Chautauquas

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo's quote on Nokia's way of business

2007-01-23T17:56:00.000-05:00

A recent article in Harvard Business Review quotes Nokia's CEO Kallasvuo on what he thinks is Nokia needs to do to keep ahead of the game:

Humility is a vital quality in a leader, just as it is for a company. Nokia, if it is to continue to prosper, has to be externally oriented. It must have the kind of humility that makes it listen to the customer and seek ideas from outside. It has to be humble in the face of complexity. Especially today, as the convergence of mobility and the Internet has everyone guessing, Nokia can’t be so overconfident as to believe its predictions are the best. Instead, we need to perceive changes as they occur and react the fastest. In a management team, that responsiveness is a product of diversity—managers must humbly accept that their own perspectives need to be broadened by others’.

I definitely like his perspective. And it's quite surprising just how many companies and leaders forget how important humility is!

Wirkle at Comsware

2007-01-10T17:54:00.000-05:00

Varun and Lomesh are at Comsware in Bangalore, India right now demonstrating the enterprise solutions from Wirkle. Here's a picture...

Changing your life into an RSS feed

2006-09-09T15:28:00.000-04:00

I log on to my computer and find 5 new email messages. They're all from myspace, gather and zillion other things I join to be able to see what they're all about. I hate email updates especially from social networking websites. It sort of represents an archaic way of conveying information when social networking sites were not quite that ubitquitous and you expected one to not look at the site very often. In those times it made sense to let me know through an email that there was something new for me to look at. Maybe it was about my friends, maybe someone had left me a message there or sent a friend request. However, now, when almost every kid has myspace or Bebo or Cyworld as their homepage and they probably log on to them 20 times a day and they carry them on their mobile phones, email updates no longer make sense to me. They are like the grocery store coupons I receive in mail about once a week and throw into recycling rightaway.

Of course, I am quite interested in finding out what's going on within social network - more in some people than others, but I don't want an email everytime something changes in the lives of all people in my network. There has to be a smarter way of addressing the need - maybe the service could have a semi-intelligent rating system which decides what kinds of updates I'd like, maybe the service could have a better delivery mechanism than email to provide me with an update (something that is non-intrusive) - somebody has to got to think of something different!

I believe at LinknSurf we addressed these updates in an interesting way: we turned people's life into an RSS feed. No spam, no clutter...what if we turned each of your buddies on the buddylist into an RSS feed instead of cluttering the buddylist with tags. Now, if you're really interested in someone you could easily see what he/she has been upto as soon as you're subscribed to an RSS feed of their lives.

Stowe Boyd (whom met I while ago) has an interesting post. He writes: Blog or Social Networking Status is Just A Kind Of Presence -- You've changed your Facebook status from "married" to "it's complicated"? It's just one of a dozen bits of status, like new blog posts, or geolocational information that should be hanging off your icon on your buddies' buddylists. And of course, we'd like this carefully managed by privacy constraints, since people don't want their estranged lovers knowing where they are hanging out. What they are reading and what they think about it -- I would like to know what my favorite individuals are reading and their take on it, but I'd also like some way to surface things that are interesting to a lot of my favorite people (a la MeMeme), some kind of sidebar to the Nerdavana buddylist, perhaps.

Happy Independence day, India

2006-08-14T23:48:00.000-04:00

Out here in Virginia one can feel Fall quietly making its way into the air, into people's moods, conversations and melodies. The last time I wrote nostalgically about India was when Spring was making a similar entry, when the dogwoods were blooming and the season's last snow flakes were quietly settling on my window. Strange. Maybe it's a change of season thing. Or maybe it's just fall, come fall and it's the festive season in India (at least where I grew up). The weather tonight is like late September in India. And that's what it reminds me of.

It reminds me of streching and yawning, trying to continue sleeping on the cot in the moist freshness of dawn. It reminds me of long hours spent drinking with friends by the canal under a low moon waiting for the shadowy train with its windows of checkered light to come. It reminds me of lovers slowly ambling down college roads in the gathering dusk wishing that the girls' hostel was open just a wee bit longer (In my college girls had to be in their dorms/hostels by 9:30 PM!!). And it reminds of stopping by the roadside and drinking tea on a chilly midnight on numerous spur-of-the-moment trips to Kasauli and Dagshai. I think it's a change of season nostalgia. Anyways...

Today, India celebrates its 59th independence day. I haven't lived long enough to recap the 59 years and I'm not wise enough to talk about the 26 I've seen. However, an article in the economist (sorry, password required) sums India's contradictions disturbingly well. Here is an excerpt.

LOOK at the big picture, and India's future seems assuredly bright. It has banished famine and cut absolute poverty by more than half. Economic growth is among the fastest of any country. Its newly confident businesses are spreading their wings. Having long been “hyphenated” with Pakistan as a dangerous trouble-spot, the country is now seen as half of an “India-China” pairing that is transforming the global economy. If this were a race, India, as the younger country, and a vibrant but stable democracy, would seem to many the better long-term bet.

Look at the detail, however, and you may despair at the depth and complexity of the problems India faces. For all its achievements, poverty remains entrenched. Some 260m people survive on less than one dollar a day. Nearly half of the country's children below the age of six are undernourished. More than half of its women are illiterate. Half its homes have no electricity, and in one state, Chhattisgarh, 82% are not even connected by road. Nor is there a huge pot of money to throw at these shortages. The government's average budget deficit, from 2000 to 2004, was exceeded only by that of Turkey. Even when it does spend money, the pipeline between government coffers and the intended beneficiaries is corroded by corruption, and cash seeps out.

As the World Bank notes in a new report (“India. Inclusive Growth & Service Delivery: Building on India's Success”. World Bank Development Policy Review, 2006), this contradiction puzzles fresh observers in three ways. First, they find the rampant economic optimism hard to swallow: it seems to exaggerate changes in the fundamental shape of the Indian economy. Second, even though the economy is booming, the performance of the public sector seems to go from bad to worse. Third, India “is the best of the world, it is the worst of the world—and the gaps are growing.” India's top technology colleges set global standards. Yet “many, if not most, children finish government primary schools incapable of simple arithmetic.”

The article however ends with hope. Here are the last two paragraphs:

All of this reads like a list of reasons for gloom about India. Far from it. The beauty of reducing the country's myriad problems to two big, related, ones, is that of all simplification: it makes the solutions seem simpler, too, even if this economic diagnosis of India's ills suggests cures that are mainly political.

Most recent Indian governments, and the present one above all, have a clear and sensible idea of their priorities: investing in infrastructure, health and education, and in improving agricultural productivity. It is not the policies that are failing so much as the machinery for implementing them. In electoral politics, good policy is often forgotten for vote-grabbing promises of jobs, contracts and subsidies. And the Indian civil service, like bureaucracies everywhere, is adept at resisting reform. But India is big enough to have plenty of stories of successful reform that can be imitated: most involve making providers of taxpayer-financed services more accountable for their delivery. Spreading those lessons should not be beyond the world's biggest democracy.

The influence economy

2006-08-07T17:19:00.000-04:00

in-flu-ence:
n. A power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort: relaxed under the influence of the music; the influence of television on modern life.
Stories, case studies and articles abound; tales come and go; and debates keep getting sparked about how 'social media', 'citizien journalism', 'web 2.0', 'network journalism' etc. etc. etc. is changing the way we do business. And it is...I contend that this is the age of influence, where competetive advantage in businesses will come from being able to influence consumers, where the barrier to entry will be influence (not knowledge, not technology but influence). So, what we're seeing is the movement from a knowledge economy to an influence economy.

Jamie Oliver sparked a reform in the school-meal-industry in UK (Read this post on Communities dominate Brands), the Indian government had to act quickly to remove censorship from blogs after the blasts (read here); Cluetrain, Naked Conversations, Communities Dominate Brands, books on blogging, are big hits. Youtube is growing at breakneck speed. The blogosphere continues to double every five months. There are more hits on myspace than google. There are people who read blogs on their phones and blog from their mobile phones. What on earth is going on?

So, the first question is 'Why are more and more people blogging/Youtubing/Myspacing'? Why are people like Jamie Oliver standing up? Why are we seeing more and more participation from the people?

The World Values Survey may provide some answers or at least a basis for a reasonable hypothesis. If you take a look at this figure (click on Introduction to World Values Survey on the lower left hand corner) from the survey, you'll see some interesting trends.

The report says (I believe that this data is from year 2001):

A central component of this emerging dimension involves the polarization between Materialist and Postmaterialist values, reflecting a cultural shift that is emerging among generations who have grown up taking survival for granted. Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance of diversity and rising demands for participation in decision making in economic and political life. These values also reflect mass polarization over tolerance of outgroups, including foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality. The shift from survival values to self-expression values also includes a shift in child-rearing values, from emphasis on hard work toward emphasis on imagination and tolerance as important values to teach a child. And it goes with a rising sense of subjective well-being that is conducive to an atmosphere of tolerance, trust and political moderation. Finally, societies that rank high on self-expression values also tend to rank high on interpersonal trust.

