Availability of Quality Talent

Aakar Patel writes a column titled “Reply To All” in the Mint newspaper on alternate Saturdays; these are available online at http://www.livemint.com/Articles/Authors.aspx?author=Aakar%20Patel&type=wa. His writing on 29th October on “Why educated Indians are only half-literate” had a number of interesting points on the available talent pool in India for the IT industry and the English media business; reading this column brought to mind a number of related points that I had wondered about in the past. I will cover some of them in this post and hope to do the rest fairly soon.

The article talks about the poor language skills of a majority of the reporters in the english media. I think that apart from language, there is also an issue of content; I suspect that many of the reporters and anchors are (to misappropriate a phrase from NDTV) incapable of “going beyond the headlines”. In the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Bombay, a regular feature of the 9 o'clock news on NDTV was to have the anchor talk to someone from Pakistan. The anchor would try to get the guest to agree on some point or the other; if the guest (often a print journalist or a member of the Paksitan establishment) chose to be non-cooperative, the anchor was often at a loss since (s)he was no match for the intellectual and debating skills of the guest. Also I don't know whether it was because I was more impressionable and less cynical at that time, but I do think that the participants in some of the current affairs discussions I've watched on Doordarshan in the eighties and early nineties were more knowledgable than the rent-a-quote types that show up on the private news channels.

I suppose this focus on english language skills could be criticized as being “elitist”. But then, if the person's primary task is to communicate a story in english, is it wrong to expect/demand above-average proficiency in the language?

In any case, I don't think the problem in the media business is because of the lack language skills alone; if that were the case then what explains the state of the Hindi news channels? It is not that the Hindi channels or the channels in other local languages offer more substance than their English counterparts.

Is it that the tabloid approach of all the news channels simply reflects what we the audience want? Is this the obvious outcome of our fascination with sound-bites, executive summaries and information in 140 character tweets?

The article mentions that “in India quality thins out very quickly” in connection with the availability of talent for the media industry. This scarcity of quality holds true in a number of other areas as well; for e.g. in education, there is a significant chasm between the top-tier and the next. I guess the increased participation of the private sector in education has meant that there are more good quality schools and colleges now than say twenty years ago; at the same time the private sector has contributed more than its fair share of mediocre institutions. Also while some of the new private schools are comparable to the “colonial institutions” mentioned in the article, these are often very expensive.

Android Initialization... and the advantages of blogging

I was looking at android system startup and found some useful material on the ENEA Android blog. Look at the various posts starting with http://androidenea.blogspot.com/2009/06/android-boot-process-from-power-on.html.

I think blogs are a useful mechanism for companies to publicize their expertise and start a conversation with interested parties - prospective customers, potential employees etc. Of course it needs to be done right to avoid appearing as a cheap attempt at publicity. I wonder how many companies in India have successfully integrated blogs into their public communication...

Individuals too can use blogs to showcase their expertise. I believe that useful to have externally accepted proofs of achievement, especially when looking to change jobs; things like patents, papers, participation in standards or open source communities are good examples of such proofs. Blogs too can serve a similar purpose if you can build a track record of meaningful posts..

LinkedIn Recommendations

I have been spending some time clearing up some long pending items on my

to do list. I was able to tick off one item over the last few days – respond to the

recommendation requests I've received on LinkedIn over the past two years.

The reason that this has been on the to-do list for a while is not because I have

received lots of requests (the number is in single digits); it was because I was

against this idea for quite some time for a number of reasons. Firstly, a lot of the

recommendations were filled with hyperbole and therefore writing in my usual

(bland, though I would prefer to call it 'under-stated') style would make the person

look quite ordinary; secondly, many of the recommendations seemed to be cases

of “i'll scratch your back if you scratch mine” with two people writing glowing

recommendations for each other; lastly, not writing any recommendations gave me

a convenient excuse to avoid writing recommendations for people I may not be too

keen to recommend (i.e. “as a matter of policy, I don't write LinkedIn

recommendations”).

