With the economy slowing down a little, I guess the 3G talk is going to be dampened a bit here in India. But I dont think it should be. The consumerist trend hasnt slowed down and Indians have woken up to enjoying the usage of digital media, devices and services, that 3G as a service could very much consolidate and bank on. This post is partly written with the knowledge I’ve gathered being on both sides of the camp, as part of the Telecom group (and the plans that they are making with IMS – IP Multimedia Subsystem) and where the web, and industry have evolved.

Lets start with a Picture.

Ubiquitous Computing, will not be just a term anymore. Centralized, easily accessible, and convergence. I think that’s the three keywords which are almost mantras in the new lifestyle that is emerging.

Trends:

Follow the numbers on the diagram with the explanations below.

1. Your mobile phone is not just a phone. Ask Nokia and they will tell you that. If we start with the way of 3G, its also the means to a broadband pipe, and 3G is just the beginning. HSDPA, LTE, and all the planned roadmap of the GSM Data Network, seems to be only getting faster and faster. Now, why would I advocate relying on my mobile’s data network as the crucial pipe for everything?

Simply because its personal. I wouldnt use most of these devices on this diagram, unless I was home. Secondly, the “Base” would have an inbuilt GSM device, that would continue the connection even when the device is removed. The Device, if inserted will enable the SIM card, and hence authenticating the user being “home”

2. There are already Cordless devices available from Siemens and the likes who allow you to “add” as many handsets as you want. I’d imagine that the Home Communications device would be something like that. When you come home and plugin your Communication Device into the base, that would configure the Home Telephony system to handle all your phone calls. I think this is where the beauty of Social networks come in. Do you realize why OpenSocial, and especially Dataportability makes a lot of sense? Partly cause of this. Spam. Imagine, you knowing someone and them knowing someone else. If Person C calls you, you might want to pick up the phone. If a random person who has no connection to you in your “Social Map” calls you, there is a high chance it might be a spam. The VoIP Gateway, will be smart enough to also have a routing engine, which will put such calls directly into the voicemail. When you are home, you wont be bringing work home, especially the calls. There will be provisions for different profiles – such as Busy, Family Time, Free and Available Etc, which will allow a person to configure their settings.

There will also be another capability for this system. Notice how there is more than one “Base” in the architecture? The extra bases are for other members in the family. If the spouse comes home and puts his/her PCD into the base, whenever he/she gets a call, the Home Telephone System would pick up the call, and do the same thing, except with his/her settings, and will ring with a distinct ring. Wouldn’t that be neat? No more running around the house searching for your mobile to pick up a call.

Note: Iotum used to have something named a relevance engine to do this. Servion, an Indian Company, has a product named UQE – Universal Queuing Engine which does call routing based on rules as well.

3. The Shared Media Server concept is already happening. I used to be working on a Smart home project sometime back, and the first and foremost thing was a shared Media Server. Sony, along with its Vaio range of products offers a software that can access shared resources. The Songs that you purchase, be it from iTunes, Amazon, or anywhere, will automatically reside on the shared media server. It will also have the podcasts that you are subscribed to, both video and audio, the Television Shows that you have bought from iTunes, the Movies that you have rented over the net from the likes of Netflicks or Bigflicks, and will also be the storage for your Slingbox, or time-place shifted Television programs.

4. Television. Its nothing more than a screen actually. The only difference is that it will have an IP input (most televisions are starting to ship with it), instead of a Cable, and it will have the capability to directly interface with the media server or go online. Another option to configure this would be to allow your Xbox, PS3, or Apple TV Box to do the IP interface and connect the output to the television and shift the intelligence to the Box. With most Gaming consoles coming with an IP interface to go “Live”, and all of them obviously eying for this space in the system, they most probably will make it there.

5. Gone are the days when one used to have clunky and huge music and entertainment systems. I doubt we’d be buying those huge devices which can play music in the masses. There will be a need for such specialized hardware, but if you have a portable device, that is most probably going to go into a dock that can amplify the sound. That’ll pretty much be the extend of the use for home theatres and music systems. The portable systems would have the ability to purchase, download, and navigate to the internet to initiate a purchase/rental download to the media server and some integration to access the media on the Media server.

6. Computers. You will most probably not feel a difference at all. The computer has been the most flexible sandbox as technologies have evolved. The interaction mechanisms obviously would evolve, as touch, voice based technologies mature and become mainstream.

