Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Note - Starting a Microfinance Organization in India

Information that I found on the web searching for a research project at my Business School. Since this was not so readily available even though its a commonly discussed topic, I thought it will be useful to share it in the format that I created.
Operational Points:

1. A co-operative is entitled to take on savings accounts unlike an NBFC (Non Banking Financial Companies). The registrar of the companies is supposed to grant these licenses.
2. To get an NBFC license from RBI, the requirement is to have Rs 2 Crore (~ $450000) and the process takes 3-4 months. In case there are defunct companies, the license for them can be bought from RBI for a sum of Rs 25 Lakhs.
3. SIDBI (Small industries development bank of India) has initiated a “Transformation loan” in 2003,to enable the MFI’s to convert to a corporate entity. The loan provided is a quasi equity product with longer repayment period and can be converted into equity when the MFI decides to become a corporate entity.

References:
1. http://brandalyzer.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/starting-a-microfinance-business-in-india/

Monday, June 27, 2011

The entire concept and applications of 'VIDEO SEARCH'

A project completed with my group while completing the IS project at IE Business School. I thought that it might be helpful for the people who are interested in this topic.

Video search is the process of locating, interpreting, indexing and delivering video content (Exhibit 1). This process is enabled by the usage of the sophisticated technologies, allowing consumers to easily find relevant professional videos and user-generated content. The leading organizations in this sphere of video search technology are Youtube, Blinkx and the traditional search giants Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Contents

1. Definition

2. Benefits

3. Costs

4. Technology Constraints

5. Risks

6. Current Technology Applications

7. Pilot Projects

8. Value adding applications

9. Exhibits

10. Endnotes

Definition

The online video content is growing exponentially as a result of several factors:

  • Availability of the broadband connection, which dramatically increased Internet speed
  • Development of Web 2.0 technologies, which boosted the amount of user-generated content
  • Growing number of the broadcasting giants targeting the Internet audience

This growth has led to two main trends: on one hand there is a huge Internet audience seeking convenient ways to browse through large amounts of digital video. On the other hand, there are a large number of Web publishers and other video content providers who need software to categorize, organize and index their clips and make them easily searchable by their sites' visitors[i].

In order to address the first trend both big search web-companies like Google, Yahoo!, as well as niche video search providers like Blinkx, CastTv, Truveo, have introduced relevant engines aimed to facilitate the video search. While traditional search engines depended on the accuracy of the metadata provided by publishers, the specialized video-search sites use technology that can search the actual content of the video.

These technologies[ii] include:

  1. Speech-recognition
  2. Video analysis
  3. Active tagging
  4. Speech-to-text
  5. Facial and optical recognition
  6. Computer vision
  7. Semantic categorization[iii

Some sites still rely heavily on human intelligence to be able to identify only high-quality videos, thereby increasing the relevancy of the product they provide to their users. Additionally, these sites have introduced sophisticated filters to enable easy search by type, content provider, relevance/date, popularity, user ratings etc. Moreover, the “community” function identifies consumer profiles, which can be further used to alert them to new content, suggest user groups and provide with recommendations upon the relevant video[iv]. Thus, due to their convenience such sites have become the single point of interest for digital video consumers.

Three major types of video search web-sites can be distinguished:

1. Designated video search engines (VSE). These sites, like Blinkx.com, CastTV, Truveo, do not host any videos, but serve purely as a search engine, allowing for the exploration and search for the specific video across the Internet, through a single gateway, with a high degree of accuracy, offering advanced filtering and sorting options.

2. Video-hosting sites, covering both video-sharing sites, which serve as a platform for uploading of user-generated content (YouTube, BrightCove and Metacafe), as well as internet TV broadcasters (ABC, CBS and Hulu). These sites not only host videos but also provide a search engine to facilitate a search of the hosted video.

3. Traditional Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo! also introduced video search functions on their sites. Google Videos now serves primarily as a search engine for videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads.

