Places near Bangalore on a Collaborative Tool– Dabbel DB

I got an excel file which had a list of tourist places near Bangalore, I really don't remember who sent it to me or created it. I have made few changes to the excel sheet and uploaded to an online collaboration tool called DabbleDB.

Dabble offers a free Commons plan as well as four monthly payment plans to suit people and organizations with different needs. I have taken Common plan under a Creative Commons license. So what is Common plan? It’s a way to build free Dabble databases under a Creative Commons license. Functionally, it’s the same as paid service except that data we keep in a free application is publicly accessible.

Please feel free to get in touch with me for any suggestion to make this a user friendly application. If you have recently seen a new tourist Place near Bangalore let’s update it on the Dabble DB. Dabble DB allows 15 users to be part of the application. This is a great experience to be in Web 2.0.

Click on the Widget on the left side menu or Click on link below http://santhguru.dabbledb.com/publish/locationlocator/07dd229a-0ad7-4184-a87d-d65797e0196b/list.html

Collaboration made easy with online database applications

Gone are the days, when you used spreadsheets for reporting data. Online collaborative tools have been changing the way we work with different teams spread across geographical areas. The scope of this analysis is limited to online collaborative tools and does not include “Groupware”. I have put together a table which compares diffierent tools on various parameters.

I have been using this online tool called “Intuit QuickBase” for couple of years now and I think, this is really a great tool. For those who are new to this, Quickbase Customizable online workgroup application for distributed teams. My experience with Quickbase has been great, it allowed me to easily create application and start tracking it immediately. Now, I don’t want to start explaining all the features and this article end up becoming Quickbase blog help. But, I would definitely like to list key learning from Quickbase usage.

1. Design Table and/or application
a. Easy for anyone to create applications ( you can enjoy lacking database design experience)
2. Customization
a. You can customize applications tables and roles easily
3. Administration
a. Manage users and start inviting them to use the application,
b. Every users who logs-in and make changes to the application becomes the record owner
4. User Interface
a. Right click options enable quick change of look and feel as well as data representation
b. Grid Edit: on top left corner “List All” report. Enables spreadsheet functionality on
HTML page. I loved this functionality
5. Reporting
a. Amazingly simplified version with private and public mode
6. Data handling
a. Easy Import and export to various formats
7. Online Help, support center and discussion forums enable you to learn on your own

Some of the apprehension I encountered with QB are
1. Stopping duplicate record entry
2. Little expensive then other tools

Exhaustive list about online database/collaborative tools can be found at
http://thinkofit.com/webconf/workspaces.htm
http://www.chin.gc.ca/English/Knowledge-Exchange/collaborative-tools.php

Reap what you MMO: India and MMOG

The argument on the PC penetration Vs Broadband availability in India will continue.
If you have played a online game called Second Life, you will notice that each computer running Second Life will need an average of 80 kbps downstream, spiking at about 400 kbps on initial connect and during teleports. Upstream is much lower, requiring 30 kbps on average.

Is India ready for MMOG type games? with mere PC penetration of 5 million (majority of this is contributed by EGovernance initiative) with less than 121 million active internet users 80% of application being email, text-chat and other educational information access. Looks like India will take some more time to catch up the broadband bandwagon.

Other part of the story: If you go to Cyber Café’s you will realize that young guys are mastering skills in FPS, strategy type online and RPG games for the sake of entertainment. In next couple of years they will start realizing that, they can make money by playing games online. The bandwidth issue may restrain our MMO developers making money (subscription) by releasing games in India. But I believe India will overcome the bandwidth problem soon. Before that happens, is there any opportunities for the Indian ITES companies in MMO. Before looking into the business models, let’s look at what MNCs are doing in SL.

Many Companies are building virtual headquarters for interaction among employees. IBM has created a separate team called “digital convergence” this team looks for customer in digital world apart from real world. IBM has now acquired 24 Second Life "islands." Other companies who have presence in SL are General Motors, (GM) Toyota Motor, Dell, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and Reuters Group.

"In Second Life you are limited only by your imagination” companies are using online world to advertise, test products and market ideas. They also might make some sales, mostly by linking Second Life visitors to their real-world e-commerce Web sites. Companies like Alchemic Dream Inc provide to MMOG management, support and localization services to above listed requirements.

This is definitely good news for innovative companies who want to capture this market, and provide services such as back office support, writing scripts, creating 3-D designs, customer support, application development and maintenance services. As far as back office is considered we need guys who have blend of online gaming + good communication skills + gaming as carrier. Not that easy to find.

