iPhone - A failure in India

iPhone - the most talked about phone of the last 2 years, failed to make any impact in India. The reason for this can be summarized in one statement probably.
The iPhone is a 'data intensive' phone and operators in India are anti-data.
I think everyone agrees with the first part of the statement.
The whole iPhone experience 'lures' people to do more and more browsing of the internet from their phone.
Companies like AdMob get a significant share of their ad-revenues from iPhone browsing which is skewed when compared to iPhone's overall market share in mobile phones.
Coming to the 2nd part - anti-data means that operators in India DO NOT want their subscribers to use GPRS heavily.
When the whole world economy is slowing down - the indian mobile market is
STILL booming to say the least.
In Jan '09 - India added 20 mn+ susbcribers ( in a month!) - that is more than 4 times the population of Singapore!

With the base growing at such a rapid pace, the network of the operators is getting clogged
with voice traffic. We are seeing 'call-drops' and 'please try again later' situations in the network more and more.
In such a situation, the operator does not want his subscriber to use GPRS which will
clog the network even more - since in 2.5G - data runs over the idle voice-channels.

Moreover, whatever channel is free, the operator wants it subscriber to use it for
voice as he makes more money when the subs uses voice as opposed to data!
No wonder, the operators insanely priced in the phone in the Rs. 31 - 36K bracket
- surpassing even the top-notch Nokia phones.

A report in Business Week claims that there were less than 20,000 iPhones sold in India!

Thats a dismal number for any phone in a 300 million+ mobile subscriber base!

Favourite Books

I've been wanting to do this for the longest time. Creating
a list of all the books I've read and remembered which is
to say they've left a mark on me -- figuratively speaking.
The list is in no order whatsoever and purely a regurgitation
of some part of my memory stack.

1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
2. Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
3. Five people you meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
4. Alchemist - Paul Coelho
5. Brief History of Time - YRDKTA?
   
6. Black Holes and Baby Universes - Collection of Essays by Stephen Hawking
7. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
   
8. Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban - YRDKTA?
9. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
10. Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
    

Will write more as I remember...

The WEb is US

Good video on how we are changing the web, or the web is changing us?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Alright man!

After weeks of holding it back, and tons of pre-alpha launch testing,
and millions of tiny bug fixes, we said to ourselves -- Alright man --
lets do it -- and so today we released our application on getjar.com
and we suddenly saw a spurt in traffic.

We are happy with the downloads, so say the least but whats interesting
to note was that were ppl from all over the place were using XShare.
We saw pictures and videos being shared from Turkey, Brunei, Italy, Latvia,
Maldives, Qatar -- just about anywhere.:-)

This is what I like about the Web.... it just doesn't matter where you
are based - at all. It has just made the whole landscape so global.

Anyway this launch has given the big boost to the enthusiam of
everyone in the team, All of us, just can't keep our hands off the
site( myxshare.com) to constantly check out the latest stuff ppl
are sharing from the phones.

Next few days we'll closely monitor the user behaviour and pattern
of sharing and I'll keep posting my insights here.

We'll also be launching the product on Handango and a couple of
other sites as well.

Keep you posted.

How some random events can bring a turn in your life.

hi guys,

Sorry for not updating this blog for quite sometime but I've been
extremely busy trying to get my company "back on track". we had
hardly had any company stuff going on for almost 4 months
(October '05-Jan '06).

The story was usual - we ran out of funds - started doing a project
on mobile application development ( both Symbian & J2ME) for
another company called Tagit. And just got so much involved in
doing that , that we could hardly spare any time for our own products
and stuff.

In end Jan - we started working with this other company
( ByteSquare) who wanted our application on phone to upload
pictures and videos to their system - and we presented this
together at APICTA 2005

And I don't know what exact happenings - but I guess just the
whole experience made me feel that my company has a lot of
potential and I am not doing justice to the stuff we have
I just felt that I had given up too soon or what - and so I decided
to put it to a stop - and give my company my 200%.

By march end - I got over with all the stuff we were doing for
Tagit and just plunged full time in to reviving my company.

Discussions from the "tuesday class" (will blog about it some
other time) were already ingrained in to my mind.
If you believe you can - you can.
So not worrying about the end goal, not worrying where I'll get
money to feed myself at the end of the month. I just focused on
getting business for my company -
and I could just see the vast difference in things now and
how they were - say - 6 months back - when, after no results
for 3-4 months I had begun to loose faith in our product -
what we had - although the faith in overall
vision was still there - but things were just not happening well.

So this time, although we haven't made millions yet -
we've had a modest start - lets just say - we've enough money
to pay ourselves this month end and we are hiring some ppl full
time from May onwards - and if things continue the way they
are right now - we'll be able to pay them as well :-)

I do not want to go for funding right now - although our current
investor(s) are ready to put in more money - but I am going to
hold my breath as much as I can - till we get one big customers -
( we are talking to a few of them - and things look very positive)
thats why I had the courage to offer jobs to ppl - without knowing
very surely - where the money will come from. Some might say
thats a stupid thing to do - but thats how things are in a startup
sometimes!

Anyway - you'll keep hearing about more stuff very soon.
The product we have is called XShare. XShare basically is
a platform to allow easy sharing of any stuff on your phone
- (pictures/videos/ringtones) etc directly
with any other phone in the world - it does not matter whether
the two phones are in different operator networks - or in different
countries - or are from different brands - our stuff "justworks" -
I've learnt from Skype - that do one thing- and do it well - make
things for the everyday man - and that has been our
design motivation right from the start. So yeah - although our
website will not reveal much - you'll soon see updates :-)

Cheers!

freeze the fucking code!!!!!

We are working in a tight deadline.
Basically have a presentation for
APICTA 2005 ( www.apicta.com)
and we are now ironing out the rough
edges. The guys were told to freeze the
code - 5 days before the event. But now
with just 2 days to go, the guy is still
tweaking things here n there. Unfortunately,
as expected - changes in certain parts of the
code - magically makes some other functionality
to stop working.

How come IT projects are so mismanaged. Only if
people would listen!


(Sorry I am just plain frustrated.)

YapperNut - another Skype Phone

I've always been very interested in Skype
related products and have been on the
lookout for something simple and friendly
to use - yet cheap. I think I got my answer.

YapperNut is a product developed by two
stanford guys who were going through the
same pain - using Skype without being tied
down to the phone. The best thing I like
about it is that it is cordless - doubles up
as a normal phone - and for dialling Skypeout
numbers - you can just press ##phonenumber#

the number doesn't need to be registered as a
speed dial number under your Skype . That
means literally -no configuration is needed on
the PC. I am thinking of sending one home to
my parents so that they can call me here in
Singapore for 0.017 euro cents!

I've ordered the product - will write a more detailed
review once I've tested and used it

Cheers!