Here are a few slides created by Rajesh Jain, a respected Indian entrepreneur (CEO of Netcore), on the outlook of Indian digital media which includes the web and mobile. Pretty useful data.
View more presentations from rajeshjain.
August 8, 2009
July 28, 2009
Order in Chaos
I have been traveling in India for the last few weeks. The contrast between the economies of US where I live and India can not be more dramatic. Things looked pretty gloomy in the US when I came here and exepected the slowdown to be evident in india as well. I was quite surprised to see people are still spending and there is still tremendous amount of construction going on. Sure, the IT industry has taken a hit as it depends quite a bit on the US and the west. But the local econonomy is still thriving.
India is a very chaotic place. You will see this on the roads where 10 vehicles pass through the space meant for 2. It is scary for people from countries like US to experience. Heck it is scary for me who grew up in India and travel here often. But some how people get from point A to point B without losing their limbs. it is quite amazing. The same thing is true in life in general. For some one who is not familar with the place you would think the society can not function in this type of chaos. It not only functions but gallops. India is even more advanced in some things compared to US. For example, one can make reservations and book tickets for trains (and soon buses) online. I get a mobile alert from the local repair shop where I checked in my laptop to fix its monitor. I can open a bank account without leaving my desk. A bank official came to me and took care of all the paperwork. I am serius. This is not because I am a big shot or anything. Almost anyone can do this. You can call the local grocery store with a list and they deliver for you (I know you can do this in US in some places). I can go on.
I see order in this chaos. I also see tremendous opportunities in this chaos. India is quite becoming. Some one said it is a functional anarchy. Quite true. I think there is no other way to grow this fast as a democracy.
June 22, 2009
Visiting India
I am currently in India as we launch our mobile healthcare information service mdava. I am talking to major health care providers, parhamas and pharmacies in India to learn about ways to help them leverage our platform. I am looking forward to learning a great deal about ways to helps these companies.
May 9, 2009
Healthcare innovation: Lessons from India
From Economist:
ENTER the main cardiac operating-room at Bangalore’s Wockhardt hospital on a typical morning, and you will find a patient on the operating table with a screen hanging between his head and chest. On a recent visit the table was occupied by a middle-aged Indian man whose serene look suggested that he was ready for the operation to come. Asked how he was, he smiled and answered in Kannada that he felt fine. Only when you stand on a stool to look over the screen do you realise that his chest cavity has already been cut open.
As the patient was chatting away, Vivek Jawali and his team had nearly completed his complex heart bypass. Because such “beating heart” surgery causes little pain and does not require general anaesthesia or blood thinners, patients are back on their feet much faster than usual. This approach, pioneered by Wockhardt, an Indian hospital chain, has proved so safe and successful that medical tourists come to Bangalore from all over the world.
Unlike the hidebound health systems of the rich world, he says, “in our country’s patient-centric health system you must innovate.” This does not mean adopting every fancy new piece of equipment. Over the years he has rejected surgical robots and “keyhole surgery” kit because the costs did not justify the benefits. Instead, he has looked for tools and techniques that spare resources and improve outcomes.
Shivinder Singh, head of Fortis, a rival hospital chain based in New Delhi, says that most of the new, expensive imaging machines are only a little better than older models. Meanwhile, vast markets for poorer patients go unserved. “We got out of this arms race a few years ago,” he says. Fortis now promises only that its scanners are “world class”, not the newest.
Mr Singh is not alone in thinking that many firms in the rich world are looking at innovation the wrong way. Paul Yock, head of the bio-design laboratory at Stanford University, which develops medical devices, argues that medical-technology giants have “looked at need, but been blind to cost.” Amid growing concern about runaway health spending, he thinks the industry can find inspiration in India.
May 4, 2009
SMS Gupshup: India’s twitter?
SMS Gupshup is one of the fastest growing mobile services in the world. It is often addressed as India’s twitter. But it is not an accurate comparison. SMS Gupshup offers group sms messaging over mobile phones. So it is a mobile app where as twitter is primarily a web app. SMS Gupshup has grown from 7M users last year to 20M users this year. At this rate in the next year or two they will have more users than India’s web users (30 to 40M). In India mobile is the killer platform, not the web. Services like SMS Gupshup and Mytoday have tremendous potential in India. Both are lead by capable entrepreneurs that I really respect and like.
In this video Mike interviews Beerud Sheth, CEO of SMS Gupshup.
April 27, 2009
International Web Paradox
NYT highlights the challenges of web companies trying to monetize international growth.
The exterior and interior of an Internet cafe in New Delhi.
Facebook is booming in Turkey and Indonesia. YouTube’s audience has nearly doubled in India and Brazil.
That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.
Call it the International Paradox.
Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.
This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.
Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.
“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”
Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.
But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.
“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.