As discussed in one of the NASSCOM’s conferences “Animation and Gaming Industry in India 2007” Hyderabad, it was made clear that over a period of time gaming will be a serious business in India. Here is the summary
1. There are more than 400 companies participated in this event
2. The conference had more than 10 panel discussion on Gaming industry on various topics such as Market Size, Challenges, Government polices, trends, resource shortage, new technologies, Training issues and discussion on mobile vs console vs PC vs online games
3. The online Gaming was not the key discussion in the conference (hope to be a separate event in 2008), from the different types of companies that have come, it looks like very few companies know about MMOG as a market and a potential
a. There are reasons/facts quoted as to why the online gaming growth will be at a slower pace compared to mobile gaming. This is purely based on the subscriber base of (200 million mobile users to 40 million broadband users in India) and growing VAS Market
b. Also, Broadband in India refers to connectivity starting from 250 kbps, which is not true in other developed countries.
c. Currently active Internet users in India are 21 million (8.4% of the total urban population in India 250 million)

I would like to say one thing to the guys playing games in the Café, you will reap what you MMOg now.

A comprehensive NASSCOM report on NASSCOM Study on Animation and Gaming Industry in India is available at http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=50768'

Reference links

Canada’s Alchemic Dream In JV With Bangalore’s Comat For Back-office Support To Online Gaming Cos

Value Added Services – A Blessing in Disguise to Mobile Industry? (VAS Vs Voice)

By-products are playing a vital role in today’s economy; sugar cane’s by-product molasses generate decent profits then main product sugar. But sugar will never let the Sugar industry into trouble unlike telecom industry, wherein voice based services are being taken over by VAS. India’s leapfrog effect gave fancy mobiles in the hands of more then 121 million people (12 Cr) and currently 6 million mobile users are added every month (March 2007). As per Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI) the total subscriber base in India today is 121 million mobile users, three times more than the traditional landlines subscribers

After the dawn of VoIP technology, it has been predicted that the voice calls (core services provided by Telecom companies) will be free of cost. Apart from being charged for connecting to Public switched telephone network, the VoIP to VoIP voice calls are literally free as of now.

Now, the question is, telecom’s core services (Voice) seems to be in the back seat and new services such as VAS will take the driver seat? Answer to this question is reflected in numbers given below.

Potential of VAS Market, very difficult to find the exact number, my quick web research resulted into these figures


“Revenue from Telecom services to touch $ 33 Billion 2010 and 10% of this will come from VAS
- Size of the VAS Industry
Rs. 2000 Cr (as per Lehman Brothers)
Rs. 2850 Cr “


Another report says, the Total revenue of 6 telecom companies (top six Indian telecom players, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, BSNL, Hutchison Essar, MTNL and Idea Cellular) expected to reach $50 billion from $22 billion (2006-07). The VAS market will be 7 to 10% of the total market.

VAS market is predominately controlled by the Telecom operators, now there are many VAS Services providers who are making inroads into this market. Some of the early bird VAS Services provider include Onmobile, Mauj.com, Hungama Mobile, IMI Mobile, Mobile-2-win – Innovative Mobile Mktg.solutions, India Games, Smart trust, ACL Wireless and Mcheck.


Future: Imagine having complete financial freedom with respect to paying your credit card bills, rent, insurance, telephone bills using your mobile, your mobile will be your virtual wallet. Services provider will offer new things, controlling your home via home tracking/networking, vehicle tracking, TRP Rating Services, High resolution gaming, Localization etc all using Mobile Phones. The above pie diagram is definitely going to add many more slices which will change our day to day life. Recently, ET carried out a survey, and found that, People will not be able to live without mobile. I think over a period of time, it will be Roti, Kapada Aur Mobile.

Some of the good resource on VAS can be found at
brew.qualcomm.com/bnry_brew/pdf/brew_2005/b105_sethi_tatad.pdf
http://www.business%20standard.com/common/storypage.php?autono=283762&leftnm=1&subLeft=0&chkFlg
http://coai.in/
www.iamai.in/mobile.pdf

Breaking out of the Pack: The four part Transformation

There are many companies who are striving to break out of the pack, there are many who have done it successfully, how can companies providing products /services make themselves stand apart and move up the value chain quickly? Is there a magic formula companies use to get instant success. After reading the article written by Mr.Shard Sharma, featured in Silicon India article July’06, Breaking Out of the Pack
I created the visual representation (image) of the four part transformation.

Amazon has come out with a new service called Mechanical Turk; blog community has coined a new name "crowdsourcing" for the same. Will it change the way the low end BPO work being carried out in India and across the world and break out of the pack again??

Product Startups: Escaping Early Stage Traps, A Nasscom workshop

April 19, 2007, Bangalore

Looks like Indian companies are getting ready for next challenge, building a world class product company out of India.

This is my general observation, IIT, IIM guys and other technology geeks who return from US look for “Startups”. I have been meeting/hearing and even noticing this change in the conference and workshops I attend.

I had a chance to attend NASSCOM Workshop for Product Startups: Escaping Early Stage Traps. The workshop leads by Sharad Sharma Managing principal http://orbitchange.com/ and founder and CEO of Tizor Systems http://www.tizor.com/

The key takeaways from the workshop are
Looking out for Product Traps: Weak Product architecture, Incomplete team, Unclear market strategy
4 dimensions: you got work towards providing balanced effort towards, Product, Team, Market Strategy and Investment. If you have a great team with a great idea without marketing strategy your chances of withstanding the market force before they drive you out is very low.
Culture and mind set: if you want to start a product Development Company with the typical offshore development guys (guys coming from instruction lead development Vs Innovative development).
Though the fund raising aspect was not discussed much due to time constraint, but the difference between the US based startup and Indian based startup was well brought out with examples.

