I once used to have the question in my head as to why cant we create a product and brand like the Mercedez in India. And then we got the Nano. Not at all the same thing, is it?

I cant stop by sit back and think what would be the scenario if we had indeed launched a car that ranks shoulder to shoulder, or even beats the quality of a Mercedez. Why Benz, lets make it beat a Bugatti Veyron, if our fancies need to fly a little. I am not so sure we would have succeeded. Am sure the first question and comparison that would come out, is the price. And India has been so successfully been marketed as a low-cost Utopia that even if we make a Mercedez, we would have to make it cheaper than the Benz.

Now is that technically feasible? Yes it is. And that is our End game in a lot of ways. But where do we start? We start at low-cost.

A lot of people get very upset and turned-off at the notion that we were, and in a lot of ways still the low-cost destination. And so should I – if that is the end game. But it isnt. Let me give you examples.

HCL once used to be nothing more than a pure outsourcing arm for Cisco in the telecom division. Today they have moved up the value chain to establish a joint-venture with Cisco (Setting up HCL-Cisco) that they co-own, and in some cases license patents and IP to Cisco. And trust me, that doesnt happen overnight or by chance. It takes leadership, strategy and direction to make that happen. Which is why I am hoping that entrepreneurs, especially startup entrepreneurs will get to hear this, cause you have to start thinking that way to get there.

So look at the Nano. Tata owns Jaguar, and Tata owns the Nano. Amazing, I must say, and it all makes sense. In order to make the Mercedez, you first have to make the Nano.

Why? Because building a brand takes time, and enroute to that, you have a brand to break – the brand that India is low-cost. And how do you do that? Thats what “Disruptive” technology stands for – by definition. Anything that can Disrupt people’s normal, everyday thoughts in terms of a breakthrough in technology, thats capable of breaking business models as well – thats also more or less the reason why technology entrepreneurship is so glamorous. Because it can bring down prices, do sexy things, grab attention and make people take notice.

So seriously, whats the link from a Nano to a Benz? The Nano is important, because its a crucial step to get to the Benz, and the crucial step and mindset breaks when you get people to say the first Wow. And the Tata Motors Company, has successfully managed to do that. Get the world to say a Wow. And that is the first leap for any of our companies, be it whatever domain to do. The wow could be quality measures, cost, design, Interaction mechanism, or the simple science behind it. But it has to begin with the Wow. Get that in, into your product somehow.

The second bit is the value engineering. How do you mass manufacture something, and still manage price points and quality. If you think this is a mechanical engineer’s curse, think again. Most web companies will bleed and die because of their “cloud” bills. That silly recursive function that takes that extra compute cycle, will come to bite you in the wrong place, if you dont fix it. This is where specialists kick in. This is where experience comes in, and this is where price point remains still. This is definitely India’s second move. And I’m already starting to see plenty of companies do this.

The Third move will be in Feature Engineering. Whatever you did in the first bit, you want to do the reverse of that, with the supervision of the second phase engineers. You want to put stuff in, but not the old stuff, make a leap and bring in the next generation of things that make it easier on the user, the manufacturer and everyone who comes near a ten foot radius of it. And this is where the next generation of Benz, Jaguar, and Bugatti’s are born.

The interesting point will be that, without step one, we would never have step three, because the evolution of talent, processes, and engineering will simply not be there. And If we try to jump directly to step three, what we will end up will be a fake imitation of a luxury product, twice priced, and having to fight the mindset of it being in the wrong place (it should be low-cost instead).

I remember standing on the stage at Proto.in in 2007 asking where are our companies that can make a Merc and Ipods. The Answer – They are coming, and the first generations of them are just born. To be in India, to be in the products space, and to thrive in it, it helps to keep this in mind. It took me a while to get this, but thats also cause I see this trend happening around me – Playing out in real life.

I can imagine the look that you have on your faces reading this. Where is our market then? Isnt the US the most wealthiest market to go tap into? Am sure you have that look on your face, judging me for that. You might want to sit down for this. I think there is a strong misconception. While the western “developed” markets might be the richest, the emerging markets are the biggest – they make for 5/6th the world, and make up in large numbers. It’s almost the long-tail in the truest sense of the word and according to the definition of Pareto distribution (Economic divide on the 20-80 rule). And listen, if it works in India, it will work in most of the emerging markets. And fortunately for us, the high cost of innovation, the inability to grasp emerging markets and the masses, all play against the research labs of the far west.

