CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

Trends / Facts / Stats / Thoughts about the Mobile "Data" space....

Below are a list of points / trends / Thoughts about the Mobile space from various sources that I have been reading over the last couple of days:

Forrester Outlook of 2014 - United States

• By the end of 2009, 234 million US consumers — 76% of the population — will have a mobile phone subscription, and the total number of phone subscriptions will approach 270 million, representing 88% of the country’s population
• Most subscriber growth will be prepaid. Those without a mobile phone are less likely to be able to afford a postpaid option: 37% of those without mobile service have a household income of less than $25,000.
• Laptop or netbook — these connected PCs will account for nearly 11 million subscriptions by 2013
• A dizzying array of devices from cars to home alarm systems to eReaders to navigation devices are available today with a cellular connection, and new options such as health monitors and connected cameras are on the way. This diversity of connected devices will result in a proliferation of wireless subscriptions beyond the traditional mobile phone.
• Mobile Internet usage will boom. As 2008 drew to a close, more than 34 million US mobile subscribers accessed the mobile Internet on their phones at least once a month. That number will grow at an impressive 52% rate in 2009 to 52 million, and mobile Net users will continue to exhibit double-digit growth through 2014, when 106 million users, or a full 39% of all wireless subscribers, will become regular mobile Net users.
• Operators’ shift from metered to unlimited data plans has been one of the critical drivers for mobile Internet and data adoption, but these plans have a downside in that they limit future data revenues while encouraging wanton usage. To manage this risk, carriers will introduce new service tiers at lower  price points — with concomitantly lower data limits — that will reduce the barrier to entry for those subscribers not yet convinced that they get their money’s worth.
• Messaging +data services - these growth engines have only served to balance the concomitant decline in voice revenues — keeping ARPU nearly flat over the past few years. This trend will continue, as the growth in data subscriptions will be tempered by the introduction of lower-price voice offerings designed to maintain growth
• Data access revenues will approach $20 billion in 2014, the rate of growth will slow as the average monthly price of a data bundle decreases from $17.34 per month in 2009 to $16.64 in 2014
• Today, nearly one-third of active handsets are 3G; by 2014, more than four in five handsets will use 3G technology — whether that’s UMTS, a flavor of HSPA, or CDMA2000 — or its successor, LTE.
• Today, even the most recalcitrant voice-centric customer isn’t able to buy a new handset in this category, and these devices constitute a paltry 3% of active phones in the US market (see Figure 3). By 2014, this number will have fallen to less than 1% of all active handsets, confined to the remaining “glove box” users and those served by remote rural providers.

Economy + Internet Trends - Morgan Stanley

• Mobile Consumer - 10billion + Units

India - An interesting article in the Wallstreet journal

• Radio Via Phone - With the more than $200 million in revenues phone company executives expect this year, the radio via phone business already makes almost as
• much as consultants at KPMG estimate all the regular FM stations in India will make.
• ......requires tailored services that are delivered simply and can work even on a $20 phone.
• Monthly ARPU, Q4-2006 - 300+ Rs, Q2-2009 - <200Rs, The biggest phone companies have also started charging per second rather than per minute, further crimping the number of rupees they get from calls.
• The mobile value-added service business, which also includes standard nonvoice services like texting, will rise close to 70% in the next year to 165 billion rupees ($3.6 billion), according estimates by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
• So far these types of services make up only about 10% of cellular companies' revenues, analysts say. But in the next five years the portion of revenue generated by these services could rise to as much as 25%, they estimate. Telephone Revenue from Non Voice Cellphone Services - 2006 - 25 Billion Rs, 2008 - 75 Billion Rs, (Estimated) 2009 - 100 Billion, (Estimated) 2010 - 160 billion Rs.
• New revenues won't come anytime soon from so-called 3G services. India has yet to even decide which private companies will be allowed to offer 3G services, though an auction of spectrum is expected early next year.
• many of India's 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators

Source : 1,  2, 3

Tags: mobile - data - mobile+trends - ms - morgan+stanley - forrester - india - US - japan

Prashanth Rai

Henning Kaggerman to join Wipro's Board

Dr. Henning Kaggerman is joining Wipro's board as of Oct 27th. I think this is great news for Wipro. It was always a great experience meeting with him at the SAP events. Henning is a big believer / proponent of the consulting or value added approach to IT services & in reducing the implementation / services costs in SAP / Packaged implementations i.e. reducing the ratio between the licenses to services fees. Will be interesting to see how his thinking influences Wipro. Some comments / excerpts:

Commenting on his appointment, Dr. Kagermann said, "I have for long admired Wipro as a company as much for its innovative approach to business as for its strong commitment to values. I am excited at the prospect of guiding the company as it prepares for its next phase of growth"

Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Limited said, "We are delighted to welcome Dr Kagermann to our Board. He brings in a unique combination of academic perspective, technical expertise and leadership experience. I am sure that Wipro will benefit from his rich knowledge, insights and wisdom."

