David Wood's visit to Imperial Business school

Today we had a pleasure of having David Wood , EVP of Research at Symbian, Ltd ( my previous employer) in our Business school. David is now responsible for understanding and guiding Symbian's response to disruptive trends in technology, business, and society. I have met David for couple of times in Symbian from my personal opinion he is very humble, has always quest for innovation(which is core to symbian's value) and very well respected person in Symbian.

The talk we had was on "Building the killer mobile experience of 2013" detailing on Innovation, Platforms, Agility and Open source.


It was really a good talk and personally it inspired me in some front for my MBA thesis !! Thesis topic isnt decided yet by me but i think I am moving towards it :)

bye for now need to head for some sleep

Cheerio

why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India

Gaurav makes a very good case why Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) will be the next big business opportunity for India after Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).

Social media practitioners often talk about it in cryptic “conversation is an art form” terms, but you can break down the social media delivery process in six discrete steps that correspond to the oft-quoted Listen -> Understand -> Engage model:-

1. Data collection
2. Data mining
3. Data analysis
4. Insight delivery
5. Consulting
6. Solution delivery

If you look hard at these six steps, you’ll find that many of them are driven by dynamics that make them very susceptible to outsourcing –

Sudhakar Ram writes below in his column about the first two waves after that i have posted column on third wave of outsourcing !! interesting read go on

As a participant in and observer of the Indian IT industry for over two decades, I can clearly see that software and services exports from India have gone through two waves and that a Third Wave is now unfolding.

Wave 1, which we can trace to the 80s and 90s, clearly established that Indian IT professionals were competent and could be trusted to deliver world-class work. This was the staff augmentation era of the industry, largely serviced through onsite services.

Wave 2, starting off in the mid-90s and currently at its peak, established India as an offshore programming destination. With labor arbitrage as the basic value proposition, Indian companies established large offshore development centers that had competent technical staff, mature CMM processes and world-class infrastructure. While the trigger for Wave 2 was the offshore initiatives by companies like GE, Motorola, Nortel etc., the Y2K bug gave it the necessary momentum. Although things slowed a bit after the dotcom bust, the shrinking IT budgets actually gave an impetus to large Fortune 500 companies to use offshore centers as a mainstream sourcing option.

India Making Millions Servicing U.S. Social Media Ecosystem

By Daya Baran at October 19, 2008 8 Comments

While U.S. companies struggle to figure out how to monetize social media, India’s tech industry has quietly figured out a way to make hundreds of millions (maybe billions) by servicing it. Everything from simple comments on blog posts, to breaking sophisticated Google CAPTCHAs, Craigslist listings, Gmail invites, Yahoo personals, MySpace profiles, YouTube uploads, Facebook friends, and now I hear Twitter tweets are all being performed in India on behalf of social networking sites, blogs, photo sharing, video, and other social media and Web 2.0 sites that depend heavily on online advertising as a revenue source are using these services to boost traffic and users.

For a mere $2 a thousand CAPTCHAs can be solved and a thousand blog comments or MySpace friend requests can be sent generating lots of traffic and links for that property and hence, increasing its online ad revenue. Workers in India process the data using CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

In fact, entire social media and online advertising campaigns featuring cool graphics, widgets, RSS feeds, and other sitewide interactive features are being created and executed from India. “Anything that can be outsourced is being outsourced today in India,” said Rajdeep Sahrawat, vice president of Nasscom, or the National Association of Software Service Companies, an Indian software industry trade organization that closely monitors trends in outsourcing.

India is no longer a call center outsourcing destination. It has rapidly become a global hub servicing the U.S. social media ecosystem and as well as the higher knowledge industries. Services such as tax filing and preparation, medical diagnoses, legal work, and financial portfolio analysis are turning to India for sophisticated knowledge processing and analysis work. A start-up that provides such services is PreMedia Global and in two years, it has grown from a brother-and-sister operation to a company with 900 employees. Initially, they considered launching a call-center operation, said co-founder Kapil Viswanathan, who studied engineering at Stanford University. However, they quickly saw that the nature of outsourcing was changing. “High-end, knowledge-based services — that’s where the growth is coming from,” he said. “We think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The California Fair Trade Coalition said virtually any job that uses a computer could be outsourced, and it argues that U.S. trade laws should be changed to make it more difficult for companies to send work overseas. “Those countries have large and rapidly growing pools of talented people with much lower incomes than people with similar skills in the United States”, Imelda Abarca, director of the coalition. But other experts say the threat to high-end American jobs is overstated. India remains “an undergraduate factory,” said Raffiq Dossani, a Stanford University researcher who studies higher education in the South Asian country. “This limits the kind of work that can be outsourced to India.”

