Greek Complexity

Free phone calls for the enterprise

On VentureBlog last week:

When at both ends of a call, SkyGenie Voodoo provides free international calls using your current phone system. For less than $100 in equipment, any company with overseas offices can get rid of their huge telecommunications costs.

I'm blown away.

SkyGenie is a product offered by a Taiwanese company called Sysgration (website seems to be down but cached on Google), which uses Skype to provide free or low-cost phone calls using a normal telephone instrument. The device allows users to continue using the handset with the normal telephone network. And unlike Skype itself, it allows routing of Skype calls to other phones and route conventional calls to Skype.

For a hundred bucks? My first reaction is, "you're kidding!" My next thought is that it is probably still some time away from widespread commercial or home use, although I am aware that some companies are already using VOIP for their internal calls. I expect providers will initially target large companies with offices across the world. Smaller businesses will have to wait a bit for judging by these comments.

But get it right and imagine the market size! A whole new set of consumers could get in on the action and so could a whole new ecosystem of businesses (off the top of my head: billing software providers, add-on data/service/content providers, security & surveillance services, video-conferencing). Of course, many of these already exist in one form or the other. What I'm going ga-ga over is the potential for growth in a new (and potentially disruptive) domain.

Link: VentureBlog: CES, Part 2: Voice Over IP Hits The Masses

Applying metaphysics to business

Knowledge@Wharton has a new article on the "philosophy of technology". The article says that cultural and social features of a market often influence the uptake of a new technology (and thence, the success of the producer) even more than the utility of the technology itself. Excerpts:

A personal computer can be regarded as a communication tool by a business executive, as an educational tool by a teacher and as a toy by a child. Different meanings to a given technology can co-exist, or replace one another sequentially. As more companies operate in a global environment, they will need to do more than simply ask whether the technological state-of-the art enables the development of a given product. They will instead have to consider what the technology means to each segment of the market and accordingly, how to position the technology-based product.

The decision to embrace or to reject technology is itself deeply affected by abstract ideas that are embedded in an individual’s (or a nation’s) general life philosophy.

The challenges [engineers] engage and the solutions they seek are impacted by beliefs too -- their own, and those of their end users -- not just by the science. R&D teams should include psychologists, sociologists, artists or other professionals from the humanities, and should increasingly involve the customers themselves.

The article talks about the invention of powered flight as one of those times that a potentially useful technology was not pursued even though all the necessary resources were in place.

19th century Europe had all it took to become the home of the first powered flight -- but it didn’t. ... Europeans saw air flight as a threat to the established social order. If people could fly, what would become of state sovereignty? The socially structured Europe couldn’t bear this thought. It took a couple of American boys, living in an unstructured frontier society, to shed an unyielding philosophy that blocked a technological leap.

Very interesting proposition: Metaphysics + Technology = Business Success

Link: Should Your Next CEO Be a Philosopher?

Ozzies can sleep easier

FT's Observer with an amusing piece:

[Virgin Mobile's Australian arm] has launched a new service called DUI, or dialling under the influence, designed to keep you from making drunken calls to, say, ex-flames. Subscribers can dial 333 and then the phone number of any boy or girl they might later call. The number will be blocked until 6am the following morning at a cost of 25 cents.

I'm really curious to see how successful this service is! The carrier released stats saying that 30% of calls made under the influences are to exes.

Link: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/40136fde-6f0a-11d9-94a8-00000e2511c8.html (subscription required)

Mahesh Murthy on entrepreneurship

Mahesh Murthy in a newsletter published by INSEAD's Department of Entrepreneurship:

There are two ways to end up with a million dollars. The traditional route is to start with nothing and work your way up. The modern way, at least a few years ago, was to start with $10 million from a VC and work your way down. In such matters, call me a traditionalist.

The article is themed around the need for entrepreneurs in India to have true passion for their business and to take real risks. Interestingly, he also says the same about venture capitalists. He says:

Almost none of them in India (with a few exceptions) had ever personally taken or appreciated risks. Successful entrepreneurs make for good VCs, not investment bankers or fund managers. And till we get that generation of VCs here, VCs will be doing more harm than good, and we're better off without them.

He also says:

Nobody's funding start-ups in India. VCs, if they exist here, are funding profitable, successful mid-sized companies.

I have been musing for a while now (and I've received some validation from VCs in Singapore and elsewhere) that this is a good opportunity for experienced early-stage investors to step up their activity in India.

Link: http://www.insead.edu/entrepreneurship/Newsletter/edition12.htm

Blogging TV

I get a lot of my news from TV, especially in the morning just before I leave for work. Does anyone have any tips on how to blog TV news efficiently? Outlandish ideas welcome!

Innovative news visualisation tool

[via IndusNeXus] Marcos Weskamp and Dan Albritton have launched a news visualisation tool that is supposed to prioritise news according to what's important for the reader. Although I don't really understand the criteria for doing this (relevance to the reader, extent of reporting in the general media, keywords...?), it seems like a good idea.

