Mysorean

As promised to one of my childhood friends, Gowtham, today I am going to write about the vision of Novatium. This post is going to come in parts. I haven’t exactly planned them out so I won’t be able to tell you how many parts. Let’s just begin.

Rajesh Jain is the man behind Novatium. Novatium is his brainchild. And this is where I work!

Rajesh Jain made big news during the peak of the dotcom craze. He sold a bunch of websites to a company called sify for Rs. 499 crores. [Roughly $110 million] An entrepreneur by choice. An intense patriot. Rajesh is a down-to-earth person and very pleasant to be with. To know more about him browse through his blog. Alternately, you click on the link titled “Emergic” in the list of “Blogs I read” to the right of this page.

I have had the privilege of having attended a meeting with Rajesh when he was down here at our office premises in Chennai. It was during the early days of Novatium. Rajesh was here to attend a board meeting. He made a presentation on his idea of Novatium and how it would look, say, 3 to 5 years down the line. Rather, he concentrated more on the what we need to focus on to get there than paint a fantasy for us! Didn’t I tell you he was down-to-earth?! ;)

Let me start with a simple question. How many of you own computers? Whoever is reading this either owns one or has access to one. There is a miniscule number of people who read blogs through mobiles. Do you know that there are approximately 600 million people in the developing markets who don’t have access to a computer? The problem with access is not that there is no channel there and hence they don’t have access. The issues are many:

Datamation carries a small write-up on my workplace:

Novatium Solutions Pvt. Ltd. of Chennai, India, is making the Nova NetPC 1000. Priced at under $100 (monitor not included) this thin client device connects to Windows, Unix and Linux servers. It uses the Linux operating system and Mozilla browser. It comes with keyboard, mouse and Webcam as standard equipment. Connection options include TCP/IP, Bluetooth, 802.11b, USB. 10/100 Ethernet and DSL.

Get in touch with me if you wanna buy one! ;) I intend to write about the incredible vision that’s the foundation of Novatium. Will do that sometime. Till then, watch this space for more!

[By the way, all this blogging that I do, happens through the same $100 Nova NetPC!]

There was an interesting question from one of my fellow-bloggers to my post on team of teams.

His question was, “What is an ecosystem?”. Interesting because of the context in which the word was being used.

ecosystem n : a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment
(Source: www.dictionary.com )

This is in the biological sense of the word. Nowadays it’s being increasingly used in the business context too.

In the business context, ecosystem means a group of companies who are facing the market with a single combined front.

Rajesh Jain writes about his learnings of being an entrepreneur. There are various important points in it for budding entrepreneurs like me. More importantly, if many budding Indian entrepreneurs read this it will be great for us. We need more Indian entrepreneurs. Important points to learn from Rajesh:

1. Don’t go by what you want to do. Go by what the market needs.
2. Unfortunately, if you face a failure, then don’t get disheartened and go back to being an employee. Analyse your mistakes and make sure you avoid them the next time round.
3. Analyse your own strengths and weaknesses. Build a team complementing these attributes.
4. Build an ecosystem, if possible, around the central idea. This will help in sharing of resources and increase chances of success.
5. Always, believe in yourself. Like Rajesh believes, the next Google-like company is possible from India.

Building an ecosystem is the most important business aspect of these learnings. Many of us venture out to build companies. Individual companies might take us to a certain point. Beyond which there may (more often than not, will) be a need to depend on another company for expertise in a certain field or it could be anything.

Having an ecosystem is like building a team. It’s always better to have a team with you than go at it alone. That’s the bottomline. Having a team of companies is an obviously better strategy.

Let’s discuss in the coming days on how we can go about doing it.

Tomorrow:

1. Initialising the team of teams
2. The discourse at Ramakrishna Ashram (continued)

My juniors from BIM won two international business plan competitions beating institutes from all over the world. A truly commendable acheivement.

There has been massive coverage by the media of this event. Today’s Hindu carried an article on this. ET has always been stingy giving footage to BIM for some strange reason. And they follow their miserliness here again.

It’s good that the institute you studied in is making news. There was a time when there was no news from BIM. During this age of PR, no news is bad news!

