I spent some time looking at Google Trends for IT Services companies with a very modest ambition. To see if they will say something interesting at a glance.

Two takeaways. One, financial performance matters: While interest in all IT companies seem to be waning, there’s a big fall for the companies whose financial performance, specifically growth rate, is poor. All these companies employ more people than they did in 2005, have more customers and earn more. The big change is in the speed at which they were growing. Two, locations matter: For Infosys and Wipro, the two Bangalore based companies which have their biggest centres in Bangalore, there’s a high level of interest in Karnataka. For the other three, predominant interest is from Chennai. It’s not about where the top managers sit. Neither TCS nor Cognizant is headquartered in Chennai, but both have their biggest centres there.

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

European Market: Are IT companies there yet?
Social, Cloud, Mobility, Analytics and Big Data – the commonly heard buzz words might be the big drivers of growth for IT companies in the future, but right now almost every analyst I have spoken to say three segments are the key: remote infrastructure, platform-based BPO and Europe. If you want growth in the next couple of years, it’s likely to come from these.

Media focus is increasingly on Europe. A recent Economic Times report quoted a Nasscom official who said at least 20 European R&D facilities have been set up in India in the last one year. And at least 3000 jobs were created by new centres started by European firms. These numbers are important because it shows European companies are increasingly comfortable with offshoring, moving work overseas, even if it’s not to a third party firm. A bigger scale outsourcing could follow. A Mint report today says for many companies Europe is growing faster than US. But, then again, the base is smaller. The next few quarters will give a clearer signal.

Also of interest
4 Ways Eye-Tracking Technology Will Change Our Lives | Popular Mechanics

But these implementations of eye-tracking tech are mere gimmicks compared with what the future of eye tracking will hold, including changes to the way we drive, play, read, and, of course, advertise

Uninor to rope in auto drivers, milkmen to sell SIMs, recharge | Business Line / PTI 

The project has kicked off with 10 auto rickshaws in Pune as a pilot. This number will soon be scaled up to 40 such auto-rickshaws.

The Muse’s Kathryn Minshew: Tech Needs More Visible Female Role Models | Xconomy 

“In the Valley it was often very hard for us to get perspectives of people who were not in tech,” Minshew said. Returning to New York offered the advantage, she said, of access to more diverse industries.

The Naked and the TED | The New Republic 

Evgeny Morozov’s scathing review of Parag & Ayesha Khanna’s book Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization

The recipe is simple. Find some peculiar global trend—the more arcane, the better. Draw a straight line connecting it to the world of apps, electric cars, and Bay Area venture capital. Mention robots, Japan, and cyberwar. Use shiny slides that contain incomprehensible but impressive maps and visualizations. Stir well. Serve on multiple platforms.

The myth of Inbox Zero and the path to peace of mind | Gigaom 

… so long as opportunities exist or work is in progress, your backlog of to-dos will always be greater than zero, no matter how you track them, define them, or how quickly you complete them.

 

Consider. Its revenues have been growing faster than the industry average, when companies such as Infosys and Wipro are struggling with growth. Its profitability has gone up in the recent quarters, surprising many industry analysts. While its peers are struggling with huge bench, its employee utilisation rates are around 80%. As a result, its employee productivity, measured by revenue per employee, has been going up. (For others it has been coming down).

The market has responded positively to all these. In the last one year, HCL Tech has done better even than TCS in NSE. On the top of all these sits its philosophy of ‘Employees First’, also the title of a book written by its former CEO Vineet Nayar.

A story in the latest issue of Forbes India argues that a closer look at the performance and the philosophy gives the answer to this paradox. While HCL has been growing faster than the industry, the growth has been primarily driven by Infrastructure management, which has a different business model compared to regular IT Services and requires different skill sets. (Even the designations are different.)

Similarly, while ‘Employees First’ philosophy gives an impression that the company gives primacy to employee satisfaction, it’s in fact about employee contribution. The philosophy came out of the recognition that a company creates value in the zone where an employee engages with the customer. Employee first approach is about helping employees to create that value. So, there’s no point in hiring an employee, when he will have no job to do, or for that matter keeping an employee in the bench.

