Mobile Apps in 2009

One of my articles recently appeared in Times of India, Economic times. Here is the link:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Software/Mobile_apps_What_to_expect_in_09/articleshow/3925983.cms

Global Financial Crisis/Economy Crisis

I was pondering a minute whether the title of the post should be a financial crisis or a economic crisis..then, I settled for both..Well, it indeed is the crisis of both finance and economy across the world. There is no dearth of headlines, articles on this subject in the newspapers and internet and probably this is also the time the folks who were the least interested are also getting interested.

One of today's businessweek article states:
Home to just 304,000 people, tiny Iceland is emerging as the biggest casualty of the global financial crisis. On Oct. 9, the government took control of the country's largest bank, Kaupthing (KAUP.ST), and halted trading on the Reykjavik stock exchange until Oct. 13. Authorities also used sweeping new emergency powers to hive off most of the domestic assets of the country's second-largest bank, Landsbanki, into a separate entity to be called "New Landsbanki" that will be fully owned by the government.

The above probably is one of the worst examples of the cascading effects of the crisis looming the world at the moment. At least for me, I cannot fathom a country declaring bankruptcy, leave aside the banks or the institutions that one is dealing with. There is lot of hue and cry about India's own bank - ICICI bank, whose stock crashed 20% today on account of some rumors.

Can we imagine something like a ICICI bank declaring itself bankrupt ? Theoretically, Yes..Practically, I'am not sure..Hopefully..NO.


Though I'am not an expert in either finance or Economy but I certainly view that there have been excesses in the last few years..Below are some examples:

20X leverages on loans, mortgages ( A fresher/1 Year exp engineer who just is landing with a job taking a house loan of 30 Lakhs )

Supply creating an virtual demand ( Banks creating an artifical demand )

60 Lakh for a 3 Bedroom Apartment.

Stock price doubling within a week ( There is no reasoning, The company is still the same )

A software Engineer having 3 offers and still not decided on the company he is going to join. He actually dumps all the three and joins a fourth company

Person having no clue about the stock market creating a demat account. ( because he hears that his neighbour has done it )

Person investing 30000 into a stock because of a 'tip'. He neither knows the industry the company is in or the company itself ..

Well, above are some of the examples that come to my mind when I read about the current crisis..I hope to add more posts on this topic..Keep reading.

Belief and Sprituality

In the last fortnight, I have been involved with many things to do with spirituality and the art of living..I read a book by Robin Sharma - "The Monk Who sold his Ferrari". I felt that this book is the westernized book that has captured the essence of what is stated in Bhagvadgita and some of the Hindu Scriptures. I have not read anything in detail either about any religious scriptures or "The Gita", but I have heard similar thoughts at various times in my life from the Hindu Pandits/Swamiji's when they deliver their religious speeches. Its a nice book and I recommend this..Its a small, compact book and captures some little but important things in Life !!!

Coincidently, I also attended the course on "Art of Living" this week, which has been very calming experience. The Pranayama and the Sudarshan Kriya are the key elements apart from some of the important but key Sutras:

- Live in the present moment, not worrying about either the past or future

- Present moment is Inevitable.

- Don't look at intention behind others mistakes, else you will be in tension

-Don't let your mind become a football because of others opinions, because opinions change every now and then.

The course is really effective and can bring about some change and relief to one's mind. Below is something that is stated in the "www.artofliving.org" about what one can expect in the 6 days:

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* Practices that heal and harmonize the body, mind, and spirit
* Skills for handling negative emotions and situations
* Practical wisdom for improving work and relationships
* Insight into the laws that govern the mind and emotions
* Stretching and low-impact yoga for health, circulation, and body stillness
--


I recommend everyone to undergo this course to seek some change in perception about Life..

3G Policy annoucement

Recently, the 3G policy in India was announced. This is going to be a important moment for several players:

Existing telecom operators
New operators who want to enter the telecom space
Foreign players who want to enter the Indian shores
VAS providers
MVNO ( Those who dont own the network and infrastructure but still can be a part of the ecosystem by paying certain sum to the Govt.

The spectrum will be auctioned in blocks of 2×5 MHz in 2.1 GHz band. There can be a maximum of 10 players in any circle and in most cases the number will vary between 5-10 players. The license will hold for 20 years and besides 3G license fee firms will have to pay spectrum usage charge

The Govt is going to raise around $10 B in Auctions, which is a huge sum.