Simultaneously, as organizations, including video content providers, produce more and more media, they face the challenge of managing all that data and providing it in a meaningful way to their users. Thus, the relevant technologies are being developed, like matching the publisher’s video with its text articles, suggesting relevant videos to users based on their preferences, categorization of clips in the video library and search engine optimization[v]. Some companies, specialized in video search technologies, provide their product via the Cloud Computing technology. For example, ReelSurfer has launched its Cloud Video Search Platform which allows a search for targeted dialog segments within a larger video and enables customers to implement this technology and avoid a large investment[vi].

Benefits

The popularity of video search engines can be attributed to the slew of benefits that it offers. One of the primary benefits is convenience. As the technology evolves, thereby mitigating issues of relevancy, it is becoming significantly more convenient to search videos for personal, business or academic reasons, rather than mere textual data. Part of this convenience is having a one-stop-shop for all your video searching needs. The ease of being able to perform all your video searches on one site – whether CastTV, Blinkx, Google Video, or Yahoo! – adds an additional dimension to the convenience factor. Another part of this convenience is being able to cut and weave through all the clutter that exists on the internet.

The Web 2.0 capabilities that are afforded with video search further draw users in. Users are able to create new wikis for enhancing or commenting on video content. Furthermore, users are able to be the ones to do the video tagging, thereby potentially increasing the level of relevancy. On the other hand, this can also be detrimental to relevancy, as it may be tagged incorrectly. Video search engines are also fairly easy to use. Most search engines simply require its users to type a query into the search box, and the sophisticated technology allows the search engine to scour the web for relevant, and often, helpful information. Sites such as Blinkx have capitalized even further upon the attractiveness of its user-friendliness by displaying search results as 25-second clips of the video. This helps customers further zero in on what they are actually looking for.

As hosts of video content evolve with the video search technology, many other benefits have developed. One such benefit is that users are able to stream videos on their computer, rather than download them, thereby freeing up disk space.

From the perspective of sites with capabilities for video searching, there is an added benefit that allows them to have insight into the user’s mind. They are able to follow what they are looking for, and in return, sell this information to an advertiser. For instance, if someone enters into a search box the keyword “ice skates,” this information can be matched and sold to an advertiser who can provide items surrounding this search to the user. This type of contextual advertising[vii] makes VSE, such as Google and BlinkxTv, have such strong business model.

Costs

As the video-hosting sites provide hosting and streaming of the videos they have to cover huge infrastructure costs in order to maintain these services. These costs include the payments for broadband connection (e.g. YouTube bandwidth costs are about $360 million a year[viii]), as well as the purchase of servers and electricity. Additionally, these companies spend a large amount of money to acquire the licenses for professional video (for YouTube it’s about $250 million annually[ix]), as well as to cover the cost of lawsuits (see Risks section). These companies struggle to cover these significant costs due to the fact that user-generated content is not easily monetized.

The video-search dedicated engines have a different cost-structure. Instead of being a repository for video content, they serve as a single entry point to browse across all the video-hosting sites on the Internet. As one of the crucial factors of their success is the provision of the efficient video-search technology, these companies invest a lot into Research and Development. Thus, Blinkx, one of the leaders in this industry, spends $10.6 million annually on R&D, which represents about 34% of their revenues[x]. Other major cost items are Sales and Marketing, Engineering Headcount and other administrative expenses.

Technology constraints

As video is a complicated medium, combining speech, images and sounds, the development of video search technology faces some major constraints. While textual features are well defined, video and acoustic features are ill-defined, computationally expensive to extract and bulky to represent[xi]. Queries by image content involve specifying image or video attributes, require the use of an index that is typically derived from the media streams. However, a lot of videos lack detailed metadata, making it hard for search engines to automatically categorize the content. Additionally some videos may be tagged incorrectly (a “tag spam”). These factors decrease significantly the quality of search and relevancy of the content provided.

The challenges of video search as compared to text search are summarized as follows[xii]:

1. Crawling: video is more likely to be accessed via a web application and inaccessible to simple spiders. This is a problem for text search (invisible web) but to a lesser extent. Access to video is more often restricted to resisted users.

2. File formats: Text search engines handle HTML format and perhaps PDF, while video media comes in a wide variety of formats.

3. Link Rot: video files are often too large to be maintained indefinitely by on web servers. News content in particular may be published only for a limited time.