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai

TCS - Change of Guard

TCS change of the guard , Check out an interview of Ramdurai & N Chandrasekaran at Moneycontrol. Ramdurai took over 13 years back at 160 million / 6000 people and now Chandrasekaran takes over at 6 Billion / 140k. These will be interesting times.

Video Interview

India's Mobile Market

Some interesting stat's / excerpts from a Knoledge@Wharton interview of Rajesh Jain:

Interesting Statistics:

1. 400 million-plus mobile users
2. Internet has been more stagnant in the last year or year and a half at about 45 million to 50 million.
3. The Internet-ad spend in India is about $140 million, which is about 3% of the overall media spend in India
4. Mobile on the other hand, the value-added-services part, where if you look at non-voice and non-P2P SMS, that’s about a billion dollars

Excerpts:

I was talking to one of the telecom providers recently and they have these USB modems, which are basically wireless modems on USB. Typically they’ve been used with laptops – people on the move, enterprise users. Interestingly, when I talked with them they said, “Look, the biggest demand we are getting for these USB modems – because they are high-speed, they are 3G speeds – is from consumers to connect their home PC, the fixed PCs, to the Internet.” Because in many places it is hard to get connectivity.

in India, SMS subscriptions and voice orders are $350 million to $400 million. That’s money being spent by consumers where the actual content providers and service providers are getting less than 20% of their money.

everyone’s focus has been on smartphones and the apps. But what everyone forgets is that in markets like India, 95% of the market doesn’t use such phones. Even in the U.S., 70% of the market does not use it.

Source: Emergic

Prashanth Rai

Daily Reading - 1st Jan 2009

When your laptop is a pain in the neck

If you use a laptop for hours at a stretch, you’re setting yourself up for muscle problems that can make your entire upper body hurt. Simple ways to make a laptop more ergonomic

Supporters of Satyam launch website,blame media for Satyam crisis

In a damage control initiative, the supporters hosted a dedicated website here on Thursday, which has received good number of messages across the world. With a tag line of "Satyameva Jayate", the website solicits public support

25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek

It's the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs' eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. "I don't think about that," he said. "When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, 'Get it away!' and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed. You have to look forward."

Web 2.0 Summit Presentation and Talk

An important part of our future is being invented out in the world. And it is from that world that I want to share stories about two companies I am involved in. Between them, they cover the two most important screens of our interactive lives - the computer and the mobile. The two companies are Novatium and NetCore.

Prashanth Rai

Sunday Morning Reading

The New Examined Life

The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data -- every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren't random, and are more orderly than some might expect.

Mr. Felton calls his compilation the Feltron Annual Report; the slight alteration of his name connotes the mechanical nature of his autobiographical cataloging effort, now entering its fourth year. He plans to continue his project over the next decade in what he hopes will result in a modern-day spin on James Boswell's famously detailed biography of Samuel Johnson. "I want to create connections where I didn't know that they existed," Mr. Felton says. "I'm a natural annotator."

For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers

Brainstorming, Mr. Boyd says, is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert. Among the problems are these: Throwing in an idea for public consideration generates fear of failure, and workers looking to advance their own interests often keep their best ideas to themselves until a more opportune time.

Instead of identifying a problem and then seeking solutions, Mr. Boyd suggests turning the process around: break down successful products and processes into separate components, then study those parts to find other potential uses. This process of “systematic inventive thinking,” which evolved from the work of the Russian engineer and scientist Genrich Altschuller, creates “pre-inventive” ideas that then can be expanded into innovations.

Dubai

DUBAI is one of those magical places that seem too good to be true. Along with the far larger and richer Abu Dhabi, it is one of seven city-states in the loose United Arab Emirates federation, which gained independence in 1971 from the overextended British empire.

Amazon Aims at Content Delivery

Amazon has become a major player in cloud computing in recent years. Many Web startups have come to rely on its pay-as-you-go hosting and computing services rather than investing in costly and complex infrastructure of their own. The newest offering from Amazon Web Services, called Cloudfront, may provide insight into Amazon's long-term business model. This new product offers companies that are already hooked on Amazon storage and processing the ability to distribute their content and thus make themselves more stable and reliable.

