Stumblers!

I heard about this site in a Business quiz program, http://www.stumbleupon.com/. Just curious; checked out what it is all about. It's one more creative idea in Web 2.0 space.

The funda is, Internet is filled with lot of interesting web sites and web pages. And we don't even see 1% of Internet. Stumble Upon is a creative idea to expose interesting web sites to users. The users of this tool are called 'Stumblers'.  The site offers a toolbar that is to be installed with our browsers. It has a "Stumble Upon" button in its toolbar; while clicking, it will show a random page of your interests. While We browse through the web, we can vote  for any site we visit (Say "I like it" or "I don't like it"). The Stumble upon maintains these preferences.

It is a random search of web pages in our interests. The results thrown by the 'stumble upon' surprises us all the time. It quite addictive too and we may lose count of hours we spend in Internet. We can tweak our preferences with stumble upon at any time based on the web results with voting utility.

How it works?

While registering for the site, it takes our fields of interest. Similarly lot of people share their interests with the site. Then it will create a pool of people who share common interests. And the site takes subjective votes for the web sites from the users. And as a Stumbler suggest a site in the any field say 'Science', it will keep showing the page to all other Stumblers and refine its notion about the site's subjective quality based on users votes. This iteration takes a long time, needs lot of users. That is now possible with Web 2.0. But after sometime, Stumble upon will create a huge repository of interesting web sites in any subject. 

'Stumbling' will not replace searching. It can't answer to any question in any field. It suggests interesting quality web sites in your field in a random manner. 'Stumble upon' takes us in a quick tour of Internet to lot of places where we would not have gone before.

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Any Ideas on YouTube Business Model?

Internet was severely lacking in availability of entertainment media . Though there are many permanent solutions to this problem, nothing was happening in real world. Media moguls lack enthusiasm to broadcast media over Internet. IPTV is also yet to take its full form.  YouTube (now become synonym for streaming media in Internet) jumped in to fill this vacuum. They made a Web2.0 user oriented media content generation/sharing website.  They made lot of sounds, brought more users to use their service and then sold it to big company for a high price. I don't think so they had a valid business model when they started this company. Now Google has to find some valid business model which can get them steady revenue from this business.

The history of YouTube is rumored like this: YouTube owners were working with PayPal and E-Bay. They wanted to create a website where E-Bay users can upload videos of their products while selling in E-Bay. Started like that, YouTube attracted lot more users and become a legend now. But I believe copyright issues are major legal hurdle for them to cross.

Original discussion in LinkedIn is here

[Ignore Read More Link Below]

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Third Dimension

I was reading interview of IMAX corporation CEO about his business challenges. IMAX made a business by 'thinking big'. With advent of malls and multiplexes, Cinemas are continuing to become smaller for want of profitability in business. In 70's, defying the gravity of smaller cinema mentality, IMAX stood tall, promised tall and delivered it and continue to deliver! Their business model revolves around giving a different immersing movie experience to viewers that can't be provided by regular cinemas and TVs. He was contemplating about 3-d cinemas as the next big paradigm shift in movie world, after the shift to color movies from monochrome.  What do you think?

On a sidekick, a little gyan on how 3-D cinemas works! Each eye sees an object with an angle shift because of inter-ocular distance. Brain maps these two images and gives the 3-D perspective. 3-D cinemas are based on this. While shooting, two lens are kept at inter-ocular distance and two views are recorded separately on two films.  Next step is to project both images in one screen for the viewers, and each projection has to be made available exclusive for separate eyes. The simple solution is to use polarization. Red and green polarized images projected on the screen. Viewers has to use special glasses which can receive red light in one eye and green light in other eye. Thus two images are made available to brain. And brain goes ahead maps them and gives the 3-D perception to viewers. Vola!

3-D movies aren't yet catching up because of increase in production costs and unavailability of infrastructure in all cinemas! There is an interesting business prospect in this problem! If we can have a technological solution to convert 2-D movies to 3-D movies as post-production process, then we are cracking the first problem - increase in production costs.  Can do a little SWOT analysis on this technical risk.

S - It is feasible, technically. Add a new projection to existing 2-D image hasn't been proven yet. But feasible!