On thinking some more, I began to feel that maybe the above reasons though

somewhat valid, were also excuses. Maybe the real reasons were my aversion

towards expressing opinions in public and good old-fashioned laziness; also I am

certain that there are good things that can be said about anyone (though it may

require more effort in some cases :-)). On a selfish note, I think that a well-written,

thoughtful recommendation reflects well on the writer. Lastly, it would be quite rich on

my part to publish recommendations that I receive while declining to write them for

others.

Another item on my to-do list is to write a blog post at least once a week. I hope I

am able to do this over the next few weeks; if I can post at least twelve times before

the end of the year, this task too can be considered done.

Our Affection For Things British

Back again after a long break. ..

A few days ago I read an article on the BBC website about a group of British men being arrested in Greece for offensive behaviour because they dressed up in nuns' habits (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8067280.stm). The article reminded me about a conversation I had with a friend some weeks ago comparing the British and Americans – we were in agreement that you would find more “characters” among the British than among Americans. I doubt we would hear about a group of American men doing something similar! Then there is the recent You Tube sensation Susan Boyle – I doubt someone like her could be anything other than British.

I guess this affection (preference?) that a number of us (late thirties and older) have for things British is a product of our experiences when growing up. A number of us went to schools with British influences (e.g. Anglo-Indian schools or schools run by missionaries where many of them were from the United Kingdom or Ireland), read Enid Blytons and the only english comedy serials we saw on television were British: “Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em”, “Fawlty Towers”, “Yes Minister” etc. (there was no Cable TV at that time). I suspect the younger folks (i.e. early thirties and younger) are more American in their tastes or at least not biased towards Britain.

I personally prefer understated comedy to the over-the-top variety; it is easy to think of Hugh Grant as being representative of the former and Jim Carrey as epitomizing the latter and to then generalize this to label all American comedy as being loud but that would be unfair. I've enjoyed watching American sitcoms such as “Caroline in the City” and “Frasier” and like Steve Martin and Bill Murray. However the cult status Sienfeld acquired puzzles me, even though I liked quite a few episodes. There would be a small clip of him doing a stand-up routine at the end of each episode. I think he was trying hard to do some understated humour (if that is actually possible..) but actually came across as being rather smug (especially that slight smile accompanied by the nod of the head).

For an enjoyable description of Britain and British idiosyncracies read Bill Bryson's book “Notes from a Small Island”. Its been a while since I read it but I still remember its gem of a start where he describes how the British (wrongly) believe that Britain is a big place.

Peter Drucker's "Five Deadly Business Sins"

I found an old classic when browsing the web this morning – “The Five Deadly Business Sins” by Peter Drucker (http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/pdf/WSJ.2005.11.29.DruckerFiveDeadlySins.pdf). These sins (in order of prevalance) are:

• Worship of high profit margins and premium pricing (e.g. Xerox's focus on feature-rich copiers and American car companies' focus on big cars provided opportunities for their Japanese competitiors to capture the rest of the market)

• Mispricing new products by charging what the market will bear (e.g. American firms' pricing of fax machines)

• Cost-driven pricing (rather than price-led costing)

• Slaughtering tomorrow's opportunity at the altar of yesterday (e.g. IBM forbade its PC division from approaching its Mainframe customers)

• Feeding problems and starving opportunities (i.e. assigning stars to fix problems)

Sins 1 and 4 are very similar to the issue Clayton Christensen addresses in his famous book “The Innovator's Dilemma”. 

Web Widgets on TVs

A common failing is to become enamoured with your present (e.g. our current city of residence, our current area of work) to the extent that we dismiss all other options as being inferior or less advanced. Such comparisons are often unfair as our views on these other options do not take into account all the changes that have happened since we last looked at them.

I have been working in the area of internet applications and services on mobile devices for the past few years and had not been tracking the impact of the internet on home entertainment, especially televisions. I read an article today on how the Yahoo Widget Engine has been integrated onto Samsung TVs (http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090324/yahoo-widgets-lend-brains-to-boob-tube/); Sony and LG Electronics are also planning to release similar products.