How Google Plans to Take Over TV

"TV is becoming like the Web," Desai says. From an advertiser's perspective, he has a point. In the 1980s, a popular TV program like The Cosby Show might have captured half the viewers in the entire United States; today's most popular shows, like American Idol, are lucky to capture a fourth of the whole audience. The difference is that there are dozens of channels now, each catering to a different set of viewers. As Desai notes, this is a lot like the Web: the audience is out there, but it's split into small bits consuming a wide variety of content.

Back-Button to the Future

Huge quantities of information are never more than a few clicks away on the Web, but it's not always easy to see what things were like yesterday. News stories and blog posts might be archived, but other information often gets lost. For instance, while it's trivial to find a book's sales ranking on Amazon today, it's less simple to see what it was last week. And for anyone curious about how news evolves, it might not be obvious how a story's prominence has changed--did it get top billing on news sites the day it broke, or was it buried at the bottom of the page? A new tool called Zoetrope is designed to help track such information by letting users browse backward through time.

Prashanth Rai

Saturday Morning Reading

Gizmodo Gallery in NY

For a few weeks you've been hearing about the Gizmodo Gallery in NYC, catching plenty of teasers for the cool stuff—contemporary marvels, homemade wundergear and pieces of history—we're showing down at the Reed Annex on Orchard St. from today 12 noon through Sunday 4pm. Now, for the first time, we're revealing the whole list. And it's annotated, for your pleasure.

5 Things to Consider Before Buying a Netbook

A netbook as we’ve come to know it is a small laptop that is cheap. That’s about it, although the term can be confusing, as larger notebooks are sometimes called netbooks, since that is currently the hot buzzword.  So you want to get a small, cheap notebook (or netbook) if you will, what are the five things you should know before plunking down your cash?

Smartphones: Symbian sinks under 50% share, Apple races past Windows Mobile

A few months back, we looked at the worldwide smartphone market numbers and watched RIM jump past Windows Mobile. Mac OS X handset sales, i.e.: the iPhone, more than doubled year-over-year and perennial market leader Symbian was in danger of dipping below the 50% line. Fast forward to today thanks to Gartner's 3rd quarter numbers and you can see that the trends are continuing. For some that's good, while others were already declining in market share and they keep sinking. Note: while other similar research came to light this week, I'm focusing on Gartner's numbers simply for consistency because I used them a quarter ago.

Truphone enables WiFi phone calls on iPod Touch

We've talked about Truphone before. They offer low-cost and free voice calling over WiFi for handsets like BlackBerries, Nokia devices and Apple's iPhone. Can you believe they now offer their service on a non-phone? Yup, as of today, Truphone enables an iPod Touch to be a voice communications device with their free client application available in the iTunes App Store.

Looking Forward to 2009 with Whrrl

Whrrl, a social discovery network developed by Pelago, not only lets you stay connected with friends, but also to discover places and events. Whrrl was the first iPhone application to receive an investment from Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers’ iFund for iPhone developers. It has also received hefty sums from T-Mobile and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. So why am I bullish? Because chief executive and co-founder Jeff Holden was the senior vice president of online consumer services for Amazon.com prior to co-founding Pelago. He was one of the developers of Amazon’s prediction system that analyzes consumer behaviour, and, based on a user’s previous searches, delivers other products that may be of interest. In a chat with Holden, he told me he has the know-how to transfer this type of system to the Whrrl platform. Judging by Amazon’s success in delivering appropriate product matches to users — if you don’t know what I mean, try it out — Holden and his team could likely develop a similarly effective geo-targeted advertising platform for Whrrl. He didn’t disclose too much to me when I talked to him, so I’m not sure if this will roll out in 2009, but he did reveal the company will attempt to monetize the platform by selling virtual goods.

Status Check: How is Your Home Wi-Fi Network Performing?

Have you taken a look at the speeds you’re getting with your home Wi-Fi network lately? Many web workers work out of their homes, and if that’s you and you work wirelessly, it makes a lot of sense to do a checkup. There are some free tools you can turn to for doing this easily and quickly.

Prashanth Rai

Indian Recession

Interesting article in the NYTimes about IT Services companies in India:

Indian technology companies are too focused on increasing the efficiency of their systems, not improving their clients’ own industry-specific processes, according to Navi Radjou, an analyst with Forrester Research. “They are having trouble tailoring a technical application to a particular business need,” he said.

Tags: it+services - indian - forrester - nytimes

Prashanth

Sunday Morning Browsing

Mumbai Blasts

India’s highest-ranking security official resigned on Sunday, as the government began to reckon with the fallout from a three-day standoff with militants that raised troubling questions about India’s vulnerability to terrorism.