Pervez Sikora, a former U.S. newspaper executive who is now chief operating officer for 2AdPro Media Solutions said he’s been approached by Silicon Valley companies that want to outsource their marketing work. It is not just U.S. companies that are flocking to India. European, Japanese as well as Arab companies are tapping into India’s legions of highly trained graduates that India’s vast college system produces every year. But the number of U.S. companies using these services is expected to increase due to the financial crisis which is forcing them to cut costs.

And, it is no longer simply tech companies that are looking to cut costs using these services - Disney, DreamWorks, and drugs manufacturing companies are also tapping the India pool. “We are getting multiple inquiries a day”, said Todd Brownrout, chief marketing officer at 2AdPro, which expects to expand from 350 employees to 1,000 next year. Two years ago, it was a tough sell to convince newspaper executives that someone sitting halfway across the globe could produce ads that are accurate and on-time. Sanjiv Gupta, chief executive of Hyderabad-based Pressmart, which provides Internet technology services to publications, argues this outsourcing model can be applied to editorial content. “It’s outsourcing of creativity,” he said.

While the debate continues over just which American jobs may be vulnerable to outsourcing, executives like Sikora acknowledge that the new global economic order is forcing Americans to reposition their careers. “People have to understand how jobs are changing and start reinventing themselves,” he said. “No one will be able to stop this now.”

Where Are The JOBS In India

An interesting read in TOI today !! Purely shows how outsourcing/growth of india is still Intact

Where Are The JOBS In India

Citigroup on Tuesday cut 53,000 more jobs, triggering fears of more layoffs by other companies across industries. TOI, however, has decided to be contrarian. Instead of only writing about pink slips, it hunted out companies that are actually hiring. Here’s the lowdown on

FINANCE & CONSULTANCY
SBI to hire 25,000 new hands, according to bank chairman O P Bhat. The fresh recruitment will be done this fiscal – 20,000 in the clerical cadre and 5,000 supervisory staff
Bank of India to hire 10,000 over the next few months. This, on top of over 30,000 fresh recruitments in 2008-09. In the next 2 yrs, the bank plans to take in 75,000 Accenture will hire 10,000 people in India by 2010, says COO Stephen J Rohleder
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, top global mgmt consultants, looking to hire 3,500 in India in 3 yrs
MetLife, a new private insurance co., will recruit 30,000 agents and 2,000 managers by March 2009, says CEO Rajesh Relan
BPO
Aegis BPO Services will add 1,000 people per month this fiscal
CAMPUS HIRING
IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta say all their students have got placements for next year
INFOTECH
Tata Consultancy Services to hire 30,000-35,000 people this year, says a spokesperson. TCS made 24,789 technical campus offers for 2009-10, a 13% jump over this year
Infosys is sticking to plans of hiring 25,000 people this fiscal, says CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan. Infosys has made around 20,000 offers for next year
Satyam plans to hire 8,000-10,000 people this fiscal, according to its HR head, S V Krishnan
MANUFACTURING
L&T will hire 10,000 people over the next 3 yrs, according to CMD A M Naik
Maruti has decided to hire 1,000 fresh hands despite the sluggishness in the auto sector, says a company spokesman

Is 3G and WIMAX disruptive for India?

As India is preparing for the rollout end of this year to mid next year of 3G and WiMax services it represents a significant move forward for the Indian mobile telecoms Industry. I could find some very positive news that India to have 230 m 3G subscribers by 2013

3G and variations of it first got rolled out in Japan back in 2001. 3G essentially allows you to shift data faster over the mobile phone network thereby opening up many new services and possibilities (such as video telephony and high speed data services for downloading information and surfing the web). WiMax is similar to home wireless technology. Where-as home wifi only reaches out a few hundred feet, WiMax has a much wider range many across kilimeter. It also offers speeds that are far greather than 3G. To WiMax in to reality, just image that you can be anywhere in the city of Mumbai, lets say, and flip open your laptop and get on to the web instantly regardless of where you stand. Work from the park, the local Cafe Coffe Day, from home or at the airport terminal. WiMax allows this and that too at high speed.