One of the panelists was Sanjay Swamy; CEO http://www.mchek.com/ provides an on-demand solution for mobile payments and two-factor authentication. The company has a vision to leverage the booming mobile market (200 million mobile users in Indian), augment everyone’s financial universe by creating a mobile payment platform. Their Tag line, "Your wallet in your mobile phone". After online banking and B2C, M2B, now its time for M2M (or C). Worth keeping a close watch on this company.

This is what Dr. G. K Jayram says, first chairman of Infosys during 1982-85, currently Dr.G.K. Jayaram is the founder–Director of the Institute of Leadership & Institutional Development (ILID) at Bangalore. http://ilid.org/.

"Transformational Leadership is ability to go beyond regular activities and create a transformation in thinking. You are leading everyday at office and home and elsewhere. TL requires 3I:
Intensity - passionate about life
Integrity - diff between right and wrong from moral stand point and
Intelligence - professional intelligence to create a great org

Optimal mix of frustration and hope brings progress.”

I think this is what is required for our new breed of blooming product companies to be successful - The Transformational leadership, last but not the least VCs blessings.

Jindal take BPOs to the villages

Time of India, 18 April 2007 (R Raghavendra): In a unique initiative, the $4-billion Jindal Group, with support from the Karnataka government, is working to take BPOs rural.
After a year of testing a rural BPO model near Bellary, the Jindal Group is now planning to set up Dattahallis (data villages) across north Karnataka. This is the first instance in the state where the benefits of BPO will penetrate the rural.

Summary
· Plan is to set up Rural BPOs in the vicinity of the all Jindal steel, aluminum and energy plants in India.
· The Bellary Dattahalli, the brainchild of Sangita Jindal, Chairperson of JSW foundation will be expanded from 100 to 1000 seats over the next year.
· All women BPO will do basic data entry outsourced by Chennai based Lason India.
· Task include filling up medical prescriptions/insurance, entering details filled by customer in lucky coupons across various stores.
· State Government is upbeat about it and will support JSoft (software unit of Jindal) to replicate this in other locations. Tumkur and Kolar are on the radar.

ChaCha : Search engine with a difference

I found this new search engine called Chacha http://try.chacha.com/?rid=310 A new way of providing Personalized search services. I got to know about his when I was on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk http://www.mturk.com/.
Go to the ChaCcha website and do a search, if you are not satisifed with results don't worry, chat with a Guide (online chat support). Ask specific questions and the Guide will do the serach and the results will be displayed for you.
Do you think ChaCha (Cha means search in Chinese) Dragon will give a tough fight to Google? or when we check the Google toolbar tomorrow we find a tool very similar to Human supported searching factility.

In any case, "The more the fierce completion the better the benefits to consumers."

"I can rotate my hand... for 360 degrees." - Harry Potter

Hey check out this blog site... Harry potter in an interview rotating his hand 360 degrees...

http://czariflores.blogspot.com/2005/10/daniel-radcliffe-rocks.html

Why we take such a long time to create hits: Mungaru Male (MM)

What is the name of the hit Kannada movie that comes to your mind which was as hit as Mungaru Male? (all over Karnataka hit)

Is it Amruthavarshini or Nammura Mandara Huve? If I remember correctly, they are more than 5 to 8 years’ old movies. You can name Jogi and other, but I would say they were not as hit has MM. What is the average period our Kannada creative guys take to make a hit movie? I think we should improve the average. Mugaru Male has given a great platform to do that, do you know what it did unknowingly?

- Brought together diverse Kannada population together
- Emphasized why fresh faces are so important
- Encouraged and put a positive thought in the Kannadigas about the Kannada films
- Rewrote the formula for making a sensational/ musical romantic hit
- Pulling Non-Kannadigas to theaters
- Increased confidence in the producers that Karnataka has a booming movie market apart from IT
- Challenged other language film makers
- Added new Fans

There were days when I used tell, Upendra is highly talented with respect to creating stuff differently, but his model of presenting reality did not sustain for long.

If you have seen the Kingfisher AD, where a guy is humming OLA LALALALA LE O wrongly and other guy tries correcting him to sing better, the notes shows “Kingfisher Fan” and “New Kingfisher Fan”

Very recently, I have also started correcting many people who are trying to sing the song “Anisuthide” wrongly.

You can add to the list and also correct me if I have missed out any other Kannada movies, which are as hit as MM.

Rural BPO

What is Rural BPO?

Comat (www.comat.com) has started a new initiative and a SBU called as Rural BPO,
It is the process of carrying out Back office support services using Tele Centers or Rural BPO Center setup by Comat Technologies across Karnataka. In brief, RBPO is
–BPO centers at rural kiosks
–Shared infrastructure
–Distributed employee pool
–ICT technology driven delivery process

Why Comat is doing this??
Comat's vision is to Energize Rural Economy by providing rural based services.