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.