HCL’s recent results were in line with this analysis. Its growth continued to be driven by infrastructure management. (And software services segment grew only marginally – by 1% compared to previous quarter, and by 4.8% compared to same quarter last year.) Its headcount addition is minimal. Its attrition rates are high. But, its revenue per employee numbers shine.

Is it a good thing? In one way, it is. After all, it’s not just HCL Tech, but the entire IT Services industry is trying hard to move to a non-linear model. IT managers across companies believe that linear growth (where hiring goes up in proportion with revenues) is unsustainable. Now, HCL Tech’s numbers show it’s able to get more revenues with less number of people.

While that seems to answer one question, it raises a bigger question of whether it’s sustainable. Kotak Securities is among the firms that are skeptical about this. In a note it wrote to its clients just after the results, it said: “We remain cautious on the company’s business model and find the profitability of the company unsustainable. Seemingly inexpensive multiples have to be seen against the backdrop of high risk business model and unsustainable margins.”

The key question about HCL Tech is not whether it’s getting more contracts in infrastructure management, but whether it has anything beyond infrastructure. It’s in this context that employee metrics are important.

Mint reports, some directors on Infosys board want the search for its next CEO “to include external candidates because the company’s current management is struggling to regain its past glory.”

So far, top Indian IT companies have shown preference for internal candidates. N Chandarasekaran, who took over from S Ramadorai, is a TCS veteran who started his career there. Francisco D’Souza’s story is no different. He was hired by Dun & Bradstreet from Carnegie Mellon, when Cognizant was its IT arm. The joke about Infosys is that it not only prefers internal candidates, but it wants them to be from the close circle of founders.

In someways having an internal candidate is good. An insider typically understands the culture and knows his/her way around. It says something nice about the company – developing future leaders and having a good long term succession plan are good management practices. In fact, some studies suggest that, in general, internal candidates outperform external candidates. A 2009 study by James S. Ang of Florida State University and Gregory Leo Nagel of Middle Tennessee State Universitym which looked at CEO transitions in a 30 year period concluded that “in large firms, internal hires provide significantly higher median performance, equal chance of the highest performance, and lesser chance of low performance….. In the aggregate, internally promoted CEOs are associated with at least 25.4% greater total financial performance than external hires”

So, should Infy stick to internal candidates? The answer is ‘No’.

The question to ask about Infosys is not whether internal CEOs, in general, are better than external CEOs, but whether internal CEOs are better than external CEOs for a company that is underperforming?

A study by Ayşe Karaevli of Sabancı University and Edward J. Zajac of Kellog says external candidates tend to do well in companies with a recent history of poor performance. “In these circumstances, it is common for the board to replace a CEO in order to stimulate change. Outsider CEOs — with the fresh knowledge and perspective that they typically bring to the company — can usually make that change more easily. Poor performance is also likely to make it easier for the new outsider CEO to overcome internal resistance to change initiatives,” they wrote.

–

Some were surprised that Saturday’s post on Infosys sounded so positive when the numbers clearly say Infosys is struggling. The piece was not about the performance of the company, but about signs of change in the management commentary. And I argued there are positive changes. The big question is whether Infy’s management will take these initial statements and steps to their logical conclusion. Here are three things to look for: a. clarity on guidance b. more acquisitions and partnerships c. status of the innovation fund, and similar initiatives. (As of employee dissatisfaction – it’s to a large extent tied to the performance of the company, one of the points that Phil Rosenzweig makes in his superb book The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers.)

–

Now, an external candidate, free from any baggage, would push such steps forward faster. The question before the present management is whether they would demonstrate that quality in the coming quarters.

Zynga’s Mark Pincus on mobile
If there was one big message from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus during his visit to India last Wednesday, it was that its future is in mobile. Zynga is of course best known for its facebook game Farmville. It has since been trying to carve an identity for itself separate from Facebook. But, as it is for Facebook, its success depends on how well it can make people play Zynga games on mobile devices. Pincus believes the answer is in making the games more social. It’s slowly making some inroads into that space. WSJ reports that one of its iPhone games “What’s The Phrase,” has hit the top 10 on App stores after a long time.