Interesting SMS services

The phones keep getting smarter but that does not stop the innovation at the bottom of the pyramid. I'am talking about the innovation in the SMS applications. This is very much relevant to the countries such as India, Philippines where SMS rules ..Below is another interesting SMS play in Italy ..

Users fire off a message to the SMS Consumatori service, and they get a response showing the average consumer prices in different parts of Italy, as well as wholesale prices. Interesting — another example of mobiles being used to spread information so markets function more efficiently. We’ve seen several examples of this in Africa, where farmers and fishermen use mobiles to check on market prices and get other information. Reuters is testing a similar mobile market information service in India

I feel that there is a definite scope for a similar aggregating service for India and I believe something like this is easily achievable. The key in not technology but the business model..I always believe this for a success of any product ..

Downloadable app Vs Browser based app for Mobiles

This is the the most common controversy that exists in the mobile application development. There are several views/contra views on each side..Just felt that I could add my views in this post. In one of his posts, David Wood of Symbian summarizes the following:

• Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) has been asking the Google Mobile team why they only make one app release every six months, whereas development of apps for PC web-browser happens much more quickly
• Downloadable apps for mobile devices are fraught with problems - including BIG issues with device fragmentation
• Taking Google Maps for mobile as an example: there are 10+ platforms to support, requiring 100's of builds in total - it all adds up to PAIN
• There must be a better way!
• The better way is to deliver services through the mobile web, instead of via downloadable applications.

Towards the browser apps, the drawbacks are as follows:

• Mobile web apps suck too!
• Javascript takes time to execute on mobile devices, and since it's single threaded, it blocks the UI
• There's often high network latency
• The mobile web apps lack access to location, the address book, and camera, etc.

Further, he states...

Four challenges facing mobile web apps

The four factors I generally highlight as limitations in mobile web applications vs. downloaded apps are:

1. The UI provided by a web browser is general purpose, and is often sub-optimal for a more complex application on the small screen of a mobile device (an example of the unsuitedness of the web browser UI in general is when users are confronted with messages such as "Don't press the Back button now!" or "Only press the OK button once!")
2. Applications need to be able to operate when they are disconnected from the network - as in an airplane or during a trip in an Olde World London underground train - or whenever reception is flaky. On a mobile device, the user experience of intermittently connected "push email" from the likes of BlackBerry is far more pleasant than an "always connected web browser" interface to server-side email
3. Web applications suffer from lack of access to much of the more "interesting" functionality on the phone
4. Web applications are often more sluggish than their downloaded equivalents.

So, where do we stand ? Guess, it is the choice the product managers need to make and not the developers ..

Nokia buys Symbian

One of the highlights of the last week was that of Nokia buying Symbian for 210 M Pounds. Symbian has a rev of around 150M Pounds and hence the valuation is not even 2 times the rev of Symbian ..

Nokia intends to make Symbian opensource. Key thing to be seen would be on how many manufacturers will go that way ..The competitors to this would be LiMo, which has been leading the opensource mobile OS movement so far ..

Android, iPhone are slightly different from what I understand. They consist of hardware, sofware partners apart from the OS itself ..While Android OS may be opensource, iPhone OS is not opensource ..Both of these can be considered as EcoSystem ..They certainly will have an impact on how applications are developed, deployed and how money is made ..

As we see the events, the mobile industry is going the similar way of the pure software industry ..Earlier software license used to be a significant cost, then it was reduced, then reduced even further..later it was made free ..then came SaaS concept ..Service costs started becoming important ...

If we draw same paradox to the mobile devices, we may have a free devices in the years to come ..and companies will make money through the services..

This is also similar to the newspaper industry ..We pay Rs 1.5 or slightly more for a newspaper, whose paper only costs will be more than that ..Companies make money through advertismensts and same relief is extended to the user through a *almost* free newspaper ...

Does the IPL model make sense?-Special Report-Sunday Specials-Opinion-The Times of India

Now the IPL has been a success, it may be worth getting to know the business model behind it..I already hear that it has been taken as casestudy in some business schools. The interesting aspect of the IPL has been that the owners who bid the lowest ( Emerging Media ) have been the most successful. Their team - Rajasthan Royals have already entered the finals and may eventually win tomorrow if they play like what they did yesterday..Apparently, they will break even in the second year itself while it may take atleast 3-4 years for other owners ..

