The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

As a person who buys loves to buy books every now and then, I have faced a constant nag. The stores in the town sell books that in their judgment, will move. They are not necessarily the books that match my taste or are the best. There are many occasions I just spend considerable time in a store and decide there’s nothing worthwhile to buy.Quite simply, there is not a single place where I can know about books, discuss them, and buy them right there.Not upto now at least.

My quest to know about books on marketing, business in general, great companies, business legends and so on got me connected to Shelfari some months back. Social networking to me till that point only meant leaving a few Orkuts scraps in iNcOmPrEhEnSiBlE blob of words and so on. Gradually I started following Shelfari and though I do notice that the level of action is not very high, I love the site for the books specific focus and the ability to have user provided reviews, discussions etc. If you are half sure on a title, ask ‘do you suggest I buy this book’ to folks who own that title.

It was announced today that Shelfari is has followed Skype into being another web property to be acquired by Amazon. Shelfari has seemingly good synergy and complimentary offerings with Amazon book section. It will be safe to assume that Amazon would use the social elements of Shelfari platform to generate book sales. Amazon would be able to tap discussions on books, see get to see early on demand being created by user generated reviews and ratings, opinions and discussions.Book lovers would almost certainly be able to buy those books there. Is social networking taking a new meaning here? Would Amazon use this platform to make people chat on other merchandise it sells?

Logical query: Are we going to see domain specific social networking sites getting consolidated by large ‘downstream’ or ‘upstream’ or ‘proximate’ players’?

I am being a little audacious in making an emphatic pronouncement on something that has got an amazing hype in India in last few days. But somehow all the hype does not  generate any great confidence in likelihood of  Apple iPhone being any great success in India. Here’s why I feel so:

1. Of course, the price, it is obscene(NDTV’s Vikram Chandra felt it was only ‘slightly expensive’ though!).
2. SMS is important for Indian mobile users, unlike the US where it is possible to come across many business executives who do not  use SMS. The iPhone is not crafted for heavy SMS usage. 
3. Yes, I know iPhone is not a  phone for business executives, but then that’s another reason in favour of my argument.
4. Far superior cameras are available in phones in 15 K range.
5. We do not love buying digital music so much. If we want, it is generally available,you know what I mean. iTunes what?
6. Operator bundling militates against our nature. In a city like Chennai and most part of India, we have three to four GSM service providers. It makes us feel lot of freedom and surrendering that choice does not go with our nature, it is all in the mind.
7. iPhone versus iPhone- Bunty can buy the iPhone in Amrika, get it unlocked on the corner-shop and use it in Patiala. Hello, Bunty is already using it- Why should he pay so much more to buy from India? And he can use it with any operator.Can Apple handle this channel conflict without relooking at the price?
8. Timing wise, August is not the time Indians are in great mood to spend big monies. That happens to be Diwali and around.That’s when the best launches tend to work. 
9. Apple is otherwise pretty much unknown commodity in India. Apple? 
10. 3G? No comments.

Did not surprise me that there are no pictures of any queues outside stores last night. BTW, do you agree with the above?

Almost all publicly listed and traded companies have a department that’s usually called investor relations or like. Their job is to ensure appropriate shareholder communication. Investor relations is a crafted art and normally speaking, companies are very careful about any form of communication between investors and management – casual conversations are a strict no, all that is to be spoken is prepared and rehearsed. The fright of of the investor relations team also hovers around what the management bosses would possibly  start to talk  on their blog – something that has a bearing on the stock, or seen to be having a bearing on the stock. Agencies such as Securities and Exchange Commission (US) and SEBI usually frown on communication that violate of the stated and unstated guidelines on shareholder communication. Enter the new SEC.

Via Ebay’s official blog, we learn that SEC in US has introduced new guidelines and recognized the social dimension of communication.