Bitcoin: stories you shouldn’t miss
Bitcoin got more attention when its value plunged in a very short time, than it got when its value went up in a short time, which says something about our fascination with falls and failures. Here are a few pieces on Bitcoin I found interesting

Never Mind Facebook; Winklevoss Twins Rule in Digital Money | Dealbook

The Winklevosses say this week’s tumult is just growing pains for a digital currency that they believe will become a sort of gold for the technorati. “People say it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s a bubble,” said Cameron Winklevoss. “People really don’t want to take it seriously. At some point that narrative will shift to ‘virtual currencies are here to stay.’ We’re in the early days.” More

How Do You Order A Beer With Bitcoins? | Popular Science

The Bitcoiners want to be ready for the future, however unlikely it is that Bitcoins will actually be used in it. Without physical currency, there’s no real reason to round off your bill to the tenth or hundredth place, and as Bitcoins rise in value (they hit $400 this week for a brief moment, then plummeted), fractional Bitcoins become more and more everyday. More

Unfazed By Bitcoin’s Wild Swings And Mysterious Origins, Silicon Valley VCs Place Their Bets | Techcrunch

“My feeling is that Bitcoin has moved away from nerdy tech types and is now attracting more of the finance and Wall Street types,” said Jered Kenna, who just re-launched TradeHill, a Bitcoin exchange targeted at accredited investors and high-net worth individuals. After launching a few weeks ago, he says he’s had investors open accounts and individually send in more than $1 million to buy Bitcoin. More

Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster | Bloomberg

Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour (a little higher than the U.S. average, lower than some high cost areas like California). That, of course, is in addition to the money devoted to buying and building the mining rigs. The site estimates the profits from the day of mining at about $681,000, based on the current value of Bitcoins. So mining, at least for the moment, is a lucrative business. More

Also of interest:

• Ahead of the curve: but bendable screens still seek breakthrough | Reuters
• Hawking: Mankind has 1,000 years to escape Earth | RT
• You Lookin’ at Me? Reflections on Google Glass | AllThingsD

On Friday, a day after Karnataka celebrated Ugadi or new year, Infosys said it would grow slower than the industry in the coming year – at 6-10% compared to Nasscom projections of 12-14%. It didn’t give EPS (earnings per share) guidance. Just last quarter, it seemed as if the company would meet its full year guidance. It didn’t. Its shares were down 20%, the biggest fall since 2003.

As in the last several quarters, Infosys blamed the macroeconomic environment for its performance and sought more time for its new strategy based on products and platforms to yield results. Infosys CEO SD Shibulal tends to repeat his key message in the form of a phrase or a word. Yesterday, the word was ‘volatility’.

But there were also signs that Infosys has changed tack.

For long, the stock market loved Infosys, and in some ways, Infosys played to its whims. It’s most evident in the way the company outperformed its own guidance. Its annual revenues went ahead of its guidance by more than 10% in four out of last 12 years. Contrast it with Wipro, which doesn’t have to pander to market the way Infosys does, because Azim Premji owns most of it. Here’s how the chart looks like.

So, what’s wrong with stepping on the guidance treadmill? It consumes a lot of management time and energy, it shifts the attention to short term, and studies suggest, it doesn’t even result in higher valuation. Some years ago, McKinsey looked the scene and found that the costs of earning guidance outweighed the benefits. It wrote

When Coca-Cola stopped issuing guidance, in late 2002, its executives had concluded that providing short-term results actually prevented management from focusing meaningfully on strategic initiatives to build its business and succeed over the long term. Instead of indicating weak earnings, Gary Fayard (who was then CFO) believed that the move signaled a renewed focus on long-term goals.

In fact, some leaders have gone a step further and even questioned the practice of quarterly reports: Unliver’s Paul Polman, writing in Forbes India’s 3rd Anniversary issue argued ‘The requirement to report back to investors every 90 days distorts behaviour and priorities. It is absurd for complex multinational companies to have to invest huge amounts of time preparing detailed income and margin statements every quarter.’

The good news is Infosys seems to be taking some baby steps towards it. A few quarters ago, it stopped issuing quarterly earnings guidance, and this quarter it declined to give EPS guidance. (Even its revenue guidance has a rather wide range of 6-10%. (Another unrelated move, but philosophically in the same direction, is its decision to increase the fixed component of employees’ salary. It reinforces long term thinking.)

Shibulal insists that the reason for not giving quarterly guidance, and for keeping its annual guidance under such a broad band is the lack of visibility. But, the strains of having to answer questions on the market reaction is clearly showing on the management. It’s not clear if they will decide to stop giving guidance, but the direction seems to be towards that.