Other Scopes:

We will soon have centralized speaker systems and controls that would allow us to listen to music all around the space, and also zone off areas where we want to listen. Wireless speaker systems will play a part in all this.

RFID controls will factor in somewhere. If I do set the control to “follow me”, the music should follow me whichever room that I go to. RFIDs will also be a basic element for Smart homes.

Smart homes are definitely on the way in. Biometric keys, computer controlled lighting,  automatic curtain open settings, burglar sensors, vacuum robots, Digital Picture Frames, etc are already available in the market, and it wont take long before they all go mainstream.

Smart Toys, such as the Nabaztag, the Chumby are going to get more and more in the face, until people start adapting them. These devices apart from giving the impression of a rich-spoilt-brat, will also be aids for older people, assisting them, taking voice commands and getting things done for them. In markets like Japan where the population is more old than the young will especially go for such products – which is also the reason why there is heavy investments into robots. I’d give it another ten to twelve years before this becomes mainstream. But the Geekery toys are on their way much sooner for sure.

If you look closely at this system, most of them are already around us in some form or the other. It just needs to evolve a step further to become a reality – and that too not too high of a step. That’s where there is a lot of opportunity for startups to focus on. Perhaps that will happen, and we wont look at 3G as just a fat pipe, and keep scratching our head for more Value Added Services to appear to make it viable. Since the Subscription for the services such as the Gaming Console “Live”, the Music Store, the Television, Internet Access can be authenticated using the SIM card, there is a scope for Mobile Phone operators to leverage that. That’d be the secret to the ROI dilemma, in my opinion.

Ofcourse, this is just the first draft. What are your thoughts?

Download: Higher Resolution Image of Diagram

“Yahoo could emerge with an edge, if they leapfrog into other verticals following the same web-based advertisement network.”

For a company which has entrenched itself in the media space, managing advertisements networks i probably the holy grail. I wouldnt recommend that Yahoo give up that leverage. Instead of going head on with Google and losing out on that battle, all they need to do is leverage that asset in a different vertical.

I wrote about perhaps using advertising networks, especially multimedia (audio/video) ads in Radio and television networks. One could argue that the ad server requirements, the infrastructure requirement and cost of operations would significantly vary because of the medium. I’d agree to some extent. But there is also a way to deploy the already existing asset, as-is, into different verticals. Read on.

I am not sure how many of you are aware of the CSCs coming up. The Community Service Centres, or Common Service Centres, are essentially Internet kiosks, each fitted with a fairly decent hardware and broadband connectivity, and the idea is to utilize those as hubs to deliver services into Rural India. It could be anything from eGovernance, health, Banking, Telecommunications, etc etc. There are a lot of private bidders who have won the tenders for regions (so the service delivery will be upto par on standards), and organizations in the likes of 3i Infotech, Reliance, Comat etc have come into this.

So Whats the opportunity for Yahoo or Google in all this? Well, there is a computer and its connected to the internet. Find a way to build a lightweight application that acts as a screensaver, which would display advertisements – pulling it from the internet – when the computer is idling. The advertisement can be focused to the rural space, and there is everyone from the likes of HLL, to your Cellphone companies, dying to get the attention of that market share.

The reason why the operators would be open to this idea is simply because everyone is trying to figure out how to break even in this business. As you could imagine, Rural India and technology are like lotus leaves and water drops. They just dont have a history of blending so far. And there is going to be that initial adoption curve issue for these services to pick up. And as a means of ensuring that the Kiosk Operator has some viable means of keeping at it, advertisements, and complementary services begin to play a role.

I believe there is a company which recently started in this space, and got funded by Sequoia. But yep, its definitely a market to explore.

Even in the midst of all that, it does seem that a lot of the Startup Companies are hardpressed for resources here in India. Here’s a solution.

A few of us have been talking about putting together a centre that trains people (as blank slated as freshers) on the common technologies that people use while building products – the usual PHP, Python, AJAX, MySQL, etc etc and getting them upto speed on mashups, APIs, documentation, and moving forward. That is the level of skill that most of the startup community folks are looking for it seems. Or am I wrong here?

If I am right, then there is a simple way around it. Every chapter of OCC in the country is doing quite well. I heard from Santhosh that Pune is a 300 people group now (though I do suspect that the turn out ratio would be still less), but who knew Pune had 300 people who would be open to being part of a community right? And the same case has gone on with Bangalore, Kolkatta, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, and even now and then with Mumbai.