I believe that we are indeed finding evidence that all those observations are true. For instance, take the number of non-profit startups in the last couple of years and the attention they are drawing, or consider all the people talking about meditation and yoga (the number of people has gone up 10 times in the last few years). We are indeed moving into a world (especially in the developed countries) where self-expression, trust and a meaningful existence seems to be gathering more value everyday. So, falling back on my education, the utility (don't you love that term) of self-expression and interpersonal trust is much higher today than it has ever been and is continuing to grow.

The second question then is, given that the societal values seem to be changing, what are people and businesses doing about it?

Easy enough to answer. We saw the advent of technology that would support self-expression (static websites to blogs). We saw this technology move from mere text (blogging) to multimedia. We saw ways of distribution of this user-generated content differ from conventional ways (syndicated content - RSS and atom.; list sharing - OPML). We saw podcasting, we are seeing Youtube. We saw content being bookmarked and ranked socially by those who consume it (social bookmarking). On the other side, we saw the facebooks, friendsters, myspaces, Cyworlds flourish. And I'm sure each one of us can name plenty of companies in all the areas I named above (and we all have our darlings that we'll put our money on!). However, the social revolution began even before these things happened. It began with pagerank (see Ajit Jaokar's post on pagerank as web 2.0 here).

People on the edge who created these things or understand them and write about them started becoming more and more known (aka influential) and then (as expected) we had ways of ranking them (See Technorati's top 100 for example). Alan Moore recently wrote about how many CEOs are beginning to blog. Stowe Boyd had an interesting observation here. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's book is full of anecdotes of how blogging helped. Why? Because blogging is about self-expression and inter-personal trust (things with high utility in this day and age).

It's not just blogging or user-generated content. We have started seeing the emergence of "community" as a buzzword. People have started forming Communities of practice and started engaging in debates about how communities differ from teams and how to build communities. Business academics have begun studying "Social Network Analysis". Engineers have started looking for opportunities for Operations Research and Management Sciences in this social network world (did I ever tell you that my MS research was on stochastic network algorithms? I would say buy my book, but its probably useless to you!). :-)

And it's not over yet. We are seeing more and more non-profit startups (look at the world values survey paragraph above). Anywhere we look, I see a bright young person starting something developmental for the society (take the increasing numbers at TED). See my last post about TED. We are seeing Jamie Olivers and Bombay helplines.

So, my last question is what does all of this mean? What does it mean to see more CEOs blog? What does it mean to see that TV selling power is falling? Why are people studying communities? And if things will work this way...what does it mean for the future?

Well, I think it means we're moving into an influence economy. Think about it, if organizations are going to start functioning as communities of practice, the formerly used ways of authority to get work done are not going to work. What will work is a leader's ability to influence members in the community to get work done. That's internal management. Customers are already basing their buying decisions on influence (I'm sure engadget is responsible for more gadget sales than any TV ad campaign. If it isn't, it will be). People trust engadget and reviews from fellow customers more than they trust salespeople (is it a surprise?). And trust leads to the ability to influence. And I'm sure all of you (especially, Alan, Tomi and Shel) will agree that more and more companies will have to blog because it creates trust between the company and its customers. TV's ability to sell is falling because TV commercials provide for less trust (among other things) than blogs.

So, we are seeing that internally in your professional career your ability to influence will take you places. Externally as an organization, you have to rely on building trust (to be able to influence) to be able to sell to consumers. If we extend this a little further it is easy to see that the commodity that businesses will be fighting for will a be a consumer's trust (aka the ability to influence a consumer)...so influence will become the barrier to entry for other businesses.

Why did we call our economy a knowledge economy so far? Because if you had more knowledge you succeeded personally in your career. If the company had more knowledge/technology the company succeeded. The barrier to entry was and to extent still is intellectual property.

Do I need to say any more that we're seeing the end of the knowledge economy and the advent of an influence economy? If you any examples that support my contention, or invalidate it, I would really like to hear them.

TED Talks

2006-08-05T19:54:00.000-04:00

TED has some of the best people talking about the world. Each one of them is worth listening to and now these talks have been made available to everyone. Click here for the talks. This is yet another example of the internet being the great leveller. More on that later.

Personally, I loved Cameron Sinclair's and Hans Rosling's talks, especially from the point of view of sustainable development for the world. I also really liked Sir Ken Robinson, maybe even more that Cameron's and Hans' talk. I couldn't agree less with Ken on the point that creativity is as important as literacy when we think of education in this day and age. Also, I like the way Cameron says that, today, we have an opportunity...opportunity, not responsibility, to get together and develop socially responsible organizations that work for world development.

Blogging and "the intellectual influence game"

2006-08-04T13:14:00.000-04:00

The Economist has an article on why economists spend valuable time blogging. (sorry, I think that link might prompt for an ID and a password). What's interesting to me is that I find more university faculty members from economics, social sciences and the liberal arts blogging than from engineering and the sciences. Maybe it's because the former subjects deal with people and realize the value of influence more than scientists or engineers who spend their lives in laboratories (an atmosphere devoid of human beings). No offence to engineers...I am one too and proud of it!

I have talked about the value of influence earlier and intend to talk about it again in a later post. However, for now here are some excerpts from the article.

“CLEARLY there is here a problem of the division of knowledge, which is quite analogous to, and at least as important as, the problem of the division of labour,” Friedrich Hayek told the London Economic Club in 1936. What Mr Hayek could not have known about knowledge was that 70 years later weblogs, or blogs, would be pooling it into a vast, virtual conversation. That economists are typing as prolifically as anyone speaks both to the value of the medium and to the worth they put on their time.

and later...

So why do it? “It's a place in the intellectual influence game,” Mr DeLong replies (by e-mail, naturally). For prominent economists, that place can come with a price. Time spent on the internet could otherwise be spent on traditional publishing or collecting consulting fees. Mr DeLong caps his blogging at 90 minutes a day. His only blog revenue comes from selling advertising links to help cover the cost of his servers, which handle more than 20,000 visitors daily.

The way it should be - way cool!

2006-08-04T01:46:00.000-04:00

The other day some work required me to delve into stuff on 'Communities of Practice' and where the concept evolved from. And as I went looking for some information I stumbled across this picture and just fell in love with it! Way cool! And what do you think Global Deepwater Wildcat Conference is about? Any guesses? It's about deep water drilling for oil...yes you're right. It's that picture of an off-shore oil rig with hundreds of hard core engineers (the civil, mechanical, chemical kinds) milling around. And they could very well have chosen a picture of drilling with engineers in hard hats and some tanks and stuff. But, no...this is the picture they chose to market the conference. It certainly makes me want to go to the conference! This is what I call - way cool!

And this just doesn't have to apply to marketing. This is what makes products fun to use, the "cool factor"..."the A-ha! effect"...the "Damn! That's awesome" expression has to come about from your users. I believe a lot of it comes from everyone in a team understanding what it is that we're making and what value will it add in our consumers' life. At LinknSurf, we had our whole team of developers create blogs to draw their own understanding of what LinknSurf would mean to them as consumers and be able to offer suggestions in terms of how to make it more FUN. In our world today, I have come to believe that you can add a lot of utility to anything by just adding FUN to it.

"Quality isn't job one"!

2006-08-02T20:41:00.000-04:00

Hu gh Macleod rocks!! He's one of my favorite cartoonists and I could cite a number of reasons why he's so good. I love the way he adds color to some cartoons; they're just a visual delight. Most of his cartoons are witty (that means I get most of them!!); he's got a no-nonsense style of saying what he has to and yada yada yada. However, most of all, what I like is his attitude and the fact that I think I'm better looking than him! ;) (kidding...I dont know what he looks like)
Oh, I also have to mention that he's prolific. He just keeps on producing good stuff...keeps going and going and going and going (there's the person you need for your advertisement energizer!)

You should definitely read some of his stuff on 'How to be creative' and 'Hughtrain'. Not only is it fun but it's his take on being passionate about what you do I really like. In fact I have some of his cartoons on my office walls to remind me that startups are about fun, they are about passion, they are about loving what you do and doing it in style and they are about changing things! Come to think of it...that's exactly why LinknSurf exists. Being an entrepreneur, one realizes that there are always times in startups when you hit the point where you think you can't do anything new or can't figure what to do next and yada yada yada...and in that slow phase, suddenly one hears back from a passionate user, just one user, and suddenly it's all worthwhile. The creative juices are flowing again and pieces begin to fall into place, at least for the time being.

And I'm recounting this from experience...yesterday one such user brought me out of the doldrums. I was actually sitting in front of the PC with my IM status reading "looking for inspiration" (Hugh there's the line for your next cartoon...) when this one teenager's email complaining about a bug sparked me back into action. And I know that this one LOVES linknsurf. That in turn makes us want to make it even better!

Kathy, are you listening? You need to write about this sometime...creating passionate users is not only good for our business...but it's what keeps us entrpreneurs alive and passionate. After all that's why we create. So, folks, create passionate users to fire your own passion. It works!