It will be interesting to observe how the evolution of web widgets on televisions (or in the cable industry) compares with the evolution of widgets on mobile devices (or in the mobile industry). Yahoo and Opera offer widget solutions for TVs and mobiles and if we were to extrapolate based on the the shape Yahoo solutions are in, widgets on mobiles (http://mobile.yahoo.com/gallery) seems to be further ahead as compared to solutions for TVs (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/).

Apart from Yahoo and Opera, other players in the mobile industry are also active in enabling widgets; device manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola have their own widget frameworks and mobile operators are attempting to standardize security mechanisms and APIs to enable widgets to access device services (the OMTP BONDI initiative). I tried googling for standardization efforts in the cable/television industry but was unable to find anything similar.

There is also the larger question on how the relationships between the different players in the mobile industry (i.e. application developers, operators, software platform providers, device manufacturers) compare with the relationships in the TV ecosystem (TV manufacturers, set-top box manufacturers, cable operators, channels, content providers). I hope to improve my understanding of this area in the coming weeks.

Monetization may be easier for Mobile Social Networks

Bill Gurley's has an interesting post on his blog - “How to Monetize Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent” (http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/03/09/how-to-monetize-a-social-network-myspace-and-facebook-should-follow-tencent/ ). He writes that social networks have a monetization problem because users are heavily immersed in the task of interacting with other users and so are less inclined to be interested in advertising; conversely nline advertising is more successful on sites where the user's intent to purchase is already formed (e.g. travel sites or on search result pages where the search query was triggered by an intent to purchase).

The post states that social sites can enhance monetization from other sources and gives the example of TenCent which generates revenues from digital items and casual games. Examples of digital items on TenCent include virtual clothes and accessories that users can buy to dress up their online avatars. Only 12% of TenCent's revenues come from advertising (as compared to over 90% for Facebook and MySpace). Gurley also explains why he thinks that people who dismiss the viability of such revenues as being an “Asian fad” are wrong.

Given the increasing popularity of social networking on mobiles and the fact that a number of mobile users are looking to personalize their handsets, I think that mobile operators can increase sales of digital items by enabling users to use the same content within the social networking application and to customize their handset. For e.g. users could purchase digital item packages that include personalization elements for their social networking avatars, wallpapers for their handset, downloadable ringtones and subscription to ring-back tone(s). As mobile users are already used to paying for digital items, it is likely that a social networking site oriented towards mobile users will be more successful in selling such items as compared to a site that is accessed primarily by desktop users. Common digital items would also mean closer integration between the handset and the social networking service (i.e. beyond the creation of specific applications such as the Facebook app for Blackberry, MySpace app for iPhone).

It will be interesting to explore how social networking on mobiles has evolved in different markets. Bill Gurley's post mentions two popular services in Japan that are accessed more often from mobiles than from desktops: Mobage-Town from DeNA (http://www.dena.jp/en/services/mobileportal.html) and GREE (they only seem to have a Japanese site; a write-up on the service is available at http://www.tokyotronic.com/2008/01/review-japans-no-2-social-network-gree.html). The creation of such “mobile-friendly” solutions in Japan seems to be mirroring the different approach taken by NTT DoCoMo as compared to operators in US during the early days of the mobile web; while the former created I-Mode (a new set of web-based services designed for mobile users), the latter viewed the mobile web as providing the desktop Internet on the handset.

India - Online Advertising and Internet Trends

Back after a blogging break that turned out to be much longer than I had planned for..

The March 17^th edition of Mint has an article on online advertising in India and data on online consumer trends for Feb 2009; these contain some interesting numbers on the advertising industry and on internet usage in India.

• The total advertising spend in 2008 was Rs. 20,717 crores, with online advertising accounting for Rs. 363 crores. The projected growth rates for the various advertising meidia in 2009 are 25% for online, 15% for radio, 7% for TV, 0% for print, -20% for outdoor and -5% for cinema.

• India has an internet user base of 50 million with 35 million active users (as of December 2008). These include 12 million Cyber-cafe users, 10 million home-only users, 8 million office-only users, 3 million college/school users and 2 million home + office users.

