Chance Favors The Prepared Mind..

Product Engineering Services will be worth over $40 billion dollars for India by the year 2020, says a leading industry body. It goes on to say that the growth rate of outsourced product engineering and R&D services was among the highest before a dip caused by the global recession. Any surprises? None, absolutely. Just take a look around. Tier 1 outsourcing service providers, mid-sized specialized companies,  and an increasing number of small and savvy start-ups; all providing a varied mix of services and/or intellectual property to global product companies. Now include the captive development centers, and India is already an important part of the global Product Engineering Ecosystem.

The opportunity is there and the projected numbers are achievable. Especially if we fast forward to a time, hopefully not too distant, when discretionary spend is available in plenty and new products are  frequently launched across the world.  Indian IT industry has a real “chance” to turn the $40 billion dollar opportunity into reality. Louis Pasteur, chemist and microbiologist, once famously said that “Chance favors the prepared mind”.  Are we prepared for the chance?

The short and simple answer is, YES! Just look at the large and growing talent pool of engineers in the Product Engineering area. Just consider the fact that everyone, from the wireless start-up in Israel to the numero uno in handsets, is using Indian talent already. Just feel the buzz when you walk into any of the relevant exhibitions/conferences that are happening more frequently nowadays. Product engineering talent and experience is becoming available,  and the industry is showing a hunger and the desire to build world-class products.

But when and how will it happen? It will happen when it happens! The Indian “elephant” will trudge along picking up whatever is necessary along the way. Can things be speeded up? Can the Indian elephant move more like the Indian Tiger?

Yes it can! But it will need some departure from the old and acceptance of a new way of doing things.  Product Engineering is essentially driven by Intellectual Property (IP),  the IP being created under a services model for the customer or developed independently and licensed to the customer.  This in turn places a  a different emphasis on  aspects such as innovation, strategy, marketing, product/portfolio management, investment models, intellectual property management, and commercial models.  Companies that aspire to become strategic partners of high value to their customers will need to devote attention and resources to the above and understand not just their customer but also the customers market and the ecosystem it operates in.

It is time to wrap up with a quote from another French gentleman. “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”, said Victor Hugo. The circumstances are conspiring. The next big thing, the next “ipod” like success, can emerge entirely from India. Let us be prepared for the chance.

Hey! That wasn’t in the plan!

Stuff happens.

The good folks who invented the cell phone surely had their moment of epiphany. A sudden realization of the cell phone’s powerful impact on society. A premonition of some not so obvious scenarios that made them exclaim ; “My God! This thing can change the world!”. And change it did, in more ways than could possibly have been imagined. It is that kind of change, change that the inventors did not think about in their wildest dreams that the cell phone is driving in many fascinating ways.

The “Swiss Army” cell phone that can play music, take photos, surf the internet, navigate, fry an omelette [sic], etc. etc. is not what is fascinating in itself. People were doing all that, without the cell phone and before phone manufacturers started to lump it all into one device. What is interesting are the imaginative uses that some innovative folks have come up with, stuff that makes one exclaim “Hey! That surely wasn’t in the plan!”.

Recently at a casual conversation over coffee, I started to list such examples as I could think of….coffee got over, so did the discussion. However I thought it interesting enough to continue that thought process and share some of those examples.

1. The cell-phone novel, Japanese Style: Cell phone novels, called Keitai Shousetsu in Japanese, are novels that started out being authored by young Japanese women primarily around romantic subjects. The novels have gained in popularity to the extent that 5 of the top 10 selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels. Starting from Japan, the phenomenon spread to China and there is now even a Malayalam cell phone novel. Hey! That wasn’t in the plan!
2. Collective Behavior: Particularly in emerging economies, the cell phone has become a powerful weapon to generate a mob or to generate similar behavior patterns amongst large parts of society. Wikipedia lists the example of a protest against the president of Philippines, organized mainly through text messages that led to removal of the president from office.  Closer home, I like the example of what was called the “Hindu Milk Miracle”. This was when word spread like wildfire, largely through text messages in the year 2006 (when in happened for the second time), about idols of Lord Ganesh drinking milk. This in turn led to large sections of people attempting to replicate the same at temples and homes across India, traffic gridlock around Ganesh temples and eventual shortage of milk!
3. Emergency Response, Cell Phones and Twitter:  Included this primarily due to the way Twitter became an important part of the emergency response during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Twitter users with cell phones on the scene helped compile list of dead and injured, and provided information on hospitals needing blood donations. Television networks even used Twitter to gather news as the attacks were unfolding in Mumbai. CNN went to the extent of terming it as “the day social media appeared to come of age”.