4. Duplication: compared to text, media files are much more likely to appear on multiple sites, and duplication is much more difficult to detect

5. Caching: the size of video media makes caching costly, and caching may violate copyrights.

6. Ranking: referral based ranking may be used, but it is more difficult to implement due to the duplication and web application issues (above). Term frequency ranking methods are typically inapplicable.

7. Browsing: summary generation or hit context extraction is more involved with video, and may introduce copyright issues. The time cost of viewing a document is higher due to buffering delays and the nature of linear media.

All these factors put a lot of constraints on the development of the video search technologies.

Risks

Search on video-hosting sites is limited to the content solely provided by the site. Thus the consumers striving to get more objective information prefer to use designated video-search engines. Additionally, video-hosting sites are often criticized for failing to comply with copyright law. For example, some companies have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material[xiii]. Besides, some of the hosted content, as well as the user comments, are criticized for being controversial. Given the amount of user-generated content uploaded daily on these sites, it becomes unrealistic to make a proactive review and control of the video and user comments.

Privacy of the users is also a big concern, as web-sites have access to the detailed data about the viewing habits of the users. For example, Apple policy for the iTunes Store is criticized for missing the criteria which would trigger the sharing of personal real-time information with government entities[xiv].

Current Applications of the Technology

VSE Technology has been applied in several fields and industries throughout the development of the technology. As the technology advances and becomes more enhanced, its utility broadens. For instance, when VSE technology came out its main use was to watch videos online, and this was revolutionary at the time (given that only common Search Engines existed). Currently, the technology has evolved so much that its been applied in countless areas. Yovisto[xv], for instance, is a VSE website dedicated exclusively to academic and educational material. It is a VSE that hosts academic videos from professors, students and lecturers around the world. It is interesting that although Yovisto is a hosting VSE and it narrows its business to academic content, it is still regarded by some as one of the top 10 VSE in the market.

One interesting example of VSE technology being applied so far is what the US Military is doing with their state of the art Video Imaging Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) [xvi]. The US Military under the Defense Advance Project Agency (DARPA) [xvii] realized that the amount of video footage and data they have stored is massive, and as machines (military airplanes, tanks, video cameras, etc.) become more and more sophisticated, such large amounts of video content will never be seen by human analysts. VIRAT is trying to develop software technology and tools that will analyze the content of the videos, thus making defense and national security more effective[xviii].

The entertainment and television industry has been the driving force of the VSE technology. More and more video content of TV shows, movies, advertisements, sports, etc., are available online (some of them in HD quality), but this content has been hard to find, as it is all scattered around the web. However, VSE technology allows users to easily find TV shows in VSE sites such as Blinkx, Youtube, and Google Video. VSE technology also allows users to search for the very focused, specific content within a video, such as an actor behaving in a specific way.

Of course, the Marketing and Advertisement industry has been intimately link with VSE technology from the beginning. With Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)[xix] advancing daily, companies are more enthusiastic with sponsoring specific videos which they might see (based on the VSEO) as a relevant channel to promote their brand or product.

Pilot Projects

Altavista[xx], which was ultimately acquired by Yahoo.com, was the first Internet search engine to provide Video search results in 2000. By 2004, it was rumored thatxxi] the big search engines - google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com - where developing VSE technologies and were to launch them.

In December 2004, Yahoo.com launched its VSE Beta version[xxii]. It consisted simply of crawling the web to find videos based on the text (metadata) of the video itself. The site only included videos from Yahoo’s paying partners (which included Altavista). Yahoo expressed, at the time of the launch, that they will index relevant links such as XML and RSS. Another reason that Yahoo had for launching their VSE, was that “it is not easy for a web crawler to find downloadable and streaming video content: In many cases, they're hidden behind complex JavaScript, Flash-based players, and other non-crawler friendly obstacles." By asking video producers to supply information about files and their content, Yahoo! is trying to get around that hurdle.

Shortly after Yahoo VSE, Google.com, msn.com and aol.com all followed with different and more enhanced versions of VSE. For instance, Google.com advertised that they would get TV shows and movies videos on their VSE. By this time Blinkx.com was also immersed in the work of launching their VSE and developing their technologies.

