Today in Tech: Mary Meeker on spotting talent; Maps; Onsite utilisation; Cloud factories & Info edge

NS Ramnath
Updated: Oct 1, 2012 01:43:22 AM UTC

Mary Meeker on spotting talent Here’s one of my favourite parts from a recent Wired interview with Mary Meeker, an analyst who saw the potential of internet long before many saw, retained faith in it even after the bubble burst, and is now a venture capitalist.

Wired: How do you discern who’s talented?
Meeker: John Doerr says you have to separate the missionaries from the mercenaries. In the good ones, there’s an unbelievable product passion. Daniel Ek at Spotify is a great example. If you ask him a question, he’s got an answer, he’s already thought it through. When he doesn’t know something, he figures out how to find out.

If you haven’t had a chance to look at Meeker’s presentation on internet trends, you must. Recently, reading about Apple’s ongoing battle with Samsung and Google, I remembered a slide from that presentation which helped me see things in perspective.

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Maps
Apple has said its maps will get better. “We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it,” it said. However, the disappointing maps that replaced Google’s in iOS6 have triggered a lot of discussion. (There’s a Hitler video already). Now, would Steve Jobs have released a product that’s not complete? A Forbes piece says yes, citing MobileMe (which we discussed last week) and the iPhone 4S antena problem. A Guardian piece has a longer list of Apple mistakes – that happened when Jobs was still around. Was Apple right in discarding Google Maps? Some have argued it had no choice.

Meanwhile Google, which has over 7000 people working on its maps, is making it better for a bigger set of people. Today’s Financial Express has a report on how Google Map Maker is reaching deeper rural India. A few weeks back, it added the traffic information for a few cities in India. (Here’e a Quora thread on how it estimates traffic). Business Line today writes about Bird Eye Systems‘ Traffline, which provides traffic information in its website and also as an sms service for a couple of networks.

Onsite utilisation rate
Low onsite utilisation rates for IT services companies could drag the margins down by 150 basis points, according to a report in Economic Times. Software companies tend to use almost all its employees (95 in a hundred), because of higher costs. Low utilisation suggests low demand. Things are actually a little more interesting than that. Sub contracting, which also comes down with lower demand, has actually gone up .

Energy consumption
A contentious New York Times piece talks about a different kind of utilization rate – that of data centres.

David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, a technology research firm, said his own recent survey of a large sample of data centers found that typical utilizations ran from 7 percent to 12 percent.
“That’s how we’ve overprovisioned and run data centers for years,” Mr. Cappuccio said. “ ‘Let’s overbuild just in case we need it’ — that level of comfort costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of energy.”

Some of the numbers are scary, and makes us wonder if the new companies are as green as they are projected to be. The cost seems to be huge. But, remember, it’s good to think in terms of opportunity cost. What will be the energy cost if we do things offline. It says companies account for 2% of total energy. What will that be if we do the stuff offline?

Info Edge
Mint reports that Info edge, best known for Naukri.com (and Hari Sadu ads) has invested at least Rs 200 crore in unrelated businesses in the last three years.

That’s Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s strategy. And, here’s how my colleague Prince Thomas captured the reasons behind his gameplan just as Sanjeev started stepping on the gas.

With new portals backed by aggressive entrepreneurs mushrooming fast around him — 20 new portals have been launched in e-commerce this year itself — Bikhchandani realised he needed to move quickly to get a slice of the fast-growing industry. “Good ideas can come from anywhere, from inside or outside. And many a time, even if we like an idea, we may not be able to work on it,” he says. The big handicap was shortage of management bandwidth. “At Info Edge, we are totally occupied in managing the present business. Adding more verticals will stretch management capabilities very thin,” says Raghuvanshi….
There’s another problem that dogs the industry. Though there are many more venture capitalists and private equity funds available to be tapped, starting a portal is an expensive option. It took Rs. 40 crore and five years for 99acres.com to bring in its first profitable quarter. So, acquisitions is the next best option for Bikhchandani.

May be it’s not entirely unrelated. Some disgruntled employees running away from Hari Sadus might embrace entrepreneurship after all.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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