Return of the Monk

Ok,

Its now 4 months since the last post, 4 months since I joined my new job, 4 months since I had a drink, 4 months since I slept in the afternoon.... 4 months that feel like a full year. Things seem finally in some sort of control - not that its become better, but there is a better sense of control. Rather, if one sees the original structure and setup like a shapeless looped string undergoing a change in shape with any sort of pressure on it, the current structure is embellished with more nodes. The purpose of nodes is to provide a static reference point as pressure is applied on the string, and at the same time, shield the pressure from distorting the overall string architecture.

A useful and easy way to imagine this is to take a rubber band and stretch it across three pins on a board. Vibrations caused by pinching the rubber band would be spread over L/3 in a strong manner, and 2L/3 in a weak manner, where L is the length of the rubber band. With the introduction of more pins along which the rubber band is now stretched, the impact of pinching keeps coming down ... for N pins, the impact is thus L/N. Now, as N-> infinity, the impact is near zero, which is a steady state situation of a perfect circle.

The point here is that there is another hidden variable, which is the interactions between the nodes. If the interaction between the nodes is positive to the overall situation, in my opinion, there spring up virtual nodes between these that work like a surface-tension mechanism to stretch the rubber band to its position of being a part of the arc of the perfect circle that would emanate. In order for this to happen, the idea or the view of the eventual circle that would emanate, in terms of its radius primarily, this idea needs to be consistent across the 2 nodes in question. This is usually referred to by management theorists as "vision alignment", but it is primarily a geometric alignment on the nature of the circle. In more complex geometries or organizational structures, the circle morphs to a sphere and we reach and understand the great Pythagorian obsession with spheres.

Thus, from here on, the blogging begins on Retail.

The Digital Monk who sold from his outlet...

Ganesh Chaturthi

I had to drop off some relatives in the railway station the night before the festival. The idea was to also pick up an idol during this trip. Having left pretty early for the 1045 train, we felt it would give us time to drop off my uncle and aunt, and then pick up the idol within an earthly hour on the way back. The traffic near National Market proved us wrong and we reached the station just in time, and thus were back in the vicinity of koramangala only around 1130pm.
Needless to say, despite a half hearted drive around, we found no idol seller. However, and that brings me to the essence of this post, what we did find open everywhere were Wine Shops. And crowded. Brisk business. I dont know exactly what the right emotions were that crossed my mind - amusement, irony, anger, disappointment... but it was a curious mix of feelings that made me write this post.
More later folks

Update

4 years down the road & time to traverse new journeys. Time to expand horizons and time to experiment in stretching boundaries. Time to rediscover oneself and time to fall headlong into chaos. Time I stopped these cliches.

Moving on is fun & scary. There's a sense of weightlessness often, as one moves from the comfortable and secure known surroundings and delves into the unknown for the sheer thrill of it. Maybe now I would contribute more thoroughly to the blog on telecom at least, no longer bound by the principles of employment & the belief in the advantage of the first mover. Maybe now I can write true gyan... as though the world is listening. But maybe now, I can really write as there is time.

Time I stopped,
Cheers!
The Digital Monk

If I could, I would...

I've been trying to get data and failing - so will go with my gut here. As media consumption habits of consumers change, especially with the younger crowds currently soaking up the internet... it would be easy to expect that in a few years time, the major media vehicle would be the internet. With the coming of more sophisticated technologies that allow for packet level inspection, the nature of targeting customer segments would become increasingly sophisticated, requiring equal intellectual sophistication in the defining of consumer segments by marketing teams - this would probably require significant reskilling or even resourcing, as the older economy generation where I include myself, have little intuitive feel on the nature of consumption of the internet by today's youth.

I guess this is the generation gap, except in an accelerated mode with the Delta-T required to elapse between generations rapidly shrinking. In fact on an aside, there must be an analytic measuring the quantum of information received per person per day, the measure of this would be an invaluable tool in making social predictions based on the nature of the information, its tagging and its recipient.

But back to the argument - in addition to the reskilling/resourcing of marketing teams that can fathom and factor the internet impact into their strategies, Ad agencies/media planning & media buying firms too need to reinvent themselves to leverage this new trend to the advantage of their clients. In the competition between agencies for the share of wallet of clients, the domain expertise of leveraging the internet will be the strong distinctive competitive advantage that the victor would bring to the table

The next big killer app

I would like to wager that the next big event on the horizon is "Working from home". Maybe its because I end up doing so much of it! But jokes apart, it does seem to instinctively ring the bell for the next big killer app. I believe that 1 year from now, when Nielsen or someone researches the internet market in India with the question "Why do you use the internet at home", the answer will move from "email & chat" to "working from home".

The mad growth rates of laptops in India as per MAIT's reports (also check out the comment from the folks at Gartner, and this phenomenon is mirrored in Asia-Pac), the construct of the job economy that is driving India's growth, the emergence of the complete high rise verticals, super high speed broadband connectivity - all these point in the single direction of Working from Home.

In the short run, simple VPN applications coupled with conferencing facilities would be the driver of adoption. Over the next six months, I believe that the market would begin to get deeper & richer with web conferencing gaining adoption... and eventually to more serious telepresence applications. The twin problems for the rapid adoption of these would be the "technological complexity" of the product, hence making it inaccessible for the untrained; and for higher end apps, the cost of the equipment will be prohibitive.

In any case, the point here is that the market is at a tipping point for the rise of the Enterprise-Home converged app, which is where Work From Home figures

Cell-Net!

Quite a complete article on the various technologies in the cellphone internet access market. CDMA's superiority is also experienced in the related wireless mobile internet market of datacards on laptops, where the speeds offered / experienced are far superior to other technologies.

But I agree with the author - GPRS really sucks in terms of the speeds it offers on datacards at least. Wonder what the iPhone would use when it comes to India - I think the US market has a CDMA version only as of now with AT&T being the provider.

Public Relations strategy rethink

Actually, the initial interest in this article was its statistics on the Datacenter market and the opportunities that such a market phenomenon creates for telco's such as mine. But then what actually got me to post was the insight into an effective and simple Public Relations strategy to adopt. What I believe is an interesting observation (interesting to the uninitiated such as I!) here is that Company X does a PR jig giving data on its feeder industry, by feeder industry I refer to the industry that is its target segment.

This allows me to redefine our approach to data-sharing-conservatism & the perils of antagonizing my "Investor Relations" group - instead of always wondering what to share and what not to, I could instead simply open up my industry research data on my feeder industries.

So... wait for my name in the press :-)

The Digital Monk rests...