By 2004-2005 the internet was evolving from being the World Wide Web, or just a library online, to a media companion of the Television. Not surprisingly, this era was when Internet dial up connections were being updated for faster broadband speed. The Internet Multimedia was just emerging, and the big search engine companies were there to harvest this niche with the VSE technology.

Value-adding applications

As video searching is an ever-evolving, albeit fairly recent technology, its potential applications span the likes of many industries such as the legal industry, public relations, social media networking sites, consumer packaged goods, retail, and medicine.
  • Public Relations - Agents within the public relations industry can employ this tool to seek out and monitor what is being said about their client. The use of video searching for this purpose is particularly useful in the political arena. The popularity of a presidential candidate can be assessed by adopting this technology and searching for specific keywords attributed to the candidate, his name, as well as his competitor. This assessment will then facilitate in changing a campaign strategy to better address the needs and concerns of voters.
  • Consumer Packaged Goods - Consumer packaged goods company- such as Kraft foods - are often interested in the awareness their products yield among consumers. While media agencies are able to provide information on product placement as well as advertisements (magazine, TV, radio, etc), it is not possible to provide comprehensive details of every possible placement. In addition, video search technologies have allowed for the gathering of statistics - how many customers viewed a specific video, what are the demographics of those customers, and what types of comments are they posting. This technology is currently being used by YouTube. (Exhibit 2)
  • Retail Industry - Theft is a major concern in the retail industry. Surveillance cameras capture activity, thereby containing a large number of hours of footage. Whether trying to zero in on whom might be to blame for a particular incident, or training new employees to be vigilant of potential thieves, video searching would aide in saving a lot of time not having to go through hours of security footage, and has the potential of avoiding a future incident, thereby saving the company thousands of dollars.
  • Medicine - Applying the video search technology to the medical field can have a significant benefit on mankind. A dermatologist, for instance, is confronted from time to time with patients displaying rare skin conditions. They are able to take a picture of this condition and run it through a video search in order to, inevitably, find a lot of targeted videos to help him figure out the prognosis, as well as treatment.
  • Legal Industry - Video search can be applied in the legal industry to benefit lawyers, judges, as well individuals outside the industry involved in a legal situation. The technology can be used to search through millions of hours of courtroom footage to focus in on the specific information one is looking for.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Recommendations to Nokia & Microsoft regarding their partnership!

For the Partnership:
1. The alliance should focus not only on the consumer business but also on the enterprise business as in this area it has a distinctive value proposition relative to its competitors.
2. Try to create an industry standard by sharing some of the technologies they have created.
3. Create a bandwagon effect by convincing the industry that this alliance will provide a differential that will make them market leaders; aiming for a self-fulfilling prophecy.
4. Prepare an exit strategy in case the partnership doesn’t work - Microsoft to potentially look at buying another operator and Nokia to use a third party operating system.

For Microsoft:
1. Microsoft should buy Nokia within the next 3-5 years if the partnership is successful.
2. Leverage on network externalities. MSN Messenger for user linkage, MS Office and Exchange as complementary products that are widely used.
3. It is in the interests of Microsoft to leverage the Nokia Microsoft capabilities to push the smart phones aggressively in the United States.

For Nokia:
1. Focus its R&D investment on developing the Meego platform and slowly drop the effort on the other operating systems.
2. It should also ensure the retention the top talent, specifically within the R&D department by incentivizing the workforce and keep communicating the benefits of the partnership.
3. Nokia should give attention to customer service and support for the current customers using Symbian and facilitate a smooth transition of these customers to the WM platform.

Read:
1. Nokia - Microsoft Partnership Risks
2. Read: Nokia-Microsoft Partnership implementation background and questions

Nokia - Microsoft Smartphone Partnership Risks

1. Windows mobile is a very new entrant in the market with very low consumer penetration levels and public awareness. There is a risk that Nokia will not be able to integrate it to make it into a competitive product.

2. There is a danger of Nokia brand dilution due to the partnership with Microsoft, particularly in countries where Nokia has a predominant mindshare like India and China.