The second change is about the story they have been telling the investors – of being an industry leader in growth and margins. Now, there is always a trade-off between growth and margins. (Cognizant, for example, traded some of its margins to consistently deliver industry leading growth.) When IT outsourcing had a huge underlying momentum, Infosys, justifiably, turned its efforts towards margins. Its processes were good, its spend on sales and marketing was optimal and it could even say ‘no’ to certain types of projects. However, when that momentum got lost in financial crisis, Infosys struggled to shift to other cylinders of growth – of getting market share through better pricing, or buying companies or getting into partnerships with them. It was not so much about the ability of the management to shift as it was the mindset.

The press conference yesterday indicated that there is a change in this mindset. Growth, Shibulal said, is one of the best ways to get margins. (In fact, he repeated the growth mantra so many times that a journalist asked if the company would from now on go full fledged after growth). While he used to speak of acquisitions as ‘falling in love’, he spoke about it as a strategic choice to pursue growth. That the company acquired Lodestone last year (besides being more open to partnerships), gives his statement credence. There is still reluctance to spend on front-end marketing (Its sales and general administration expenses as a percentage of sales continues to be low). However, its competitors say it has gotten more aggressive on pricing and taking up projects with skewed cash-flows.

At Infosys, the traditional tightfistedness about acquisitions naturally extended to how it saw investments even within the company. At least two former senior executives told me that it has never been easy to get a new initiative approved by the top management. Even when it decides to go ahead with an initiative, getting a big budget for it can be frustrating. There is a sign that it’s changing too. Infosys announced its setting aside $100 million for a fund that would incubate ideas from within and invest in ideas from outside. By no means is this idea radical, but it certainly indicates a clear deviation from the conservative approach to new initiatives.

While all these are good signs, it’s important to remember why they got lost on the observers. For two reasons. One is the management’s broader commentary on the economy and demand situation today. It’s volatile. Mangers across the world and across sectors tend to underspend when there’s uncertainty, and that’s showing on IT demand. It’s especially harsh on Infosys because of its portfolio mix. Shibulal loses no opportunity to point out that close to a third of company’s revenue depend on discretionary spending compared to about 15% for the industry as a whole. Second, the company also made it clear products and platforms cannot suddenly start driving its growth. It will take time.

Yet, these signs are important because they indicate how the company hopes to steer the ship till then.

Also read:

Will Infosys Make a Comeback? by Sudin Apte – from our Big Questions of 2012 edition.
Has Infy’s new strategy started delivering? - written after last quarter results.

Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman, Happiest Minds (Mallikarjun Katakol for Forbes India)

When Ashok Soota announced his plans to start a company called Happiest Minds, a week after quitting Mindtree around this time two years ago, the reaction was one of skepticism. Even though he was a respected figure in IT circles, Soota was well past retirement age. (He was 70 then). Besides, the industry was undergoing one of its roughest patches. It had lost its momentum, and the incumbents were chasing growth by cutting prices, grabbing others’ market shares or trying to buy smaller companies. What could a start-up do? Albert Hieronimus, Soota’s successor at Mindtree in a Business Standard interview said: “The question he has to answer is if the world needs another MindTree.”

Happiest Minds has just finished its first full year of operations, and Soota said he will soon give an update on how it has fared so far. It’s not a listed firm, and I am not sure if we will get detailed financial results. However, we will get a sense of how right or wrong his critics were. In fact, some details of his strategy have emerged in the last few quarters..

One. Soota was not exactly trying to set up yet another Mindtree, or for that matter, yet another IT Services company. He looked at the market in a more granular fashion, and focussed on specific parts of IT Services that promised to grow faster, the emerging technologies such as cloud, mobility, social, big data and analytics. There are eye-popping numbers from Gartner and McKinsey about the scale of the opportunity, but they are irrelevant for a start-up. Suffice to say, these segments are growing fast, and Happiest Minds doesn’t exactly suffer undue disadvantage for being a new player.

