experienced IT projects that failed to meet their schedules
b) 49% suffered from budget overruns
c) 47% had higher-than-expected maintenance costs
d) 41% failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI

Business-critical software and services projects are clearly failing to deliver on the business objectives they set out to achieve. They take too long, cost too much and are riddled with defects.

1 in 3 companies’ IT projects fail to perform against expectations…

I suggest the local vendors should go back and take a look at their project commitments and under-achievements. A neat, honest compilation would highlight where they go wrong and the shortfalls that led to them. If you are too shy to do it, learn from others and bridge the knowledge gap – Michael Krigsman interviewing N.Chandrasekaran of TCS. Some candid admissions there.

Then I read this report today. It kinda’ pats the Indian IT vendors and tells the investors to go long on Indian IT. They seem to say it is still a good bet despite the rising Rupee and falling margins / stock prices. I say don’t get deluded – if local vendors don’t start listening to the customer. The customer speaks thro his CIO who in turn sounds more like LOB executive. Spend some time understanding customer’s LOB and be a strategic partner besides just being a bodyshop or an off-shore vendor. If you don’t, you are sure to be outdone by an IBM, Accenture or an EDS at the next pitch.

If the Indian vendors still aren’t convinced, Wall Street (ADRs are listed at Nasdaq and NYSE) and Dalal Street (counterpart at Mumbai, India, where their underlying shares are listed) will talk to them. They will understand that language anyway. You decide which option is better.

Losing sight of domestic business...

2007-12-10T04:14:00.000-08:00

Yeah, flat world indeed… Here. IBM eating straight off Indian IT vendors’ plate, snatching it right from under their nose.

Vodafone Essar has signed an IT outsourcing agreement with IBM India. Deal size is rumored to be about $600 M. Under the five-year agreement, IBM India will assume responsibility for the management of all Vodafone Essar's IT operations with the exception of network service platforms. IBM India will also manage internal IT services for Vodafone Essar like data centre operations and the help desk while supporting key areas like security and change programs.

I wonder why Indian IT vendors like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Satyam didn’t get this business. In these bad times for the $$, revenues in any other currency should be most welcome - it acts as a zero cost natural hedge against the falling dollar and protects margins to some degree. Still haunted by that margin fixation…? Or is it that Vodafone India has lost its western flavor after acquiring Hutch Essar…?

While Indian IT vendors are crowing about falling $$, global IT majors like IBM are cornering larger share of India’s growing domestic IT budgets. Smart, isn’t it…? Deals like this act as a natural hedge against the fast decaying dollar and ups the ante against India’s IT majors that still keep gazing westward.

But with one difference. They also do this. The thoroughbred that IBM is, it also plans to increase its investments in its two software laboratories in Pune and Bangalore as part of its $1.5 billion security initiative in 2008, announced on November 1. Fuelled by recent security business acquisitions (including Internet Security Systems — now IBM-ISS), and more than 18 months in development, the IBM security initiative is the largest-ever undertaken in the IT industry. In comparison, the R&D spends of India’s IT vendors are mostly on project specific training for setting up labs etc., before client visits (masked as R&D). Now you know why that looks like a rounding error to me…:)

[Update : Industry estimates peg the turnovers of MNCs like Dell, Intel, Microsoft and IBM at well over the half-billion dollar mark. Firms, like Cisco, are said to have crossed the billion-dollar mark in domestic sales in 2006-07, and for a player like HP India, it is estimated in excess of $2.5 billion. ]

"Hell, I don't know how to bill"

2007-12-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

Andy Dornan examines the impact of virtualization and multi-core processors on software licensing models, with significant implications for data center consolidation projects that use these technologies. Article is a bit long, so I gist it for you.

Licensing savings were one of the main arguments initially made in favor of application streaming, the first desktop virtualization technology aimed at the enterprise. Vendors like Softricity promised that centralizing applications on a server, instead of installing them on every desktop, would mean fewer required licenses, because apps would need to be licensed only for the number of people actually using them at any given time. That savings pitch fell by the wayside, however, once Softricity was bought by Microsoft.

Now the traditional licensing model is threatened again. Multicore processors and virtualization are nails in the coffin for standard software licensing models, but there's no agreement on a replacement. And the problem isn't confined to the data center. Licensing issues have already slowed development of Intel's virtualization technologies aimed at desktop management, while Microsoft is using desktop virtualization as a way to drive adoption of its Software Assurance subscriptions.

While it's tempting for enterprise IT to chuckle at this state of affairs, you need to pay attention: Alternative licensing schemes range from the familiar, like open source and SaaS, to untested models like pricing based on memory or virtual cores. At best, they could mean lower costs and more flexibility.

But let's be real--when have software vendors embraced low costs and flexibility? Worst case, the hardware savings from the server consolidation that virtualization enables will be gobbled up by software licensing charges....

"Guess, where I am"

2007-12-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

Starting next week and over the next few months, several United States airlines will test Internet service on their planes – News.