W- It is a R&D problem. Initial solution may not be of high quality. Academia work on this is unknown! I had a seen one interesting link in Carnegie Mellon University site about software that can do 3-D photo Popup image of a given 2-D image. Try it out

O - Market for a simple digital device that does conversion in production end

T- Work on breaking infrastructure problem has to go hand-in-hand!

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Thinking Blogger Award

Hola! Thanks dear for giving this award to me.  I am pleasantly surprised. Now my turn to give this prestigious award to bloggers whom I admire and for whom I am an ardent fan.

Poetry-

GP, Ghosty needs no introduction.  His blog will bag awards in many categories, yet I love his poems. His blog is full of emotions; never hidden his darkest emotions from his writing.

Mystic Rose, Mysty's poems are classical pieces. I love her writing.

Photography-

Visi- real pro photographer.   Her picture are poetic too! Her narrations of daily life incidents are simple yet attractive. Undoubtedly a classy blog!

Expression of emotions -

Thooya- Her words and memories adds the missing meaning to millions of martyrs who yielded their life for the mother land.  She is a great girl with immense potential to contribute significantly to Tamil Elam struggles

Creativity-

RanjHith. Creativity and innovation should be his second name. Lovely whiz kid with tons of ideas loaded on his head.

Modesty, subtle mockery on real life incidents -

Das- Not lot of people can mock at various meaningless incidents happening around with ease, Das can do.  I enjoy his writings.

Variety, optimism, inspiration -

Jeevz - His blog has never run out of varieties. Poems, movie reviews, inspirational words, stories, pictures, chennai happenings.... always bubbling with lot of energy

 

CONGRATULATIONS buddies!

You deserve this special mention!

And thanks Marutham once again for tagging me and giving me a meaningful topic to write on for my 300th post! Yeah, I can't believe that I wrote 300 posts for my blog!

And a tamil rap song from Yogi, Dr.Burn...

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The Death Valley!

A business idea born in an individual's mind crosses several stages to become a successful product. Assume our guy conceives a business idea, he needs a round of initial investment called seed investments. In order not to liquidate his ownership over the company for want of funds, he goes to an Angel investor. After making a prototype of the dream product with seed investment as R&D product, he need to scale up to meet the stringent quality requirements/market requirements. Then Venture capitalists jumps in for his help. The main difference betweenVC's and AI's is VC's take part substantially in business development. VC's share calculated risks among their communities, you could have seen a consortium of VC's bail in start ups . Break. Assume our guy caught the market attention with a disruptive product. If product is compelling, the market expands like a nuclear fission reaction.

That's entry of Death Valley for the start ups. The death valley is a huge desert in California that finished off many pioneers who ventured towards west coast in horse clad wagons. The company moves from R&D paradigm to manufacturing paradigm. The company need to scale up to produce a prototype that can be manufactured in large scale. The ballpark numbers of the death valley in high techstart up business is around US $ 300-500 Million. For a successful chip company with market disruptive product, getting the initial 100's of million $ revenue is easy.

The company loses it sheen as R&D house in death valley. The typical problems associated with death valley are management issues like scaling up production, distribution of the manufactured goods, change the manufacturing process to increase the form factor, improve the efficiency of manufacturing and supply chain problems. The engineering community that had been attracted by the R&D nature of thestart up start leaving this mighty ship. The attrition increases. Most of the start ups merges or get acquired by big sharks in industry at the death valley.

The big sharks had seen this valley, had crosses this quagmire successfully. They will have sufficient management bandwidth set already to solve the issues associated with scaling and manufacturing. The big sharks need innovative products. Thestart ups with innovative products need management power of big sharks. That's the reason for big merger and acquisition going on in the industry.

This is one of my discussion topic with my mentor the other day. I am confident that setting up a start up is no more a-mere-dream. I am concentrating on learning to innovate with the knowledge that went inside bits and pieces. I am more interested in learning up the issues faced by the corporation while scaling up. After all this, establishing a successful business conglomerate is not under one individual's purview, it has to be a perfect team event. A perfect team is mix of people with right attitude with big visions and dreams.

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Met my mentor!