Here’s the thought. What if in one of the OCCs a dozen of the startup companies, especially the folks who can code and code really well, commit that they will run a two month training program for people in these languages? It is going to take a bit of time and commitment, but there are a lot of resources already on the web, and with a couple of screencasts, and proper documentation, you could essentially also use it as training material for the next batch of people that you hire in your company later on.

What I am proposing is that a batch of technology entrepreneurs, each taking a week to cover different aspects of the course, could put their hands together to collaboratively solve an issue which is haunting a great many of them.

So if you could fix one of the startups offices as the centre for this activity, Put up a wiki where people can sign up for this course, and these 12 startup entrepreneurs/programmers get a chance to do a round of questioning and if they think that the candidate would be able to perform with some guidance, then the community as a whole comes together to train these few candidates and at the end of it, can assimilate them into the company.

There are a couple of reasons why I think this can be made to work:

1. Most freshers are scared of working for startups. The first question I face all the time is “Will they train us?”

2. People who do undergo any sort of training, usually go for some MS Certification and those courses are expensive. Its not like you can afford to get the developmental licenses anyways, and since they have themselves invested in getting trained, the salary expectations are going to be higher from you.

3. At the moment there are very few people who can talk about these technologies for the mass community to learn from. Perhaps contributing to the general knowledge of the masses to improve their skill level, if reached critical mass, will start churning on its own.

4. More people trained on OpenSource Technologies (that’s really what enables Startups), might also slightly increase the chances of people contributing back to Opensource. *fingers crossed*

5. I also think that most startup founders struggle to explain what they have in their head to others. And teaching concepts to others gets you to that level where tomorrow when you need to grow a community around your product, you can converse in a manner that the people can comprehend.

And ofcourse, none of this has to be done for free. I’d strongly suggest that the teams charge the candidate 3000 – 4000Rs a month for this. That is also additional revenue, so its not technically charity either.

So, there is only one question that lingers. Worth giving it a try? What do you think?

A friend of mine and I, over some conversations were discussing about some of the bigger brands that we see around us and something along the topics of Return on Equity. Not sure if you are aware of, but Microsoft has a 52% return on equity. Yahoo has roughly about 7% and falling drastically and Google has one which stands at around 26% – and growing steadily. Whatever you may say, Microsoft has played this game with a whole new set of balls and one most people simply won’t understand. And if you ask me, they are a much better company in terms of strategy and products compared to Google, anyday.

Yahoo could emerge with an edge, if they leapfrog into other verticals following the same web-based advertisement network.

But that’s not the focus of this post.

The conversation was that, if a company has Advertisement as its core strength and has built a competence in it, then its going to be very hard for the company to drop that and adapt the advertising network of its partner/rival. Well, for the case of survival they might, but since they do have the core competence, the resources and the minds that can think in that direction, what could they possibly do, was the question.

Fact: Yahoo makes most of its money via advertisement, and that too on banner ads.

This becomes an issue when you have so much internet portals and properties, but just simply have to fill them with advertisements in order to make them viable. And in this day and age of APIs, nobody might even come visit the site to get hit by the advertisement. You are forced to rethink in terms of strategically placing the advertisement within the content, but thats a very very hard thing.

My Take: I think this is probably the same route as making fiber out of rocks. There might be some way to do it, but whatever it is, its one rare, long process.

I’d say, flip the coin, and lets look out to the horizon. Go after other streams, television and Radio… to be precise.

So go down memory lane and you will remember how there was a time when all the internet properties used to have a sales team to go chase after advertisers and get them onboard and once the term was over the havoc began all over again. Most of them knew that they could make more money if they managed the deal directly with the advertisers, but the cost that went into chasing orders, and managing the clients was too much an ordeal that when the concept of advertisement networks came about, people were more than glad to give up a marginal cost to have these services “managed”.

It happened for the web medium, and it can happen for the television and Radio network as well. Because they face the very same problems.

If you don’t believe me, check out this company. There is a company named Spotrunner. What they do is that they build an inventory of ads that the local television operators, while doing the programming, can draw advertisements out of. I think thats a very neat bloody idea. I know of people who are running campaigns and they get the sweetest deals out of this television networks during “off seasons”. And when its off seasons, oh boy, the inventories are really bad that they’ll run just about anything to keep those media streams flowing. During rainy seasons, nobody wants to sell or buy cars, consumer goods etc, and that usually is what constitutes a large chunk of the advertisement revenue. So, they usually fill it up with fillers and Awareness Advertisements.

