Om Malik has started a weekly column on the state of Broadband in India.
The ISPs in India have started realizing that the money to be made is in the volume and not the top-tier market and prohibitvely priced premium services. Thanks in part to Reliance InfoComm and the state owned ISP viz. BSNL; High-speed Internet is a reality in India. Atlhough, it is still limited to large ciities/metros. Also, thanks to increased awareness and literacy levels, people are realizing the potential of Internet in India coupled with a hunger for more bandwidth.
Broadband letter from India
March 18th, 2005Bill Gates Picture: Seemingly Unfamiliar Face
March 9th, 2005
[Alt + PrtSc’ed on Mar 09, 2005]
Must have Cash? Pay Cash: The Height of Taxation
March 4th, 2005In order to curb the flow of Black Money (it is estimated to be at 20% of India’s GDP or $82 billion), the Government of India is proposing a scheme to tax withdrawals (ATMs, Cashier’s Check/Demand Draft, Cash from Teller, etc.) of more than Rs.10,000 per day. This tax is 0.1% of the withdrawal amount. Looks like the whole Indian Finance Ministry worked for a credit card company in their previous lives.
To justify the tax, The Finance Minister added that the idea was to have a tax trail; citing the example of Brazil.
Wake up and smell the coffee:
1. No hospital in India (except for the ones 99% of Indians could not afford) takes a form of payment other than Cash. So, be ready to tip the ATM on your way to the hospital.
2. How about buying 2 wheelers? Cash is king and the average price of a two-wheeler is Rs.20,000
3. How about wage payment? Every Friday (or daily) pay a tip to the teller for paying your workers.
4. Planning for an overseas trip? Need to buy some foreign exchange? Tip again! Ridiculous
What the Finance Minister does not realize that the hoarders of ‘Black Money’ will never park their illegal funds in Bank. There are better routes like soft money loans to construction companies/builders, finance Bollywood movies, launder it overseas or simply stash away in jute sacks in ordinary looking cupboards. It is totally pointless to cite the Brazil example; Brazil did it to raise revenue. Mr. Finance Minister probably needs some help from the IT bigwigs in order to have an United States IRS like paper trail 1.
On a different note, this sounds like an opportunity for Visa, MasterCard gang. The total spend on personal expenditure using credit cards is less than 1% in India.
1A bank would notify the IRS if there were cash deposit/withdrawal of more than $10,000.
Writing A Feed Crawler in Java
February 27th, 2005Thanks to my current day job, I haven’t written any serious (Java) code for a long time. Couple of weeks ago, I was mulling over to overcome this loss of habit–more so trying to refresh the skills. So, I started writing a crawler and a harvester for the RSS/Atom feeds. It may not be a big deal, but I never wrote one before. It became interesting when I fired-up Eclipse. The harvester returned 280 blogs on my second-degree of separation. If your weblog stats have a sharp uptrend for the last 10 days then you know who to thank.
I picked up ROME as the feed parser of choice. ROME has couple of bugs, which I’ll be sending to the developers. The nastiest one is its inability to parse atom feeds from blogspot.com. I may know the solution, but need to go through the ROME source code in order to fix/suggest solution.
The harvester/crawler source uses simple java.net.HttpURLConnection for HTTP transfers. The next step is to make it work over Java NIO in order to “up” the performance of network I/O for frequent updates and large set of feeds.
Writing the code was easy once the hands got dirty–The big task is to figure out what to do with this code. How about me-too of Bloglines, Technorati or Kinja?
Hello, to the world of raw structured data and it’s various formats viz. RSS 0.90/ 0.91/0.92/0.93/0.94/1.0/2.0/atom 0.3 (including the standard & proposed RSS modules)!
Reference Web vs. the Incremental Web: How the current discovery methods will break
February 16th, 2005Google searches the reference Internet. Users come to google with a specific query, and search a vast corpus of largely static information. This is a very valuable and lucrative service to provide: it’s the Yellow Pages.
On the other hand, Weblogs (which looks like yet another HTML page) are chronologically organized. The posts are structured data, well tagged and facilitate easy discovery. The ranking & indexing becomes easier in case of weblog. A search engine may assign higher rank to keywords appearing in the <dc:subject> or <title> tags compared to the content in <description> tag. Thanks to this tagging almost, the ranking scheme does not become somebody’s personal algorithm. Compare this to how Google assigns the magic rank to the non-structure web; More weight is given to words appearing in the HTML <title> tag or the the text of the links in the <a> tag (oversimplification here, Google does a tad more). Same scheme is applied to <H1>, <B> tags. The logic of doing this is obvious.
On the outset, the difference between regular HTML pages and Weblogs is not much. However, HTML can be read only with a browser while Weblogs can be read with the browser and other client-based (NewsMonster, Gush, etc.) and web-based (Bloglines, Feedster, etc.) applications. Thanks to standardized delivery medium like RSS or Atom, the Weblog could be read on any custom software or device.
Google works best on Reference web, the web, which is primarly, contained of HTML pages and the content is not tagged beyond the ones required for rendering the HTML markup. Try searching on Google for the latest conversation on Java. The top site is from Sun. On a different twist try searching for some help on formatting/parsing a java.util.Date object–The search result references the discussion around the deprecated APIs. This is the reference web–here the content does not say what it is and what it refers to. It’s the search engine’s algorithm, which decides how to cut, chop and present.