One Zen adage that I believe religiously is:
“When student is ready, teacher will appear”

I was longing to meet my teacher for life/mentor for my career. All through the years, my internal search is predominantly on evaluating my decisions and behavior and set the bio compass towards proper direction: to lead a life with right attitude and to leave a legacy behind my death. I hope I am developing the right attitude behavior over the years. And felt this stand is vindicated when my Team Leader gave a recommendation for me. Here are his words as in my LinkedIn profile:

“Other than sound technical ability and rich experience in embedded systems, Nirek’s biggest strength is his excellent attitude, because of his enthusiasm to take additional responsibilities and commitment to see the end results, managing Nirek becomes easier. He is an excellent team player and knows very clearly what exactly he wants to achieve. Because of his great attitude I see him as a colleague and involve him in technical decision making. On his leadership ability he leads by setting example and is straight forward.”

A quick note on what I am going through now. I am working with a company which is under financial crunches. They are winding up Indian operations. I am one of retained team members in India. I had been offered a role in advanced technology team in my company’s global operation. The catch is the team is going to work from our china center. That means I should relocate to China. There are certain risks associated with relocating to china. The financial crunches surrounding the company are still not broken down. The motivation of the team in startup in the group is not guaranteed. I like to bet on my manager as he is very capable person who can turn a good product in no time. His management capabilities are above par. He is very genuine to me till now.

As per my manager’s advice, I started looking for other job offers in Bangalore. I spoke to few companies and got confirmation for job offer from them. There is only one company which I consider as my prospective future employer. I met my mentor in that company. He is the managing director of the company’s division in Bangalore. He is Gung Ho about his product. His vision and knowledge of the industry is a big library to learn. His enthusiasm caught up with me the moment I met him. He has two successful startups experience in his career history. He had invited me for a friendly chat. It was more like a class room experience on startups, business technologies, Public versus private investments and I was listening to him. After the lengthy chat, I was trying to recollect the discussion to details and could jot down most of it. I will share that discussion with my views in future posts.

I could easily accept this offer and quit my company. But then I don't want to do that now, I want to give my current company as first preference. I am evaluating the risks associated with me moving to china for my career now.

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Few multimedia centric business models

Disclaimer: This article is written based on my understanding of the companies and their product lines. Please check the web about the accuracy of the statistics, if you are referring to them. And these are my personal opinions.

Historically media centric product requirements had driven the DSP business. The DSP industry came into existence because of the marketing push from TI. TI spuns the new market now and then with their unique innovation. "I would also say that TI has had a positive impact on our business, in that they are stimulating the market. They have a lot of great technologies as well as excellent management and vision, and they are innovating and opening or at least stimulating new markets" says VP-sales of their competitor. Along with DSP silicon businesses, many techonological startups has seen their genesis, growth and success also. These companies business is based on developing and selling intellectual properties(IP) on multimedia codecs on particular DSPs.

Here are few success stories and few stories waiting to be etched in business history.

This company has often been featured while discussing IP based business model in DSP world. It was started in 2001 and had weathered almost all ups and downs in the industry till today. Now has more than 200 employees in India. With the close network of this company, he could garner a good name in high-value quality driven markets based on IPs on different multimedia codecs. Their major product idealogy was to sell hi-quality codecs till 2004, then slowly shifted the focus towards bigger system developments like IP video phone, Pesonal media players, streaming media devices, VoIP devices, essentially media centric consumer electronics devices. The revenue were around 4M US$ for 2005.

"Multimedia codecs IP business is profitable, but not a high revenue generating one" are the words of a young startup's co-founder. I spoke to this team last week. Their business model is again similar to the earlier company, but from a different origin. The team is right now very small, only five people working in small office,a 'garage-based-startup'. Their business model is debatable 'you still have enough room for startups to play around in IP based codecs business'. But their last year's revenue does the marketing. A big silicon vendor has licensed their codecs. Wow! isn't it enough to shut up the critics!

Before looking any further, let see few products offerings from these kind of companies:

Internet based streaming devices for entertainment (sling box, streaming servers, IPTV...)
Digital video broadcast (DTV)
Mobile multimedia devices (video players, PMPs, DVB-H...)

And the big daddy of all this business is this . It was started in mid 90's and went to IPO in early 2000. Now it is a huge company with lot of revenues coming from services work. They started as high value research based product development company, eventually stepped into services based on the customer requirements. Service business indeed found to be the best business model for any Indian IT company! You could find any business products and services in embedded and networking domain business in their offerings. Any startup eyeing for IPO route can't avoid these guys business lines. Well proven and viable, scalable and perfect fit for Indian IT climate.