“The last time the SEC issued guidance in this area, the idea of ’social networks’ hadn’t yet been developed, and creating a social network where shareholders could meet and exchange views was barely imaginable,” said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox.” Ongoing developments in technology have increased both the markets’ and investors’ demand for more timely company disclosure on the Web, and in turn, raised new securities law issues for public companies to consider. The guidance issued today clarifies the rules of the road so investors can gain — quickly and in a cost-effective manner — the benefits of Internet disclosure of the latest information on the companies they own or are considering buying.”

Clearly this goes a mile. The issue here appears interactive nature of blog format which allowed for two way communication and content was not static. It also does away with the requirement of a communication to acquire a printer-friendly format, which means an investor communication could even be blogpost, a Tweet, or multimedia film, or a flash based slides. Awesome.In one stroke, SEC gave a big leg-up to faster communication. When will the rest of the world adopt this?

Read my favorite CEO Blog- Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz is an old time blogger Why, his General Counsel Mile Dillion blogs too. Mike should be relieved at the above developments.

Ashish Sinha of PluGGd.in noted over a tweet yesterday morning that Ebay India does about a transaction a minute. That makes it 1440 transactions a day and considering that many of these transactions would be not so high in value, the daily turnover of Ebay India would appear pathetically lamentable. That is the state of a country of a billion people and often billed as IT powerhouse.

Sadly, as I noted earlier, it is the smaller countries in the world that are the best wired today. But then online commerce is not just about net penetration alone.The Tweet debate with Mayank Gupta  and Ashish was whether it is true that  the inhibiting factor is the Indian attitude to touch and feel buying, rather than click and buying. I do not think this is completely true. We as investors in securities, do massive online trading, hold our shares electronically and so on. We buy airline and train tickets online and many of us buy books and music online too.  Why, India could be an example of how matrimonial sites do roaring business with Shaadi and Bharatmatrimony setting a trend. And there are several sites doing property and property rental brokerages such as MagicBricks and 99Acres and so on. The numbers may be small, regionally skewed towards south India, but certainly. The story is different in consumer durables, such as white goods, furniture etc.

The press release from Income Tax Department points out that over 1.25 lmillion annual tax returns were filed electronically- returnees either did it themselves, or relied on an accountant to do so. That’s certainly a good baby step in doing things online. The point to note is that while the net subscriber base has not taken off as envisaged, the mobile operators continue to add a million subscribers a month. Add the 3G spectrum auction news and you come to conclude that online commerce in India would perhaps take off via the mobiles.

I raise this question not because I feel that Managers should love technology. I raise this because Prahalad and Krishnan have convincingly established the centrality of the role of IT in an enterprise. They even recommend that the CEO should personally get involved in design of the core IT architecture of his enterprise. That begs the question – how many of today’s managers would consider the thought of getting involved with IT palatable?

When I was B-School student, the guys who were somewhat shy of accounting and finance took refuge by opting for all marketing options. I was one of them. The assumption was that once into marketing, there are no great money related numbers to be seen and worried about – all we had to do was to churn out excellent branding collaterals. And how wrong those notions were! Speaking to any marketing or sales professional would corroborate that they deal in money related number crunching as the ‘core Fin’ guys. ‘Where’s the data?‘ and ‘What is the projected contribution?’ becomes key questions to plan and initiate any new marketing or sales activity. So in effect, we go back to the professor’s advice that Marketing guys need to be reasonably good in Finance too.

Not just that, the best CEOs (and budding CEOs)are known to have excellent command of their company’s finances- don’t leave it to the CFO seems to be the mantra. That brings us to what Prahalad and Krishnan advise to the CEOs- don’t leave your enterprise’s tech DNA to the CIO alone- get involved yourself! That’s precisely my question – how can the managers get over their fear of technology around them. Even the most adventurous managers find it difficult to setup mail on their laptop , configure a printer, locate a mail or backup their phone contacts – why, how to even set-up a browser proxy!!  How can they lead their enterprise tomorrow when IT is supposed to the centerpiece of innovation of tomorrow’s corporation?!!!