Contrast this to the incremental web–The content says what it is, what categories it belongs to and when it was published.
I think this is an immense opportunity, some of which is being addressed by Topix, Technorati, Feedster, etc. But, Weblog searching is still in infancy. Using the traditional search techniques–the wheat (the blog entries I want to read) and the chaff (the blog entries I want to avoid) are going in the grind together.
On a grand scheme of things, I think we are on the path to the Semantic Web.
Total Internal Refraction
February 11th, 2005
Interestingly, Paris Las Vegas and Bellagio are diagonally opposite (look at the map below). The picture was shot while looking towards Bellagio; standing behind the protective glass shield on a pedestrian Xing over ‘The Strip’ at Las Vegas.
Lucky or Smart? Smart enough to recognize the luck!
January 30th, 2005Bo Peabody started Tripod.com, with his professor (who gave him a B- in his course!), and later sold it to Lycos for $58 million. Inc. magazine has an excerpt of his new book, Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life.
Most interesting byte, “Was I lucky? You bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize that I was getting lucky.”
The book has some interesting thoughts which are worth deep interpretation. For example, the first round of $3m funding was done by the venture capital firm NEA, where Peadbody admits that NEA liked the plan because it mentioned the word “Internet” several hundred times. And why did NEA agreed to look into his business plan; his professor’s wife’s brother’s college roommate knew someone who knew someone at NEA(well, it’s always like that).
He further says, “I’ve often kidded that 90 percent of Tripod’s value was in the amount of press we received in such a concentrated period of time. Sitting at a board meeting, lamenting our anemic revenue, I once joked to the board of directors that rather than actually running ads on the Tripod site, I’d sell potential advertising customers the opportunity that I might mention them in an article or wear their logo on my baseball cap. The board didn’t laugh. They asked me to look into whether or not this plan was possible. Had I actually begun to believe what was being said about me in the press, I would never have sold Tripod when I did. I would have reasoned, instead, that I was in fact a genius, and that I should take complete credit for the great things happening to my company. Never mind that Tripod had little revenue, no profits, and an unproven business model; we should take this horse public. Had we taken it public, we would most likely have failed, and everyone, including many unsuspecting individual investors, would have lost a lot of money.”
Epinions founders sue Benchmark, August et al.
January 25th, 2005SiliconBeat reports.
Epinions.com was a high-flying startup with prominent backers like Benchmark, August, etc. I also remember listening to Nirav and Naval Ravikant at numerous occassions at TiE, SIPA, etc. The three co-founders (including RV Guha) left almost $18 million in stock options of @Home, Yahoo, and AOL to start epinions.com and took the company to funding stage in record 12 weeks from the idea (even before a single line of code was written!).
Found this on Google —
Everyone has an opinion, how do you get paid for it. Well, something to reflect upon.
Two India existing as One
January 8th, 2005Resurgent India is being strongly divided into two faces. There are various ways to put it–rural vs. urban, literate vs. illiterate, rich vs. poor, malnutritioned vs. obese, haves vs. have-nots, etc. Each category beckons other. The two faces co-exist with one face wishing that the other would just go away, unmindful of the fact that the social fabric has been stitched that way. India’s burgeoning population of skilled and unskilled labor is the very thing, which is putting it to advantage. Western world is ready to outsource anything involving human labor at the drop of a coin. The very reason that the Indian steel industry majors can think of doubling the output of finished steel from 36 million tonnes is because of cheap labor ( In fact labor never comes to the mind while planning, as it is abundantly available!). Think about the same in United States–most of the large-scale mining and industrial units are on the path of thin margins because of expensive labor.
One face is occupying the springing malls, clean offices, and housing units–The other living in slums, working in dastardly conditions earning just the minimum wage. Take this:
- India still has the world
The PaanWalla and the Indian Mobile Phone Revolution
November 25th, 2004SQ 416 was late by few minutes for its scheduled time at 10:30p. Next was a hassle-free checkout (Thanks to 9 pieces of luggage and two sleepy kids!) through the Green Channel of customs at the Kolkata International airport. The next stop had to be a roadside paan shop. I was carrying a burning desire to chew a paan on arrival.
So, we stopped. The paanwalla(click here for a a look-alike) was chatting on a shining mobile phone. On my arrival at his counter, I could hear him closing the conversation in his local dialect, “…Auron baad mein, kustomber hai”. Translated — Rest later, I have a customer. The counter, which was barely 10 feet by 10 feet also had leaflets of Reliance India Mobile prepaid cards stuck on the side of his wall.
Although, growth in the youth market has been fast last year symbolizing the breadth of the Indian Mobile phone customers; the depth of the market could be estimated when you see a paanwalla handling a mobile phone. A paanwalla could be characterized as someone with minimal or basic education, a non-incorporated small business, no taxes, and possibly without a postal address.
Thanks to popular schemes offering free incoming & intra-carrier calls; Indian users have been adding 1.5m – 1.7m new customers every month with an estimated base of 38 million users.