Two, Soota has now started expanding to adjacent areas that promise growth, with a specific kind of positioning. A case in point is its recent announcement of setting up engineering R&D services. Sandeep Agarwal, who is heading this division says, it’s an example of how it all integrates. On one hand, there’s a growing demand for smarter devices. (For example, a weighing machine that will automatically send the measurements to your phone; or an accelerometer that will sync with another machine that reads your pulse rate.) On the other, Happiest Minds has been putting its resources behind cloud, analytics, mobility etc. Agarwal’s division is now building business cases bringing these two together. Smaller companies tend to do these better.

Finally, these two elements sit on the back of Soota’s reputation as an industry veteran and his heavy duty rolodex. The combination has helped attract talent, get VC investments (Canan Partners is an investor) , and create the impression that while the company is young, the resources behind it come with a long experience.

Does all these mean it’s time for skeptics to eat their words. It’s too early to say. Soota has not always got its calls right. Mindtree’s misstep of trying to get into making mobile handsets is attributed to him. But, with Happiest Minds, he seems to have taken all the steps in the right direction. Whether he has been walking or sprinting, we will know soon.

There must be something instructive about Bitcoin crossing $100 in value on April Fool’s day.

For the skeptics, the virtual currency system always had an aura of a Ponzi scheme. No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto, the designer of the Bitcoin network, is (or for that matter, who ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ are, for it could be a group). Despite the media attention, the number of users is pretty small. (There are close to 11 million Bitcoins in circulation today). Its value has been as volatile as Virender Sehwag‘s batting in the recent matches, even if the broad direction seems to be upwards. There is a good chance that many see bitcoin merely as a speculative investment. Buy it today, and you can always sell it to a greater fool tomorrow.

But, Bitcoin has a primary use, a more important role to play – as a medium of transaction. Its unique features – it is anonymous, secure, not regulated by governments/central banks, and it is low cost since it bypasses banks/third parties – have made it the go-to currency for certain types of markets online, such as gambling. In future, there will be more such applications. However, all these don’t explain why its value tripled in just a month, and crossed $100 on April Fool’s day.

(For more on Bitcoin, check out this old piece by James Suroweicki in Technology Review  and a recent piece on an exchange that handles 76% of bitcoin trading in The Verge.)

Three views on batteries

Somehow, when talking about gadgets, battery life has become at best the fourth of fifth thing you mention. It shouldn’t be. It should be the very first. At this point, it’s the only thing that matters. ~ Gizmodo

 

 

Because battery capacity hasn’t improved much over the years, the batteries themselves have gotten bigger, limiting how thin and light phones can be. Meanwhile, technologies like 1080p screens and wireless screen mirroring have been hamstrung by batteries that can’t keep up. Bad battery life can be an Achilles’ heel for otherwise solid phones; by the time you realize your phone’s battery stinks, it might be too late to send it back to the store. ~ Time

I think the research in the world is largely misdirected. What I mean by that is that the conventional approach for battery research is: ‘Let’s find the coolest chemistry. And then we publish the paper and somebody else should figure out how to make this device cheaper.’ ~ Donald R. Sadoway , John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mint

Also of Interest

• Steve Jobs’ long shadow: Gascón said Foulkes discussed the long and laborious process of researching and producing a kill-switch technology for devices, and also said the next two generations of iPhones have already been developed. “They preceded Tim Cook,” the district attorney said he was told of the future iPhones.  | SH Examiner
• More competition for Dropbox: Amazon turns Cloud Drive into a Dropbox rival with file syncing | Arstechnica
• Siri, the salesman: Nuance hopes its voice-recognition tech can produce mobile ads that you actually want to have a conversation with. | Technology Review
• Today’s joke, tomorrow’s reality: Google Nose is not really a joke | Fortune
• Cool It: Is the Internet Too Hot for Data Centers to Handle? Scientific American

Today, Economic Times reports that Polaris approached L&T Infotech and Wipro to see if they would buy its IT services business (The Chennai-based company also has product and cloud businesses). None of the three players have confirmed.

Polaris management has been trying to restructure the business for sometime now, hoping to unlock shareholder value. Its Price to Earnings ratio has been hovering around 5. Mindtree, which is just behind Polaris in Nasscom’s ranking, has a P/E of 17. A Times of India story last month said Arun Jain, who founded Polaris and has been at its helm through its rough and eventful journey, “plans to retain the software products business with $100 million turnover and plans to scale it up rapidly.”

