Product Barcamp

It’s been quite a long time since I posted. This is latest new event I am planning to attend.

It is the first product barcamp in the country (I think!) cuz I have not heard of anything similar before. The aim of this barcamp is to bring all the product companies in hyderabad out into the open so that we can learn from their experiences.

Here is a brief about the event:

March 28^th, 4:30pm @ IIIT, Gachibowli, Hyderabad

Event: Hyderabad Software Products Showcase

Showcase producs from Hyderabad,  demo recent new products/startups, established products from Hyderabad, successful entrepreneurs sharing perspective, discuss the eco-system and support network available

Target: Product companies, Startups, Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Objective: To highlight the strong product traction, successes, opportunities and eco-system available.

:30	Tea
5:00	Anil Jampala, President Hysea, Welcome address
5:05	Ramanathan, CEO, Cordys India- Journey of a Product company- the Business perspective
5:30	Products landscape- Ramesh Loganathan (MD, Progress Software India)
6:00	Case study- internal innovation- Microsoft (Rich Web on mobiles)- Sudeep Bharati, Director, Mobile Developer group, Microsoft
6:15	CEO Speak
	Suheim Sheikh- Founder CEO, SDG Software
	Jay Pullur, Founder/CEO, Pramati
	CK Shastri, Founder/ CEO, Intense Technologies
	Azhar Farhan, Serial tech Entrepreneur
	Mahesh Murthy, Founder CEO Pinstorm & Founder CEO Seedfund Sandeep Bhandarkar CEO and Founder of Fineng
7:15	Panel discussion - CEOs, Academia, Support system & VCs
	CEOs, Prof.Sangal (IIIT), Sateesh Andra (DFJ), Hemir Doshi (IDG Ventures), Unnikrishnan (Sun)
8:00	Eco system- Sateesh Andra;  Hemir Doshi (IDG Ventures), Unnikrishnan (Sun)
8:25	Announce IIIT Innovation lab- Rajeev sangal
8:30	Dinner

See you there! For those who can not make it, wait for the update after!

 

Comapring FOSS.in with TIE ISB Connect

Yes, I attended both this year. Incidentally I was there at TIE ISB Connect last year as well. It’s amazing how there is always a really pretty girl dressed very chic, who is the student coordinator for services

There are a myriad differences. Let’s start with the basics:

TIE ISB has lots more suits, better food, more deserts, more people in general and definitely a much higher net worth per head on average, not to mention age.

The event is purely for profit and reeks of it. It is a very honest, straight forward event. The speakers who come in are top notch in their fields. Most speeches/presentations deserve ovations. It’s professional.

The event has lots of people looking for a few VCs, to corner, and talk about their company and things they do. It is purely networking oriented.

The technology talks involve no code but rather a recount of what has happened in the recent past and a few people playing Nostradamus about the field. More often than not, since they are the guys who are putting money where their mouth is (either as VCs or entrepreneurs), it’s true.

I thought FOSS guys were determined, but I have met certain entrepreneurs with such grit and determination, it’s almost insane. There are people who are working without funding for the last 4 years! From what I hear, the VCs are chasing them now.

FOSS.in that way, for a non-programmer was not all that great. Since I have a tech background, I could understand a few things they said, but that’s about it. I could engage in conversations with the contributors of Mozilla and Openoffice but it was more at a level that looked at what is happening and what will happen to the usage, user-friendliness and such of the products.

Very honestly, it seemed that the event had double standards - one of playing the do-good, open-source promoting kind and the other where large and small corporates promote themselves shamelessly. I will not even spare the open source communities who promote themselves shamelessly. While there was an air of contribution going around everywhere, there definitely was an air of marketing going around too! It’s almost like they were hot and cold currents that kept the system going and the people rotating from one place to another!

Some of the talks were fantastic. Some speakers were phenomenal, but on the whole it was a little too dry for me and I definitely could not contribute anything there!

It was an event where I believe every open source product/project was being shamelessly promoted to attract scores of programmers/users to flock to it and contribute. It’s no different from services marketing except these are free services (obviously numbers matter to them too… their funding is linked to it!).

At the TIE ISB connect, people really did want to connect, meet each other. Entrepreneurs wanted to share ideas, build on each others thoughts. At FOSS.in, I really did not find too many people engaged in thought exchange as such. There was more discourse on other general things rather than idea generation and such. Unless the primary contributors of the project (i.e. employees) asked for and were patient enough to listen to feedback and suggestions, there were barely any exchanged. Several talks were more like reports of what had been happening for the past 6 months than anything else.

 

Our visit to FOSS.in

Prasad was speaker at FOSS.in in Bangalore. He took a tutorial on how to build applications on the Mozilla platform. It was received very well. In fact there were several people who appreciated it’s simplicity. Anant - in his blog says, “The calculator example complete with it’s own add-on manager ( for adding scientific support ) was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.”

As if that wasn’t praise enough, Chris Hofmann, one of the creators of javascript and one of senior most members at the Mozilla Foundation said - “Of all the presentations I have seen (world over) for a primer to developing applications on Mozilla platform, this was the best.” Myk, who gave two talks at the event, also liked it. Now that is indeed great testimony.