The keitai culture

2006-08-01T15:40:00.000-04:00

"Keitai isn't just a new technology, it's a new culture" reads a Wired news story from Feb 2006 that I stumbled upon today. Keitai is Japanese for cell phone. Whether the rest of the world will go the Keitai way or not is for all of us to see. However, I have a lurking suspicion that a lot of us will.

You know what I'm going to say - for entreprenuers, as I keep on repeating, we need to design services for the Keitai culture, for the mobile experience and not just translate web-based services to the tiny mobile screen!

Here are some excerpts from the story:

Walking through Tokyo's Ginza district one Friday evening last month I saw an extraordinary sight that will soon become an ordinary one: A businessman was talking into his keitai (the Japanese word for cell phone), holding it out in front of him rather than to his ear. Suddenly, smiling, he raised the device to his lips and kissed the screen.

It wasn't hard to piece together an explanation -- the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they'd synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn't be my last. Soon enough we will see this scene repeated in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and San Francisco.

...and this...

Increasingly, when I go out here in Osaka, what I'm observing in public places is people silently surfing on their i-mode keitais. I tear myself away from the internet only to enjoy endless vistas of other people using it.

I shouldn't be surprised. Japan Media Review tells us that there are 89 million keitai subscriptions in Japan. Seventy percent of the population owns at least one keitai.
This saturation has a very literal impact on my movements through the city: it's not unusual to have to jump out of the way of a young man wobbling along Osaka's narrow backstreets on a bicycle, concentrating on the glowing screen of his keitai. Perhaps he's lost and consulting a GPS navigation service, or, who knows, he may even be reading a Wired News column in translated, stripped-down Hotwired i-mode format. He may be reading me, which would be great, but has he seen me?

And later in the article:

It's also a little worrying to see two girls in a cafe running out of things to say and sitting face to face in silence, each reading their keitai screen. The massive success of keitai culture in Japan is largely due to the decision, taken in the late '90s, to market the phones to women and young people. It would be sad if their online conversations had silenced their cafe conversations.

Then again, information ubiquity is great. You can sew facts into conversations on the fly. It's great, for instance, when you're in the middle of a si- or seven-hour drinking and eating session in a reggae izakaya, and someone mentions an island where there's an art installation, and with a few clicks you can call up and save the details of exactly how to get there.

Wagging the long tail: Blogging and marketing

2006-07-31T20:48:00.000-04:00

Looking at the long tail from the perspective of blog traffic (aka potential to influence public opinion)

Chris Anderson's long tail got a lot of attention lately! (Read Ed Sim's post and Chris Anderson's post to follow the discussion that Lee Gomes sparked with his WSJ article. Don't miss all the comments). Also, Ajit Jaokar recently wrote about how critical it was to monetize the long tail for a startup to be classified as a web 2.0 startup.

My question is on a tangent. Does the blogosphere really have a significant long tail? Or as the perennial question has always been, how long is the tail (when it comes to the blogosphere in our case). Technorati's State of the Blogosphere reports often talk about the number of blogs created and how frequently they're updated etc. and how many survive. Interesting statistics.

However, what I would like to see is that how many blogs are visited and commented upon fairly regularly? That is, going with the long tail questions, what percentage of the total traffic do the top 10% (or top 1000) of the blogs own and how much do the others own. A lot of people believe (and maybe rightly so) that blogging is only big in the blogosphere which is dominated by a certain number of "A level" bloggers. Any data Mr. Sirfy?

So, my question is that if you're into marketing, can you make enough noise by getting those bloggers in the long tail writing about you? Or do you reach more people by getting the top 100 to pay attention? I'm flipping the long tail question i.e., the long tail as presented by Chris Anderson is about the consumers. This is not the long tail as applied to consumers. This applies to influence. Is the collective influence of the bloggers in the long tail comparable to the influence of the "A level" bloggers? As a company are you going to market yourselves by reaching out to the most influential (the head) or are you going to start with the grassroots and let them write about your product (the tail) of their own volition?

In theory I would like to believe that in the case of the blogosphere, the tail is comparable to the head. After all, web 2.0 is believed to "a great leveller". And we all believe in how powerful the voice of the people is. I would just like to see some statistics. Anyone have any data/answers/stories?

By the way, the cartoon above is from the gaping void. And in the spirit of the question, check out this post showing some videos on blogging by Peter Hirshberg of Technorati. You gotta love them. And Peter, in case you read this, I would love to take a look at the statistics I requested earlier.

Networking social networks: Looking into the future

2006-07-30T16:15:00.000-04:00

Social networking, the phenomena that most of us have been talking about is fast approaching a saturation point in terms of its market. What will the future look like for social networking? What are the social networking websites missing? A reminder of Reed's law about Group Forming Networks for those who have forgotten or are unaware - there is much greater utility in connecting group forming networks than mainting individual networks.

An article in Business 2.0 on the introduction of the Korean social networking giant, Cyworld, in the US set me thinking in a couple of different directions. (Yes, I do think sometimes! It's focussing that's hard as the last sentence suggests)Plenty of people have talked about Cyworld (see this and this as examples) and there has been much noise about whether Cyworld will be able to replicate its Korean success in the US market. Everyone has offered their own opinion on why Cyworld will succeed in the US market. However, for now, we will not talk about Cyworld or why it will succeed...for now I want to draw your attention to the following excerpts from the article.

Cyworld is entering the U.S. market at a time of social-networking saturation. MySpace and Facebook are already well entrenched. Hi5, Multiply, TagWorld, and even the much-maligned Friendster are gaining fast. Cyworld has discovered many more waiting in the wings. "Our intelligence shows there are probably 30 launching this year," Streefland says.

A couple of paragraphs later, you'll find this:

The single most important factor in getting people to join is having friends who are already on the network. So when every teenager and 20-something already has a profile on MySpace or Facebook, how many more social networks are they willing to try?

The answer, according to Lee, is more than you might think. Two-thirds of U.S. youths have profiles on multiple networks - but 53 percent would join another if it were compelling enough. "They are playing with identities," Lee says. "They are trying to figure out who they are."

On MySpace, they can be glamorous party creatures. On Facebook, they can be students. And on Cyworld, the bet goes, they can be themselves. "Everyone in our focus groups has a MySpace page," Streefland says, "but it doesn't necessarily satisfy them.

The observation of interest here is "Two-thirds of U.S. youths have profiles on multiple networks - but 53 percent would join another if it were compelling enough"

How many of us had multiple email addresses (at least those in their 20s did) and we ended up thinking that multiple email accounts were a nuisance? Of course maybe many of us keep personal separate from work and maybe even have one for junk etc. Yet, don't we sometimes wish we had one? So, how many of us will not, sooner or later, start thinking that multiple profiles are a nuisance?

Also, don't forget one thing with the email analogy - unlike email, these social networks don't communicate with each other. How irritating would it have been if you couldn't have sent someone with a yahoo email account an email from your google account? If there is something interesting on my myspace profile, wouldn't I would want to share it with my facebook friends? So, as people get spread across these social networks the need to communicate across networks is going to increase. I don't see any of the social networking sites going that way. Instead, it seems they'll be waging the battle for consumer loyalty the way businesses in the past did.

Web 2.0 is about convergence. Think RSS...the reason I like my RSS reader is because I can get all I read at one place. I don't have to go to multiple sites. Why should I have to go to multiple social networking sites?

Also, does anyone remember Reed's law? Here's an excerpt from David P. Reed's paper on the sneaky exponential:

When we combine two networks together so that users of one network can connect seamlessly to users of the other, Metcalfe's Law tells us already that substantial new value is created: (M+N)² = M² +N²+2MN. This bonus term, 2MN, is substantial-up to 100% of the value in the original unconnected networks. Thus there is an enormous incentive to find ways to interconnect networks, since the members of each network can access a much larger set of potential transaction partners. With the GFN law, interconnection is even more powerful, creating many new potential groups that span the two networks: 2M+N = 2M2N. The GFN interconnection bonus percentage itself grows exponentially with the size of the smaller network.

What we see, then, is that there are really at least three categories of value that networks can provide: the linear value of services that are aimed at individual users, the "square" value from facilitating transactions, and exponential value from facilitating group affiliations. What's important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases.

For the complete article, click here.

The obvious conclusion then is that very soon there is going to be a need for a service that can connect major social networks.

Major firms market on Myspace

2006-07-28T11:40:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week Lily Allen, the myspace diva, got some more attention as she performed live. In the case of Lily Allen what the users were picking up was genuinely her music. It wasn't useless content pushed to the users to try and sell something else. Marketing on Myspace is becoming a big deal. It makes one wonder how long will it take before Myspace becomes like TV where commercials are an eveyrday nuisance. The economist writes:

"MySpace seems to offer a chance for companies to take their marketing into new, potentially more lucrative territory, by becoming, in effect, members of their customers' network of “friends”. A growing number of firms have established their own pages on MySpace, to which users can link. In the process, some are getting into bed with some unlikely partners. Earlier this year, for example, Unilever, a consumer-goods giant, hooked up with Christine Dolce to promote Axe, a deodorant. Ms Dolce, who goes by the alias ForBiddeN, boasts around 900,000 “friends” who link to her MySpace page. Bleached, buxom and with impressive marketing savvy, she is arguably the most successful brand to emerge from MySpace, and has already launched a line of clothing."