• The top websites in India (based on the percentage of users accessing them) Google (75%), Yahoo (65%), Orkut (40%), Rediff (28%), YouTube, MSN and Blogspot (around 22% each)

• The top websites in India (based on page views) are Yahoo, Orkut, Google, Rediff, Facebook. I think this data needs to be looked at some more; Yahoo is represented by yahoo.com (2.76 billion page views) whereas Google entries include google.com (2.47b) and google.co.in (1.9b). Why doesn't Yahoo's India site (yahoo.co.in) show up in the list? Do the numbers for Google, Yahoo etc. include all their sites; for e.g. is gmail.com counted as part of google.com?

• The Indian Railways online booking site (irctc.co.in) surprisingly (?) ranks within in the top ten websites (with 180 million page views); it is accessed by 12% of India's internet users.

The data on internet usage has been obtained from ViziSense, an audience measurement service. Their website (http://www.vizisense.com) has a list of the top 100 domains and a paper explaining their methodology. Their data sources are a “well-diversified panel of 12000 active internet users” and “tracker tags” that are placed on the web pages of participating publishers. Vizisense then uses statistical techniques to scale this data to obtain estimates for the entire population.

Some interesting points in the article include:

• By adopting e-commerce, companies can “kill the time and distance from generation of interest by viewing the advertisement to actual purchase”

• Online ads are dominated by web portals, financial services, information technology firms and automobile firms. Consumer durables are likely to increase their online advertising as many consumers are likely to use the web to research and compare products.

• The popularity of cybercafes has meant that personalization features such as downloadable widgets have not taken off in India.

• Nokia projects 500 million mobile phone subscribers in India by 2011, with 50 million mobile internet users, 100 million music-enabled handsets and 200 million radio-enabled handsets.

Each of these points is worth exploring further in future posts (that I hope to write soon!). For e.g.

• The only time I have clicked on the ads shown with search results is when searching for information needed for a purchase decision. Is this the case for other users as well? If yes, are we likely to see an increase in the percentage of searches done for product research and also an increase in the percentage of cases where the user clicks on the search ads?

• What are the implications of having a internet user base that primarily uses public machines to access the web?

• Would a user listening to radio on his mobile handset be receptive to advertising delivered to the handset by the operator/manufacturer through other means? In other words, can the operator use the commercial breaks in the radio program to deliver ads he has selected (instead of having the user listen to the ads from the radio station)?

NY Book Review on Ahmed Rashid's "Descent into Chaos.."

“The New York Review of Books” has a very informative review of Ahmed Rashid’s book “Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”. The review (available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22274) is written by William Dalrymple.

It is strange that people still choose to create monsters (the jihadists in this case) in spite of various instances of the Frankenstein story occurring in real life. 

Thoughts on Work

When looking to change jobs many of us have a lot of hesitation in considering opportunities outside of our domain. I too was having a similar reluctance until I happened to read Seth Godin’s blog post (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/vwgME2z2bXI/what-are-you-good-at.html) on the difference between process and content. According to him, domain knowledge is content, which is important but can be learned; process, which is a set of “soft” skills and experiences are more valuable and harder to learn. Therefore we need to communicate our “process abilities” and become great in the processes we are already good at.

Another interesting post (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/K26DzSxVD9Y/creativity-and-stretching-the-sweatshirt.html) states that people who don’t consider themselves as the creative type, will appear as creative to most people as long as they observe creative things others have done and keep up with the state of the art.

Another post (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/-wvOE4Ut_Ok/in-the-mood.html) talks about how the missing piece in achieving something is not the knowledge; instead the problem is that we are not “in the mood” to do what is needed. I think this is yet another reminder on the importance of having the right attitude. And now that we are on the topic, Charles Swindoll’s quote is quite relevant: “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes.”  (http://thinkexist.com/quotes/charles_r._swindoll/)

Moibile Technologies to Watch

Gartner has put out a media release on their report ““Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010” (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=867012). The list includes: 

• Faster access networks: High-speed Wi-Fi (802.11n), Cellular Broadband (HSPA)
  
• Local Connectivity Solutions: Near-Field Communications, Bluetooth 3.0
  
• Hardware Improvements: Better display technologies
  
• Location Sensing Applications
  
• Mobile User Interface improvements
  
• Mobile Web and Widgets
  

I have more than a passing interest in the last two technologies. There have been a number of posts on these topics in the VisionMobile blog (http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/ ) the past few months. Some of the more interesting ones are: 