The advantage of 3G to mobile phone operators is that there are a lot of phone models in the market aleady which already support 3G out-of-the-box. With further investment in installing 3G transmission towers the basic infrastructure for 3G in India can be rapidly rolled out. WiMax, on the other hand, could take a little longer to become widespread. The equipment necessary to receive WiMax signals isn’t readily available in India yet and transmissions in the WiMax spectrum is some-what limited to date. In India, Tata Communications has been experiementing with a WiMax trial and Bangalore and hopes to expand this across Mumbai and Delhi once spectrum has been allocated.

What really interests me is that WiMax has the potential to reach remote rural populations in India where existing mobile coverage is patchy or non-existant. This would open up the possibility of bridging the digital divide and binging the advantages of access to the Internet to whole new communities. History has shown that Internet access in rural areas of India has been mostly a good thing with a great examples being the e-Choupal project, which enables farmers to get price of grain and seed direct from market instead of going through the middle man via internet terminal in their villages and farms.

Access to the internet in rural areas also spreads the influence of better and wider education to all of India’s population, helping to unlock the latant tallent of a youthful and eager work force. Ultimately, however, as technologies like WiMax and 3G reach the masses, it will enable India to innovate and invent in ways it hasn’t done so before. Entepreneurs up and down the country as well as would-be entrepreneurs will suddenly have a new medium to release their ideas through. When I look at the divide between the uptake of broadband internet and mobile telephony in India, the choice today is clear. More Indian’s today own and use a mobile phone and the number of mobile subscribers dwarfs the number of broadband intenet subscribers. Everyone from your ricksha-wala to duba-wala, city slicker to gardener, cleaner to call centre worker now owns a mobile phone and the uptake is unstopable.

Although market saturation of mobile phone ownership is some years off in India, like its global counterparts, Indian telco’s will eventually start to feel the pinch and one way to sustain and increase revenue is to expand sevice offerings.

3G and WiMax will enable Indian telco’s to offer their subscriber base a multitude of new services including premium video content, video to video chat between hand-sets (and cross network), selling software to mobile phone business users and innovating in the burgeoning mobile phone games industry. Like it’s console games counterpart, mobile gaming is booming in International makets and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in India once the networks enable people to download large files to their phones. Culturally, Indian’s differ in many ways to the world at large and one of those differences is the high value placed on education. Nintendo already realises this and its DS games console, coupled with the plethora of recent educational titles that you play on the Nintendo DS is taking off like hot-cakes. This is a natural appeal and fit with the Indian psychi and mind-set.

Finally, 3G will allow Indian users to upload photos and videos from their phones to the web and partipicate in the mobile social networking space beyond the confines of SMS and becomes what is coined as citizen journalists. Indian teleco’s will probably offer a selection of data packages to subscibers, although like the west, most teleco’s will no-doubt standardise data tarrifs on flat rate “eat as much as you like” structures to reduce confusion and streamline billing.

There are countless ways the Indian telco’s and consumers will benefit from 3G and WiMax and I cannot wait for this market to blossom in India. With over 71 countries now offering 3G to its consumers, it’s time for India to join the 3G club and perhaps suplant it altogether with WiMax.

Go India go !

Ever wondered why Americans are more “private” than the BRIC countries

Ever wondered why Americans are more “private” than the BRIC countries..
I found a interesting hypothesis on how the attitudes of people towards privacy ( broadly in terms of social network) of different countries in world !!






India could be seen as both highly social and also not afraid of government action. And Brazil would be highly social (Gaurav calls Indians and Brazilians “hyper-social”), but Brazilians seem somewhat afraid of government action (see their recent wiretapping scandals).
This model has lot of questions unanswered but I really appreciate the thought process in collecting data..read further for more information
https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/blogs/isdyahoofellow/hypotheses-about-privacy-attitudes/

Top 250 movie alltime

http://www.imdb.com/chart/top

I was surprised to find myself in having seen only 15 of top 100 :( altough next one year is going hectic i wish to tick off atleast another 50 from list !!

It would be nice to know from my dear readers on how many you have seen!!