It further goes on to say:

The biggest challenge—for MySpace itself, and for the firms that want to use it to promote their wares—is not to alienate potential customers by being overtly commercial. “We need to be engaging with them, not banging them over the head with brandalism that pollutes their space,” says Kevin George of Unilever. But, he says, “when you deliver 18- to 24-year-old guys content they want to engage with, they don't mind if it comes from a brand.” This theory will now be put to the test, as MySpacers' attention is fought over by brands including Procter & Gamble's Old Spice, State Farm insurance, Elexa by Trojan female condoms, and the US Marine Corps.

LinknSurf lets mobile web connect people internet doesn't

2006-07-28T02:07:00.000-04:00

I have to recount an interesting experience to all the people interested in the mobile web. I was on LinknSurf (www.linknsurf.com) yesterday (well, I'm on it all the time) and was exchanging messages with another user - a teenager from England - that I met on LinknSurf.

Somewhere in the conversation, I asked her whether she had a myspace profile because I wanted her to connect to LinknSurf on myspace (www.myspace.com/linksurf). However, the response startled me, especially coming from a mobile savvy teen (given then she had downloaded and installed LinknSurf on her phone and is using it actively). She asked me "What is Myspace?". She went on to say that if it was a website she wouldnt know about it because she can't really use the internet too much but she uses her phone all the time! Take a deep breath and repeat the statement in your head ladies and gentlemen...SHE CAN'T REALLY USE THE INTERNET (PC-BASED) BUT SHE USES HER PHONE ALL THE TIME AND SHE LOVES IT.

This maybe an isolated case today...but it's a case that has happened. It's something that I have held as a belief for a long time. Yesterday, however was the first time it happened in a verifiable way on LinknSurf itself. Watch out for more cases like this - I am another living example for one.

More on text messages after Alan and Tomi's post

2006-07-25T23:49:00.000-04:00

Tomi Ahonen wrote recently wrote about text messages being the biggest data application in the world. Here's a testimony to how ubiqitous text messaging has become: Nate Anderson references a survey conucted by british newspaper, The Times, to make the following conclusion:

text messaging has become an essential part of the British mating ritual. More than 50 percent of all 18- to 24- year olds who responded to the survey said that they had used text messages to ask for dates and had engaged in some fairly explicit SMS chat.
While cell phones are certainly popular in the US, they still remain more common in Europe. A survey recently revealed that Brits have more phones in circulation than people in the country—and they don't even hold the top spot. That honor goes to Italy, which has more phones per capita than any other European country.

Government bans blog sites in India after blasts

2006-07-25T22:53:00.000-04:00

It has been exactly two weeks since those atrocious blasts ripped Bombay (Mumbai) apart and brought life to a standstill. However, as I heard someone say on BBC, that if there is one thing that is common in all major cities of the world, it is resilience. Well, much as expected Bombay was returned to its usual pace the very next day. However, like Madrid, London and New York, there will always be some scars left behind.

While the public rose to the occasion and in the wake of the jammed cell phone network several blogging sites helped stranded people in Bombay communicate with each other, while the public showed solidarity and the whole city observed a two-minute silence to commemorate the suffering of its fellow citizens, while the people unilaterally expressed anger against such atrocious terrorist activity, the Government of India decided to block people's right to express.

Lomesh writes "Just finished reading up my Times of India newspaper where an article stuck my eye. After the brutal Mumbai blasts of 7/11 where more than 250 people were killed and hundreds of others were severely injured, the DoT (Department of Telecom) for some good enough reason decided to block famous blogging websites including Blogspot and Typepad."

He further references this and this as proof. The officials claimed that only wanted certain blogs to be blocked (a list believed to be about 22 pages long!!).

The International Herald Tribune finally reported this on the 20th. When will the regimes of the world learn?

LinknSurf press release

2006-06-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

Folks, you can find the latest linknsurf press release here. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at support (at) linknsurf (dot) com, or leave a comment here. Happy LinknSurfing!

Of communities and the blogosphere

2006-06-15T16:23:00.000-04:00

Alan Moore and Shel Israel talk about their recent conversation at Content 2.0 and with the BBC in their respective posts (click here for Shel and here for Alan). It's an interesting discussion where Alan and Shel take opposing sides in the discussion. Shel believes that companies cannot spawn communities of users while Alan does. Alan uses his tour de france example and Shel his Boeing 777 example. I couldn't listen to their entire conversation at Content 2.0, but I did listen to their BBC interview.

Personally, I don't see what the difference is. It's looking at the same coin from different sides. To me, what Shel calls a "community of people who fly cramped and uncomfortable in the back end of commercial planes" is giving rise to a new community of people "who like to take Boeing 777 for long flights when flying coach class". One may argue that the Boeing 777 community would not have emerged had the other community of disgruntled flyers not existed. Was the plane created to serve this community? Certainly. Was it obvious that a community of passionate 777 flyers may be created as a result? I think. So, is Boeing the cause of a 777 community by providing for the needs of the disgruntled community? Or is the disgruntled community itself the cause?

Now, looking at the flip side of the coin, at Alan's tour de france example. Would the newspaper have been able to publicize itself had a community of people who wanted to cycle across France not existed? Would it have been possible with just one cyclist? Did the newspaper editor realize what that one event he out together for publicty would amount to?

In some ways I agree with Shel...that a community with a need exists first. Then I agree with Alan...that the business that meets the need actually brings the people with need together and creates a community. So, maybe that's the only difference between what Alan and Shel have to say...

The way I see it is that Alan and Shel have different definitions for the term "community". In my mind, Shel refers to a set of people with the same interest/problem whether they are connected to each other because of the same interest/problem or not as a community. Alan on the other hand calls a set of people a community if their relationship exists because of the similarity of their interest/problem. For example, for Shel, a number of people wanting to cycle across France who could talk to each other is a community. On the other hand, for Alan, people connected together now because of the tour de France is a community created by the tour de france.

Here's another way of looking at it - is the community of Mac users, a Mac-loving community or a Windows-hating community? Shel probably says Windows-hating and Alan says Mac-lovers.

I think that both of them are communities at different stages in the evolution cycle. They're both a part of the system - one is the crest and the other the ebb. However, we won't be able to make a wave without both of them. The fact is that if a group of people with a common need exist (a community in Shel's terms), some business will meet it and in doing so create a group of people (a community in Alan's terms).

The thing to not forget though is that in a community, the members must be able to interact with each other. What the blogosphere has done is made it easier for people to interact - so it has widened these communities beyond what we ever imagined. Those pockets of people with similar interests are now connected with pockets across the world forming one large community. These people earlier scattered had no voice, but now that they can interact they have a voice that matters. In the long run, I simply think this makes things easier for marketeers because now you'll know where and how to reach your audience. The challenge is to create something good enough for your audience to want it and the best way is to get people in the audience to sell it.

However, that's in the long run...right now I believe that as much hype as we associate with Blogosphere, the number of people it influences is still small. Any opinions anyone?

Just some cliched observations from another entrepreneur

2006-06-06T12:02:00.000-04:00

I've just come back from an extended break from LinknSurf and the Web 2.0 world - while it wasn't exactly a sabbatical, it did help me relax a little, focus on other things and think of some new things for LinknSurf. Besides LinknSurf, I also had some time to reflect on the startup scene in general and what I had learnt from my startup besides the obvious.

If you're in an emerging area in a consumer (not enterprise) market with almost no precedents, here are a couple of things that no one ever told you about a startup (or at least no one told me. And if someone did, I forgot!!!):

There are no discrete mistakes. Things happen in a continuum and it's HARD to isolate single things and deal with them
Actually, there are NO mistakes. The ones you've identified are basically conjectures. You THINK that that is where you went wrong and there will seldom be any way to verify it but your instinct
Startups operate in a series of experiments. With each little experiment, from the way the product looks to how you spread the word, you probably learn more of WHAT NOT TO DO in the next experiment than WHAT TO DO
The day you figure out WHAT TO DO, take a deep breath and savor the moment. The feeling won't last very long! But go ahead and DO IT! Not doing is the worst thing you can do.
The gap between identifying 'what is needed' and actually providing for it is really really small. It's so small that none of your big ideas are going to squeeze through it. Try the smaller ones first
All the experienced people you talk to offer opinions that are no different than yours unless you drive them to the details. It's the details that matter - that's where the devil lies. And then again, you realize that no one gives a damn about that neat little detail you implemented till it shows up unexpectedly one day and then you won't be able to wipe the grin off your face for at least that day
The most enriching experience is to see most of your ideas and opinions being challenged, ground to dust and thrown away and see new ones emerge out of that dust which MAY work. Like someone said, convicition is a luxury for those on the sidelines. You're on the frontlines - so stop fighting FOR your ideas, start fighting WITH them
MONEY MATTERS. Yeah, everyone told you that, but no one told you HOW MUCH it matters
Trust me, no one knows your product and market better than you. However, DOES IT MATTER? Passionate users are created when the USER USES THE PRODUCT BETTER THAN YOU
Sometimes, things work out for no reason at all, just the way they don't sometimes
IT'S MORE FUN AND FULFILLING THAN YOU EVER IMAGINED

Well, I guess that's a pretty cliched list. Any one else have any other observations or opinions? More on LinknSurf and Wirkle in my next post.