That's progress, but as usual, there's a price. As many people as there are who are enthusiastic about keeping their connections aloft, surely there must be an equal number who appreciated the brief hours of electronic abstinence imposed by airline travel, the enforced opportunity to put the keyboard away and do something analog, like reading one of those low-tech paper books, or pondering the questions of the universe, or even something as bold as emptying the brain and quieting the mind. Sure, you'll still have the choice to unplug; you just won't have the built-in excuse. Still, these pilot programs are the leading edge of an inevitability.

Can’t imagine someone sending IMs up to the cockpit saying stuff like, "I'm in ur cabin, messing with ur frequencies."

Are you really sorry, Facebook..?

2007-12-05T22:31:00.000-08:00

Mark Zuckerberg says something like this on the Beacon Fiasco in his Facebook blog. The only sentence that conveyed something close to remorse in that smallest font, full-page piece is “I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better”. Does that sound like an apology to you…? Not really.

To me it sounded like the tone of someone big who never thought he would get caught. Yet here he is, caught with his fingers in the "Big Brother" jar. May be Mark thought it's okay to break the law until it's discovered, then just haul out PR people until it all blows over – in doing that, he's only following the other moghuls that went down that road before him. They are made of sterner stuff. Even after they get caught, the instinct is to spin and fudge and brazen it out. No wonder Microsoft has partnered with them and got straight into business – of infecting them with its wild ways. It's a match made in heaven. These guys are a bit like Google too, only their slogan isn't "Don't be evil" -- it's "Don't get caught."

Business models are known to align the enterprise interests with those of its customers. The happier customers are, the more money they make. Facebook's business model is the opposite. It pits Facebook against its customers. The amount of money that Facebook can make is defined (and constrained) by the degree to which its users will allow themselves to be exploited.

But how different is Facebook from other big players? Not much. Is it any different from Google handing over search data to China, or Microsoft crushing opposing browsers beneath its heels, or Du Pont denying that CFCs destroy the ozone layer, etc.?

"If Facebook is so ass, why not just stop using it?" I ask the world. I am not expecting candid answers though....

Nokia gets ambitious

2007-11-29T23:01:00.000-08:00

Here’ what I wrote about Nokia earlier…

The Finns seem to have finished their reindeer steak lunch and have chased it down with some frosty beer… But what they have liked best it seems is their move to the Asian tropics - India in particular.

It now wants to be a one-stop platform for mobile users to buy music and entertainment services, do their business over the mobile Internet and use their handsets for everything from banking to buying movie tickets. Put simply, Nokia wants to be an Internet-driven services firm.

In a statement announcing the decision in August this year, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said, “the convergence of the mobile communications and Internet industries is opening up new growth opportunities for us, in the devices business as well as in consumer Internet services and enterprise solutions. Growing consumer demand for rich, mobile experiences creates an opportunity for change. Nokia will bring these capabilities to the broadest range of devices and price points.”

How will this happen? They seem to have elaborate plans. Internal restructuring, inorganic growth, services integration and silo management etc. Find it all here.

Does it spell good or bad news for many small mobile application developers…? How will it get the telcos to fix the ubiquitous call drops? If that basic service isn’t fixed, I don’t think people will migrate to high end phones.

I’ve got some curious enquiries from mobile app developers… What should I be telling them…? That Nokia is in a shopping mood...? Are you Mr.Shivakumar....?

Don't let your telco gouge you

2007-11-29T06:48:00.000-08:00

You may have read about Cubic Telecom’s disruptive service here earlier.

Now here’s David Berlind’s take on it based on his actual experience using it in Ireland. “If Skype was disruptive to telcos, then Cubic is going to be their nightmare (good for you)” he says.

Read on and save precious airtime $$... Don’t let your telco gouge you while roaming overseas.

The boy-coder turns big dreamer

2007-11-28T06:08:00.000-08:00

If opening up Facebook API ever had a purpose, this seems to be it. The Mark Zuckerberg tell all.

Social Networking sites (SNs) like Facebook and MySpace after amassing millions of users, have eventually put them to the best use. They have too much of your personal stuff, likes and preferences that can’t go unexploited by advertisers. But when they say that’s their purpose, they won’t find many takers. So what do they do?

First open up the API for developers to celebrate. Ask them to develop cool applications that could suck in more users. That makes it easier for you to define habits, categorize users and segment the market in terms of early adopters. Now go present those findings in a platter so that advertisers could close in for the kill. Users like you’ve nowhere to hide, just stick around like suckers and be part of a captive audience for them to infect you.

Then I turn to Nick Carr. Here's why he calls it a social graft.

Quote the Zuckster: "The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today."

Yes, today is the first day of the rest of advertising's life.”

So that’s it. As Nick says “Marketing is conversational, says Zuckerberg, and advertising is social. There is no intimacy that is not a branding opportunity, no friendship that can't be monetized, no kiss that doesn't carry an exchange of value. The cluetrain has reached its last stop, its terminus, the end of the line.”

Touche.

On my other blogs

2007-11-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

All go-rhythmic

Detroit would love this
That sinking feeling
Look who is shorting the dollar

General Partners v Limited Partners

But they are exporting it all
It’s like yesterday once more
Who wants to change

Angel 4 Angels

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