Does the IPL model make sense?-Special Report-Sunday Specials-Opinion-The Times of India:
"To get a fix on the answers to these questions, let's start from the source of the river of moolah. The IPL - read BCCI - has four major sources of revenue. The first is the sale of media rights for the matches, which will fetch the board $1 billion over a 10-year period. The second includes things like title sponsorship of the tournament, licensed merchandise and so on. Put together, these form what the IPL calls 'central revenues'.

From the sale of media rights, IPL will keep 20% for itself, give out 8% as prize money for the tournament and distribute the remaining 72% evenly between the 8 franchisees. These proportions are valid till 2012, after which IPL’s share goes up in two stages by 2018, with the shares of both prize money and franchisees declining.

The second stream - other central revenues - will be shared between IPL, franchisees and prize money in the ratio 40:54:6 up to 2017 after which IPL’s share will increase to 50%, the franchisees’ share will drop to 45% and the remaining 5% will go for prize money. The third major source is, of course, the amounts bid by the franchisees. The fourth stream comes from the revenues generated by the franchisee rights, of which 20% will be given to IPL.

From the franchisees’ perspective, while the share in central revenues will be a given, they can raise money on their own by a variety of means. These include selling advertising space in the stadia for home matches, licensing products for their team like T-shirts, getting sponsorship for the team uniform, advertising on tickets and so on, apart from the gate money. As already mentioned, 20% of all of this will then go to IPL.

What do the players make? Apart from the annual fee contracted with the franchisee, they get a daily allowance of $100 through the IPL season, which lasts about a month-and-a-half. The total amount spent on player fees for an IPL team cannot be less than $3.3 million each year and is actually expected to be significantly higher. In other words, players will earn about Rs 80 lakh or more per season on average, though the amount would vary from one member of the team to another.

Players could also get bonuses from the team owners and perhaps even the prize money that the team wins by virtue of where it finishes in the tournament. But it is for each franchisee to decide whether these payments are made to the players or not.

Even in the case of the annual fee negotiated between a player and the franchisee, not all of the negotiated amount may actually go into the player’s pocket.

This is because the IPL is reaching two different kinds of agreements with players when it gets them on board. Under one arrangement — called the "firm agreement", the IPL commits a certain fee to the player. If a franchisee bids more for that player in the auction between franchisees for different players, the IPL gets to keep the excess. Under the other - the "basic agreement" – the player gets whatever is bid for him. Not surprisingly, most players so far have opted for the "basic agreement".

iPhone - Kleiner's first investment

Kleiner Perkin's first investment on the iPhone fund as been on a LBS service offered by Pelago. Read on ...

That's the idea behind Pelago, the first company funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as part of the $100 million iFund the venture capital firm announced in March at Apple's last big iPhone event. Pelago's software, called Whrrl, ties the mapping capabilities of the iPhone and other smartphones with the ability to find information about places where you, your friends, or anyone has been. Say you're lost in Las Vegas and need a restaurant recommendation. With iPhone in hand, you can scan the locations of nearby restaurants, just Italian restaurants, or just those recommended by foodie friends. Or you could search for the highest-rated bars or kid-friendly activities recommended by friends from your social network. There's going to be a "what's going on around me right now" button, says Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy. "You're always one button away from that immediate context."

Top 10 tech trends: Smart phones, alternative energies, Boomer technologies » VentureBeat

Below is an interesting analysis of the ten top tech trends predicted by "churchhill club" of silicon valley, which includes folks like Vinod Khosla and other reputed people from the investment community.