On subjective probability and behavioral economics

2006-04-01T16:24:00.001-05:00

I recently ran into an interesting, but an almost too general article, 'The marketplace of perceptions' (Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, March - April, 2006). What surprised me is that there was no mention of Frank P. Ramsey and his work on subjective probability that has had a profound impact on Economics since he first published his 1926 essay, 'Truth and Probability'. (Don't let the math in the essay scare you, even if you're not the math types, the essay is fascinating and certainly recognized as one of the most revolutionary works in probability theory.) To add to Craig Lambert's essay, here are excerpts from Ramsey's essay:

"...Thirdly, it sometimes means that if his mind worked according to certain rules, which we may roughly call 'scientific method', he would have such a degree of belief. But fourthly it need mean none of these things for men have not always believed in scientific method, and just as we ask 'But am I necessarily reasonable," we can also ask 'But is the scientist necessarily reasonable?' In this ultimate meaning it seems to me that we can identify reasonable opinion with the opinion of an ideal person in similar circumstances. What, however, would this ideal person's opinion be? As has previously been remarked, the highest ideal would be always to have a true opinion and be certain of it; but this ideal is more suited to God than to man."

and

"Let us take a habit of forming opinion in a certain way; e.g. the habit of proceeding from the
opinion that a toadstool is yellow to the opinion that it is unwholesome. Then we can accept the fact that the person has a habit of this sort, and ask merely what degree of opinion that the toadstool is unwholesome it would be best for him to entertain when he sees it; i.e. granting that he is going to think always in the same way about all yellow toadstools, we can ask what degree of confidence it would be best for him to have that they are unwholesome. And the answer is that it will in general be best for his degree of belief that a yellow toadstool is unwholesome to be equal to the proportion of yellow toadstools which are in fact unwholesome. (This follows from the meaning of degree of belief.) This conclusion is necessarily vague in regard to the spatio-temporal range of toadstools which it includes, but hardly vaguer than the question which it answers."

And of course the famous example that explained degree of belief

"I am at a cross-roads and do not know the way; but I rather think one of the two ways is right. I propose therefore to go that way but keep my eyes open for someone to ask; if now I see someone half a mile away over the fields, whether I turn aside to ask him will depend on the relative inconvenience of going out of my way to cross the fields or of continuing on the wrong road if it is the wrong road. But it will also depend on how confident I am that I am right; and clearly the more confident I am of this the less distance I should be willing to go from the road to check my opinion. I propose therefore to use the distance I would be prepared to go to ask, as a measure of the confidence of my opinion; and what I have said above explains how this is to be done."

Also, it is quite apparent that Ramsey's use of bets to measure partial belief can be extended into measuring change in the utility of certain goods over time (going back to Lambert's essay where he brings up the notion of discounting both cost and benefit in the future). I'll see if I can find some work on use of betting principle in determining variation in utility over time because I'm sure someone would have done that by now. Maybe someone reading this blog who has an idea can leave me a comment to simplify my search.

A Tao Te Ching lesson for the Entrepreneur

2006-03-25T21:19:00.000-05:00

We join thirty spokes
to the hub of the wheel,
yet it's the center hole
that drives the chariot.

We shape clay
to birth a vessel,
yet it's the hollow within
that makes it useful.

We chisel doors and windows
to construct a room,
yet it's the inner space
that makes it livable

Thus do we
create what is
to use what is not.

- Verse 11, Tao Te Ching

A lesson for entrepreneurs - remember to differentiate between what we create (what is) and what the customers use (what is not).

Of rain, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and PCOs

2006-03-21T23:21:00.000-05:00

Out here in Arlington, VA, the dogwood's been out for about two weeks now and yet as I sit here today, I can see the light snowshower from my window. For some reason, I've had India - the colors, the moods, the sounds, the people, the perspectives - spinning through my head today. So, I inserted one of the discs from my Ustaad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawalli collection into the player, poured a bourbon and let the mood sink in.

Three years isn't that long a time if one thinks about it, yet, sometimes it seems like a long time and college and school in India seems so far behind. I remember strange things from college and even stranger ones from school and then there are those that I could never forget - like the rain...there are few feelings that compare to the elation, the joy that rain brings in Punjab. From the sound of the drops on tin roofs or the excited banter of children gambolling in the rain or the dull monotonous beating of the drops against the cabin windows in Larji, rain enchants, fascinates and mesmerizes people in that part of the world.

...zindagi bhar kay shikvay gilay thay bahut
waqt itna kahaan thaa kay dohraatey hum
ek hichkee mein keh daalee sub daastaan
hum ney kissay ko is taraah mukhtasar kar liya...

The last time I was in India, I just couldn't stop being amazed at the number of PCOs at every corner of every town, every village in India. If there was a corner on a street that was vacant, there was a PCO there. One could talk about technology or the telecom revolution...what I was looking at was a testimony to our fundamental need to communicate. These millions and millions of little shacks connecting the aspirations, dreams, joys and sorrows of a billion people - in a lot of ways the PCO changed India more than anything else. I wonder if the mobile phone will ever do what the PCOs did to India.

Is systemic thinking enough to explain networks?

2006-03-18T20:40:00.000-05:00

Weltanschauung is the word Germans use to refer to 'our concept of the nature of reality'. That's only one of the many interesting things I picked up from this interesting essay on systemic thinking by Russell Ackoff. (Thanks to Nivi for posting a link to this essay) I highly recommend that you read the essay and not go with the my little summary of it.

Like a true philosopher, Ackoff draws on the evolution of scientific thinking since Renaissance to build an understanding of why we think the way we think or in his words why we hold a particular "world view", "a concept of the nature of the world" or "theory of reality". The essay makes for interesting reading as a whole, though at moments I thought that he had indeed taken certain liberties in terms of development of his arguments.

To quickly sum up the essay: in the "machine age", our thinking was categorized by three fundamental beliefs: first, complete understanding of universe was possible; second, in order to understand the universe, one had to understand the elements it was composed of and it was possible to break up the entire universe into an aggregation of fundamental elements - and breaking the whole into its parts is called analysis; third, once the elements have been understood, the way they relate together to form the whole needs to be understood, and all relationships can be broken into the fundamental relationship of cause and effect. Newtonian mechanics is a result of this age.

In the age of systems, these three beliefs changed due to various reasons. From Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which first challenged the first belief to Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics and Von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory that finally marked the onset of the systems age, Ackoff presents a series of dilemmas that led to our migration to the age of systems. In the systems age then, the three beliefs changed: first, a complete and total understandng of the universe was not possible, it was an ideal, but not possible; second, the means of understanding changed from analysis to synthesis; third mere cause-and-effect changed into "producer-product" (credited to Arthur Singer Jr.) relationship.

Using systemic thinking, he goes on to describe that the current age is based on automation - automating three key things - observation, communication and thought - the functions of the mind, while the machine age was about mechanization - mechanizing the muscle.

Ackoff wrote this wonderful piece in 1994. However, things have changed since then, and here's some changes - the three parts of this system that Ackoff identified - instruments for observation (measurement instruments), instruments for communicating (telephone, telegraph etc.) and instruments for thought (computer) are competing for survival. The computer is beginning to compete with the phone for resources - something that is not explained in Ackoff's world view. Even if one takes his "organism" argument, "organisms" were a part of a system, and while they had the power to help or harm the whole system, they did not compete with each other for survival in a Darwinian sense because each part of the system performed a specific function that other parts could not. So, while parts could indeed have a "purpose", their "functions" were still mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

However, what happens to the system when its parts compete for survival? Using Aristotle's logic, the above question in itself is incorrect for systems, because by definition, parts of a system don't compete with each other. Are these then not the parts of the system? Or, is this a dilemma for the age of systemic thinking? Are we entering a new age, one of networks, where the beliefs of the system age don't hold?

2006-02-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

Another post from my cell phone using linknsurf - I was at VC outlook '06 in New York yesterday and it turned out to be interesting...will write more once I get back. One thing Ipicked up was that there are mixed feelings about early stage investment in the VC community.

LinknSurf - Automating word of mouth

2006-02-18T20:46:00.000-05:00

Just for the sake of this discussion, let’s classify the mechanisms through which we receive information into two categories (a) Push-based and (b) Pull-based.

Conventional forms of media like TV, newspapers and radios would apparently be classified under the push-based mechanisms. You have no control over what you get, except maybe turning the TV off. Advertising in all its forms would also apparently be classified as a push-based mechanism. Also, a friend telling you something about his/her experience, or recommending a restaurant is pushing you information.There is no way for you to pre-determine the relevance of this information except its source.