If you are looking for the slides, they can be found here!

FOSS.in was a great place to meet the Mozilla folks and we got to really know them at a human level. I suppose all FOSS users like me tend to deify the original creators of great products we use (esp in the open source domain). I got to meet and have dinner (twice) with the Mozilla developers. We got an opportunity to educate them a little bit about India, the cuisine, the culture and so forth. They seemed to enjoy our company (which is why I think they invited us to dinner twice, a party and we even went out to try chat, pani puri etc.). Mary, the event manager at Mozilla, supposedly ate half a kilo of sweets like we eat a pair of gulab jamun. She said she liked sweets, little did we knew it was so much. Perhaps we would have sent a kilo!

I think our relationship with Mozilla is just about to begin! Let’s hope it is a long, friendly one.

 

$199 PC

My friend sent me the link to the launch of the $199 PC by Everex. It was indeed quite interesting to read about since I have been following the MIT’s $100 laptop plan for a long time now. I am sure that Negroponte is definitely wondering, how the hell did this happen so quickly?

Well, I dug in a little further just to find out what exactly these two offerings are and how different are they?

Well, let’s start with the more well known one

The $100 laptop

This is a product created under the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) vision with the help of MIT Media Lab. Nicholas Negroponte has been working on this for at least a couple of years now and it is finally a reality. I have not personally tried the laptop, but there are others who have. Here is a pre-review!

The most interesting and innovative feature of the whole laptop is that it can be charged mechanically. A few winds ensures that it is good to run for another half and hour. Given that it is designed to work in the most remote African village, this is great!

From the latest news we know, the $100 laptop is actually going to priced very close to $200 ($182 from what I last remember reading).

Now for this Everex and gOS based machine: $199 PC

This machine is built to have all of Google’s products and was confused as Google’s OS. The clarifications can be found here. The most amazing (strange - however you see it) part is that these are only available through Walmart? (Is that where Americans are buying PCs these days?? ) I thought Indians bought a funny places, but buying PCs at Walmart is definitely a new thing to me and worse yet, it seems to be exclusively available just there!  What’s the deal in that?

Another interesting thing about this $199 PC is that it is powered by VIA (which is probably the third largest PC chip company after Intel and AMD). Interestingly, VIA has shown a clean value proposition in building such cheap hardware and obviously there are lots of advantags to doing that. Once the cost of the PC goes down (like the telephone instrument), it’s uptake goes up… More people using it means more outreach of software and more necessity of broadband (making PC broadband also highly inexpensive esp. in a country like India). If the dream to put a PC in every village has to be realized, hardware like this needs to be created! After all, people don’t really need super powerful machines. They just need to be able to the basic Office stuff and perhaps use the internet for communication, tele-medicine and getting info about their business (primarily agriculture and commodities). More about the Indian need and situation in another post.

This as well as the $100 laptop are powered by Linux and other Free/Libre Open Source Software (a philosophy that the start up I work with believes in passionately). The similarities are amazing and yet each tool has it’s own distinct value proposition.

Let’s see how both of these inexpensive machines pan out!

 

The future of software

There was a very interesting article I read today from the stable of Knowledge@Wharton (K@W) titled: “Software’s Future: Melding the Web and the Desktop.” The article essentially talks about the three evolving models characterized by Microsoft (desktop software licenses and web based services), Google (primarily web based services with desktop data sharing) and Adobe (platform for building apps for both desktop+web like AIR).

All three models were discussed and various business models surrounding the same were discussed as well.

Microsoft: product licensing + subscription + ads

Google: ads + subscription (recently started with their $50/user/year for Google Docs)

Adobe: Sales of developer tools for their standard formats (pdfs, flash etc.)

My thoughts on the same are as follows:

The purely web based scenario will take at least a decade to truly mature. There is a lot of movement towards that field and the pace of growth is tremendous, but a lot of organizations are critically (and correctly) concerned about data security and service outage. I believe in my previous post, I talked about SaaS and how it has certain drawbacks of which data security and service outage (or withholding) were prime.

What is amazing though is the fact that a professor at Wharton echoed our thoughts on the pricing model of the future of software. We believe software is moving more towards becoming a utility than anything else. We believe that going forward charges on software would be on the basis of a utility firm (pay exactly for how much you use - not a fixed amount per month, but rather exactly how much you use!)

Here is an excerpt from the article:

(Prof.) Anand says another model that’s likely to emerge is one that is based on usage. In this model, a person who used a program infrequently could employ the web-based version for free or a small fee. Heavy users would pay more based on usage. In this model, which would apply to both web-based and desktop software, Anand likens software providers to electric utilities. “The notion is you can charge different prices based on levels of usage,” he says.

Given the huge disparity in usage of software in various companies, it is more appropriate to charge them as per their usage rather some standard blanket fee. It also becomes easier for the company to measure the utility of using certain services. Cost cutting will have more meaning in the organization when such vital usage and impact statistics are recorded and available.

We discussed this same thought almost 3 months back and are working towards making this a reality in the enterprise collaboration space.