Mumbai attackers trained by special forces: Russian expert

A top Russian counter-terrorism expert on Sunday underlined that the Mumbai attackers were not "ordinary terrorists" and were probably trained by the special operations forces set up in Pakistan by the US intelligence prior to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Importance of Technology Leadership for th US:

Mr. Bhidé makes a detailed argument that contradicts the prevailing view of expert panels and authors who contend that the nation’s prosperity is threatened by the technological rise of China and India, and that America’s capacity for innovation is eroding. To arrest the decline, they insist that more scientists and engineers, and more government spending on research, are sorely needed.

Mr. Bhidé derides the conventional view in science and technology circles as “techno-nationalism,” needlessly alarmist and based on a widely held misunderstanding of how technological innovation yields economic growth. In his view, many analysts put too much emphasis on the production of new technological ideas. Instead, he observes, the real economic payoff lies in innovations in how technologies are used.

America’s competitive advantage, Mr. Bhidé explains, resides mainly in its creative use of information technology, especially in the large and growing services sector, led by companies like Wal-Mart.\

Wired on Ray Ozzie

But there's something else: Ozzie hates speaking in public. His idea of paradise is pitching his vision around a table near a whiteboard, where he can proceed conversationally and draw on his marketplace savvy, quiet confidence, and ability to scrawl out XML code on the fly. Auditoriums are something else. "I have high anxiety—massive, huge, tremendous anxiety," he says. "It's not a natural act for me." The infrequency of his public appearances has triggered murmurs that the guy in Gates' chair is afraid to face his public, like some sort of software Greta Garbo. "Where's Ray?" Microsoft observers have been asking, as Google grabs more headlines and Apple relentlessly mocks the company's shortcomings. Two-plus years into the job, there is still a bit of mystery to Ray Ozzie.

Tags: news - mumbai+blasts - microsoft - ray+ozzie

Prashanth Rai

Saturday Morning Browsing

Tech Spending:

Every quarter since 2001, ChangeWave Research has asked about 2,000 businesses about their tech-spending plans. The survey released Friday, which was conducted in early November, found that 45% of businesses say they’ll decrease tech spending—or spend nothing at all—next quarter. That’s up from 29% who said they would decrease spending last quarter. It’s also a new record for the survey, topping the 37% who said they would decrease spending in September 2001. Just 10% of businesses said that they would increase tech spending next quarter, a record low for the survey.

More bad news: Thirty-nine percent of businesses say they’ve spent less than they originally planned so far this quarter. And 48% say they don’t think tech spending will begin to pick up again until after the third quarter of 2009.

IT Job cuts:

The number of job cuts in the tech sector this year already surpasses the total for all of 2007 and 2006, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Projected over the full year, cuts are on pace to reach their highest level since 2003. (One silver lining: We aren’t close to approaching 2001 levels, when the tech sector shed 695,581 jobs.)

But wait, there’s more. Two-thirds of job cuts—about 89,000—have taken place since July. So the trend isn’t good. And there are plenty of signs that the economic slump is just starting to hit the tech sector in earnest. Intel, for example, cut its revenue forecast for the current quarter by about 10% this week.

Software 0% Financing:

Microsoft Thursday said that new customers for its Dynamics customer management and accounting software can qualify for 0% financing. The announcement follows a similar one in late October from SAP, which offered 0% financing to qualified small and medium-size businesses that buy its software.

If free money in the middle of a credit crisis sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Only qualified customers will get 0% financing and, as a Microsoft spokeswoman tells us, “the guidelines are pretty stringent.” In other words, this is just a hook to get people to consider buying software at a time when they might otherwise delay purchases. Coincidentally (or not), Microsoft’s Dynamics group is holding a big conference next week.

Hope:

International Business Machines chairman and chief executive Samuel J. Palmisano, making a rare public appearance, said that he anticipates the current financial crisis will be “a short term issue.” He declined to say how short.

Approach to difficult times @ Mindtree - Indian IT Services:

The first time ever the Indian IT industry tasted a downturn was in 2001. That is when 9/11 sealed the doubt over whether the dot.com and telecom busts as well as a recession were all real. At that time, at MindTree, we were a less than 500 people. We did two things immediately: the internal board took a 25% salary cut and everyone else took a 10% cut. Those steps were not enough. So, we seriously considered asking the “bottom 5%”, formally assessed as “non-performers”, to be let go. That was when we had a lesson in people caring. The middle-management team walked in to Chairman Ashok Soota’s room and said they were willing to volunteer an additional 2.5% reduction in salary so that the bottom 5% could be retained until the market rebounded. Their logic was simple: do not let go of poor performers at a time when jobs are difficult to come by in any case. We listened to them and we all survived.

Tags: sap - microsoft - mindtree - ibm - jobs - tech+spending - recesssion

Prashanth Rai