When you go looking for certain information, you’re pulling information. So, web search, going to a library and looking for stuff or simply calling someone and seeking information – all the means get classified as pull-based information gathering mechanisms.

Given the above descriptions, where does the present-day-and-age RSS fit in? Is it push-based or pull-based? Well, I’d say that it is push-based because it is like subscribing to a magazine in some ways, only now you can pull it from all sorts of sources instead of a single source. However, someone may argue otherwise and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

However, getting to the point, in some ways each of the conventional information mechanism has been automated in the web world. In the push-based mechanism, print media translated into Web 1.0 and now into RSS feeds and syndicated content which includes the blogosphere. Pull-based mechanism saw the advent of web search and now we have social search and social bookmarks and even tag-searching.

Yet, in both push-based and pull-based mechanisms, what in my view has not been automated is peer-to-peer communication. There is information that exists between me and the people I know, and I will not have access to this information unless someone shares it with me or I specifically go looking for it. I will never know that Joe started a blog on mobile technology unless he tells me or I go looking for it. I will never know that Emily met a common high-school friend after years unless she tells me about it. Is this information relevant to me? Yes, it is. What will you call this information?

I see a big opportunity for applications that can somehow facilitate this process. We already have a starting point – social networking. How we leverage a social network to facilitate flow of information and increase its relevance is to me an interesting problem.

With LinknSurf we have tried to address a little bit of it – just a tiny little bit.

2006-02-16T00:28:00.000-05:00

This is a post from my cell phone using linknsurf. Just felt like expressing what I'm feeling at the moment and the REM song on the radio expresses it well - "I'm looking for answers from the great beyond..."

LinknSurf, the launch and what it's about...

2006-01-31T15:26:00.000-05:00

I probably should have written this at 3:00 AM on the 19th of January from a hotel room in Alabama because that is where I was when LinknSurf really hit the world. Now, between you and me, and no offence to the south, a hotel room in a remote corner in Alabama is not where you want to be when that happens - from unreliable wi-fi access in the room, to poor phone signals - oh yesss, you get the whole treatment!! Wait, there's more drama to it - two of us were in California, one in Alabama and five in India as we released LinknSurf while talking on the phone!!

So, what is LinknSurf? And more importantly why do YOU need LinknSurf?

In simple terms, LinknSurf is a mobile application that has been created to keep YOU in touch with stuff that matters to you. What does that mean? It means that the information that exists between you and your peers (your social network) that is relevant to you is now delivered to you. And this information was never captured before. For example, if someone in your group of friends adds a new person to his contact list, you will get an update and the ability to add that person to your list in one click. The same applies:

If someone creates a blog
subscribes to an RSS feed
Joins a community etc

...all of which you can do on LinknSurf.

Note: The image may not be reproduced without permission. I would like to thank a team-member for it.

So, what you take away from this is that, you will no longer have to make an effort to stay stay connected with others. Information will be delivered to you instead of you having to go look for it. And, no matter what the information is for (personal or professional reasosns), it will be information you choose to recieve, from whom you choose to recieve!

Well, we are all excited to see this baby come out! Now, let's see how the world percieves it!

successful products and economic/social wealth

2006-01-10T17:38:00.000-05:00

For a long time now, I've believed that a successful product/service creates new wealth in an economy/society. And by new I mean, that wealth did not exist earlier. Now, I'm no economist, to be able to defend this hypothesis in economic terms, but I can throw out some examples and explain what I'm trying to say.

If one looks at any web-based success story today, you'll see how eventually the service/product created new wealth. For example, E-bay, it might be known as the world's largest auction site and might be only about buying and selling, it has provided economic value to junk that used to rot away in people's basements and garages. Thus, it has gone about created new wealth in the economy by suddenly being able to pair supply with demand across physical boundaries. And E-bay isn't the only one - take Google as the next example. They might be the world's best search engine and it may be their page-rank system that got them going. However, what made them succesful is the fact that people suddenly had easy access to relevant information. Not only did it save people time and energy, but it provided advertisers with a targeted market, thus increasing the probability of finding a customer with limited spending on advertising. And if that isn't creating wealth that did not already exist, what is it? One could make a similar argument about myspace, or yahoo or microsoft.

The moral of my story then is that the ideas that revolutionize the market, or products/services that really make it big, are those that have the potential to create something in the economy. They add something to the social and economic fabric of a society and change the very way people function. That to me, is the touchstone of a succesful product/service. So, now each time I look at a startup, the first question in my mind is 'Is this going to create some new wealth in the economy'? And it doesn't matter whether it is tangible or not.

Of course, making money out of a venture is, I believe, a by-product of the larger outcome of creation of new wealth. So, even though social-networking sites (except linked-in) might not have figured out how to monetize their service, they have managed to create economic/social wealth by bringing people together.

mobile vision for the new year - II

2006-01-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching Will Ferell's Anchorman. Somehow everything in the movie reminded me of cellular phone carriers - the silly wars, the stupid tactics and most of all depriving consumers of quality services.

This may sound too trite and oft-quoted an outlook into the future, but sometime or the other, these mobile goliaths will have to yield. Depriving consumers of full the power of mobility is not really going to work. Already dozens of little enterprenneurial ventures are beginning to challenge the restrictive boundaries. The fact that biggies from the web like google and yahoo are pushing into the mobile world, is also going to put a lot of pressure on wireless providers to finally upgrade their data networks and start providing superior service.

There was a DHL commercial out a couple of months back - "Whatever happened to customer service?". Someone needs to pull the wireless carriers in front of the TV and have them watch it. Instead of advertising about its network, it'll be a welcome move to see it advertise it's customer service - when it becomes worth advertising. I'm pretty certain that wireless carriers see the future as well, all I'm waiting to see is how they're going to deal with it. Embracing change is their only option as I see it or they will be forced to accept change when they're not in a position to leverage it for advantage.

Mobile vision for the new year

2006-01-05T19:06:00.000-05:00

A very happy new year to everyone. For the first post in 2006, this is probably a little late. However, better late than never.

Looking ahead into 2006, I see an exciting year. Link 'n' Surf is ready for a beta version launch and we're all holding our breath, waiting to see where it takes us. We all know that the past is about the only thing in life that is certain. Yet, every now and then, future stares at us long and hard enough for us to unmistakably see its countenance. For people in the mobile technology and web 2.0 sectors, this is one such time.

In a nebulous space, slowly being defined by many-an-enterprenneur, we might not know who will take the trophy, but we do know that the mobile device will take the world into a connected knowledge environment like never before. Everyone will be connected like never before, everyone will have access to knowledge and everyone will be mobile.

This is what I see in the coming year and hopefully Link 'n' Surf will be able to play a part in that. With this I would like to wish everyone a very happy new year and thank everyone in the Wirkle team for all their hard work in 2005.

random interesting posts to read

2005-11-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I wrote something here. I attribute it to some traveling and a lot of work, so a lot of thoughts have come and gone without me being able to write anything about them. Well, one can't keep one's natural self from showing up for too long, so I'm back.

Before I start talking about my stuff, here are a couple of interesting posts:

Time and again, I've found some really amazing posts at the 'Creating Passionate Users' blog. I highly recommend it to everyone. Here's another great post for anyone trying to create or sell software.
An interesting trend to take note of for enterpreneurs. I've myself felt a little bit of this. While the startup is certainly rife with new ideas right now and it almost feels like exciting times of the 90s, the VC market is a little more wary right now. It's almost impossible for early stage companies to find investment right now without executing the concept to a significant level. In the web and mobile world expecially, one has to have the product ready (at least a limited version of it) to be able to convince any VC to look at you. VCs seem to be looking for safer bets - well it is needless to say that nothing is safe in the VC business. The trend quoted in this post certainly attests to that.

Another interesting reminder for those trying to sell something. What the consumer really wants.

on how to predict google's next product

2005-08-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: I hope there are no legal issues involved due to my use of the google logo on this post. In case there are, please let me know and I will remove it.

Nivi writes:

So how do you predict Google’s next product?

Take any piece of software you use all day: e.g. address book, calendar, web browser, iTunes, MS Office, stock charts.

Ask yourself: “What do I really really really wish this product could do?”

Wait for Google to make your dream come true. Or develop the dream product yourself so you can sell it to AOL/Yahoo/IAC/MS when Google launches their version.

Read the full post on Nivi's blog.

mobile content - some more discussion

2005-08-26T17:36:00.000-04:00

Since, the comments on my blog are not readily visible, I thought I'll reproduce Dennis' comment on the main page for reference as I discuss some ideas. My ideas follow Dennis' comment.

Dennis wrote:

"I just love the power of the blog and I'm thankful that you've addressed these issues so openly. It’s difficult to give an answer to your question so I hope my rambling makes any sense.

Extrapolating existing concepts unto a new platform will not be (or only limitedly be) successful. Mobile is a different state of mind and it requires a different way of interaction. I totally agree with you there.

