Mysorean

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.

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

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!]

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!

Rajesh Jain quotes an article from News.com regarding the Indian Tech Renaissance. One of the sections talks wholly about Novatium. Novatium is where I work.

Once fairly anonymous organizations hired to run support desks and develop server applications for large multinational corporations, Indian companies are raising their profile as brand name suppliers in hardware design, software development, consulting services and virtually anything else in technology. Infused with new blood from a young tech-savvy work force, the new movement is a major advance toward economic independence that carries broad ramifications for a country whose past includes colonial rule, experiments in socialism and devastating poverty.

There are a few quotes by me in the report. Michael Kanellos had met with me about a month ago, thanks to an introduction by VIA’s Ravi Pradhan.

Not surprisingly, optimism is running high as younger generations come of age. The national exuberance has inspired many entrepreneurs, including Rajesh Jain, who sold an Indian-based Web portal, IndiaWorld, for around $100 million in 2000 and who is now incubating companies that he expects will bring computing to the masses in his country.

“For the first time,” he said, “there is confidence that tomorrow will be better than today.”
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2005: Entrepreneur Rajesh Jain begins to promote thin clients costing $100 to $150 as computers for the mass population. “It’s not that we need just cheaper solutions. We need the newest technology, but at fundamentally lower price points,” Jain has said.
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One of the critical ingredients for the $100 computer is probably in your garage.

In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard “thin clients” of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices. Adding a monitor doubles the price to $150, but the company will offer used displays to keep the cost down.

“If you want to reach the $100 to $120 price point, you need to use old monitors,” said Novatium founder and board member Rajesh Jain, a local entrepreneur who sold the IndiaWorld portal for $115 million in cash in 2000 and has started a host of companies since. “Monitors have a lifetime of seven to eight years.”

It is this kind of entrepreneurial thinking that has made Jain the latest visionary to seek out today’s Holy Grail of home computing: a desktop that will start to bring the Internet to the more than 5 billion people around the world who aren’t on it yet.
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“Just because we are an emerging market doesn’t mean we want an inferior product,” said Jain of Novatium. The engineering behind his company’s base model illustrates his point.

Instead of a microprocessor, it will contain a digital signal processor that compresses and decompresses music and video files. In addition to lowering costs, the technology is designed to provide access to the full range of the Internet without bogging down the machine’s operations. (Novatium would not disclose which chip brand it would use, but one of its investors is also the chairman of digital signal processor designer Analog Devices.)

Using Linux applications and software from Jain’s Netcore Solutions, these machines will be tweaked so that multiple people can use them. This would reduce the cost of memory in the server that does the bulk of the computing work for the Novatium thin clients on its network.

Jain will also try to establish “operator grids,” local businesses that run the servers while acting as an Internet service provider. Eventually, instead of buying their machines, he said customers could have the option of paying a grid operator $15 to $20 a month for all hardware, software and storage needs.

While acknowledging the risks inherent in any start-up venture, Jain speaks eagerly of what he calls the phenomenon of the black swan–a rare, but not impossible, event.

“Google was a black swan,” he said. “No one expects the next Microsoft or Intel or Cisco to come out of India, but I believe it is entirely possible.”

Overall, the story is a big positive for India and reflects its coming of age. Now, if we can only get more Indian entrepreneurs to start thinking about building out tomorrow’s world, the renaissance will lead to domination. What is needed is a mix of entrepreneurial passion, cutting-edge innovation, and big thinking. We also need to leverage our domestic market — solving the needs of the consumers and SMEs in India can provide Indian companies the right platform to extend the solutions to other emerging markets also. And perhaps, ensure innovation blowback (as John Hagel says) to the developed markets.