The iPhone vs Infineon

Here is a nice post about how iPhone will impact our ex company Infineon in a positive way. A good read as always from Sramana Mitra.
Main points to be taken are :-
iPhone and it's nearest competitor PRADA are both based on Infineon chips and hence its money for Infineon on both sides of the fence no matter who wins. I find it a little difficult to believe the revenue numbers for Infineon since I do not think modem chips can be sold for that much in today's market. All the same, fact remains that Infineon seems to be turning a corner with iPhone.

Hurray !!!

Our first application is ready for Alpha testing. It is the coolest way to keep marketing calls and SMSs at bay.
Here is the link to the demo of the application. So any of you / your friends family etc have a GPRS enabled Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phone, please get in touch with me. It's completely free !!(At least for the time being)
This link may help you find the device compatibility.

Technology vs Business Case

Coming from technical background we all tend to think with our technological spectacles. When someone asks us simple questions like btw who is your customer and how are you going to sell this thing, we tend to fumble. Our thoughts start from cool things we can achieve with technology at hand and tend to end with how users will benefit from it. Which means user perspective is sometimes the last thought on our mind. After talking to plenty of people in the industry I came to realise that this phenomenon is not only limited to us technical people, we have been able to successfully infect all the marketing ,sales and finance guys who work with us as well. You know what if you look at some funded companies in India you may get the feeling that VCs love cool technologies too. (see all the funded companies in the area of IMS, WiMax, and so on...)

BTW here is a nice article explaining the advantages of ignorance in start-ups.(wink)

As usual there is other school of thought from people coming from non technical backgrounds like finance, marketing, sales or people who have really seen the world and know many things.These guys tend to believe that an idea should start from a business case, we need to know what is the market, whom and how we can sell our product and eventually how we can make money from it from the beginning. Like someone told me the other day, you can do a start-up in two ways first, where you do what you love to do and believe in it, this way you may succeed but chances are low. Other way is where you try to know as much as possible in advance and then be flexible enough to start loving something which you know will sell, this way you may not be an outright success, but the chances are more that you will not fail completely.

Now with time, I have come to realise that the later kind of people do have a valid point after all. It is eventually how you want to do your start-up. If you do it as a business, you should listen to these guys and should create something which you know will sell from the beginning. But if you are doing it for your own pleasure, you can have a luxury of venturing in to something completely unknown.Here is a nice read about mindset of current bunch of entrepreneurs from Sramana Mitra.

Obviously the best case scenario is that these two kind of people converge on something they are both really convinced about and that's when you get the Woz and Jobs combination.

Programming is beautiful

So, I am coding again. Trying to learn all the things which I somehow unlearned in recent past.
That's one of the things you get to do as a part of working for a start-up even better when you have co-founded it. You get to do everything in fact you 'have to' do everything. In last few months, I got to clean my office ..:-), Got to talk to some investment bankers, Some VCs, Got to participate in the long term and mid term strategy of our company and products, did a demo to a customer, and most importantly for a good part of last few months I spent in designing ,coding and debugging software.
Software is my passion especially when I am doing it for mobile phones. Debugging is something I like to do even more. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I still get the 'kick' out of fixing difficult issues or designing something cool as I used to get when I was a young engineer. It is an amazing experience.
It was really a breath of fresh air for me after 2-3 years while I was away from actual implementation details.
Coding is where my roots lie. As much as I love managing teams, evangelising our products and ideas, trying to get feedback from other people about our direction, etc, I do not get the complete feeling till I have actually implemented something on my own , however small it is.
For me it is like poetry or music, a way of expressing myself. No amount of processes will make it mundane for me. I am not sure how many people are left in the industry like me. But I think there are plenty otherwise the open source communities would not be thriving so much. I am also very lucky to have found my co-founders who share similar passions about work.
I loved this industry from the first month of me joining Wipro as a young programmer. Till then I was not really aware that this is something I am so much passionate about. Going back to the days where I am part of building something from scratch, I cannot describe the pleasure in words.
May you all find a way to experience similar pleasure.

Mobile Market

A must read for everyone dealing with Mobile industry.
It just gives a perspective on Mobile Phone industry and can break some popular myths ..:-)
Especially the one I like is Mobile Internet is "Not the dumb little brother of the Internet". Something we all know in Mobile industry but especially people coming from PC Internet background find hard to digest.

Start-ups and Open source

In December last year, when we started with the idea of Mobisy, we had little knowledge about open source revolution that is happening. In our Mobile Handset Embedded software world, everything is proprietary and there is little or no talk about open source. Chhavi having worked on LwIP, was our only source of information. Personally, my information was limited to Linux kernel. But then, it all changed when I downloaded Open Office in Feb 2007. I was amazed by the amount of functionality offered by an open source product , it was running smooth on my Windows XP and for converting docs to pdfs I now did not have to buy Adobe acrobat writer. For converting images to SVG I did not have to pay huge money to Adobe. To convert documents, I did not need to use slow and crappy Microsoft office. What more for our new laptop, we decided to not even install Microsoft office. And then we came across this whole wave of Open utilities. One of our first projects is based on an Open source browser for mobile phones, S60Webkit by Nokia. There is even one more open source browser available from Mozilla called as Minimo. Imagine if this was not available we had to start from writing/porting our own browser setting us back by at least 6 months and god knows how much money. Now even a key component like J2ME which provides most deployed applications execution environment to Mobile Developers all over the world is getting open sourced.
Purely from technical perspective, it has never been easier to run a successful start up. Open source community is a huge boost to the entrepreneurial spirit.
If you look carefully around your product, you will find multitude of open source projects which you can simply re use. And this also encourages the start ups to open source their own code to get more and more developers contributing to your platform to make it richer.
We are really entering an era where not only the internet is maturing with Web 2.0, software is really becoming a service as the open source community once envisaged.

Forget Eyeballs, it's all about Eardrums !!

When we talk about Mobile technologies, monetising data platforms and lowering the walled gardens, we all conveniently forget that killer application of Mobile Phone is "call". This thought is also supported by Steve Jobs in iPhone launch who arguably came up with coolest phone on the planet. I also heard it from Dr. Aditya Dev Sood of CKS consulting recently.

So what are the call based applications we can come up with for Indian market which is hugely multilingual, multicultural but ready to pay?
I think following should be some basic characteristics of such applications

1. It should be easy and intuitive to use.
2. Literacy should not be a barrier to entry.
3. It should be localised to the audiences tastes ,wishes and languages?

So I am more and more becoming of the opinion that, in Indian Mobile world, it is not about how many eyeballs you can attract, it is about how many eardrums are listening to what you have to say/ provide.
How you can achieve easy to use voice based applications which can network those for whom reading and writing is not at all convenient / desirable?
How can you bring Mobile 2.0 with innovative applications of Voice/ Call?

Now that's a thought which will keep me awake for a few nights !