The next company is a big success story in recent times. It was co-founded by 10-15 project leads from earlier one in 2001. Their growth was linked with ARM processors penetration to embedded market. For dummies, ARM is a micro processor similar to Intel processors, but for easy programmability, signal processing capabilites and soft RTLs. This company has proved the capabilities of ARM in video processing for the first time. It's a wonderful idea to piggyback with ARM's growth in embedded market. Their codecs become popular as more silicon companies started using ARM. Their clientele is very impressive before the selloff. It was sold at around US$ 33M.

Another company from same origin is this. The top architects from the earlier company came out after its acquisition and started this company. Here the business concentration is little different- media centred but in different domains like IPTV, surveillance, biomedical equipments, automotive safety equipments and other consumer electronic devices. I had spoken to their top managers today. Their past success is their visiting card. They could scale up their team to 20+ people in hardly 5 months of existence. That's impressive. Yet to strike any business deals, hope to see them in action soon.

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Safe bloggin!

We all love our blogs. While publishing a blogpost, we take few things for granted. Those can potentially fall under prevention of copyright infringement laws. I was embedding lot of images/ youtube videos from internet to fit the theme of the post. But my sole intention while doing so is not to infringe those artist's or creator's copyright and it is purely for non-commerical purposes. Few brickbats I had received now and then made me realise these mistakes.

Here are few do's and dont's for safe blogging.

Don't embed an image available in internet into your post. If you want to do so, please read that site's copyright notice. Usually web admins allow embedding their images with conditions to give them a link and a note of credit for images. If you want to use those images in your homepage, you got to download them, upload to your image server and use it in your post.

Youtube is becoming the most popular entertainment option for netizens. But youtube videos are big copyright infringement violations bomb waiting to explode anytime. When you embed a youtube video into your blog, you are indirectly broadcasting the original video without the content owner's prior information/permission. Do you know, if someone use film songs as background music in their youtube videos, then the music company which has copyright for those audios can sue them.

Don't give links to business corporate houses unnecessarily. And better don't mention their names explicitly when you want to write about them. It is good manners not to write about their business models explicitly. Don't mention any names in your posts, unless you want them to be indexed by google. We got to respect the views of lot of people who don't like to see critiques about them.

Don't publish your or your friends photos on your blog. There are lot of unethical hackers in this world who can use the images for wrong purposes. You can even see morphed version of your photos floating in web mocking at you.

Better have a separate online identity. It is not going to cost you anything more. And don't give out your contact details. Even incase you commit few mistakes, it can save your soul!

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Demotivation!

What I am witnessing here is a slow death of a company. Really frustrating and demotivating!

The founders of this company had written a success story before. Lot of things went wrong in this venture, though it is not yet discarded as closed chapter. People are trying their best to secure the venture funding for the new business. I am recording here the learnings from what I felt as wrong things happened to this company and their wrong decisions.

Without clear product vision, the company should not expand operations. The past business success is definitely not a guarantee for the future success!

Managing multiple centers for research and development shouldn't be followed at the earlier stages of a company. Because it needs enormous management bandwidth. That wastage of resource can be utilised for other constructive busines development purposes.

Top end management should work from same office of engineers. That keeps the team motivated enough to achieve.

Teams shouldn't be scaled up unless revenues allow it. Services business needs swift team scaling up, which can be avoided in the earlier stages.

Don't bite the pie which you can't swallow; don't enter the market which you can't manage.

The nature of work/product should be unique. If it is not a blue ocean, clearly mark the product differentiation strategy and stick to it.

The earlier resources should work with similar idealogues. Running a viable business model should be their sole concentration for the formative years.

The perfect team should have a visionary, a manager, a finance guy, a business development manager, a technical architect with clear product engineering knowledge. It is definitely a team work, rather than individual contribution.

Explore all business oppurtunities like 'your competitor can be your client also'

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Media World!

Where the multimedia business worlds make their green bucks?

Don't just skip it as one more lengthy posts! Do critique my analysis on the media world.