But imagine if… a centralized network would manage all the advertisements with vendors, create an inventory, and as broadcast partners sign up, all they would have to do is enter in the keywords for the show, and they’d see options of which ads they can play. They can pick, and queue it and go about their work. When the ad gets played, whatever amount was agreed upon with the vendor gets deducted from the advertising account – this could technically even be a prepaid account. Now this totally leverages the broadcaster, since he has options of playing an ad of a sponsor that they have, and use the flexibility of the ad inventory to fill whatever is required, and hence maximizing his revenue potential. If laziness is one to bet on, eventually they’ll scrap their sales force, and resort to doing programming with most of these advertisements running in.

This is also brilliant, cause imagine if there is a talk show happening and knowing how most programmers can flip through the show quickly, they can even generate keywords – manually, or there could be a simple app that extracts out the audio and picks up keywords, and can “suggest” advertisements that would make the most sense. THAT would be relevant advertising indeed.

I think television stations get away with it, by a little bit. But Radio stations really struggle. If you do the same for them, with just audio, they’d keeel (spelling intentional) over themselves for it. I have closely observed how some of these radio stations work, including the popular and well known ones and having friends in that circle, one only hears one thing over and over again – finding sponsors and advertisers is a tough job.

So you’d start with something like this, and move on to the second phase, and then there is even a third. That, we’ll talk about tomorrow.

But Yahoo, I really hope you’ll see this, and more so, I’d like you to come back to your former glory. I think my first email account ever was a yahoo one, and perhaps that bit of loyalty still runs.

Energy is a Pressing Matter and Hot Topic in all Circles, but I think the basis of our problem isnt focused on.

So I was sitting through a Sustainability Conference in IIT Madras today and there was one talk on Energy Consumption. The talk essentially mentioned how we ascertain energy demands by our peak hours. The problem being we need that at the most, and at times when its not the peak, we have to “shed” the load, and it usually ends up being dumped into the grid, and thanks to our grids not being designed properly, it usually ends up overloading half of rural India. That’s a different story all together.

The hint was in a passing by comment that the problem with energy is that it has to be consumed as and when its produced. There is simply no way to store it. If you want to store it in batteries and such, its simply not viable for large quantities, since its very expensive.

I have no idea what happened for the rest of the talk, apart for when he showed graphs and numbers – which always catches my attention, but he also mentioned that they were not accurate, which made me go “bleh” and back to my thinking process.

The Idea:

So Energy. The basis is that all energy is created from one form or the other. So Lets accept that we cant break this rule and make newton roll over in his grave. Knowing limitations are a plus point.

Lets learn a little bit of inspiration from biology. We take food, we break it down into amino acids, the smallest and easily metabolic form of food, and then the system burns it into energy as per the demands of the body. Compare it with however it is that we create energy, saying that one form of energy – coal or whatever is converted into energy which is converted into electricity which is probably the simplest form of energy.

If you look at biology, the food that is intaken, if the broken down food is more than the “demand” of the system, then the system quickly converts them into FAT and stores them all around the body – which is what provides all those funky love handles that people put so much energy to get rid of. But quite strictly speaking, its just the systems way of saying that we are consuming more than we need, and it is storing it away for a rainy day. The first signs of starvation and thats the storage unit that the system starts feeding off of.

Whats the FAT version of electricity? That’s the question.

Now, I am thinking that there is a possibility here that one cannot go directly from coal into  free flowing electrons. And we are probably missing a middle step that might help us with efficiency.

Secondly, there must be a way to join these electrons to become something that is more passive and with a trigger break them down into simpler free flowing electrons again.

And you know what? If that is possible… you and I would never have to wait for ages for our phones or ipods t get charged. We can technically dump these “FAT” into our devices, and let the device trigger these substance into electrons so that we get a full charge. But the deal is that, just like it doesnt take the body more than a few enzymes to break down FAT back into Amino acids and use them, we have to have these in a form that the devices themselves can transform without elaborate machinery – aka. combustion chambers and engines.

I think it should be possible. These are days when I wish I was a physicist and a chemist put together. But if, and I think it can be, it is possible, then technically we should be able to catch “energy” as and when it happens – from the lightnings, to tornadoes, to cyclones, save up all the energy and use it for when we need it. We can harvest all of the Sunlight hitting the earth and probably setup plants that can fight some of the global warming, and probably use energy in a way that is not as harmful to the planet as our current barbaric ways are.