• How UI frameworks are enabling a new type of content – UI Personalities. http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2009/01/ui-personalities-a-new-premium-content-market-on-the-radar/
  
• Mobile Application Runtimes – which includes Webkit. http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2008/10/who-will-win-the-race-of-mobile-application-runtimes/
  
• Mobile Megatrends 2008 (http://www.slideshare.net/andreasc/Mobile-megatrends-2008-VisionMobile) which includes mobile web & widgets, the competition between application execution environments etc. The description of how value in mobile software is bubbling up the software layers is especially interesting.

Wireless Data Revenues

There is a post on Giga OM (http://gigaom.com/2009/01/28/so-far-wireless-data-looks-recession-proof) on how wireless data revenues at the top US carriers are still growing despite the recession. AT&T made $3.07b on wireless data, which amounted to 10% of total wireless revenues in the Dec 2008 quarter (and 8% of 2008 annual revenues). This amounts to a year-on-year growth of 51% and a quarter-on-quarter growth of 12%. The corresponding figures for Verizon Wireless are $2.97b, which amounted to 12% of the quarter’s wireless revenues and 11% of annual revenues. The growth figures are 44% and 6%.

The AT&T investor material at http://www.att.com/gen/investor-relations?pid=262 provides some interesting data.

• Total revenues for the Dec 2008 quarter were 31.1b, a 2.4% growth over the Dec 2007 quarter. Total revenues for 2008 were $124b, a 4.3% growth on 2007.
  
• While the gross post-paid sub addition was 3.5m, the net addition was much lower at 1.3m. Similarly while the gross subscriber addition was 5.8m, the net addition 2.1m.
  
• Total number of subscribers at end-2008 is 77m, up 7m from 2007.
  
• 60m of the 77m subscribers were post-paid.
  
• Nearly 80 billion text messages in the Dec 2008 quarter, more than double the number for the Dec 2007 quarter.
  
• Wireless data growth drivers identified as premier network (only US carrier with broad 3G HSPA deployment), premier devices (exclusive deals for high-end devices such as iPhone 3G, Blackberry Bold; quick messaging devices), rich apps and content (mobile TV, video sharing, largest mobile music catalog).
  
• Postpaid subscriber ARPU at $60 with a wireless data ARPU of $16.3
  

 

I looked at the Dec 2008 quarter results for Airtel at http://www.bhartiairtel.in/index.php?id=results  to check on how the results compare:

• Revenues in the Dec 2008 Quarter were Rs. 79.4b and 56.1b in Dec 2007 Quarter (a year-on-year growth of 42%).
  
• Airtel has 86m subscribers, with 8.1m net additions in the quarter.
  
• 93.5% of the customer base (and 99.6% of the additions) are pre-paid
  
• ARPU is Rs. 324 ($6.7)
  

The only statistic that looks similar is the %age of non-voice revenues, 9.5% (with 4.1% as SMS) in the Dec 2008 quarter (10.0% and 4.5% in Sept quarter; 9.3% and 4.4% in the Dec 2007 quarter). This translates to 7.5b in Dec 2008 and 5.2b in the Dec 2007 quarter, a y on y growth of 44%.

 

Airtel data revenues are growing at the same rate as the overall revenues. Given the growth rate of their overall revenues, specifically growing data revenues may not be a priority at this time. Two of the factors that AT&T mentioned as driving wireless data revenue growth (faster network, better devices) don’t apply in Airtel’s case.  I would think that services such as ring-tones and caller-tunes (which do not require superior devices or high speed networks) make up the bulk of the 5.4% of their non-voice, non-SMS revenues.

Indian operators are also likely to increase their focus on non-voice revenues in the future. Will this lead to more instances of operators working with vendors to have devices available exclusively on their network (like the iPhone 3G on AT&T in the US)? Will they subsidize high-end devices as part of service contracts? The alternate path would be for operators to focus on building services that work on any handset the subscriber may choose to buy; in other words, the India handset market will continue to be predominantly retail driven.