TCS is now second largest employer in IT Services globally
Here are some interesting numbers from Mint report

TCS Versus Infosys
Mint very gently suggests that Infosys is getting a little more aggressive. It has become more flexible in its pricing, and has become a little more open with partnerships. (The Bangalore based company has entered into a partnership with IPSoft). And, in a report last week, JP Morgan said TCS might be going in the opposite direction. Reason: In the last four years, there has been no notable acquisitions. Till we have more evidence, it’s best to see these views as a reflection of desires and concerns, rather than of real action on ground.

H1-B Visa Lottery
The idea that life is a lottery has been around for sometime, and it’s gaining ground in the recent years. (Billionaire Warren Buffett often talks about ovarian lottery. Model Cameron Russell’s speech on winning genetic lottery has gone viral). So, there’s something philosophical about the news that US will give out its H1-B Visas through lotteries, first time since 2008. More

Also of interest

A Kickstarter project that you might be interested in: Runner Without A Country. By Bill Gallagher. A documentary about refugee Guor Marial, the Olympic marathon runner who ran in the London 2012 Olympics without a country.

AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka says a lot about the big trend on the web when he writes: Is this an attempt at an attention-grabbing way of summarizing an extensively reported story someone else produced? Yep! And am I going to (respectfully) aggregate the rest of this piece? Of course!

• Toronto doctor turns his iPhone into ‘field microscope’ that can detect intestinal worms for less than $10 | National Post
• Why Computing Won’t Be Limited By Moore’s Law. Ever | Read Write
• Six Questions To Ask Before Dropping Out Of College To Become An Entrepreneur  | Forbes
• How the Higgs Boson Might Spell Doom for the Universe | Scientific American
• Michael Dell Said to Consider Blackstone LBO Only With CEO Guarantee | Bloomberg

The news that TCS is close to signing a Rs 1,100 crore systems integration contract  from India Post, just a week after Infosys bagging deal to manage the postal network’s rural operations underlines the increasing importance of domestic market for Indian IT companies. Domestic market was largely ignored by Indian IT players till IBM woke everyone up by signing a huge deal with Airtel. These days hardly any analyst meet or press conference winds up without a reference to performance in Indian market. The conversations, however, are mostly around IT Services and not around BPO. Are there indications that it will change?

I recently spoke to Pavan Vaish, who co-founded Daksh, a BPO, and continued to head it for about 10 years after selling it to IBM. (Another co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal went on to found Helion, a VC firm). Pavan is now the global COO of a legal process outsourcing company called UnitedLex. Mr Vaish said it will remain an IT Services story, rather than a BPO story, for a few more years. In fact some global players who tried tapping the domestic BPO market had to pull back their efforts, he said.

Dell deal: Three bids; three questions
The Dell buy back deal is getting more and more interesting. Bloomberg reports, “Dell Inc. said it got proposals from Blackstone Group LP (BX) and Carl Icahn that may be superior to Michael Dell’s $24.4 billion buyout plan, putting pressure on the founder to sweeten his terms or switch allegiances.”

Here’s a quick summary

Growing up in the Knowledge Society
Leela Fernandes reviews  Nicholas Nisbett’s book in Economic and Political Weekly:

Growing up in the Knowledge Society presents an ethnographic study of the ways in which individual middle-class men interact with and are shaped by the IT industry in their daily lives. The book locates itself within scholarly debates on the knowledge society and approaches the IT industry through an anthropological lens that focuses on the cultural dimensions of technological change. In particular, the book identifies cybercafés and IT training institutes as sites that serve as social and cultural spaces for the negotiation of the identities, social relationships and aspirations of young middle-class men. The book provides a detailed analysis of the spatial organisation and varied sociocultural practices associated with Bangalore’s cybercafés.

I haven’t read the book myself, but the reference to IT training institutes and cybercafes make the research seem somewhat dated. There was a time when these two defined the growth of IT. No longer.

