Mysorean

40+ Channels of pure music. No advertisements and other useless stuff. And to top it all, they have my favourite person as their brand ambassador!

An article in the Business Standard quotes my father regarding the financial results of Infotech Enterprises Limited.

Infotech Enterprises will be spending Rs 34 crore on plant and machinery and Rs. 30 crore on development of the facility. According to S Nataraja, vice-president (finance and accounts), Infotech Enterprises, the expansion will be financed primarily by internal accruals and partly by debt.

An article in the Economic Times talks about a 10k PC that Intel will launch sometime later this year.

Traditionally, low-priced PCs have not succeeded in India, as the cost of distribution and promotion doesn’t leave enough for the distributors who control the trade. Indian PC makers who launched sub-Rs 10,000 PCs with much media fanfare have stopped promoting or even supplying them to their distributors. The margins on these PCs are too small to receive adequate attention from PC makers or their distributors, and volumes are not high due to a lack of promotion

It’s Intel’s turn now! Get into low cost computers, increase volumes, achieve economies of scale, lower costs, higher profits. Rural Markets, ha!

Here is the other view I was talking about. The $100 laptop will save the world! An excerpt from the article: [You need to register to read the full article. Registration is free btw]

So how can any worthwhile computer cost less than a pair of good headphones? Through a series of cost-cutting tricks. The laptops will run on free “open source” software, use cheaper “flash” memory instead of a hard disk and most likely employ new LCD technology to drop the monitor’s cost to just $35. Each laptop will also come with a hand crank, making it usable even in electricity-free rural areas.

The monitor seems to be the crucial link in the whole scheme of things. If they can create a breakthrough on that, then they are almost there. After that, it will be a series of small issues. The critical issue, as far as I know, will be the monitor. They get that down to below $40 in the LCD form, then they are through!

All the best Mr. Negroponte.

An article on vnunet.com rubbishes the claims of Negroponte’s well publicised venture of the $100 laptop. Wherever I go I am asked, “How will your product stand if that $100 laptop comes into the market?”. Well, the answer is in the article here.

Celebrity inventor Trevor Baylis has said he is “not convinced” that Nicholas Negroponte has got very far with the $100 laptop he is developing for the Third World.

Baylis, who invented the clockwork wireless radio, was recently invited to MIT Media Lab to meet Negroponte and see the prototype, but said that it “could have put together with a Lego kit”.

“Nothing worked. I was expecting him to show me the screen in action or the wind-up feature, but I saw nothing but a basic prototype,” he said.

“If Negroponte has done it, full marks to the guy, but I am not 100 per cent convinced. It was all something of a PR stunt.”

Baylis clearly has a lot to contribute to the project as he invented a wind-up radio that is now used widely in the Third World. He also lays claim to demonstrating the world’s first wind-up computer.

“A few years ago I was in Botswana seeing the radio in use and people from Apple were there,” he explained. “So for fun we hooked up my wind-up system to their eMate. We managed to get the screen to activate for a few seconds which amazed everyone.”

Baylis believes he could develop wind-up technology for the MIT laptop but questioned whether such technology is currently available.

“The hard part is not developing the wind-up technology but finding a low-power screen,” he said. “I would love to be involved in something like this. I have seen what an impact on lives my radio has had. This could be the same.”

But Baylis said he came away from Boston feeling non-plussed. “Negroponte did not ask me to provide the technology,” he complained. “He was more interested in looking at my wind-up torch, which I didn’t develop anyway. I bought it in China for £3.”

Baylis is keen for a UK initiative to make an attempt at a similar device. “HP has told me that the screen can’t be made yet, but you never know,” he explained. “Perhaps we can all get together and make it happen.”

Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osbourne computer, is working on a similar wind-up computer project. The details are on his blog here.

Meanwhile the US National Science Foundation is funding the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions project at the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Robertson, chief executive at open source firm Linspire, said that his company has researched the viability of the project and has deemed it inadequate.

Business Today carries an article in the “Trends” section about the ecosystem that Rajesh Jain has created.

The article talks about the various companies that Rajesh has invested in:

Netcore Solutions Open Source software solutions for SMEs and large corporates

Novatium [Check out the new website! I was involved in its creation!]
A $100-computing interface targeted at the bottom-of-the-pyramid computer users in developing countries like Asia and Africa

Seraja Technologies: An events search engine on the worldwide web using experiential tools

Midas Communications Technologies: Wireless broadband solutions company, part of IIT Madras’ TeNeT Group

n-Logue: Part of the TeNeT group; provides internet and voice centres in small towns and villages

Rajshri Media: A broadband and mobile content company

PubSub.com: A matching engine that matches pre-stored query against any new informationo that appears on the web.

“I think about what I am doing as blending entrepreneurship and thesis-based investing. Will it pay off? I hope so,” he writes in his blog. As I like to think, the future is an instantiation of someone’s vision. So, why cannot it be ours?

Thus signs-off the article.

Edition of Business Today dated December 18, 2005.

[Via Anu]

Just read this amazing article written by Peter Drukker in 1979.

The clarity in thought and the ability to drill down from policy to grassroot-level strikes you the most. No wonder he was regarded so highly.

Hats-off to you Mr. Drukker.

You can download and read the article by clicking on “Reference” link below or click here.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL ), the country’s largest telecom player, is coming out with an offer bundling PC and a broadband connection for a monthly EMI of Rs 500-Rs 650 in a move that may spur PC penetration in the country.