Top 10 tech trends: Smart phones, alternative energies, Boomer technologies » VentureBeat: "Trend 1: Customer data stored by different service providers will be combined to create more intelligent services. Josh Kopelman, managing partner at First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund, who founded online retailer Half.com (sold to eBay after a year for $300 million) said such customer data includes your financial records, dinner reservations, preferences in the iTunes store, random searches on Google and much more. In this way the Internet goes from satisfying explicit user needs (like searching for a friend to add on Facebook) to satisfying implicit needs (like telling who you should add and why adding them would be helpful to you).
Audience: 95 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 2: Oil will have increasing difficulty competing with biofuels made from cheap non-food crops for transportation. Vinod Khosla (pictured left below, beside Kopelman), founder of Khosla Ventures, which focuses on alternative fuels and green technologies, said coal will become less competitive compared to reliable solar thermal and other alternative energy sources.
Audience: 90 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 3: Water technology will replace abating global warming as a global priority. Joe Schoendorf, partner at Accel Partners, previously vice president of marketing for Appl" said the world is running out of usable water and this will kill millions more people in our lifetime than global warming.
Audience: 80 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 4: The mobile device industry’s migration to smart phones will produce great disruption for big industry players. Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners together with U2 lead singer Bono, and early private equity investor in technology, said the disruption will exceed what the PC industry experienced as it moved from character mode to graphical interfaces. Shifts in the competitive balance will hurt Motorola, Microsoft and probably LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Apple, Nokia, Palm and RIM will do better. [McNamee's firm is an investor in Palm]
Audience: 75 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 5: Booming market for healthy aging technologies Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and well-known for his founding investment in Hotmail, said a booming market in such technologies will allow people in their 60s and beyond to continue working and living a good life. Every 11 seconds, a baby boomer from the 1940s turns 60. These people have time and money and are Internet-savvy, so they represent an enormous market for services like mental exercise programs and online education in various topics. It fits into a larger vision that could also include an eBay for information services that exceeds the market for physical goods.
Audience: 70 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 6: Four-fifths of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within five to 10 years. Schoendorf said mobile Internet devices are rapidly becoming the leading device category.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 7: Algorithms will be constructed to develop new industrial chemicals, new biofuels and eventually artificial intelligence. This was Jurveston’s prediction.
Audience: 50 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 8: The mobile phone is your most important device. This prediction by Khosla is similar to Trend 6, but he predicted an even more intimate connection with the phone: Mobile phone applications will extend beyond e-mailing to include a virtual credit card, your ID, access to location systems and personal information filing systems. If you lose your phone, your data on it will all be backed up on a network so that you can load it all on to a new phone. Ten years ago people thought it would be ridiculous to have a camera in your cell phone, in two years you will have two cameras per phone – one for taking photos of yourself, and one for taking photos of others.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 9: There is going to be a venture capital shakeout. Lower costs and barriers to entry for startups will have a dramatic impact on the venture capital industry and lower returns. This was Kopelman’s prediction.
Audience: 40 percent voted “Yes”.

Trend 10: Within five years everything that matters to you will be available on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. This was McNamee’s prediction, and it’s similar to Trend 8. This will cause a massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices.
Audience: 30 percent voted “Yes”.

HighContrast

One of the best casestudies during my Bschool stint was one on IDEO, which is a company known for its design and innovation. Recently, I came across a article on the same and found it interesting to be blogged ..

HighContrast: "Focus on Desirability

The core of the IDEO philosophy starts with a focus on desirability. Come up with something people want then figure out how to optimize the technical and business aspects of it. Keep in mind that designing for people means designing for a journey through the product/service lifecycle.

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The presenters told cautionary tales about clients who come up with a vision of something that people want but then cut so many corners to get feasibility and viability where they want them to be that the end result deviates substantially from the original vision.

The lesson here is to stay true to your vision. Apple under Steve’s inspired but at the same time occasionally ruthless leadership is probably the best recent example of a company doing everything it can to stay true to its vision. The teams building the iPod and iPhone jumped through a lot of hoops to build great products. Apple even took the risk of launching the iPhone on the relatively limited AT&T network rather than compromise their vision in dealing with larger mobile operators. Microsoft’s Vista is an example of a product that comes from a company which has lost some of its vision.
The Process

The IDEO process goes from observation to solution through intermediate three steps (a) synthesis, where observations get abstracted to a core form of knowledge and understanding about the domain, (b) th"

WebGuild: Social Networking and Mobile

Every interesting post on the intersection between online social networking and mobile. It is imperative that one does not overestimate this opportunity.

Also, interesting to note that browser based access accounts for close to 77% of data traffic and remaining is through WAP. Also, WAP traffic is going to see reduction in numbers as browsers start becoming more powerful..

WebGuild: Social Networking and Mobile

India Entrepreneurs - why they do not scale

Interesting thoughts on why Indian Entrepreneurs have not scaled up ( in an article in businessweek by Krishnamurthy)..I have personally seen some of this aspects..I agree to all the points mentioned ..