Also of interest

Yahoo buys Summly

• Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO), the largest U.S. Web portal, is buying Summly, a mobile startup run by a 17-year-old, for about $30 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction. ~ Bloomberg
• Got a tech idea and want to make a fortune before you’re out of your teens? Just do it, is the advice of the London schoolboy who’s just sold his smartphone news app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. ~ Reuters

Google expands TV White Space trial in South Africa

• White space has the advantage that low frequency signals can travel longer distances. The technology is well suited to provide low cost connectivity to rural communities with poor telecommunications infrastructure, and for expanding coverage of wireless broadband in densely populated urban areas. ~ Google

Zynga ropes in Lazard analyst Atul Bagga

• The gaming company looks to have snapped up Atul Bagga, an analyst formerly of Lazard Capital Markets, to be the new VP of finance at Zynga, according to a recent change in Bagga’s LinkedIn profile. ~ AllThingsD

Blackberry CEO on smartphones

• “To me, this is not just the next smartphone. This has the power of a laptop. This is not just a smartphone anymore. This is your personal computing power. Think about what you can do with that. How many personal computing devices do you carry? Why not unify this to one device that executes all your computing needs?” ~ BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins to ABC news

Why choices aren’t always good

• “Search-amplified risk”: the more options put in front of someone, the more they overestimate their chances of a jackpot. The participants with the large number of choices searched more, and ended up seeing the “risky” events more frequently, but didn’t look into it enough to find the probability of actually winning.  ~ Popular Science

5 big opportunities in mobile

• Thousands of startup companies see mobile computing as their chance to strike it big. Technology Review’s top picks.

a) the context in which the ‘research crisis’ descended on India’s premier engineering institutes (They were founded in that phase of India’s industrial growth in which PhDs were not the top priority, and the industries did not provide IITs an incentive to focus on research),

b) the way IITs are responding to this challenge  (which seems to be typical of any organisation: throw more resources at it. And in this case, since the problem is defined in terms of numbers (‘too few PhDs’), the solution seems all the more relevant),

and c) the crucial piece that could take its agenda forward (the best analogy I can think of is the way economists approached Russia after the collapse of Soviet Union. First, privatization seemed to be the answer, and then the focus turned on institution building. In case of IITs, the attention needs to shift towards governance)

Research in engineering was an alien concept in those days. Indian industry did not need PhDs in engineering either. This changed slowly after liberalisation, as its technology industries formed and multinationals set up R&D centres in India. IITs started more serious research in the 1990s, but Indian industry had moved too quickly. By 2010, when the Kakodkar Committee was set up, the engineering institutional system in India had become too lopsided, producing a million undergraduates and 1,000 PhDs.

…

 

In just three years, the combined PhD intake of IITs has gone up from 1,000 to 3,000 a year. IIT Chennai, for example, admitted 80 PhDs in 2007, but 160 in 2012. The new IIT Hyderabad already has 212 PhD students, against its faculty strength of 100. IIT Bombay admits 450 PhD students every year; over 50% of its students are either masters or PhD students.

….

 

Shailendra Mehta, professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad, asked himself a question two years ago: why is Harvard Universityalways number one? In more general terms, why do American universities always rank high? The reason, Mehta concluded, is not in the money they spend but in their ways of governance. Top US universities, including public ones, are governed by their alumni.

Open Internet: Two Meanings
Open Internet has been in the news last two days thanks to Eric Schmidt.

Earlier this week we saw how the word open has become a catch all phrase that it could mean anything – not always clear, and perhaps, not always good. Open internet is one such.

At one level, it’s about censorship – and I would assume Schmidt was talking mostly about this while he was in India. Governments demand companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to remove content for whatever reason. India, under the present government, has built a sorry reputation for itself on this front. Google’s Transparency Report details removal requests and user data request by various governments. Check out India report here.

Open internet also refers to net neutrality, which in effect says that an internet service provider cannot discriminate between different types of data or platforms. For example, an ISP cannot charge more for video streaming on Youtube compared to downloading a pdf file from your Dropbox; or more for checking your facebook compared to checking the latest news on Yahoo!. Treat all data equally. Pro-net-neutrality camp, in which Google is a vocal member, argues for net neutrality, saying that’s the way it has been all throughout its growth, and it’s best to leave it that way. Anti-net-neutrality camp argues that it ISPs should have the freedom to price their service, much like any other business. The debate is far from over.

eCommerce in China
You might have read the engrossing dispatches on Chinese internet and e-commerce companies by Neelima Mahajan-Bansal. (They are here: A Nation of Shopping Freaks; China’s Hi-Tech Grocer; Behind the Great Firewall: a Parallel Internet Universe )

McKinsey has just brought out a report on the world’s second largest e-tail market. The numbers are both interesting and staggering. Here’s a sample

The benefits of being an Onsite CEO
Among the several insightful quotes in Mint profile of Francisco D’Souza, here’s the one I liked. It’s from Vinnie Mirchandani, a former Gartner analyst who blogs at Deal Architect, and he talks about D’Souza being based in New Jersey.