Diwali celebration : MBA

We bunch of Indians in MBA class arranged for few sweets to all our classmates. The same evening we went to diwali party. It was fun = good food, good dance and good way to know your batch mate. My perception is you get your friends in class in a bit different angle at parties. the point i am leading to is parties are good for networking ;).

We went to a restaurant called as urban turban.. the food and ambiance was good !

Leadership brand

This video talk by harvard business school gives good insight on how one can develop his own brand. Basically it means how I can use my strengths to deliver more value to others.

Obama becomes new US president

One interesting aspect about Obama:A guy born to a Muslim father of African origin and a Christian mom, An American, half Kenyan, half white, half black,raised in Indonesia and graduated from Harvard, who have Hussain in his middle name can became US president.

So that means people actually vote for the most competent guy in the race, especially during a crisis, color and race wont matter during tough days.

Hope we will see changed world which Obama promsies !! and no wars please.
Though I have read that his policies are good for indian americans but not as a whole for India when compared to republicans. I think world peace is more important in this point of time.

Nokia Research on Mobile Phone Usage

Pretty interesting to know that nokia is going to bottom of pyramid for mobile innovations

Communication Literacy Design

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: literacy delhi)

Shared Phone Use

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: charging power)

Why Ideas remain as ideas

Why do we fail to take idea's forward and execute it??

We are totally not convinced that the idea will work
we dont have passion to execute an idea and thus don't take the risk
we don't have necessary skill set to execute it
we assume things will work in a certain way, but reality will be something else
we are not sure whom to trust and wont share ideas with others
we don't want to move out of comfort zone
Probably your ideas are ahead of time
You shared it with wrong people
You lack the environment, which encourages ideas

may be ..hmmm may be..End of the day what matters is whether you executed it or not

What is management consultancy?

What is management consultancy?

As a MBA student all we hear in today's world( after credit crunch and pretty low investment banking jobs) is shift towards management consultancy. I could gather very good idea of the information below.

Consultants are hired by companies who need a fresh outside perspective along with the problem solving and analytical skills.

Management consulting firms can be classified on the basis of their functional area such as specializing in giving advice on general business strategy question, or providing advisory services in niche and specialized areas like technology, marketing, finance, operations or HR. An alternative/parallel way of classification can be on the structure followed, i.e. some concentrate on a specific industry area like financial services or retail, while there are some which are huge and have divisions that provide advice on everything from top-level strategy, to choosing which software to install, to interesting things like saving money on paper clips.

Consulting firms are typically organized according to industry and type of problem as well. For example, a firm like Bain & Company might focus on strategy problems only but in virtually any industry. On the other hand, there can be firms which focus on a particular industry only but advise on nearly any type of issue. Many of the larger firms however have a matrix organization, with both industry practice groups and functional practice groups.

Saying this, there is one thing which management consulting firms have in common: they all are powered by their people, their IP. The only product which a consulting firm ultimately has on offer is its employees' ability to solve the problem. As a consultant, you are that problem solver.

Types of Consulting Services
Management consulting firms provide services in 6 primary categories: Pure strategy, Operations strategy, marketing strategy, IT strategy, Financial strategy and HR strategy. The figure below shows how these areas fit together.









Strategy Consulting: It helps client's most senior executives understand and face the macro level challenges of running their companies. Eg. Recommending a new strategic direction for a growing telecommunications company or to understand why a particular company always lose money and how they can reposition themselves to milk profit from new markets.

Marketing Consulting: Consultants work with senior marketing or BD leadership to shape overall marketing plan or develop detailed approaches to launch a new product or optimize existing ones. E.g. To evaluate the ROI in various marketing and sales activities


Operations Consulting: Investigating customer service response times, reducing inventory and backlog levels, looking at the supply chain are some of the works that a consultant working in this domain does.

IT strategy Consulting: Helping clients achieve their business goals by leveraging in depth knowledge of computer and telecom hardware, software etc. There are two kinds of consulting, IT strategy and IT implementation consulting.

Financial Strategy Consulting: 3 primary categories, Corporate Finance, Risk Management and Insurance, and Corporate restructuring or turnaround consulting.

HR strategy Consulting: Putting the right people with right skills at the right place at the right compensation is what an HR consultant will do. They also restructure organizations, and help in change management.