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.