PHONifier is a far from optimal service. I totally agree again. Even more so, PHONifier will die over time and the quicker it dies the better. When you think about it, it’s idiotic that a PHONifier type service is needed to surf content on your mobile…

That we need something new instead of an extrapolation of a PC-based browser I don’t really agree with. I do believe that the way we present content to a mobile device should change. No one knows what navigation structure to use, to name a simple example. Yet the tremendous talent behind modern day websites shouldn’t be delayed because they need to learn something new. All they should have to learn is how a mobile user thinks and then be able to apply this knowledge in a simple and intuitive way.

The connection between ShotCode and PHONifier is there because it allows anyone without mobile knowledge to instantly set up and try out a mobile service. Your current, standard webpages, can be “optimized” on the fly.

How we can make this “optimization” even better or completely eliminate it, I haven’t figured out yet. As far as I've understood CSS already allows you to do a lot of this optimization quite easily. If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. Let’s keep on trying things until we find it. :) "

I'm immensely impressed with Dennis' comment especially the humility in the way he talked about PHONifier which by all means is a great product for our present day needs.

I think I didn't communicate clearly what I had in mind about the extrapolation of a PC-based browser. What I was trying to talk about was broader than just the browser. I hope the ramblings below make some sense.

Consider the PC-based browsing model, it is an each-time-discover-push-and-pull mechanism. That is, every time a user browses, he/she first needs to discover/state the correct hyperlink, then the user pushes a request to the server, which then pulls the information requested and provides it to the user. This model relies on the user being able to discover the correct hyperlink to click on or type the URL into the address bar and in the case of PC it is easy because the user has a mouse and a keyboard.

Now, consider RSS/atom, it's a one-time-discover-and-pull based model, where a user subscribes to a feed once and it is pulled each time there is an update. The reason why we have seen so many mobile RSS readers spring up in such a short time is the simplicity of accessing syndicated content. One doesn't have to deal with discovery (navigation) and requesting (typing or clicking) each time one needs information.

Now, consider the above difference in the models, in light of the potential success of mobile RSS readers and the certain failure of WAP. I see an indication of what can succeed on mobile phones. And note that when it came to syndicated content, the content providers did not have to learn a whole lot. I'm not saying that all content has to be syndicated, I'm saying that we have to come up with a mechanism that incorporates some insight about how users have been behaving when it comes to mobile content and what model has succeeded and what has failed.

You're probably thinking that RSS is just a mechanism of delivering content and not a way of optimizing it for the mobile screen. You're right it is not optimizing content for the mobile screen. Yet, in terms of the overall "mobile experience" that I keep talking about, RSS provides for a better experience on cell phones than pre-RSS ways of accessing content. So does shotcode. The mobile experience is larger, wider and bigger than just the screen and navigation.

While RSS feeds just eliminate the 'discovery' requirement as discussed above, the mobile browser will bridge the 'discovery' and 'navigation' gap based on some new model where the providers will not have to learn a whole lot. The browser might thus support a different model (different from the PC-based way) of accessing and providing content altogether and therefore will not be an extrapolation of the PC-based browser.

That's sort of what I had in mind when I wrote about extrapolation. Maybe it doesn't make sense, maybe it does - but I agree with the notion of "let's keep trying until we succeed!". :)

Comments anyone? You can reach me at harshdhundia at gmail.

the blog school

2005-08-24T00:33:00.000-04:00

"I just love the power of the blog." A recent post culminated into quite an interesting learning experience for me. I realized the power of the blog to reach people and also some blog etiquette. I'll like to thank Oliver Starr and Dennis Hettema for more than just their insightful comments. Both, Oliver's insightful comment and Dennis' answer to my critique left with me with lessons, I might have not learnt otherwise - Oliver on Blog etiquette and Dennis on how to positively respond to a critique. This is a small example of how self-governing communities evolve - a new entrant does something that is percieved as a mistake by experienced members of a community. Some responsible experienced folks check the new entrant but still encourage participation, and the new entrant being a responsible person considers the advice and becomes a more responsible participant.

This seems to be the way blogging has evolved and will continue to evolve. As web shifts to a plethora of users generating content, let it be for any reason, the control, on what is acceptable and what is not, is also going to lie with a plethora of users. That's what Craigslist uses for blocking spam and it has proved to be quite succesful. Now, I'm no sociologist but the intricacies of how the web 2.0 world will evolve in terms of people sharing responsibilities would be interesting to observe.

More to come on this...but anyone have any ideas on what social rules will change in the web 2.0 world? One interesting argument to consider is this one by Nivi , which I came across on Rajesh Jain's blog. Oh, and a discussion on Dennis' comment in my next post.

some interesting posts

2005-08-20T18:12:00.000-04:00

Over the last week or so a couple of interesting posts appeared that I think present an interesting picture when juxtaposed against each other.

A very interesting post by Jim Moore lays out why web superservices will transform the landscape. He writes:

"Traditional web services were tightly typed and constrained by the typology within which they were developed. Traditional web services are of necessity sponsored by large corporation because only a powerful economic entity can fund the design of a grand service typology, enforce a complex implementation of typing, and establish the training and tools and conferences and other institutions needed to establish a community of developers willing to work together under a particular framework. This is why there is really no competition in web services to the two corporate enties, Java, supported by Sun, and .net from Microsoft.

The new world of web superservices has no such limitations. Web superservices are by design only minimally or loosely typed, in order to promote the freedom of developers to imagine what they will. This is the big idea. The less typing the better. The less change in the basic standards--for example, URLs and RSS--the better. Loose typing promotes community participation.For those who are "Snow Crash" fans, the new world of superservices is more akin to the Metaverse, Stephenson's imagined digital city that has no boundaries, and allows every hacker to build whatever house or building he or she desires. The city expands without limit as new structures are built on open ground at its edges, and the edges move out to encompass more territory."

Now, put this in perspective with this post by Phil Windley presenting excerpts from Nick Gall's keynote at OSCON. Phil Windley reports the following from Nick Gall:

"Internetworked architectures should be interoperable, composable, extensible, generic, federated, and simple. Achieving these characteristics in an architecture requires that you create three standards:

Identifier (address, reference, name)
Format (document, message, packet)
Protocol (interaction, behavior, request/reply)

Email, Web, and containerized shipping have all of these in their own form. The hourglass in containerized shipping is takes multiple goods (grain, chairs, umbrellas) and stuffs them all into standard intermodal container (the spanning layer in Clark's terms) and then these get put on any kind of transport (ship, rail, truck).

Web 1.0 made a three compromises. It was read-only, one-way links, and macroformated (page-level granularity). Gall says that search engines are an example of something that's been layered onto Web 1.0 to deal, in part, with one of these compromises (back-links). Web 2.0 fixes these three compromises.

There will be unintended consequences of architectures in internetworked architectures. These can result in serendipity (like mash-ups, RSS, and podcasting) as well as perverse effects (like viruses, spam, and phishing). "

Those are views of the same thing from two different points. Both lay out how things will evolve in an increasingly networked and yet easy-to-change world, where everyone will be able to change and create and link. In such a world, I wonder, how will a user recieve information he/she wants? Any ideas on what users want and how "web superservices" will help them get what they want?

For Dennis Hettema of PHONifier

2005-08-16T11:53:00.000-04:00

Dennis Hettema, the man behind shotcodes and now PHONifier, explains why he built PHONifier in an email to Oliver Starr which Oliver has published (click here). (and while I'm referencing, see this one too). Here is what I have to say to Dennis and I hope that this reaches him in some way - let's check the power of the blog.

I like the fact that you call this a "first step". And I will say that what you've created with PHONifier is probably a better version of existing technologies. However, in my opinion PHONifier still is a copy-content-from-the-PC-based-web-and-paste-it-to-a-small-screen solution. You've raised some very key points in your email that all of us in the wireless content sector have asked again and again and yet with PHONifier we fail to address those.

You'll agree that having content providers provide mobile friendly sites is one thing, but realizing how content will be used and accessed on mobile phones is another. So, while PHONifier might be a step towards providing mobile-friendly content, it necessarily does not provide a mobile friendly experience. At least not yet. And while a part of the fallacies (nothing specific to PHONifier) come from not knowing exactly what we want as mobile users, a part of it comes from the desire to extrapolate the exisiting concepts into other areas. And this extrapolation does not always work - it didn't work for the internet and will not work for cell phones.

Look at shotcodes - we all love shotcodes because it provides a complete mobile friendly experience - not just content that is easily viewable. Shotcodes to this date continues to draw the "Oohs" and the "Aahs" and "this is really cool", while for me PHONifier didn't quite do the same. 'Shotcodes' is NOT an extrapolation of what a webcam can do on the PC - it uses the mobile phone's camera capability in its own way and provides a user with a great mechanism to get something that the user actually needs. It is user-friendly, innovative and specific to the user's needs.

