The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Lekhni evaluates the profound stupidity of naming someone as “Tallulah does the hula from Hawaii" and moves on to the implications of imperfect nomenclatures.

It isn’t too long ago that the Canadians famously decreed that their computers cannot distinguish one Amrit Kaur from another, and hence they would not entertain visa requests from ladies having Kaur and Singh as their surname. Thankfully they reprogrammed their computers and retreated.

Fortunately God was not a database admin, else he would have shouted "imperfect unique key" at the sight of such simple and oft occurring names such as mine. Why, most possibly we human beings would be all be reduced to numbers. The simpletons would say "Hi, I 897364926, call me 89". They more style concerned ones would introduce as "Hi, I am 89. 897364926". Idea Cellular guys even perceived this as a great opportunity to get rid of caste and religion differences and ran a very humorous TVC.

Then the Indian politician would almost certainly invent the VIP quota in that too. All numbers ending with two zeroes would either be allotted to ‘VIPs’. For four zeroes you would need some real clout, and not just be another ‘VIP’. For one paltry zero at the end you would need to pay some extra premium at the name registry. Of, course the recommendation from the local ‘leader’, would make sure you get it for sure. In Gulf countries, their would be confusion galore as they read-write left-to-right. When you greet someone as "Hello 43 Sheikh", he’d quickly retort that he’s Thirty-Four Sheikh, not Forty Three Sheikh.

Of course, those numerologically discerning would fight for numbers that add upto 9. Consider Amitabh Bachchan not as as Amitabh Bachchan but 9⁹. (Namaskar 24-36-24ji, Kaun Banega Crorepati se main 9⁹ bol raha hoon. Aapke pati 548266 hamare saamne hot seat par baithe hain") I am quite certain names such as 900009, 636300 would be reserved by parents even before the series is opened. Why, name squatters would do roaring business on Ebay.

The usual icebreakers in Chennai – and I love them – would have to morph and mutate. Today when I meet someone whose name I should know but I don’t, I just greet him as "Hi Bala, Paddy was mentioning about your new house". It turns out to be right, or the person responds, "I am Paddy, you must be meaning that Bala told you about my house?". I quickly grin that I took the names mixed up and get away. Either way you are not sure what his name is, since Bala could be Balamurugan, or Balasubramanyam. And if he’s Paddy, whether he’s Padmanabhan Chelapathi, or Padmanaban Ramamurthy. Either way, I remain completely confused. And wait. In eight out of ten cases Bala or Paddy turn out to be Venkat, actually!

But then I am not complaining. When I was growing up in Delhi, a friendly sardar once introduced himself to me as, "Hi I’m Balwant, you can call me Lovely".

I have been a net freak for quite a while now and don’t let go a single chance to lecture my colleagues and friends on the latest tools and sites that help us do this and do that. I use it like a machine to communicate and buy sell, blog, and occasionally leave scraps and respond to them, and poke people on Facebook. I also admire when Mark Zuckerburg rides the wave of social networking to become a billionaire, but never given a thought beyond that, my skepticism always getting better of my sense to appreciate innovative new business. The social networking thing never touched me, I mean like the way it has , in the last few weeks.

The MBA boys are fairly well connected, and most of them are a phone call away. One did not have to make much effort to create the phonebook, it somehow seems to have happened, via meetings at airports, or when visiting another city. And anyway, Gazab, Padri and Mota all love that old thing called Linkedin, where you invite and accept and then basically do nothing. And precisely how joke forwards in the old boys network can be called as connecting actually beats me.It is somehow integral to the creed to MBAs to ‘hate’ each other and still be in touch! My wife (mercifully, not an MBA, but a more real variety called PhD researcher) has been a die-hard Orkuter who keeps telling me of people she reconnected via Orkut.

Cut to late 2007. The long lost engineering gang starts to emerge. It becomes interesting to see the difference of one person could make to building this connect. Okay, make it two of them. And Tripathi is in Australia, and Binay in Bengal, working as an Indian Railways officer. After digital identities, phone numbers are ascertained, one to another, and I get to be back in touch with several of them. Call it engineering precision.Wow!