Sometimes I find some India-based CEOs to be surrounded by too many ‘yes men’, so in that sense, it has helped Frank that he is not based in India.

 

 

Also of interest

• Facebook Targeted in U.S. as Asian Chat App Line Invades | Bloomberg
• Blackstone asks Oracle’s Hurd if he wants to run Dell | Reuters
• Google’s Keep Could Take On Both Pinterest And Evernote, If It Gets The Google+ Social Plumbing | Techcrunch
• The Raspberry Pi Dynamic Headlight Can Tell You How Fast You’re Cycling | Techcrunch

• FightBack
• Ideophone SOS
• Sentinel

The impact of such apps can be huge. A similar app in US, Circle of 6, tags itself as a free app that prevents violence before it happens. (Yes, the last three words are redundant, but you can’t overstate the case.) It also won a couple of awards, including one from Whitehouse in the US. But, in India, these apps are constrained by how accurately telcos can locate you. Economic Times, (in a report that confirms India will soon have a single number for emergency, like 911 in the US) has this revealing paragraph

In May 2011, at the behest of security agencies, the Centre had unveiled new rules mandating telcos to install within 12 months, advanced tracking devices on every cell tower in the country to pinpoint the location of a minimum 30% of their customers within 50 meters of accuracy and 80% of their customers within 300 meters of accuracy. In the second year, telcos were mandated to further enhance this facility to ensure that 50% of the customers can be tracked within 50 meters of accuracy and 95% within 300 meters Mobile phone companies have, however, not implemented the government order citing capital expenditure. (emphasis mine)

Michael Sandel wouldn’t approve

Click here to view the embedded video.

HCL Tech splits hair
In an interview with Business Line, Prithvi Shergill, HCL Tech HR head argues that the company did not give “offer letters”, only “letters of intent”, to freshers. About 5000 fresh graduates across the country who were given to understand that they have a job offer from HCL Tech have been protesting since last month because they were not given joining dates. As to when they would join depends on the demand, and the picture is still hazy there. It’s not just for HCL Tech, but across the sector. Most companies simply reduced the hires from campuses in line with what they could foresee as demand. HCL Tech didn’t.

Interestingly, Shergill told BL: “We have always maintained that we will hire as per business demand that we foresee.”

If only they had.

Francisco D’Souza in Top 10 in Glassdoor’s highly rated CEOs list
Glassdoor, a social community and career website, is increasingly becoming popular among those trying to get an inside glimpse of a company. The website lets users anonymously post information on salaries, interviews etc. It also lets the employees rate their CEO. Francisco is rated a few notches above Google’s Larry Page and Apple’s Tim Cook. N Chandrasekaran of TCS and Krishnakumar of Mindtree, and TK Kurien of Wipro are three others who have made it to top 50.

Here’s the top 10 based on the approval rating.

Check out the complete list here.

McKinsey on Internet in India
India can transform its Internet profile, expand usage, and boost GDP, argues McKinsey. Here’s a graph from its report

On a related note, Eric Schmidt makes a case for open internet in a ToI op-ed

India accepts that investing in the internet is as crucial as investing in roads or telephone lines. The bigger question is, which internet will it invest in, an open or closed one? If people in power are overly pessimistic about the internet, their pessimism will be self-fulfilling. In seeking to control all of it – including the good parts that are working well – they’ll stop good Indians from doing great things. Instead, they should focus on giving every Indian the best shot at using the internet to make his or her country even better.
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Also of interest

• Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks | New York Times
• Google’s Eric Schmidt takes first-hand look at Indian start-ups | Business Standard
• Samsung Preparing Wristwatch as It Races Apple for Sales | Bloomberg
• Jawbone Takes Next Step in Fitness-Tracking Race, Launches UP for Android | AllThingsD
• Amazon’s new ‘Send to Kindle’ button saves stories for later, directly from participating websites | The Verge