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.

The importance of user experience

Multiple companies are competing in the same space to win customers. In terms of price, features and support there is really not much different between one compared with other. Then, whats the differentiating factor between one product (company) to other? The 'user experience' is the answer. Everybody knows how Apple's iPod has disrupted the music industry, thanks to its excellent user experience. Probably iPod is the only gadget my mother can use at first shot without any problem.

I own a Sony Ericsson's p990i, which is one of the high-end mobile phones as of today. It has a whole bunch of features in two different modes. In fact there are many features that I have not used even a single time. I am sure thats the case with any technology product/gadget even if you are a geek. But there is a fundamental design problem with the product (See picture).




The call receive and disconnect buttons are placed next to each other with no gap in between them. Any adult's thumb is bigger than the button size. In my case 4 out of 10 times I end up cutting the call, instead of receiving it. The person on the other end (especially friends and family members) feel that I am cutting the call deliberately. This is a classic example for bad use experience design of p990i. Its very small design error but makes a huge difference for users like me.

Have you ever faced such bad user experience with any product?

Network Bandwidth in a Company Infrastructure

Many areas in technology consists of cycles.

When for example, we want to host more web servers etc, we in turn want more powerful chips to host the traffic load and in turn want the telecom providers to provide for more fiber.

If then, the traffic load comes down because the expected usage of the web servers is not there, what happens to the telecom provider who has provided fiber. I guess there is revenue loss.

The same thing applies to a data center such as the networking within a company where we want faster LANs for applications hosted inside the company.

The reason i am saying this is that i believe that the IT industry has yet again come to a juncture where adding more networking capacity blindly within a company is going to result in wastage. Companies just do not need more networking bandwidth but due to the large growth of employees especially in places like India, they probably need more computing power and better applications which in turn needs to drive the bandwidth.

You may well ask, but "does not more people imply more bandwidth" ? That depends on the type of usage. Applications in companies are more data driven (as against multimedia) and interactive which are not bandwidth intensive but needs more data processing capabilities.

How does this affect the common guy ? Well, if you are the network infrastructure administrator of your company, my guess is you will begin to need very good reasons to ask for more budget to enlarge bandwidth capacity.

Computing As A Service In My Telephone Bill

Ever wanted to get updated with good software, computing environment and have somebody else bother about the computer maintenance.

Imagine this scenario.

a. I am an existing Airtel broadband subscriber
b. Airtel announces its new computing package @ Rs.99 a month
c. Curious, I go to see what they have to offer
d. The attendant says you can take a pre-packaged computing USB for free and put into your computer and start off using a given set of provisioned applications
e. She further says they have pre-packaged USB for Teens, Professionals, Adult etc and says I can try one free for a week.
f. I take the Teens USB and put into my computer (assume the comp boots off the USB)
g. On booting from USB, you automatically connect to live.airtel.net
h. Signing on is done and based on your profile, the Teen VM profile is loaded (the actual provisioning process)at the airtel site.
i. At this stage, it looks to be like a sophisticated pcAnywhere and I wonder whats its all about.
j. Then I realize that while the computing is going on at live.airtel.net, all data is being stored in the USB stick or my own hard drive.
k. The intelligent thing that these guys have done is not only with the provisioning (maybe using one of these hi-tech virtualization stuff) but also tap the data addresses, stream it over the net in a secure manner and store it the local USB.
l. Now, I can take this same USB stick with the data and go to any cyber café parlor and do the same operation. I am actually location agnostic now.
m. I went back to my small business and wondered whether I can get my accountant a corporate "Professionals" USB in the same way and stop him from telling me that the computer stopped working and he cannot give me my reports for this quarter.

Why should searching for a book be manual in libraries ?

I had requested for a few books to be purchased at my company office. There were the obvious delays (red-tape, you know) and finally it got purchased.The problems of ordering something in an office means that your manager keeps asking whether you are using what you ordered. Being familiar with the practice, i immediately set forth to the library and asked the librarian for the books.

The library is medium in size (not your usual community library size) but large nonetheless. The librarian used the technology at her command and searched for the book by name and got the ISBN number. From this, she got the location where the book was supposed to be and asked me to go take a look.I searched and searched at the location until the guy next to me started getting annoyed at me asking him to keep moving. Gave up and asked for help from the librarian. She too searched and searched and searched to no avail.

To cut a long story short, somebody had placed the book two rows away. We finally located it and all was well. Importantly, i now could tell my manager that i am reading the books i had ordered.The larger question of course is, why is there nothing that can help you search the rows for a book. How about this idea ?

Develop a ISBN reader. There are several small devices that can get programmed to read the ISBN number wirelessly. Get one with the wireless ISBN reader interface plus a USB or similar well-known interface. Attach it to a computer, run a program that will encode it to search for a list of ISBN numbers. Now take the device with you and run it across the rows. When it senses the ISBN number, i guess it can beep ?

Seems simple but of course, there may be stuff that i am not expert at. It may even be available already. Comments ?

Update [13-May-07] - I have been looking for a device that can do this. The closest is one that actually does the reverse. It collects the ISBN number of books on shelves and can input into your computer. Take a look at

http://www.collectorz.com/book/