Ofcourse all of this is a one way broadcast. Apart from adult sites which are apparently making their niche through two way interaction, there is not much that is happening in this space.

Is there any of that, that can be adapted into the “green” scenario? A couple of light bulbs went on and off and here’s the thought (or Idea):

The forest department today plans thousands of saplings every year on barren lands to convert them into lush green forests, but the biggest problem with it has been the case of watering them. There is not enough manpower to do those menial tasks – at the salary that the govt is providing – and there is also the issue of accountability where all the saplings near the roadside stand straight and well watered, but the ones in the interior die away because laziness kicks in for most of these workers. They are not to be blamed either when the scorching sun is merciless on them and they are poorly prepped for all that.

The idea is to basically plant all the saplings as the forest department does and then have water drums which can be filled periodically with water from trucks (much simpler task). The pipes to the saplings will be set on drip irrigation and there will be a soil moisture sensor in the soil which measures if there is water or not. Set a Camera that overlooks this area, connect it to the Internet and create a frontend to a MMORPG (Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game). If that’s too much of an acronym, think Second Life. People can “adopt” grids of these fields and take care of them. All they have to do is, once the soil moisture turns a bit low, hit the buttons that will start the drip irrigation and stop them when the moisture level is optimal.

There are already countless number of such “events” that happen in Second Life, where if one plants a sapling in the virtual world, an organization instead plants one in the real world somewhere. This would just be an extension of that.

Now, technically you can take this to the next level. Think of all the Wild Life Sanctuaries. The biggest problem today is Poachers (I am still worried if I have to show stuffed toys of Tigers as our National Animal to my kids someday), and the forest officers are not nearly paid enough to scout the areas – and they are very ill armed to protect themselves from these animals as well. What if we could setup a range of Wifi cameras, stream the videos and let people monitor them. I’m sure there are enough animal activists around the world that some might even take it up while we sleep. All they would have to do is to hit a button which will alert the officer if a Poacher is spotted. And give the front end the control to click a snap if they want to document something and we might capture poachers and exotic wildlife as souvenirs.

I think finally, and its about time that the conscious of having to go green is kicking in. And we are gonna have to do everything – not just to sustain – but positively influence this planet to make it sustainable and even stay on the existential path. Maybe entrepreneurship, technology and the enthusiasm of the global audience can create a network of Global Watchers, to take care of the assets around us – All this while getting to “play” their roles.

There is this basic ideology. The paradox of the masses. Whenever at any given network the number of members become too huge, the system starts to break down. It happened with all other social networks, it happened with the internet before that, it happened with ICQ, it happened with Orkut, and it will happen with Facebook. Lets take the case of Orkut, and with a much more real life example to follow it. Orkut was great till it was reference based, and then case the day when it was opened up to everyone and then the masses came in and so did the “frandship” requests. Long story short, I deleted my account in Orkut and am hiding in Facebook till that eventual doom also arrives at the door step of Facebook.

I think this is the logical thing that is going to happen to facebook. Imagine that you are part of an elite club such as the Lion’s club (if it is elite enough) or lets take the Madras Club (known for its elitism) and you were part of the elite 50 and you knew everyone who was part of the club. Most of the members in that club enjoy that lifestyle and keep it closed for the very nature that they dont want to democratize it. Lets say that they do, what is going to happen is that there will be 300+ people flowing in, soon you realize that you dont very much “belong”.

In the first order of things of all creatures, the necessity to belong is a crucial one. When that starts to erode, everything starts to fall apart. In my visual imagination, its like a tower that rises and rises, till it eventually starts to crumble under its own weight and falls apart, that smaller networks start to arise out of the ashes of the parent.

All this is to state one thing. The future of social networks is one where there will be niche verticals that will get created for various things. Imagine meetups with a social networking aspect and that is what will happen. Now this is happening in some level with Ning . But the issue with Ning is two fold. One it cant get out of the domain name of Ning.com (which can be easily fixed), and the other is the fact that I need to recreate the membership everytime. What if I create a new “community” pretty much like what we do inside orkut or Facebook, but outside of the walled garden?

So the future is pretty much a case where there will be skeleton frameworks available so that one can give it the look, and theme it to what they want, all the way from Mac Cultists, to Cricket Fans to whatever one fancies, and the social linkages will be drawn out of Opensocial. Using the linkages one can easily pass on how one’s friend is part of a new network and can draw out a larger easily accessible audience for each of these interest groups.