3. Even though Nokia is banking on the Microsoft brand and partnership to propel it in the premium market of USA where Nokia has been lagging, it is possible that this will not happen due to the strong presence of Apple, Google and RIM.

4. Nokia will be paying royalty to Microsoft for using the Windows platform on its phones which can lead to an increase in the prices of its handsets reducing its competitiveness. It also might erode margins in price sensitive markets like India and China.

5. Since it is abandoning its own R&D efforts in the OS space, it might be left stranded as just another mobile box maker if the partnership is not successful.

6. The partnership has the potential to create dissatisfaction amongst Nokia employees since there will be a reported 7000 layoffs. This can cause employee attrition and a significant drop in employee productivity.

7. Meego was an OS platform that was created for mobiles as well as Tablet computers, an area where Nokia is already very late. Removing Meego will leave it even more vulnerable to the future mobility solutions.

8. For Microsoft, since it has sweetened the deal by giving billions of dollars to Nokia, if the deal goes sour, it can lead to the death knell of the Windows mobile platform. This will be very bad for revenues and the Microsoft brand itself.

9. If the deal is unsuccessful, it will leave Microsoft without a potential alternative to its cash cows of Office and Windows platforms leading to significant problems in the future.

(Note: Some of these are derivatives of an article from the Nokia official blogsite itself)

Read:
1. Nokia-Microsoft Partnership implementation background and questions
2. Nokia - Microsoft Partnership recommendationsLink

Implementation of the Nokia & Microsoft partnership in the smart phone space and Nokia's strategy to counter Android and Apple. Questions!

Nokia is the world leader in mobile phone sales, both by volume and by value. Headquartered in Finland, it is one of the most prominent telecommunications company in the world. Similarly, Microsoft is one of the largest software makers in the world by value and volume. However in the mobile space, both the organizations have been losing market share in recent years as newer and better rivals have sprung up to capture niche segments or have created their own segments entirely. If we take the Smartphone market, Nokia’s share in 2008 was by far the largest at 47.4% worldwide. Today it has reached 31% and is at the number 2 spot after Android phones (Owned by Google). Considering that smart phones constitute 30% of Nokia’s revenues and are the fastest and probably the only growing segment of the market for mobile phones, this is a major challenge for Nokia. Smart phones are expected to deliver 50% of the revenues for mobile companies by 2014. Similarly Microsoft in 2004 accounted for 24% of the smart phone market. Today they are languishing at around 3%. Almost the entire market for Microsoft has been usurped by Google’s Android and to a smaller extent, Apple’s iOS.

Nokia had its own operating platform (OS), Symbian OS, which was acquired by the organization in 2008 (Nokia was a majority shareholder in Symbian Ltd till then). It was the most popular platform till 2010 when Android overtook it. It was considered a very good OS for long but during the 2008-2010 period, Google and iOS came up with better platforms and concepts like App stores (consisting of 3rd party applications) which revolutionized the industry. Nokia was slow in reacting to these changes, even though its phones are still considered highly feature rich. Another problem associated with Nokia phones is the sheer number of models which can confuse a customer as to the relevant one for their needs. In recent years, the models have also been criticised as having bland and unappealing looks relative to the competitors. In a similar way, Microsoft’s Mobile operating system was considered a strong contender, particularly in the business and enterprise consumer space but lost its way over the same period of 2008-2010. Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, admitted recently that Microsoft had lost its way in the Smartphone segment. The Mobile operating systems version 6.0 and later 6.5 were considered outdated and had problems in adapting to newer hardware systems like ‘capacitive touch screens’ like the ones on latest generation smart phones. They were also very slow in introducing app stores for 3rd party applications so the major developers moved to Android and Apple to create applications for their systems. Furthermore, Microsoft charged $25 per phone for the use of its Smartphone OS while Google gave it away for free as OS was not the driver for Google. They were concentrating on the search and advertising market. Their latest OS, Windows Phone 7 (WP7), which had been completely redesigned as a consumer phone rather than a business phone was well received by critics but lacked a major phone partner to create a worldwide reach and penetration.