If anyone can make it happen, and playing with the advantages that we have in terms of the ability to communicate better with the rest of the world, the collaborations we have with abroad, the support that we can garner from the govt (alright alright, we can improve on this bit) and most importantly, our inherent need to innovate, we are probably the best suited for it. And if we are bold enough to take that first step, our journey has finally begun – well hurry up, cause there are already folks getting a headstart on that – Mark my words, the Nano will lead the way to the next generation of Jaguars!

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

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.

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

Coming back to the present day and age, most of the patents that we file which are commercially focused, we do a little bit of groundwork as to who is working on what and what is already patented, and there is a fair bit of strategic positioning that goes into how you want to leverage your IP to hedge towards future opportunities. It’s a fun excercise.

Here’s where the paranoid bit comes in. Most of the time, we use strings of keywords to search through patent search engines, and at times even Google’s patent search engine to find out what already exists out there. If you are smart, you’d have figured out where I am going with this.

Let me form my base of reasoning here. Most businesses have three kinds of activities that go on with every interaction that happens with a customer. The First is the straightforward transaction. The second is in understanding the needs of the customer and evolving their next product line. And the third, which a lot of folks also miss, is the data that you have of all the interactions that have gone on with you and your customer. Understanding your customer, which also means understanding a very niche market segment and with behavorial patterns and data is a very lucrative asset – one that is rarely put to use by most companies. If you are planning a marketing campaign, be it digital or offline, the data you collect, observe and dissect later on, might even hold mysteries to turning your company around later on at some point in time.

So coming back to the paranoid self, I am applying these three cases to the sites which offer me these services to search. For one, I search and get the search results which translates to pageviews and advertisements which is good for these companies. The more I search, the feedbacks that I provide helps them improve their service. And there is also this thing where I am a little worried as to what happens to all these search queries that I have put into this engine, which if analysed properly, can give out what I have in hand as my core IP to start off with.

I used to use vague terms such as “Mobile+Speech” but, then there are results that throw out in the thousands that it takes ages to go through all of them. When I was living in a different continent under a different system, our IP law team made sure to keep an eye on what patents were already out there, what we had created, and also they had a list of all the pending patents, which helps to ensure that we are in the current, and are positioned well. I am not sure we have a way of tracking “pending patents” here in India yet.

There are some controversies that Albert Einstein was a clerk in a Patent office and it is quite possible that most of his theories were influenced by the applications that came in. Imagine that, sitting in a patent office and you get to sift through countless research, delivered in a form which is easily digestible, coming right at ya. Sometimes the controversy does seem to be leaning towards a case against Einstein. If he did get “influenced” by those ideas, then perhaps he did exploit an opportunity quite well, lived and died, so he doesn’t care anymore either. I am, at times worried if these search engines are doing the same task.

I am not saying that these engines are using these keywords to start looking up, or feeding that data to people who could leverage them and translate them into IP. But what I am saying is that, a startup, or an academician needs to be aware that the possibility exists. Do use your discretion on the matter.

Well, there are a few platforms that you might be interested to play around with, if you have an interest for embedded systems, and especially the mobile platform. Here it goes:

MobiSy: Rich Applications for your Mobile.

OpenMoko: An open development kit – Imagine having a phone with everything unlocked, and nothing beyond the realm of control by code. That’s what OpenMoko grants you. It’s a fabulous kit for folks who want to go beyond developing apps for Java or Symbian, or Windows Mobile.

Android: Well known. Enough said.

Bug Labs: Custom-build your pieces. I found this a few days ago, and am absolutely floored. The beauty about this kit is that its not restricted to mobile handsets. Its almost the lego of the electronics world.

Mango Technologies: Mobile Application Framework. A Bangalore based company. Related note: Check out Mophun, a mobile gaming application Framework.

Flashlite: When this thing gets mainstream from adobe, we better watch out for some deadly applications.

QTopia from Trolltech, an application platform and User Interface Layer for Linux powered devices – handhelds, and the likes.

So why am I mentioning all this? If a Luxury handset manufacturer in Bangalore has gotten funded $2Million, what are the next set of pieces which will have to fall in place?