In this age of dollar salaries and big pay packets for MBAs, it’s indeed refreshing to have management students thinking about improving the Rural areas. There is definitely no big bucks involved, only hardwork. And these guys are actually implementing this one. All the best! And anything anytime for this, try me out!

Today’s ET has an article about intra-network call rates:

Operators have been asked (by the DoT) to withdraw tariff schemes charging much lower rates for calls terminating within the network of the same operator than those terminating in other networks. This would increase tariffs for more than 60m mobile users, as operators would withdraw lower tariffs for intra-network calls.

The withdrawal will leave no meaning to differentiation strategy in this industry. The operators are trying to increase their market shares by launching schemes that have a difference in the intra-network call rates. This is going to benefit the customers too. Why is the DoT playing spoilsport? Instead of pointing out that section 25 talks about no discrimination between intra and inter-network calls, why isn’t the section abolished? Think ahead DoT.

An article from ToI quotes Mysore going completely wi-fi:

This ‘dream’ became a reality due to three entrepreneurs.The story goes that three men — Shankar Prasad, Srikanth V Rao and G Saravanan — having worked for some of the most well-known software companies, decided to help Mysoreans connect better. They started a company called WiFiyNet with their own investment.

The initiative was clickstarted in August 2004 by putting up the first access point (also known as hot spot) in Jayalakshmipuram, an upmarket area in Mysore.

Today, the city has three access points. And with this 2.4 GHz (frequency of transmission) Wi-Fi connectivity, Mysore became a true hot spot.

“By paying Rs 750 a month, irrespective of the kind of data download, internet is available round the clock. Currently, we provide 128-kbps speeds. Our technology is 54-mbps-enabled; hence, we can even take it to the extent of providing IP television,” says Prasad.

This is Mysore for you. There was a t-shirt that was made by one of the hostels in Mysore which had the caption, “We handle both tradition and technology” with the picture of a brahmin holding a computer with one hand and a mangalaarthi plate in the other! I thought this fitted perfectly to Mysore as a whole.

Mysore, considered to be sleepy, has taken a giant step towards technology. There are very few cities even in the developed country – USA which are connected wirelessly. It reminds many people of the way Bangalore looked 20 years back. I just hope it doesn’t become another Bangalore!

We need to thank people like: Shankar, Srikanth and Saravanan who have made this possible. This is the way individuals can make a difference to the country. Thanks to you from a Mysorean!

Tomorrow: Blogging daily

58 million handsets now. 250 million by 2008. On a guesstimate, I can say that about 60% of this market is going to generate business only on voice and sms. 150 million people will primarily use voice and sms. With the kind of price wars that we have seen in recent times, calls and sms’es are not going to be the cash cows. The money, or the profit as the professionals would like to call it, is in Value-Added Services (VAS). And that’s going to come from the remaining 100 million handsets/users depending on your inclination to make money! ;-)

VAS, as of now, includes services like setting caller ring tunes, downloading ringtones for your cellphone, downloading images of your favourite celebrity, MMS (You know this, right?! Courtesy: DPS) etc. Call me and you will hear “Yuhin chala chal raahi” from Swades instead of the boring Tring Tring!! That’s called a Caller ring tune. I am charged A monthly rental of Rs. 30/- for using this service, Rs. 15/- monthly rental for this song in particular. But before all this, I would have called the Service Provider to choose a song, right? That call costs me Rs. 6/- per minute. If this is not a Goldmine for the Industry, then tell me what is?!

Let us take a look at what could be the future Goldmines. Imagine you want to play a game with your friend in another city. All you will have to do is, logon to the Server of the Service Provider and send a request to your friend to join in. He will login from the other end and there you go, both of you are onto a game of Chess! No joysticks nothing! Your trackpad and your phone.

Well, the pricing structure for this could be based on many things. It could be based on the game you are choosing. It could be on the number of minutes you play the game. If you are a on a different scheme, this game could be a free access to you. Or else, one of you might have to pay for the whole game, the one who initiated is ideally the payee.

Lets move on to watching movies. The board meeting is really boring, and you want to watch a favourite movie of yours in the meanwhile to escape the yapping! You just get in to the server of your Service Provider and ask for your movie to be streamed your mobile. And there you are, transported into the celluloid world from the stiff collars and diplomatic idle talk.