On 11th Feb 2011, Microsoft and Nokia joined hands as a strategic alliance where Windows 7 would replace Symbian completely for Nokia’s range of smart phones. The application stores of the two parties would be merged, Bing search would become the primary search engine on the phones and Nokia Maps would become the primary mapping feature. Nokia would also be able to customize the WP7 to a certain extent. As Nokia is the largest phone maker, and WP7 is considered a good platform, this alliance will a strong contender against Android and Apple. This was reflected in the Nokia CEO statement where he mentioned that it is now a “3 horse race”.

I consider this a challenging strategy for Nokia and Microsoft as it has suddenly been forced to create an alliance which has both pros and cons for the companies. If successful, it can significantly disrupt their opponents lead and propel them to the top of the Smartphone segment while creating a huge branding opportunity for the parties as dynamic entities (a tag that they had lost over the years). However, since this is an as yet untested partnership, it can create problems in delivering the products that were conceived. They will be forced to create a relatively stable Mobile Ecosystem in a short duration across the world which can be a very challenging task as the bulk of the developers are in the Android and Apple camps. The Strategy that they implement would need to be clearly defined without any ambiguity to take on their competitors. Currently the phone line-ups have not been finalised and this would be an ideal starting point for their strategy. Would they like to replicate the fragmented approach of Google or the niche offerings of Apple I phones. How would Nokia differentiate its phones once Windows licences its OS to other phone manufacturers like HTC or Samsung. How would Symbian and WP7 coexist since Symbian would be sold in middle and low end phone for a long time as mentioned by Nokia? Finally, who would be in charge of the mobile operating system research and development for the alliance since Nokia would become only a handset manufacturer if it decides to let go of mobile operating systems completely. These are some of the questions that Nokia urgently needs to find answers to...

Read:
1. Nokia - Microsoft Partnership Risks
2. Nokia - Microsoft Partnership recommendations

What does ARM leverage into the PC arena? In turn, how exactly can the new 3D architecture help Intel – what is their game?

The Battle of Mobile Chips - Part 2:

Before the Tablet revolution happened, the products were well differentiated from one other like Servers, Personal computers, Laptops, Net books, Mobiles. Tablet computing has positioned itself between Mobiles and PC’s and has taken a large portion of growth away from PC’s and Laptops which are still growing but the growth has slowed down. ARM is the major player here since it was able to create chips for these tablets as they were closer to the requirements of mobiles than PC’s. Mobility, smaller size and most importantly low and efficient power usage matters highly in the mobile world and also in the Tablets world. ARM has been able to completely seize this market. Further in the server space, due to increasing virtualization and cloud computing usage, companies like Facebook and YouTube have become very big datacenters and the costs associated with these datacenters is very high. If the ARM chips are able to signify a reduction in power usage and therefore cut costs for the final corporate user, it will be in a pole position to capture a significant market share from Intel. ARM also brings the entire ecosystem it created to this market that in turn reinforces the brand and the importance of ARM to the final consumer. Finally, for device makers it would make sense to rely on one partner to supply chips for all their appliances to bring economies of scale and reduce costs. Apple would be a prime example here.

However, Intel is not stagnant. The 3D architecture chips created, will enable it to close the gap with ARM in terms of power consumption and performance, thereby ensuring that it guards its own flanks in the server market. If the consumers are able to get the work done by using Intel chips, the switching cost could be high for moving to an unproven chipmaker. It also gives a chance to Intel to enter the mobile market, particularly with Microsoft, its long time partner in the PC world, which has shown interest in the ARM SOC architecture but has still not made products based on it. Like mentioned for Apple, it gives Microsoft the ability to reduce costs if it can negotiate long term deals with Intel to supply chips for its entire line of products. Intel is vertically integrated in terms of production and it probably gives it a better leverage to adapt to the changes in different types of chip making and to demand fluctuations.

It is possible that both companies will reach equilibrium in terms of the market share in the combined mobile & pc worlds in a few years. If like the cereal industry, they are ready to complement each other and become an oligopoly, it will be profitable for both of them. If however, they make it a zero sum game and try to gain the entire market for themselves, there can be a price war which could lead to a perfect competition and a significant erosion of margins. Two players might also help some device makers to ensure there is competition.