So, BSNL has been doing more good work than the others in its field. This move must help BSNL achieve the numbers that Dayanidhi Maran wants them to by the end of 2006. Maran wants the internet connections to reach the 1 million number a la telephone connections. Noble intentions. All the best to Maran and his ministry and the BSNL to achieve this.

My idea of the future is that every Telephone Service provider will slowly get into providing broadband [well yeah, that's the present!;)]. And since the cap on broadband is decided by the PC penetration, they will look to bundle PCs alongwith their broadband connections like BSNL is doing now.

The dealers will realise they are benefiting most out of this kind of arrangement and lobby more for the schemes such as BBPC (BroadBand + PC). But customers, who are not technically skilled, will realise they are not able to use their PCs much. There will be a high downtime because of virus attacks, etc.

This is where Novatium’s Nova NetPCs will play a role. It fits in perfectly. Any support necessary will be available at a phone call. Once the grid is ready it is just a matter of plug and play! :)

At a stunning $100 (monitor extra) we are sure of hitting the sweet spot. But the point is that when we reach the home segment, the box will not be sold unit-wise. It will be bundled along with the network connection that you ask for. You might apply for a Wi-Fi connection or a broadband connection or a triple play connection (More about this later) alongwith which you will get a Nova NetPC as the end-device. Similar to how you get a telephone instrument on applying for a telephone connection.

But the similarity doesn’t end there. You use your phone under a particular scheme and you pay the corresponding rental and usage charges, right?! Well, Novatium intends to relay computing through the same model. You will pay a constant rental for the device at your end. And choose a scheme. The scheme might look very similar to your broadband schemes. Apart from that you will have a choose your application scheme. Based on the OS & applications you choose, you will be billed. A sample bill is shown below:

This is an absolute fantasy of a bill. When I include Windows as one of the applications being used, then the bill seems to shoot up. If Linux is adopted as the OS, then the bill would work out to be 2245.50 – [(875) + (60) + (30) + (22.50)] = Rs. 1258/- In this money, you have used your computer to download 500 MB worth of data from the net, played interesting network games for 1 hr a day (excluding weekends) and also talked on the telephone.

Actually, it’s not the money that’s important. It’s the mode of payment that should interest you. No more spending of thousands to acquire a computer and later spending more to maintain it. More than the money spent it’s the time and peace of mind that gets affected by running behind the dealers and the others of that ilk.

Let’s hope we are able to ring in the utlity model with success! :)

In the previous post, we saw why the market for PCs will not grow just by cutting cost. As such, no market can follow just the “Low-cost” strategy and increase the size of the market. You do need innovation on every front. And we, at Novatium, believe that we are right on course with the innovation.

Novatium is working on developing a hardware technology platform that will form the basis for any kind of an access device. The access device could be a computer (or a thin client in IT terms), an entertainment-plus-computing box (or an IP Set Top Box) or a handheld communcation device (You want to call it a PDA?). Why do we call it an access device? What does it access? Let me answer that now.

There’s a concept called grid computing. Essentially, it is nothing but your client-server architecture scaled upto monstrous levels. The grid might be at a single location or at various dispersed locations with the appropriate network architecture. The grid will consist of several bytes of storage space and switches and routers and all the critical network components. Also, there will be various forms and sizes of content on the grid. Okay, looks like I am complicating this grid concept. I will try another route.

Imagine an electricity grid. You have a generating station, it could be hydro, thermal, etc. type. Then you have a combination of step-up and step-down transformers to deliver the right voltage to our homes. You also have various kinds of wires (high-tension, low-tension, etc.) running around everywhere again with the same intention of delivering electricity to our homes. Similarly, in a computing grid, you will have a cluster of servers that have a lot content and storage space behaving as your generating station.

If this grid doesn’t explain the grid I am talking about, then I give up! :)

The issues that get automatically taken care of by the grid include: OS upgrades, Anti-virus runs, application administration and every other conceivable exercise that you need to run yourself on your PC right now, will be available at a phone call’s distance. That too toll free! ;) Computing will no longer be a techie-dominated area! It will be a service very much like your telephone services. Thus providing a hassle-free experience for the customer. I am considering that this will be affordable to everybody like the mobile phones of today.

It is this grid that our access devices will “access”. These access devices are built on a hardware technology platform built by Novatium base-up. We have put together various pieces of hardware and integrated them together to perform the functions that we want it to perform.

Looking at Nova NetPC, the computing-grid access device, the various functionalities that it will be capable of are:

1. Basic computing:

   Productivity suite applications like OpenOffice, MS Office, etc,

   E-mail clients like Thunderbird, MS Outlook, etc,

   Browsing on browsers like Firefox, Netscape, IE, etc.,

   Instant messaging on messengers like Yahoo!, MSN, GAIM, etc.

2. Value added computing:

   Audio/ Video streaming: Voice chat, Webcam conference, listening to music, watching movies (on the grid, not from CD’s)

   Data Mobility: USB stick functionality

   Local Peripherals access: Printers, scanners, etc.

Nova NetPC, is the first among the various products that Novatium will be launching. Hassle-free, easy-to-use and affordable are the keywords. To take computing to the next billion, this is the kind of innovation that we are betting on.

Next post: The Utility Model