Cut to last evening.Via an Orkut scrap, Apurva Mathur, my class mate from Kendriya Vidyalaya , Andrewsganj, New Delhi (we like calling it KVAG) points me to a picture posted on Facebook which is our school farewell picture(Three months back I discovered Apurva Mathur when surfing KVAG community on Orkut at my wife’s insistence). I have long lost the my copy of this photo so this one gets all my attention. I try to recall the names, but Vivek Varma, my newly discovered classmate has taken the pains to list all the names. Not just that, he has tagged couple of them via their Facebook profiles. I was completely overwhelmed to see the picture yesterday. I asked Vivek for his phone number and spoke to him near midnight. We used to travel together to school in the same van, and studied in the same class for 4 years.It was quite unbelievable to hear his voice after so about 19 years. I have been day dreaming this morning and listening mentally to my classroom ruckus, which happened decades back.

Facebook and Orkut – wish your owners another billion dollars. What you have given me is treasure.

PS: What next? My kindergarten friends from Doon Cultural Centre? My early school friends from Prabhat Tara School Muzaffarpur? How will they come to be reconnected to me- via Twitter?

Conference calls are part of life. Serial start-up entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia and Yogesh Patel  run SabSeBolo which is a free conference call solution in India. I have the following wishlist with SabSeBolo:

Slideshow integration: Ability to run slides to all my call participants . Zoho Show and Google Docs have a feature that allows for remote presentation of slides. Can there be a  linkup?  And wow, what a feature enrichment it would be.

More access numbers: SabSeBolo currently provides for access numbers in Mumbai and Bangalore. But then it costs a decent amount of money to call interstate in India. Give us ten more cities.Give us ten more countries too.

SabSeBolo certainly could do with some sharp targetting SMEs, families, NGOs, Alumni Groups with the current offering. I also feel its very long name (it is made up of three Hindi words, literally meaning talk to everyone) could also do with a relook.

Frankly, I never use CNN to follow tech news. But I found this as the lead story few minutes back. A new search engine is coming into existence. Cuil is yet another search engine but this one has a pedigree worth a mention- it is founded by an ex-Googler Anna Pattersen who has earlier sold her company to Google. The business of search just got interesting.

Per TechCrunch, Cuil has massive index and that’s the real hype around Cuil. But one attempt at running a few searches will tell you, it is far from what you would expect. What I found interesting is the rendering, which comes with separate streams of result (networking sites, pictures etc). What is not so exciting are the results. I for example do not exist on Cuil and I could not ascertain whether my blog does!

So is this the Google beater the world has been waiting for?

And what’s the business model? Even the most respected sites are quite on this aspect of Cuil  but one can safely assume when search is around, its application to advertising cannot be far behind? And just btw, has Mr. Ballmer sent his scouts to explore the acquisition rightaway?

If Dr Prahalad’s previous book on BOP kicked up quite a debate, here’s one that you should not forget reading – "The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks" must be read for the brilliance alone. Read more…

If there is one thing I would credit Prahalad and Krishnan for achieving via their latest book, it is to boldly bring Information Technology out of the closet to mainstream corporate strategy. Their book is around innovation and ‘co-creation’ a term used quite liberally in the book. You could read co-creation to mean value generation by collaboration(The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks).

The leitmotif running through the chapters is what Prahalad and Krishnan call the new paradigm of R=G a and N=1. It essentially denotes global access to resources and talents (R=G) and ability to individualize experiences for consumers of various products and services. The R=G quest is generally attributed to optimize material and service costs and N=1 is the ultimate personal buying experience. No firm would have the wherewithal to satisfy the experiences of one customer at a time.They also point out that choice or no choice, the world is gradually moving towards this new paradigm. Think the personalized Google (igoogle.com) or the IT enabled personal tutor teaching math sitting thousands of kilometers away.