Now comes the fancy bit. Each of the these verticals will need to be monetized to be sustainable. And just as facebook has Beacon, there is a need for a Unplugged beacon which can power these networks and make these initiatives sustainable. Given that they will be such a niche target area, getting an audience of say 40,000 – 60,000 for each genre would be fairly simple and would make for a very focused approach for these marketers and advertisers. There will be new ways and means of delivering the content, message and engaging those audiences.

There is most certainly an opportunity to tap here, especially as we start to see eCommerce on the rise in emerging markets with such staggering numbers.

I often used to quote the phrase that “Ideas are worth nothing. Implementation is all that matters”. Its true, but it also frustrates a lot of people who think they have fabulous ideas in their hands. I don’t spell it out as much anymore, but I have figured out much easier ways to get that same point across.

A couple of months ago, I was introduced to a guy named Sian, the brains behind an event named Alpha Summit that used to happen in Europe. It was almost like Proto.in, except that their focus was slightly different. They focused on Tombstone companies. Companies which would have died, if not for that boost that an event brings together. They succeeded a bit in what they did, but turning around a company is no one day matter, it takes months and years to turn some companies around, and hence the Alpha Summit is no more. But the thought has stayed in my mind, that some companies simply are hatching ideas that are way ahead of its time. If the timing is right, and if it is repositioned, there is a chance for a miracle. Heck, if we have already categorized them as a tombstone, why not give it that shot? That’s been a thought in my head, as we are also looking at ways to evolve where Proto.in stands right now. But this thought goes beyond that.

When I first heard from Arun Katiyar, the concept of an Event Web, I was quite amused. It’s true, our life is a sequence of events, and an “event-web” as he put it, makes a lot of sense. SERaja was a company for which the visions came from Rajesh Jain and Ramesh Jain. Ramesh has published a paper on the same concept. They were one of the companies that presented at the first edition of Proto.in. Unfortunately, it seems that they didnt manage to build traction as they hoped to, but then just recently I heard a very similar pitch. It came from Dandelife and Lifeblob. Timelines, events, blogs, friends and how everything is interconnected.

While SEraja had complicated the implementation a bit my mixing multimedia content and such, and also adding the complexity of mobile phones and such, Lifeblog is taking the incremental step of taking blogs, appealing from a point where everyone is comfortable and taking it from there. To be quite honest, I signed up, found a fair bit of friends there and am still trying to figure out how well it works. I haven’t made too many posts there, given that I can barely keep my facebook, blog and twitter updated – let alone a lifeblob. But if you haven’t already succumbed to so many social networks, it does make sense to stick to that.

One of the oldest ideas that makes me remember of the phrase that Ideas are immortal is how Location-based services are coming up. LBS had the imaginations of people lighted up and quite a bit of rave imaginations I must say, were running behind what it could possibly do. Five years ago when I was bootstrapping a venture, we explored around that, lobbied with the canadian govt to give us location data and were shooed away. Fun times. But today companies such as bangalore-based Yulop are digging that old grave up and bringing that dream to life – atleast the hope of such dreams back to life.

Most often timing, and the wrong timing is what kills an idea. VoIP still hasn’t taken off, because people really don’t know what to do with it beyond making phone calls, and the infrastructure cost that goes into it is so darn expensive that it doesn’t justify the phone calls as a function or feature. VoIP will die its death in this timeline, but will come back again. Perhaps when 3G becomes prevalent and demand pushes need and applications and services are born, a revival might come in place.

Quite a lot of folks ask me whats a good idea worth exploring. It is quite interesting to note that the “ideas to toss” section of this blog is one of the most popular ones, apart from the controversial ones that come up from time to time. People are looking for ideas, and thats a statement. Sometimes, in order to look into the future, you just have to look at the past and see what has died before its time, and perhaps give those tombstones a new leash on life.

If you want a hint and a springboard, go right ahead to the deadpool section of Techcrunch and see, what you can dig up, and where you can play the part of a necromancer (Oh the Diablo playing days!)

More Links to Click:
Startup North
Startups that came back from the Dead
Michael Arrington Seeds Dead Startups.
Y Combinator List, with Lots of Dead Startups

I often used to quote the phrase that “Ideas are worth nothing. Implementation is all that matters”. Its true, but it also frustrates a lot of people who think they have fabulous ideas in their hands. I don’t spell it out as much anymore, but I have figured out much easier ways to get that same point across.