One gap that comes to my mind is at education level. Not many institutions force their students to integrate IT into their academics. Not too many of them even have the wherewithal of teaching a cost/benefit and risk evaluation of single instance ERP versus multiple instances. Nor to explain the benefit of grounds up application suitability to packages. The least they can help develop some code and language comfort. Facebook wouldn’t have emerged from Harvard otherwise.

The second gap clearly appears at structured training programmes. The Management Trainees are rotated in Sales,HR, Finance, Marketing, sourcing etc, but generally  one does not come across companies where MTs are made to do an OS install – that’s the technicians job who sits in the corner room.  Nor are they expected to calculate the Airconditioning load of server rooms. Not to compute the ROI of a new IT initiative. This, despite them using IT driven products (personal technology items such as laptops, mobiles, corporate applications) all the time, it is not something that a manager should dirty is hand.It is an attitudinal thing.

Would the next wave of business leaders break this mould? Not just because Prahalad and Krishnan expect them to do so, but because in my judgment, it appears such a natural thing. Would it happen though?

Related link:

Prahalad and Krishnan Bring IT Out of the Closet

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value through Global Networks by C.K Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan

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?

I clicked this picture in the parking outside my office -I found it simple and crisp. I am not talking more, let the ad talk for itself – see below.

The medium of communication – copy on a tyre – provides an instant connect with the service being promoted, which is tyre puncture (or flat tire) repair service with a mobility. The placement of the ad in the parking area is just apt.The ad is not loaded with unnecessary detail. I was amazed by this intelligent ad! Do we really need to outsource creativity or necessarily expect only gurus to come up with brilliant advertising?!!

Okay, I agree I have been giving too much of this blog’s prime real estate to the Times of India upcoming launch in Chennai. Not that I have a great love for current day TOI, but as a graduate of marketing, I feel competition in this media would make the readers great benefits. And yes, I would get to see my childhood newspaper, in my city.

To be fair, others have tried to challenge the Hindu in Chennai , the Deccan Chronicle and the New Indian Express are there too, but have not been able to come up anywhere near the market leader.

As I suspected, the outdoor action has started. I noticed this advertising hoarding yesterday on my way to office. The traffic at the Turnbulls Road curve was standstill, giving ample time to click this snap.  While it does not say about what product it is advertising, the hints are that it is a Times of India ad, which is seeking attention and acting as the teaser for something to follow. The artwork is a collage of some newspaper, presumably, the TOI. The copy is simple "Next Change?". This ad is all over Chennai.

Not that market leader and Chennai’s very own, the Hindu is sitting quiet. The Kasturba Nagar metro station, whose walls are generally plastered by all kinds of cell phone service ads, is finally yielding its walls to others, and a very sober and tempered Hindu ad has made its way there.

I do not have a great picture of the Hindu ad and if I do get one, I would surely put it here. BTW, what are folks at Deccan Chronicle and New Indian Express upto, meanwhile? At a strategy level, perhaps allow these two titans to fight it out, and stay out of the punching line of both of them, whatsay ??

While International Media Group IDG has brought one of its most popular IT publications for managers CIO, subscribing to it is a pain. The first issue of CIO India was published in Nov 2005 and according to IDG, currently distributes 6000 copies across India. I wonder who gets them.

Having followed US edition of CIO (It is absolutely first rate) for a while now, I was quite delighted to know there is an Indian edition too. However, try to subscribe to a paper copy. First, there is no concept of paid subscription. One need to register a request for a print subscription, and that begins an endless wait to hear whether your subscription was approved or not. (I registered in May 2007 and am still waiting to hear back from them!). And no, CIO does not sell off the shelf, it only comes into your letter box.

I wish this subscription request and acceptance process is improved significantly if CIO India has to indeed make a mark. I have sent multiple emails over the last three quarters and followed it up with phone calls to their Bangalore office, nothing happens. You don’t even get a mail saying the subscription was not approved.

One fix is to introduce paid subscription too, so those who want it (me!) go ahead with it.

PS: I wish Computerworld is here too, soon enough and let there be a paid subscription too.