Treating the business like a family—almost literally: this might come as a surprise to those in the developed countries, but promoters of small businesses develop an emotional attachment to everything about the business, including the people. The leadership style is patriarchal. A significant majority have not fired anyone in their business. Performance orientation is lacking and a comfort with the status-quo is palpable.

Inability to prioritize: entrepreneurs engaged in small businesses are in a perennial "fire-fighting" mode. Everything appears to be a crisis. Considerable time and effort is expended on trivial matters often at the expense of growth, creativity and innovation. Strategy is conspicuous by its absence. Not surprisingly, the business remains small.

Inability to delegate and empower: the CEOs of small businesses find it extremely hard to delegate. Even after two decades, they want to be the ones to sign a cheque even if it is for only a few dollars. They want every little detail in every domain—how many units were produced, how many were sold, how many people were absent for the day, how many phone calls were made. As a result, they lose sight of the big picture. They are unable to envision a grand future. They cannot dream big.

Aversion to risk: what we witness in small businesses can be termed "Destructive Paranoia". There is a constant dread of what might happen next. Competition seems to send a chill down the spine. Getting into uncharted territory is anathema. Obstacles or downturns, that are bound to occur in any business, are looked upon as bad omens. This kind of hyper-conservatism blocks the generation of new ideas.

The learning curve—what is that?

Entrepreneurs running small and medium enterprises fail to keep pace with change—be it technology, be it customer expectations or processes that can transform their businesses. One is astonished to see the number of entrepreneurs who feel a sense of "mission accomplished." That is a euphemism for tunnel vision—I have a house, a car, a decent bank balance, business is OK, why should I bother learning new tools, techniques, and new ways of doing?

Sure, there are external constraints as well. Finance is a major issue and interest rates are high. Again, though this problem appears to be external, it has more to do with the mindset. small and medium entrepreneurs seem to think that the only way one can obtain finance is through debt. The fact that some of the best organizations in the world are zero-debt companies comes as a surprise to them. Nearly 95% of small and medium enterprises are either proprietary firms or partnerships. Just 6% are in the corporate sector and here again, a vast majority are closely-held (not listed on any stock exchange). Equity is seen as being both risky (sharing ownership) and difficult (who will subscribe to our shares?).

How to Change the World: Ten Things You Didn't Know About Facebook

How to Change the World: Ten Things You Didn't Know About Facebook: "#

You can syndicate your blog. Through Facebook Notes, you can import one RSS-syndicated site, and items fed via RSS will appear on Facebook, to all your friends via the News Feed. This can also be done for each Facebook Page you create, in the same manner as your regular Facebook account. For information, see my blog post on the subject.
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You can post images and set your status via your cell phone. Just add the 'Mobile' app, and soon you will be able to add photos you take with your cell phone's camera, by simply sending it to mobile@facebook.com and registering your phone with Facebook. You can also receive and send statuses directly to Facebook via SMS. SMS features are supported by almost all carriers but T-Mobile, and even with T-Mobile you can still send photos and check Facebook through your cell phone's web browser.
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You can post 'Polls,' or 'Surveys' to different demographics. Click on the 'Business' link in the footer of your Facebook account, then click on 'Facebook Polls,' and you'll soon have access to create your own polls, of which you can target towards certain age groups, interests, and other demographics, and track the results. You can even set a budget of how much you want to spend for the entire Poll. Polls are $.25 a response. You can"

Insurance Companies Offer Mobile Payment Options To Customers

Things are hotting up in the Mobile Payments space in India. Lot of activity happening with companies like mCheck, Paymate, Obopay, Atom leading the race ..There are several others trying to get a pie from this booming area ..While each works on a different business model, the sucess of the company in a longer run would be based on the following factors:

- One that leverages the critical mass ..( at the bottom of the pyramid )
- Ease of use
- Distribution
- Compliance ( RBI, security etc ).

Insurance Companies Offer Mobile Payment Options To Customers: "atom PayBuzz, from atom Technologies Limited, a Financial Technologies Group venture, has tied up with ICICI Lombard General Insurance and Reliance General insurance for accepting payments over a simple phone call originating from any landline or mobile phone. Customers will now be able to pay their insurance premium amongst other things over a simple phone call by using their credit cards. atom Paybuzz which has arrangements with insurance establishments across India, is a secure mechanism for payments based on touch-tone IVR technology."