So, why does a mobile browser have to be an extrapolation of PC-based browsers - we need something new. The underlying assumption that content on a PC and content on the cell phone have the same utility vlaue has to change. And while we say we realize that the utilities are different, we still don't seem to use our awareness of this fact. Indeed, a big part of the responsibility needs to be taken by the content providers, but enablers like PHONifier have to drive this change. And that's what I don't see PHONifier doing at the moment.

more on mobile optimized web pages

2005-08-12T01:55:00.000-04:00

In one of my recent posts, I had talked about how the sites were optimized only for the screen, bandwidth and memory and not the overall experience. Here comes another one (PHONifier)that almost fits into the same category, but still has some features worth discussing. PHONifier was launched yesterday and combines a feed (RSS/atom) reader with a mobile client that can supposedly optimize sites for cell phone screens.

However, before I get into any comparisons, the one laudable thing about the phonifier team is the that they openly give links to alternatives on their webpage. They mention IYHY and skweezer as alternatives to phonifier. The other thing I really appreciate is making the source code available. Gotta give you a thumbs up for that guys.

You might want to read a comparison between IYHY and PHONifier on Oliver Starr's blog.

The bottomline for me is that content is still not provided in a desirable way even though one may argue that it's a step forward.

tag search - does it really work?

2005-08-08T00:10:00.000-04:00

Now, I do not intend to bash Technorati (they being the most well known in the tag-search domain) and I honestly do believe that the idea does indeed have great potential. Being a recent convert, I decided to check how their 'tag search' works. I made two assumptions for my test, both of which I believe are quite reasonable.

1) Most of technorati's admirers are tech-savvy people
2) Most of these tech-savvy people would know about mobile blogging

So, I decided to search for posts tagged 'mobile blogging'. The search results rolled out to 68 posts tagged in the last 102 days. I looked at the first 10 - lo and behold - not one of them had to do with mobile blogging! (I've included a screen shot of the first few results above) A lot of them had been categorized by the authors under mobile blogging, because they were written while mobile and at least one of them (the first one incidentally), had nothing to do with mobile blogging at all!

So, was I looking for blog posts that came from mobile devices? Or was I looking for posts about mobile blogging? Semantically, we should be able to pick up the latter and that's what I was looking for. Someday, when tags become an integral part of web publishing and people associate real semantics with them, tag searches will be incredibly relevant. However, until then, I guess we will still have to fish for relevant information.

mobile content - so close, yet so far

2005-08-05T17:56:00.000-04:00

It''s been a while since I sat down to write, so the references here are probably about a week or two old.

The technophiles (I wonder if that is a word - if it's not, then we need this one: 'techno' - technology and 'phile' - lover) keep writing about the inadequacy of available mobile content, which we all agree with. Recent posts by Russel Beattie and Carlo reiterate the same point. And while I'm still talking about references, don't miss these insightful posts on the same by Sunil (click here and here).

The one thing to do about it is to change the medium. What we call optimized content today is merely a copy-paste job from the PC with a few bells and whistles added to it. So, while it might be optimized for the small screen we have on the phones, or maybe in some cases for a smaller memory and bandwidth, it is not really optimized for the overall experience.

The question then, to really ask is: What is the overall mobile experience?

Any ideas anyone? Please leave comments.

Instead of undertaking the daunting task of writing about the mobile experience, I'm going to lay out how it's different from a PC. That may help to put some things in perspective.

Unlike on a PC, I don't like to type in URLs on a mobile device. However, still something here can be learned from PCs - auto completion of already keyed in URLs. Is that so hard to do?
Unlike on a PC, I don't have a mouse on my cell phone. So, I don't like to click on too many hyperlinks on a mobile device. That is what I mean a copy-paste job from a PC.
Unlike on a PC, I'm not stationary with my mobile phone and definitely not at home or in my office. So, I don't really have time to fish for information - when I look for something on my phone, I know what I want. The thing is , can you provide me with that? I don't want to fish around for it.
Unlike my PC, when I access RSS feeds using an aggregator, going to the actual blog to read the whole thing is not an option I want on my phone. I don't want to swap between screens or have to read the same first paragraph over again. I want the whole feed as text on my phone.
Unlike my PC, my location matters when I'm mobile - can someone please use this information to provide me with better information. I know I can get weather and restaurants and locate hot spots and sixth sense can provide profiles in the vicinity - but how about linking my to-do things with my location and sending me a reminder (now wouldn't that be cool) or some other information about something in the vicinity that I would be interested in?
Unlike my PC, I can use my mobile to instantly initiate voice communication with someone...make me use it!

To sum up basically - the mobile and the PC might have many overlaps - but they're used in different environments and also provide different experiences. The way content is delivered right now is like fitting Danny DeVito into Arnold Schwarznegger's suit using some pins and needles.

things you can do with RSS

2005-08-05T17:52:00.000-04:00

Just found this interesting link on emergic about a wiki on things you can do with RSS. A few of them as quoted there are

- News syndication
- Get RSS content through your email
- Track Fedex packages
- Get bargains at Ebay
- Get stock updates
- Get the weather reports
- Find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products
- Track Music, radio shows, TV clips
- Stay updated on someone's schedule
- Get cinema schedule updates
- Read your favourite comics
- Get software updates
- Be notified of traffic conditions

Click on the link above for the full Wiki.

RSS Scalability

2005-07-27T14:26:00.000-04:00

How to deal with an RSS feed overload without losing any important feeds? I'd vaguely hit that question somewhere in my mind, but hadn't quite articulated it yet. However, as soon I saw Jose's article, I saw the light of the day. He writes:

"as a means of improving the scalability of the RSS aggregation approach, i have begun using an approach of doing second order analysis on the aggregated materials to make use of the redundancy in the information. i dub this technique “RSS clustering” because i group stories by topic. the redundancy observed in any collection of RSS feeds can be used for two main purposes. the first is to highlight the interesting bits of news within a pool of feeds, basing this on the assumption that the apperance of the topic in multiple entries is proportional to the importance of that topic. the second is that entries can be clustered around these topics, reducing the volume of information presented to the user at any one time. "

MoSoSos : Mobile Social Software/Services

2005-07-26T09:56:00.000-04:00

...and I was going to write this essay elaborating my last post on why social networking on mobile phones might be the way to go, when I ran into sixth sense and this article on MoSoSos or mobile social software/services.

It seems that in my previous post, I failed to capture one essential component of mobile phones - they're mobile!!! So, networking becomes proximity based and maybe that's what differentiates it from PC-based social networking. At least that's what all of the above seem to be doing. However, is that really the only way to go? Why are stories of mobile networking still far and few in between? Why isn't the mobile revolution catching on?

Apparently, as I read here, using mobile phones for proximity based networking has been around for a while. Was it the business models, or is it something fundamental about the service that is not making it succeed?

Social networking and mobile phones

2005-07-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

The recent sale of myspace has once again brought the spotlight on social networking. While people are still trying to figure out how to monetize social networking and asking whether it is actually paying off, the number of sites providing the service keep on growing and diversifying. Whether one can come up with a succesful business model or not, the demand for such a service is undeniable, which is why the business has continued to grow.

If you haven't still haven't figured out where I'm headed with this, I'll lay it out now - Cell phones as mediums of social networking. There are a lot of driving factors that make it appealing for mobile phones. A recent post on mobile gaming by Oliver Starr quoting Greg Costikyan's edited version of a presentation to nokia on the true mobile game, is what set my mind running with the possibilities that mobile phones offer for networking.

What is a mobile device?

"Well, for one thing, they are first and foremost voice communication devices. And they store quite a lot of information about your circle of friends and business contacts, in the phone book. Along with a datebook (which most people don't use, but some do, particularly on higher-end phones where they can hotsynch to an Outlook calendar). They are personalized devices--people add ring tones, screenery, and images of friends so they can see a pic when someone calls. And they're networked--as computing devices, they may be primitive, analogous to (say) pre-Pentium computers, but early home PCs weren't networked until comparatively recently.
From a user perspective, they areprimarily social devices, used to keep in touch with friends, family,and business contacts, mainly via voice and texting." (Excerpted from Greg Costikyan's talk on the true mobile game)

So, what do we need for social networking?

A profile, which in most cases has contacts, pictures of contacts, interests and some other information. It also has a way in which one could get in touch with the profiled person. And it allows one the ability to look at a contacts' contacts.

Now, I'm not going to try to make the prophetic statement about how exactly mobile networking will come about, but the synergies I see between the capabilities of a mobile phone and the needs of a social networking service, drive me to believe that somewhere over there is a big opportunity to bring them together.

And I'm not quite done with this yet, I'll continue this once I've sorted out some more thoughts on this...

chautauqua

2005-07-23T21:19:00.000-04:00

In 1974, Robert Pirsig wrote a book that captured the imagination of an entire generation and captivated many in the following generation. He called it "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". In '99, my second year in college, when I read the book, I encountered the term Chautauqua for the first time.

"I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important. What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua — that´s the only name that I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, […] an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. "( Pirsig, p.17)

While I'm not going to pose myself as being wise enough to enlighten anyone, but the idea of talks meant to improve intellect and entertain at the same time catches my fancy. Hence, the title of this blog.