A couple of months ago, I was introduced to a guy named Sian, the brains behind an event named Alpha Summit that used to happen in Europe. It was almost like Proto.in, except that their focus was slightly different. They focused on Tombstone companies. Companies which would have died, if not for that boost that an event brings together. They succeeded a bit in what they did, but turning around a company is no one day matter, it takes months and years to turn some companies around, and hence the Alpha Summit is no more. But the thought has stayed in my mind, that some companies simply are hatching ideas that are way ahead of its time. If the timing is right, and if it is repositioned, there is a chance for a miracle. Heck, if we have already categorized them as a tombstone, why not give it that shot? That’s been a thought in my head, as we are also looking at ways to evolve where Proto.in stands right now. But this thought goes beyond that.

When I first heard from Arun Katiyar, the concept of an Event Web, I was quite amused. It’s true, our life is a sequence of events, and an “event-web” as he put it, makes a lot of sense. SERaja was a company for which the visions came from Rajesh Jain and Ramesh Jain. Ramesh has published a paper on the same concept. They were one of the companies that presented at the first edition of Proto.in. Unfortunately, it seems that they didnt manage to build traction as they hoped to, but then just recently I heard a very similar pitch. It came from Dandelife and Lifeblob. Timelines, events, blogs, friends and how everything is interconnected.

While SEraja had complicated the implementation a bit my mixing multimedia content and such, and also adding the complexity of mobile phones and such, Lifeblog is taking the incremental step of taking blogs, appealing from a point where everyone is comfortable and taking it from there. To be quite honest, I signed up, found a fair bit of friends there and am still trying to figure out how well it works. I haven’t made too many posts there, given that I can barely keep my facebook, blog and twitter updated – let alone a lifeblob. But if you haven’t already succumbed to so many social networks, it does make sense to stick to that.

One of the oldest ideas that makes me remember of the phrase that Ideas are immortal is how Location-based services are coming up. LBS had the imaginations of people lighted up and quite a bit of rave imaginations I must say, were running behind what it could possibly do. Five years ago when I was bootstrapping a venture, we explored around that, lobbied with the canadian govt to give us location data and were shooed away. Fun times. But today companies such as bangalore-based Yulop are digging that old grave up and bringing that dream to life – atleast the hope of such dreams back to life.

Most often timing, and the wrong timing is what kills an idea. VoIP still hasn’t taken off, because people really don’t know what to do with it beyond making phone calls, and the infrastructure cost that goes into it is so darn expensive that it doesn’t justify the phone calls as a function or feature. VoIP will die its death in this timeline, but will come back again. Perhaps when 3G becomes prevalent and demand pushes need and applications and services are born, a revival might come in place.

Quite a lot of folks ask me whats a good idea worth exploring. It is quite interesting to note that the “ideas to toss” section of this blog is one of the most popular ones, apart from the controversial ones that come up from time to time. People are looking for ideas, and thats a statement. Sometimes, in order to look into the future, you just have to look at the past and see what has died before its time, and perhaps give those tombstones a new leash on life.

If you want a hint and a springboard, go right ahead to the deadpool section of Techcrunch and see, what you can dig up, and where you can play the part of a necromancer (Oh the Diablo playing days!)

More Links to Click:
Startup North
Startups that came back from the Dead
Michael Arrington Seeds Dead Startups.
Y Combinator List, with Lots of Dead Startups

It will make sense because:

1. Our Broadband penetration whatever the 4.2 million users are, are all essentially mostly IT Professionals.

2. These chums, have no interest in anything apart from Cricket, because they dont have time to understand the decades of stories behind political quibbles and other issues going on.

3.Humor has slowly begun to find a way among this crowd and given that these guys are all young, and most of them watch shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Even South Park (Please dont ask me what these shows are), a show done with a live-actual person, but on the same lines of humor, will bring about active engagement in a interesting fashion.

Rocket boom Stats:

+ Over 1 million post-roll complete downloads per week; 200,000 viewers per day
+ Over 500,000 text impressions per week of company name & link; 100,000 per day

The Video infrastructure, the entire thing to make this happen, along with the infrastructure to play ads and monetize this is, is available with two indian Startups – Ventuno Tech and Tekriti Software. If you have the guts (everybody in the media business needs guts), the ability to produce a show, and get a couple of eager, hyper, good-looking people on camera, you are game!