First the end customer in mind of everyone is clear – the common man. Almost all people are equipped with Television. The TV is in itself a big success which gave inroads for media world to enter the common man with so much ease. The media houses took its genesis after the invention of TV. The second best push came from Personal Computers. Big corporation rise with this like Intel, Microsoft, IBM… Next, Communication moguls invented, discovered, then reinvented and rediscovered themselves to put the mobile phone on the common man’s hand. That’s the next big success story in the media world. Then came the second wave of media houses in the name of communication service providers.

In the other side of the world, in deep forests of Silicon Valley university forests, some geeks came up with invention of media era –Internet. Internet has been readily accepted by the different people, as I would say. Emails and information burst made the internet the people friendly. As more and more people adapt to internet, now internet has become immortal and eternal entity in all people’s life.Having seen the two ends of big business empire – People with TV, PC , mobile phones and Internet- now is the time to analyze deeply the different media business models exists in the world which revolves around them.

Internet through fixed cables:
The demand for more bandwidth to access internet fuels this business model. The universities research crew suggests lot of alternatives to copper cables like fiber- to-home, which had been already laid and arguably the cheapest way to push internet to each home.Corporations like Conexant, Broadcom… make the innovative products based on DSL technology. They sell the hardware like modem to people. Companies on fiber-to-home products ?

Wireless Data access:
The mobile internet access is kind of innovative idea on its own. If you are one of people who gets daunted by computers and internet, then it is one more nightmare for you, it’s like internet tag-tailing you wherever you go. People had been offered with different ways to access internet on the go. WiMax, WiFi a.k.a Hotspots: It is the wireless counterpart to DSL. The maximum bandwidth with which you can access the data is still and will always be less than wireline modems. This business has two faces, the hardware makers and the hotspots provider for the people; this is where ISP jumps in to eat their pie. Mobile phone based internet: The mobile phone spectrum available is very less to provide broadband data access. Then researchers spent a lot of time in inventing different ways to reach the broadband data rate. The GSM people evolve with different generations viz 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G… CDMA counterparts also push more data with CDMA, CDMA 2000…With the infrastructure ready to supply the enough data access to the people, the hardware OEMs came up with different versions of computer laptops, palm tops, simputers, tablet PC, blackberry devices. We can see green bucks flowing in the each direction.

Media content providers to Internet:
The people who had tasted the conventional media entertainment with TVs, are now baffled with neo-media entertainment source –Internet. The people need for more entertainment in Internet in the form of music, videos, news… in turns fuels the broadband hardware and supply business. And we can see when more bandwidth is provided to people, the demand of more entertainment in Internet also rises which in turn fuels the media content provider businesses. The media content providers for the internet evolved in the time. YouTube is the corporate face for video streaming business model. iTunes, Napster, Windows media player, Real Player… have become the audio and other media content providers for internet.The recent (rags to riches story overnight) innovative player is video streaming is Sling Media. The content from conventional television are digitized and sent via Internet to people through streaming servers.

Media content providers to Mobile phones:
The video streaming through internet can cater to this market segment too. But it eats up the mobile spectrum, which is a big resource not to be wasted for entertainment purposes. That need gave birth to direct digital broadcast to the mobile phones. The mobile phones are becoming freakier and techie these days. The mobile TV is one more added feature to your cute handset. To receive the broadcasted signals, your phone needs a tuner and the hardware to understand the digital signal and play it on your mobile phone screen. The single chip solution for tuner and decoder has a big potential. This market is expected to mature by 2008. This business pie is estimated to be around 27 billions US$ by 2008. The revenue here is shared between the broadcasters (essentially the media houses that do conventional broadcasting and/or communication service providers) and the mobile phone makers. The software makers are also vying to share this pie. It is already a crowded market and everyone wants to jump in here. A big consolidation wave is waiting in the corner.

Satellite Media to people:
Satellite radio operators in US of A are expecting to break even in 2007. The infrastructure requires huge costs than any media providers in this case. WorldSpace is a well known player in satellite radio provider. Direct-to-Home TV broadcasts are already exists in the world. In India, Dish TV, Tata Sky… are few service providers. The DTH receivers can be used to access data from Internet. That means the internet is going to enter your drawing room through one more channel- Satellites. I am not sure any corporate aiming at this pie.