The implication of this simple to appear idea appear quite profound upon reflection. This model of getting access to the best resources (Wal-Mart =10 BN USD trade with China) and selling it to buyers they way they would like to buy – mass personalization- call for constant innovation and Prahalad and Krishnan have brought ICT into the central core of this innovation space. The message is very clear – the CEO cannot leave IT backbone of the organization to the CIO, the way he cannot leave the financial health of the organization to the CFO alone. In  other words ICT is not a service, but the core of an organization’s DNA. I like this idea.

The idea that has traditionally held ground is that IT is a cost , a type of price one need to pay to get the business going. Prahalad and Krishnan challenge this notion and emphasize that for innovation that may happen now and for times to come, ICT DNA of the firm need to sing in tandem with the corporate DNA of the company. Very bold indeed. And so marvelously persuasive.

And if you have read Nicolas Carr’s thought-piece ‘Does IT Matter?‘, you have an answer in this book. In simple terms one could say that Nicolas Carr had argued that IT would cease to be the source of competitive advantage since all firms have access to the same IT resources. Prahalad and Krishnan hit back so credibly on this notion and say just the opposite – IT (or ICT) is and would remains the source of competitive advantage. What is also interesting here is that while traditional corporate strategy has thought IT has being synonymous with ERPs, Prahalad and Krishnan notice the unbundling that is happening so rapidly, as one can notice through the applications plugging into Facebook. They also note the reality of the existence of proprietary systems serving the typical needs of  firms.

I really loved this book. If there is some grouse I have with this book it is the long narration on ICICI and ITC’s E-Chaupal- these cannot be cited as example of everything everywhere(BOP, Innovation etc etc) – I am sure there are other firms that have done amazing things worth getting that kind of coverage.

On the whole, very exciting indeed. Must read recommendation from me. And trust me, I had a very conservative take on Dr. Prahalad’s book on BOP.

Have you heard an instance of a dad and son both being bloggers? I learnt about Asit and Aniket Barma, who both hold their point of view via their respective blogs. Read More..

I do not normally comment on blogs per se. But then it is not too commonplace to find two bloggers in the same family, more so belonging to two different generations. The Barmas are an exception.  Asit , who has started blogging recently, while his son Aniket has been blogging since September last year. Blogging seems to bring the excitement of sharing and reliving the happenings irrespective to age , generation and profession.

But then there are differences too. While Aniket has chosen Blogger as his platform to talk about his academics, cricket and so on, for Asit it is hosted WordPress with custom look and feel as the platform of choice. Writing seem to come very naturally to both dad and son though.

Aniket feels the movie Jaane Tu has a great music (Melodious Rock – is it a new genre?!) and recommends the movie to everyone, dad Asit feels impressed enough by Genalia to compare  her to test cricket (vis-a-vis Deepika Padukone who is like T20 as Asit would have us believe). Who says men age!

Asit and Aniket, keep blogging, we are following your blog. I found Asit’s today’s post on his meeting with Syed Kirmani at MMA yesterday quite interesting.

Note: Another family where two generations are bloggers – Rajeev Karwal and Samarth Karwal.

Extremely few companies in India have achieved such an astounding success as Wipro, which was founded as an edible oil company and turned to IT. In fact, people outside India would be surprised to know that Wipro makes childcare products, lighting products etc. It is now a USD 4 BN giant employing nearly hundred thousand employees. Read More..

No, I don’t mean outsourcing as we know it. I merely mean IT adoption and IT readiness in a general sense. It should not surprise that the Global IT Report published by Prof. Soumitra Dutta of Insead business school has Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland as the top three countries in that order. In fact, the list of Top 10 countries in the word has only one large country – USA, which has moved up three notches. The Global IT Report is quite a pointer, since it compares parameters such as ICT environment by looking a regulatory environment and infocomm infrastructure. I am also assuming this report also takes government ICT focus as a parameter to rate.

I am a little surprised not to see India in the list. It has one of the fastest growing ICT industry, and telecom is fairly well regulated. But then, one would not count India as being anywhere near being as network ready as Singapore or Korea which seem to be leading the way.

I liked Insead’s Knowledge portal and strongly recommend a look. I also found case study on Indian Railways here. I wonder how many other B-Schools have the vision to create an external knowledge community like Insead.