Pricing again is a question of how big the movie is. Or even maybe, how recent the movie is. There could be a day when a movie has a cellphone release. Ram Gopal Varma’s “Industry” releasing in India for the first time on your cellphones. The best part is, you can tune into the movie whenever you want to and watch it right from the beginning. So, you don’t have to wait for the Friday reviews!

We get sms alerts from Banks right now. You can send a query to the bank’s database with your cellphone and get status updates of your banking accounts. The day is not far away when the bank will have a microsite (I am refraining from calling it a website because it will look small on your screens. But otherwise, it will be your usual website). You will access it from the browser on your cellphone and do a fund transfer to your friend’s account. Well, the other part could be that you will be able to track your wife’s credit card expenses over the cellphone!! Great, ain’t it?!!

This Bank service will become something for which we the end customers won’t pay upfront. The Bank will deduct a standard amount (Say Rs. 100/- per month) for providing this service. And they will have a back-end arrangement with the Cellphone Service Provider. Of course, this won’t be the first payment mode they will start with. They will definitely start with a per transaction fee and a minimum floor value on each transaction to get a hold of the volumes of transaction that will happen. The additional value I see in this model is that the per transaction overhead cost of the Bank will go down drastically. As everything is automated.

Where’s the opportunity to make money you ask? Open a company. Appser Private Limited. Please don’t go legal on me. I just thought of an abbreviation of Application + Server. Start building gaming, movie, banking, etc. can we think of more? applications that will interface with the middle and high-end mobiles in the market. Try making them talk to the stripped down browsers that are available in the mobiles. Otherwise, make relevant patches that can be added to the existing browsers on the cellphones and make them available for free download.

Now go to the Cellphone Service Providers and give him this idea that you will do the back-end management of these VAS servers. It’s a Goldmine. Atleast in India, I haven’t heard of anyone going in this direction. Of course, the networks are yet to mature to this requirement. A start in the direction is all that is necessary. The money here is going to be bigger than Gold!

Tomorrow: Independence Day

I still remember the hostel days during my undergrad when I used to walk upto an STD booth and wait in a queue to call up home for the customary once per week call. It’s wierd that most of the times I would not call home and be comfortable with myself. Anyway, that’s a different topic altogether. The point is there was something called an STD booth that was an integral part of my weekly routine. The presence of a routine is highly questionable you say? I agree unconditionally!

We were a gang of four as you have gangs during your student days. We always lived in our own world. Never bothered about what was happening to other gangs, or rather I should say that we were not even aware of who the other gangs were made up of! It was not arrogance, it was just a sign of how beautifully we complemented each other. We didn’t need to look beyond the four of us for anything.

It was the flower of friendship that bloomed and has now grown into a well-nurtured plant of eight years old. I shall write in detail about our friendship some other time. Just to give an idea: Our autograph books (we never signed for each other) are filled by various people. There was one comment that has stayed in my mind very strongly. “It’s surprising to see such pure friendship in today’s world of opportunistic connections. Sometimes, I have felt envious of your gang and wanted to be a part of it. Such was the bond that you guys shared”.

Yesterday, we had a conference call that kp (Krishnaprasad) enabled. Sam (Sameer, IITB) and I joined in. The other guy (Shastri) was on his way to his native. So, we couldn’t get him into the call. We talked for about an hour. Needless to say, it went off as if it was 10 minutes. At the end of it, Sam wished us happy anniversary. This guy has this knack of remembering all kinds of dates. (One example: October 11th 1997, Sam and Adi met for the second time in the CET counselling cell, Bangalore! Of course, I don’t remember the right date!) Both of were as usual waiting in silence for him to announce the Red Letter Day! But this time, Sam had a date that would hit the right emotional chord!August 14th was the day that our final sem exams had begun! Our last exam together.

After a lot of emotional discussion we arrived at one question. Did we ever think that we will be conversing over a conference call with each of us on our cell phones in the three metros? It was definitely out of our imagination at that point of time. As even cell phones were quite a technological fantasy for us. Today, merely 4 years from that day (only from the technological point of view please! We feel we have been away from each other for decades!), see where we are in terms of technology? We have cell phones. We are talking from our respective homes in our cities through a conference call! ?Undreamt of when we started our engineering!

