News for the week ending Sept 12th

News from the world of tech biz for the week of Sept 12th.


The past week will mostly be known as the week when Yahoo's board fired it's CEO. While many were pre-occupied following this story, other things did take place. Read on....


1. Tablet Sales in India - An interesting read on the market share of tablets in India. A report by Cyber media research tells the story of about 100k tablets sold till march 2011. The leader by a mile is Samsung galaxy and Android. 
Another quarter of a million tablets is expected to be sold between march and December 2011. Many are waiting for the post holiday season sales numbers of the tablets from Reliance and Bharti. if 2-5 million tablets can be sold over the next 2 years in India, then an app store for India centric software will definitely be worth pursuing. A lot of activity around software centered around the Indian tablet user  could be in demand(calculate your auto fare, translators from Indian languages to English, access text books  etc.).  


2. Chrome and FireFox leads the market - The 30-30-30 rule is at play in India. Based on the research done by statcounter, Approximating the numbers tells us that the aggressive marketing (including an advertisement at prime time TV), has paid big dividends. Given that Google seems to be into everything and failing on many fronts, this data will help compensate for other bad news. While FireFox and chrome do have a lot in common (plug ins, developer centric browsers, multiple tabs and most importantly speed), it is interesting to see IE being beaten even in free software market. IE's global market share is about 38%.  Microsoft is the new IBM (the one that cannot innovate because it has become too big) and Google is the new Microsoft (in a good way though, Google has helped re-write online software with new terminologies like perpetual beta and single version browser for all). With popular support for HTML 5 and a lightweight browser becoming a reality, this battle will be worth fighting for.


3. Draft IT bill to emphasize on connectivity for all - It is always boring to read about a new law in India. But policies are a different thing. TRAI, IRDA are some of the many policy initiatives that have borne fruit at an alarming pace (considering India's pace with policy and execution). This new policy will bring the focus onto connectivity between devices, wifi in public transport, rural adoption of IT. Combine this news with MSME, a good push by mobile carriers to achieve higher penetration and lastly the demographic state of India. This can only spell more Internet based business will start and prosper in the country. It may no longer be enough to copy business models from the US, but actually think of scale-able ideas that work in India.


Interesting read


Bangalore is not a bad place to work in - This time a great read about Bangalore and it's traffic state which is nothing new  to anybody who may have visited the city anytime over the past 10 years. There are so many things about this article that is interesting. IBM has something called commuter pain. Wow! how do they even model that! Here is chart that shows Bangalore's traffic is not the worst one. Even in the BRICS, it is not the worst. Bangalore is the worst traffic in India, but it is better to commute in Bangalore than it is in Beijing or Shenzen. Yeah finally Indian traffic is better than China's. Here is a metric where we are better off by doing less.  It led me to the IBM microsite on traffic management.  What was interesting is that the hardware spec for the product is quite detailed. I wonder how effective can a packaged solution be when applied across many cities.

News for the week ending September 4th 2011

Here are some important news from the Indian technology business scene


1. SMSSupshup receives 5th round of funding - Taking the total funding to $47 m, Investors seem confident of a long term game in the SMS / messaging market. This round was led by Tenaya capital along with existing investors. The advertisers lining up to SMS gup shup is impressive - Microsoft, Kingfsher and more. It would be interesting to see whether a pure play SMS company can derive returns in the future as data plans become very affordable in India.


2. NDTV partners with InMobi's to handle Mobile advertising - InMobi has bagged a good deal to be the front agency for advertisers who wish to advertise on NDTV's mobile app. NDTV's mobile app on iOS and Andriod allows users to view live TV, news videos and more. The app is free and  allows ads to be placed both in video and regular txt ad formats. InMobi will indeed leverage it's own ad platform to deliver the value. This also allows InMobi to be in a leadership position when it comes to getting new sites / apps partner with them.


3. Karnataka government leads the way with eGovernance - Government of Karnataka, has arguably invested the most on eGovernance within  India . Long lines to pay utility bills are thing of the distant past. Bangalore one is also a very unique concept in citizen-government interaction using a private-public partnership. The latest initiative  by the government will ensure that all government orders, circulars, land records etc. will be scanned and uploaded for public consumption. With an earmarked budget of INR 32 crore, it will be an initiative that will help Karnataka cement it's leadership position as the more e-Governed state. The problem with such initiatives, is that they are separate initiatives which build applications in silo with no SSO or common infrastructure in mind. The future challenges for content aggregation and managing BigData is huge. 


4. Just how big is the Indian Internet and eCommerce market? - based on a report by JuxtConsult, this articles puts the online market size in India at 50 million with 17 million being open to eCommerce. While the Indian internet is about a 12 years old, the last 3 years have seen sustained innovation by .coms.The users seem to be out  from their shell. A projection of these numbers taking the addressable market size as 150 million (read last paragraph of this article), will show us that the eCommerce market will be about 50 - 70 million in the long run. Not bad market to pursue as long as one can deliver value at a competitive price. Can Flipkart still deliver a book within 24 hours of placing an order across India and be profitable? - If it can then Dalal street will regain appetite for .coms.


Interesting Read


While the US job scene seems to always give bad news month on month, this chart shows the ironic twist in the tale - Profit per employee is at historic at a high. The profit per employee is at USD 15000/-. Job loss and new efficiency mechanisms definitely prop these numbers up. While political America hopes to understand whether Government spending should go or Income should rise, Corporate America is waiting in the sidelines becoming more worthy than the government. Many people already believe that Wall street and Main street control the US political scene, the balance sheets of  private companies and that of the Government will only reinforce this belief. Who will be the next President of USA?- this time watch CNBC not CNN.