“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”
Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.
April 24, 2009
Bill Gates of Bangalore?
The Gaurdian calls Nandan Nilekani, co founder of Infosys, the Bill Gates of Bangalore. High praise indeed!
Indian businessman Nandan Nilekani. Photograph: Felix Clay
The man who inspired the slogan “the world is flat” has a small revision to make in the light of recent events. “The world has got flattened,” says Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Indian technology giant Infosys.
The “Bill Gates of Bangalore” - as he became known to star-struck American commentators - first served as inspiration to Thomas Friedman when the New York Times columnist wrote that bible of globalisation, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, way back in 2005. Then, as now, at the epicentre of the Indian IT outsourcing boom, Infosys and its charismatic co-founder seemed the embodiment of the optimistic mood. Soaring world trade, the endless march of the internet and a common language (jargon-inflected English) were ironing out political and geographical divisions around the world.
It all feels an age ago, sitting over a pot of tea in a deserted London hotel foyer. Global trade has collapsed, protectionism is on the rise and the banking crisis has national governments rushing to resurrect control over international business. But Nilekani insists the analysis still holds. “Because the world was flat, we all got flattened: the crisis moved around the world faster,” he says in that enigmatic way that visionary businessmen get away with. Whether he means we were all just flattened to the ground by the financial earthquake at the same time, or irreversibly rolled smooth by the progressive force of globalisation, is left unspoken.
India (and Infosys) have not been immune from the earthquake. The stockmarket has crashed and one of Nilekani’s main competitors, Satyam, has been caught up in a huge accounting scandal. But the optimism that greeted both China and India’s historic re-entry into the world economy remains. India’s banking system was heavily regulated and avoided the worst of the crisis. And as 700 million Indians vote in elections this month, the world has been reminded of the tremendous economic potential of this giant democracy.
April 22, 2009
India sees record growth in mobile usage
From Reuters:
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian mobile operators added a record 15.64 million customers in March, helped by the expansion of networks to smaller towns and rural areas, data from the telecoms regulator showed.
The mobile subscriber base in the world’s fastest-growing wireless market rose by 50 percent, or more than 130 million, to 391.8 million in the 12 months ended March, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said.
India is the second-biggest market for wireless services, lagging only China which has more than 600 million users.
Indian operators had added 15.41 million customers in January and 13.45 million users in February.
The country also had about 38 million fixed-line subscribers at end-March.
India is all about mobile not the web.
Satyam fraud quite elaborate
NYT takes a close look at the elaborate fraud commited at Satyam, the much maligned indian outsourcing company.
B. Ramalinga Raju, center, one of the founders of Satyam, is among the executives accused of fraud at the outsourcing firm
NEW DELHI — Managers at the outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services spun an elaborate web of fraud to attract customers and investors, while using stakes in the company to raise cash for themselves, according to a report filed by India’s top investigation agency.
The deception played out over at least eight years, involved dual accounting books, more than 7,000 forged invoices, dozens of fake bank statements, thousands of unnecessary employees and auditors who received fees several times the market rate, according to a charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in a court in Hyderabad.
The 77-page document details the scope of the fraud at Satyam, and lays out the bureau’s case for charging six company managers, their PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors and an adviser with cheating, forgery and falsification of accounts.
Satyam managers, including the founding brothers B. Ramalinga and B. Rama Raju “were able to attract prospective customers and investors by making them believe” that the company was “carrying out huge volumes of business,” the report said.
The details of the bureau’s investigation could bolster a string of class-action suits pending against Satyam managers and auditors.
Tech Mahindra, a joint venture between the Indian conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra and BT Group, won an auction to take over Satyam on April 13 with a bid valuing the company at $1.1 billion. The deal may still need to clear regulatory hurdles in the United States and Europe.
The Raju family and their friends, which held 19 percent of Satyam when it went public in 1992, “made hay when the sun was shining” by selling shares as they carried out the fraud, the bureau said in its report. More than 300 investment companies were started, some of which used loans backed by shares to invest in real estate and agriculture, the report said. Banks issuing the loans included Deutsche Investments India, GE Capital Services and DSP Merrill Lynch.
April 8, 2009
India web mail policy
Om Malik reports:
Google, if it wants to offer its GMail service to Indian national, will soon have to set up servers locally in India and offer email addresses ending in dot-in. Same holds true for Microsoft’s HotMail, Yahoo Mail, Rediff and every other web service that wants to do business in India. These changes are being mandatory because of recent amendments in the IT Act. The government officials are using the Mumbai terror attacks and identity theft cases to push through these baffling changes in the IT Act. Stay tuned for more on this developing story. I wonder if more countries follow suit leading to the balkanization of web services. Any thoughts folks?
Yeah, I have a thought. WTF? It is called web mail for a reason. This is really lame.