Addkiosk : Anytime digital download

The 'on-demand' digital download been introduced in India by 'Addkiosk' in Chennai. According to this news item, they are claiming to have around 100,000 music tracks under various categories. Users can visit these kiosks installed in place like retail stores, railway stations, malls and download their favorite music. The company has invested a whopping Rs 60 million for this service. I am not sure how easily ROI will happen for such businesses in India.

If we look from optimistic perspective, increasing mobile phones can be a huge target for such services. People won't mind paying 4-5 rupees per song and download into their handsets. But how many of them will actually use this service? Who is the exact target customer? If urban folks are the target customers, they can very well download music from internet for FREE. If they target music lovers, number of download will be less. Also the rural Indians are not very comfortable using such devices (my mother still not comfortable using bank ATMs). As their main revenue is dependent on volume of download, I am not sure where it is going to come from.

The iTunes business model worked in the US mainly because of strict laws against piracy. In countries like India, imposing them would be extremely difficult task. While it’s exciting to see such 'cool' technologies getting deployed in India, only time will tell the success of such devices. But I am extremely skeptical about it.

Voice based services

Technology penetration got a long way to go in countries like India. The PC penetration, High-speed internet connectivity, technology awareness are some of the major problems in rural/semi-urban India. I can say this with confidence because I was born and brought up in a town. Even today I don't see any change in the way small and medium businesses operate in my home town. They still use word-of-mouth method for marketing their product/services, maintain company accounts using manual notebooks (named chitta, kurippu, peredu in Tamil) and the whole supply chain is tracked manually.

In spite of the limitations mentioned above, telecom/mobile infrastructure is pretty strong in these rural areas. But the number of technology products/ventures focussed in India on leveraging such a strong infrastructure is very less. Most of the entrepreneurial ventures I have come across (at least in Bangalore) are mainly started by 'geeks' who believe that they can build a business with their 'cool' looking products. These 'cool' products cannot be marketed in countries like India, where the technology awareness is lacking big time.

In the lines of leveraging telecom/mobile infrastructure, I have come across some companies like Ubona. Their idea is to provide voice based services to get the local information (say nearby restaurants, hospitals, schools) by calling a pre-defined phone number. This comes free of cost for the consumers and service providers can build their brand by listing their firms with the voice service provider. In a way they are trying to adapt the model what Google has done with internet. I found this concept pretty interesting. Following are the reasons why such concepts will work in India:

1. The business model is built around transactions. By considering mass population of India, there is no problem with respect to number of transactions. The success of telecom service provides in India is a typical example for tapping power of transactions.
2. The rural consumer will not be able to pay for such services from his side. By making this as a free service, compelling reason can be created.
3. Rural consumers are comfortable using telephones/mobiles. So the challenge of reducing the complexity of man-machine-interface is ruled out.
4. There rural consumers are still not aware of many new services/products offered. This is a good opportunity to be tapped. At the same time extending support for regional languages is very critical.
5. There is no need to build any new infrastructure. So very minimal cap-ex for deployment.

Only time will tell success of such services. But I am confident that such services make sense in rural India.

Security for the Car Driver

One of the recent issues of the IEEE Spectrum carried an article of a security breakin into the Greek telephony system.

In order to keep the telephony system updated, the switch manufacturer usually updates firmware in a "live" manner. In many cases, this happens remotely. During this procedure for a Greek telephony switch, some miscreant had tampered with the firmware and used the tampered software to tap many calls. Even the high level Greek government officials were not spared. Finally, the issue came to light due to several SMS being bounced causing people to look at the firmware versions and their authenticity.

Switch over to similar problems that may occur during any remote firmware updates. Such cases where firmware is used include cars reaching to manufacturers to give information about the car's health. Well, what's to say that a disgruntled or malicious employee replaces this with a software which for instance, connects to the GPS and keeps giving your coordinates always.

From thereon, it is not much to track you or your loved ones easily. Well, that's what tech does to society. Seemingly innocuous stuff being used for totally unknown purposes. Atleast, it keeps the security industry occupied and gives them job security.

Time for the embedded systems industry and engineers who have so far stayed away from main-stream security problems to start paying attention, especially if they are going to start updating firmware remotely.