There must be other examples of the cell phone impacting the behavior of society at large. But if you thought that it was just humans who are affected, think again. It has been reported that some urban song birds have become adept at mimicking ring tones and melodies! The next time a cell phone rings in the city, don’t just pat your pocket and look at people around you. Look up! It could be from up there!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novels

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear?currentPage=all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob

http://www.milkmiracle.com/

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_nicholson.html

http://www.w3.org/2008/02/MS4D_WS/papers/joinus_v2.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

What Lies Between

Things are hotting up in the space between the smartphone and the laptop. Google’s announcement of  Chrome OS for Netbooks, Symbian foundation previous statement that its OS can run on the Intel Atom chipset, Dell’s plans for a pocket sized Android device; these are just some of the evidence popping up on the radar. All this activity should also rejuvenate the forces that will create the next avatar of the mobile personal device.

 It is no surprise that everyone wants a piece of an expanding market, but what is exciting is that this trend has the potential to drive innovation in the fast growing “in-between” segment. This segment has seen innovation in the recent and not so recent past, but with mixed results. The Dell product is reportedly a pocket sized Mobile Internet Device that is slightly larger than the iPod Touch and doesn’t have cellphone capabilities. Sounds like a PDA,  do we need another? Internet centric devices have been around for some time but have either evolved into special purpose appliances (Internet Radio, Internet Phone) or gone the other extreme and tried to mimic the laptop.

 However, if one were to think of a PDA sized product that uses innovative input and display technologies, leverages developments in Cloud computing and availability of bandwidth, it does sound like a product worth carrying around. Worth carrying around, provided bandwidth, internet based services are available at reasonable cost – that will make it an idea whose time has come.

 The cellphone was conceived as a voice-centric product;  its physical form, hardware, software developed for this core functionality. The Personal Computer was conceived as a device to put computing power on the desks of individuals. It is time now for the space in between to be occupied by a mobile personal device, developed ground up, for todays internet.

 http://www.wirelessweek.com/article.aspx?id=170664

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/23/android-symbian-limo-technology-wireless-android.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124630305634469553.html

http://www.wirelessweek.com/article.aspx?id=170574

When Cellphone Met Computer

There was some interesting news from Nokia and Intel last week that connects with my previous post on the “mobile device” of the future.

Nokia (about 40% of the mobile phone market) and Intel (about 80% of the microprocessor market for laptops and desktops), have teamed up to make new mobile computing device and chipset architectures. “It is about creating a new class of devices…” says a quote from Nokia.

Nokia’s “upward” progress on to increasingly powerful smartphones and  internet tablets is well known. And so is Intel’s “downward” foray into Atom chips that are in the growing market for netbooks today. What lies in between? And how will each class of device affect the market of the other?

Here is a quote from the press release;

“We will explore new ideas in designs, materials, and displays that will go far beyond devices and services on the market today. This collaboration will be compelling not only for our companies, but also for our industries, our partners and, of course, for consumers,” Kai Oistamo, executive VP for devices at Nokia, said in a statement.

Finally, some related newslinks;

 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10271192-64.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124576988211341997.html

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/06/new-intelnokia-partnership-a-huge-win-for-mobile-linux.ars

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/17111

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218100891

Is it a Phone? Is it a Computer? No, it is Super…???

It is not a mobile “phone”. It is not even a mobile “computer”. Find a new word!

Read an article in the newspaper that got me going. The article described a system called the PhonePointPen, that can use a mobile phone as a pen to record hand-written information. The system captures gestures using accelerometers that are built into some modern mobile phones, and translates it into images that can be saved on the phone or on the internet.

The all-in-one device with a camera, music player, radio, internet browser, gaming engine, office applications et al, is nothing new. However, what is interesting is that another distinct trend seems to be emerging. The newer innovations are about using the physical attributes of the mobile itself to greater effect, and  about overcoming the physical limitations of the phone. Consider a few examples;

• Start with the mobile “pen” mentioned earlier, possibly inspired by the Nintendo Wii use of accelerometers.
• NFC (Near Field Communications) technology, already used in Japan, is being used to convert the phone into a “wallet” used for payment and ticketing  applications
• Consider the prototype that came out last year, of a handheld “projector” that could output an image between 50 to 60 inch (that’s right) of acceptable resolution. The target device – the mobile phone.
• Also consider that there is a virtual laser “keyboard” already in the market that can be connected to compatible smartphones. The device projects a full-size keyboard on a flat surface, then uses optical recognition technologies to intercept finger movements and record the keys tapped.
• What’s more, a leading manufacturer has already designed a phone that can double as a “metal detector” – you can now find your lost keys in the sofa and check your visitor for concealed arms at the same time!

The mobile as computer is a fait accompli. The mobile as a pen, a TV remote, a metal detector, m-wallet, a projector….this is happening. To add to the never ending list of possibilities, here is one more that it always was from the beginning…a paperweight!

But seriously, folks…what is the mobile “device” circa 2020, circa 2040? Any projections?