Since, I was talking about the ‘last mile‘ syndrome that India is affected with. Here is a standing example of how we can overcome the problem. The cellphone industry overtook the number of landlines in the country within 5 years of their entry into the market. As a market, we have totally skipped the landline lifecycle and have directly entered the cellphone or the mobile industry as we calll it.

BSNL, Airtel and Hutch are the primary players in the GSM arena. While Reliance and Tata Indicom are the prime movers in the CDMA sector. The combined coverage is astounding. The call rates is one of the lowest in the World. With Hutch introducing the STD Hutch to Hutch at Re. 1, the price war has now entered new ground. To even think where this will lead to is just so exciting. We are at 58 million handsets (I remember reading this somewhere. I am not good with numbers. Please do confirm if you have the right figures). The potential is estimated to be atleast 200 million more. With price points falling (of handsets and call rates) with increasing volumes, the Indian Mobile Industry is a space to watch out for! All of us stand to be benefitted.

Tomorrow: Gold! Ahoy!

I was watching the highlights of the finals of the Indian Oil Cup 2005 between India and Sri Lanka. My friends had already told me about the fate that India had met with. But I was not ready to believe them. I was very confident it was going to be India’s day and we would thrash SL downright!

The turning point of the match, I believe, was the dismissal of Yuvraj Singh. The body language of the Lankans when Dravid and Singh were consolidating the Indian innings with their partnership was quite evident. Sagging shoulders, dropping heads, scratching heads, shouting at each other, etc. Just when the match was in our hands, there was this sweep that Yuvraj played straight into the hands of the square leg fielder.

After that the collapse was quick. I was able to immediately recall hundreds of such matches where India snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The Indo-Pak test which we lost by 12 runs is still fresh in my memory!

India has this block to run the last mile. We stumble at a very significant stage. The scent of victory probably intoxicates the men in the middle. This is true not only in terms of cricket. You may want to observe our Government machinery. The word “bureaucracy” has attained a negative connotation. We devise good policies at the top. The ones that hit the headlines are actually good news. You know the ones like “Rs. 70,000 crores budget allocated for Defense”, “Free Power for farmers”, “Golden Quadrilateral Project inaugurated”. These are all pieces of strategic vision.

Whether these schemes and policies actually hit the intended beneficiaries is doubtful. And why is it doubtful? A cynical mind would suggest that the scheme or policy was formulated with the intention of eating up the money. So, the question of reaching the end-point doesn’t arise at all. To such arguments, there is no answer.

Assuming that the intentions were there but we went wrong somewhere and then analysing to find out where we went wrong is a useful exercise. It will atleast help us as a country to aviod that mistake the next time and hence take a step towards a better future. For 57 years, we have been handling issues on our own. We need to learn quickly.

The learning curve takes a steep turn towards the top at a particular point in time. Is this period of two-three years that point of time? It probably is if you believe what Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam says and his Vision 2020. In 1992, with the opening up of the economy and devaluation of the rupee twice in 24 hrs, we were expected to be superpowers by 2000. Well, there’s another theory that says that those initiatives were more forced than a result of a conscious analytical mind. The same man who implemented those changes that gave rise to a new hope to the country is again at the helm of affairs. Is it fair to expect him to get it right this time?

If we get our last mile right, then yes, we have the right man at the top to get to where we want by 2020. And what does the last mile consist of? Only one thing. Commitment. If I am in the business of making computing affordable to the emerging markets, I need to give myself completely to it. Whether I succeed or not, I must be happy with the effort that I have put in. The people who come in touch with me must be enthused about what I am doing. I must radiate positive energy around me.

Imagine if this happens to you everytime you enter a Government office to pay your bills or apply for a tender. Whether you bag the tender or not, you will be happy that you have put in your best. Instead of the feeling: That guy paid him more than I did and hence he got the tender! Now, isn’t there a change in your attitude towards the system? I am sure there is. It’s just the last mile that’s not working.

We choke at the last mile. Once we overcome that, there’s no stopping us from a better future. India will emerge as a Nation that will be the centre for technology and spirituality. And since, it’s a spirituality-based position, we will continue in that position forever!

Tomorrow: Mobiles – A ‘last mile’ success story!