Why did Intel miss the mobile market so far and what is the ‘lever’ that enables ARM to hold onto such a large share of the mobile device market?

The Battle of Mobile Chips - Part 1:

The mobile and the PC markets till date were working in their own Silos. These worlds have stayed separate since the requirements of both were different in terms of software, hardware and more importantly consumer usage. PC was for computing usage and mobiles were for communication. The major reason for Intel missing the mobile market was that it was entrenched in the PC and server domain. It had a strong partnership with Microsoft and this enabled it to have a dominant market share in the PC segment. The operating systems and the chips need to be designed to optimize power and take advantage of the chip capabilities, something that the windows OS and the Intel chips did very effectively. They were structured to give them advantage over other processors and ecosystems. Since Windows was the standard in the computing space, Intel also quickly became the standard in the chip making arena. However because it was a monopoly in the chip making arena and was making significant rents, it did not pay attention to the emerging threat of ARM which was anyways a small part of the chip making industry. It was more concerned about countering AMD processors in the PC market. Akin to the Walmart/ Kmart example, it would have to change its operating structure to adapt to the mobile ecosystem. ARM, being small and being just focused on design which was its prime capability, was flexible & created a niche for itself. The investments that Intel would have had to make would have been significant, without knowing the rate of return, as it would have been unsure of the potential of the market itself.

The lever that enabled ARM to get into this market was Apple who used acorn chips for its products early on. However, the lever that enabled ARM to hold on to such a large share was the fact that it avoided the market leaders Intel and AMD and created the mobile chip ecosystem itself. This was a small segment of the market and ARM became very efficient in this segment and grew with the system. Since it is a design organization, it remained very flexible as it did not have the constraints of the production of chips. It was the responsibility of other companies who derived returns from the manufacturing. These companies in turn supplied to the appliance makers who had a significant demand for their products and were conscious of the fact that ARM kept on improving the quality of the products making it more efficient and thereby improving the appliance itself. This ecosystem helped everyone to make good returns and enabled them to make significant investments in ramping production volumes. The strategic interaction among the players and then with the customer created the network externalities. ARM was known because of its interaction with Apple so other companies used its products and when this was successful, further companies and manufacturers queued up to license its products creating a monopoly in the mobile market.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Grim Picture: Chronic Poverty regions and Statewise distribution

It pains me a lot to put up this graphic as per a Rediff.com report (See link Below), but it is necessary for all of us to realise that India can never be a happy country at peace with itself if we have such widespread poverty and unhappiness. We need to much much much more....and as educated and reasonably prosperous Indians, it should be our responsibility as much as it is the responsibility of the governments.

(Just an added FYI: Most of the states doing well seem to have initiated some form of Market reforms creating opportunities for everyone)

50 per cent of India's poor are chronic poor.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Baba Ramdev's Facebook Profile! :)


One of 'THE' funniest forwards i have received in a long time...would love for it to be True! ;P (Note: Click image to enlarge it)

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Jamshedpur - One of the Greenest cities in India

Just thought would share an Article that appeared on Rediff on the greenest cities in India and which included my lovely City, Jamshedpur.
(Note: The rediff.com Link can be accessed by clicking on the title of the blog.)

Jamshedpur was founded by late Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata.

Jamshedpur

The city founded by late Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, is a planned industrial city. It is also known as Steel City and TataNagar.

It is located on the Chota Nagpur plateau and is surrounded by the picturesque Dalma Hills. Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers border the city on the north and west parts of the city.

Jamshedpur was declared the seventh cleanest city of India for the year 2010 according to survey by the Government of India.

It has been selected as one of the cities for the Global Compact Cities Pilot Programme by United Nations, the only one to be selected in India as well as the entire South-East Asia.

The major attraction of Steel city are Dimna Lake, Jubilee Park, Zoological Park and Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary, which is a dense forests in Jamshedpur and rich in flora and fauna.

The responsibility of conservation and maintenance are taken care of by Tata Steel.