Newsmap takes news feeds from Google News and displays headlines in font sizes that vary according to the "importance" of the news item. It is a good parallel to real-world newspapers, which use large headlines for important news and small headlines for less important news. But it goes a step beyond the newspaper model because it can be customised to each reader.

This could be an especially useful service for people with very little time who don't have any specific news needs and only want to be generally aware of things going on. A mobile application suggests itself.

Link: Newsmap

Reliance provides real-time commodity prices

I feel prescient. :-) I wrote a few days ago about how Reliance's wireless infrastructure could be used to provide mobile data and other content to large numbers of users. And today I came across this posting on IndusNeXus.com that reported on Reliance providing real-time data on spot and future commodity prices at no cost.

Of course, I didn't really "predict" this: Reliance's press release on this initiative was released on December 9.

The service is targeted at farmers, traders and cooperatives. A Reliance spokesman said:

This facility on R World provides access to millions of new users who have not had the opportunity to access real time commodity and securities prices. With a customer base of over 9 million and our recent initiatives to expand our network to over 5000 towns covering urban and rural areas as well as rail routes and highways, a sizable farmer and trader community that have not had access to real-time information on PCs or the Internet will benefit from this new initiative on Reliance mobiles.

On information, feeds and aggregators

Rajesh Jain points me to an interesting piece by Werner Vogels (via The Shifted Librarian):

The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle 150-200 feeds without too much stress. But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of  current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation.

One way of separating the information from the feed might be to watch out for specific keywords that one is interested in. In my day job, I need to know what's new about certain topics every day. FeedDemon allows me to create Watches that will watch for these words in all the feeds I subscribe to. So I don't even know now how many feeds I'm subscribed to today. It just doesn't matter.

Of course, this can only be done if one has certain keywords in mind. But it's a pretty efficient quick-and-dirty way of gleaning information from a vast (and growing) number of sources. The time saved can be used to read in full only those feeds that are truly important to oneself.

Thoughts?

"High-tech in China? Bah!"

Guy de Jonquieres of the Financial Times assails opinions of China as a technology powerhouse. Some of his comments:

[China] now has more researchers than Japan. Its annual research and development spending, though still well below US levels, is rising five times faster, while the OECD says China's biggest exports are now high-tech products... [But] the bulk of China's "high-tech" exports are actually low-margin commodity products such as personal computers and DVD players, assembled from imported components that account for most of their value...

[Weak intellectual property laws] provide no rewards for innovation. China's international patent applications, though growing, are still less than 1 per cent of the total filed in the US and Europe. And while start-up companies abound in China, they are poorly supported by its financial system. Its bigger banks favour lending to state-owned industries; venture capital is in its infancy, and the country's immature equity market fails to offer the dependable exit route demanded by sophisticated early-stage investors.

I think Mr de Jonquieres's focus on the current economic impact of high-tech research in China is a little too restrictive. China isn't a powerhouse of technological innovation today measured by exports, revenues or patent filings. However, I am aware of areas and applications where Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs are at the cutting edge. (Shameless plug: see www.inseadinnovasia.com for some examples.)

Also, economic impact from technology arises as a consequence of having a pipeline of research thrusts. I believe China does have a pipeline of technologies that will be commercialised over the years to come.

Furthermore, comparisons between China and the US/Europe are not easily made. The very metrics used may not be relevant (comparing dollar Chinese revenues to dollar American revenues) because some Chinese products will no doubt be meant for the local market. Also, some Chinese technologies doubtless find their way into Western products. This phenomenon will only grow over time. Revenues from these products accrue to the US/European entities. Only a small proportion would be attributed to China.

So is China a high-tech colossus today measured by GdJ's criteria? No.

Is it a high-tech power today based on technological output. Maybe. Sort of. In some areas.

Will it be a high-tech giant in the future? Yes.

Link: FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - Guy de Jonquieres: The China high-tech myth.

A cellphone for children

One of the world's youngest countries, demographically speaking, will soon have access to a "baby cellphone" -- a cellphone meant for children. Sify reports on the launch of this phone in India:

[The handset] is claimed to be ''the world's first state of the art cell phone with harmless radiation''.

The product, which is likely to be priced at Rs 5,900 [US$135], will enable the parents to know the location of the child. It will have facility to send an automatic SMS, cellphone and e-mail in the event of the child crossing the defined boundaries. Also, it would have facility to call select ten numbers, thereby cutting on the possible misuse of the mobile phone.

I wonder how well this will take off. Measured by demographics and sheer market growth, this is a big opportunity. And the phone is quite cheap too.

I think there's also an opportunity to build children-specific content around this phone -- cartoons, games, movies, music...

Link: http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=13655472

Thanks to textually.org and ipipi.