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.

 

Biz models: Open source hybrid vs. Traditional enterprise software

Recently I have been reading up a lot about the hybrid open source business model. It is something quite different from the traditional model used by enterprise software companies. As the model is different, so are the pitches to customers. I am going to try and delve into the major differences but primarily from a marketing angle.

Traditional enterprise software is a little over 35 years old and stands a towering USD 60 billion. The advent of FOSS has changed how software companies run their own show and most of the enterprise biggies have taken to quite well (after all it is reducing their developmental costs).

Traditional enterprise software businesses have pitched the “one throat to throttle” concept. If anything went wrong with the software, there would be one company to blame for it, who is responsible for it. During the initial days of open source, this is precisely what was missing. With the hybrid model, it is addressed partially in that the community version is supported by the community and the enterprise version is supported for a fee (thereby providing a neck to catch hold of!).

I have a fundamental question at this juncture. If something about the software is unusable (for that business), which is it better to have - a blackbox binary or open source freedom which lets you change what you want to. Being able to craft a product to suit your enterprise ends is perhaps the largest advantage open source software provides.

Traditional software companies have focussed on licenses for usage ( not upgradation but just usage) of the software. Which is like buying a shirt with a one week limit or a movie with a 30 day expiry. If you want to wear the shirt after that one week, you need renew your licenses and same goes for the movie. Would you really let that happen in those cases? Why do people let it happen in the case of software?

The difference between charging for support and charging for permission to use is quite stark! Taking money without providing upgrades in like giving yesterday’s newspaper and still charging for it. For marketeers, this difference is quite important. With the hybrid model you are essentially pledging that you will not charge the company if they don’t use your service.

So why give out the source code a free community version? I suppose the answer lies in the concept of collective intelligence. With more people working on the product (as users, developers, testers or just advisers), it moves faster and in a direction more homogeneous with what the users (enterprise or community) really want.

This is not to say that traditional enterprise software has no role to play. It has a very big role to play. In markets where there is no software available, a more traditional approach maximizes economic returns for the company that created the software. Traditional enterprise software business model has a lot of marketing costs, which makes the products riskier. With a hybrid model, the risk is reduced as the software is try before you buy!

In India, we are already seeing traditional software companies (usually with proprietary data formats) providing companies the try before you buy alternative. The idea is that after 6 months, the data generated is stored in the proprietary format anyway - hence the user is locked in! To really give choice, the data storage should be standards compliant, thereby allowing the user to shift, if she so pleases. This freedom is the corner stone of the FOSS model.

The more we look at it, the more obvious it seems that this is a more beneficial model overall, considering economic gain of all parties involved. Only time will tell if the markets think the same way!

 

$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!