In midst of different business models evolved in the time, we had seen many flop shows too like: Internet through TV. It never picked up because of basic difference in their mode of communication. TV is essentially a broadcast receiver. But for internet, we need to do one-to-one communication, which means we need the feedback channel from the end equipment. TV in PC. People clearly want to have separate devices for entertainment and internet. Satellite mobile phones – Iridium project collapse is the biggest failure ever in communication world.

Lot of allied business thrived in the sidelines of these big bucks.
Multimedia codec supply business. More the digitization of the analog speech, audio, image and video happen and more the need for the digitization arises, these companies can survive. But there is a need for them to rise in the value chain to supply end-to-end products. Small players can compete here. Electronic devices ODMs and OEMs. Whatever be the product, these guys help are necessary to see them in store shelf. Highly competitive field, clearly ear marked as Red oceans. VLSI and ASIC design. Again these are need of the hours. Same as codecs business, small players are competing here. Of course big sharks take away a lot of revenue here. Customizable processors like DSPs are necessary to reach the market fast. Might not be the final and best solution for all problems, but it saves lot of research time.

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Known company, Unheard story

Cafe coffee day is my favorite company in recent times. I wrote about its business model earlier in my blog. Recently read/heard a lot about its origin and spirt of entrepreneurship it nurtures. VG Siddhartha leads the CCD's dominance in coffee retailing. No wonder you never heard about him earlier, he is a media-shy person and he keeps his profile low because of inintentional political tint associated with him. He is son-in-law of SM Krishna, former congress chief minister of karnatka. Other than family relationship, Siddhartha maintains a well kept distance from politics.

His story is one more Indian rags to riches story in post-globalisation regime. Not completely a first generation entrepreneur, he had his dad to give him a huge sum of money to start business with. He got trained in management in JM Morgan Stanley, Bombay. After his management trainee tenure, started a share investment company called Sivan. He started investing every penny of profit he gets out of his share business into coffee plantations in chickmagalur in karnataka. He has been a lot of coffee plantaion then. Now his empire is India 2nd largest coffee plantation, next to Tata. Identifying the potential coffee retail market and staunchly believing in Indian economy is laudable attributes I like to speak about him. India's economy is a success story in itself and it has potential to write a lot of business success stories in history. Siddhartha believed in this buoyant economy when he started his company. His belief is earning him in tons of golds these days.

Those days, coffee plantation owners sell their products to coffee boards of Indian goverment. Post-1992, they were let off in the free market. Siddhartha started his Amalgamated Bean CoffeeTrading Limited and started trading coffee. He entered in coffee powder retail market first. The Barista evolution in India in 1990's and Star Bucks influence lead him to cafe retailing in the brand name of Cafe Coffee day. Now CCD has more than whopping 300+ retail outlets all over India. They cover a huge retail area in Bangalore itself. In Indiranagar where I am residing, there are four CCD outlets in the near vicinity and still all are brimming with crowds all through the peak hours and in weekends. Coffee days are identified as youth icons and their 23% percent of business comes from teenagers. Remanining market percentages are shared by adults in age group of 20-29 years. His aim for the company is to become "StarBucks of India". With the profits of CCD, Siddhartha has diversified to technology ventures with his new company. It had invested in best known startup companies in India like Ittiam. Way to go indeed!

Now some economics funda, their profiit model could be explained as pyramid model. Defining pyramid profit model: these companies offer different product ranges for different segments of people in society. Basic ingredient is same, but quality and frills are changed to accomodate multi level society. A classic example of this profit model is retail petrol pumps, where you could see them selling petrol/diesel in different price tags with a differentiation in oxidiser content. I could see a tint of saturation logic of Walmart model too. Saturation logic symbolises the company to open a lot of retail units in the same circle and saturate the market. Which will provide a tough challenge to its competitors to enter that retail region. Walmart is often quoted/fussed about for sticking to this saturation profit model, they started in rural america, slowly saturated the market and then went further towards urban area. By the time walmart entered urban area, they had become a giant with big market in rurals which can never been taken away from them. By the time other retailers had woken up to competition from Walmart, they had scaled new peaks in revenues.

External Links

[+] Coffee day group home

[+] Amalgamated Bean coffee trading Ltd

[+] Global Technology Ventures

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