Time for AT&T to look at yahoo

With Yahoo under 10 bucks and MS turning away , AT&T can seriously consider Yahoo. At the risk of using consulting jargon , both companies have synergies in SBC Yahoo Internet , Yahoo web remote for uVerse and yahoo mail for AT&T internet customers. But the reason I am suggesting this merger is beyond such skin deep items.

Problem at Yahoo is to monetize the eyeballs .. AT&T can help ..

Time has come to productize email. If AT&T offers yahoo email say @ $1 a month , millions of users can subscribe provided there is no random advertising , guarantee of AT&T security and promise that no one search your mail box .. just need packaging..

If AT&T provides me capability to call any lanline or wireless in US from my YM and incoming YM calls end at my landline (in case I an not online), I won't mind paying $ 2 extra to AT&T on my monthly bill . There goes random competitors like Skype and Vonage. Now AT&T can think to itself that Vonage and Skype are NOT competitors but some day they need to face these challenges. And think , how else would AT&T reincarnate otherwise dying landline?

How about using AT&T database to build yahoo 360 social network .. Imagine if all the people I call from my landline or wireless , show up in my yahoo 360 social network !!! With my calling history and voice mails .. wow .. I may not like to pay extra for this but AT&T can pump all sorts of applications and be a hip company again .. kick the butt of Facebook here ..create a buzz for uVerse.

And the best part is to offer yahoo apps to AT&T SMB customers. AT&T had millions of small businesses who can use yahoo mail , messenger and websites with their domain name ..

AT&T is already integrating yahoo games with uVerse. How about bundling yahoo news and mail on your LCD TV .. Now this is a long shot but Yahoo can be a great media partners for uVerse. Will be great if I could see my TV at uverse.yahoo.com anywhere anytime ...and may be on my cell for 5 extra bucks a month ..

AT&T has a lot at their plate in terms of their self discovery ..understanding that they are AT&T (not Cingular) .. but this is too good an opportunity to miss

From Yahoo's standpoint , AT&T is a lot better partner than big brother like MS or Google. They can add great value to AT&T , be a jewel in the crown and really fuel the innovation they are known for ...

My heart goes for Palm

I am crying not only for it sank to $ 3 but for the fact that Palm Centro is one of the best phone on market. What a waste.

Yes it is still the best despite iPhones and Blackberries of the world. I can vouch on it - I have all three:-). Its not coming from a quick hush hush review of 15 mins , I been using all three from last six months. There are many things that you realize only after you spend some time and sleepover few nights. I use Blackberry as my standby laptop, my daughter has an iTouch and she uses Palm Centro as a phone. Technically I end up using all three coz she is (in her own lingo ) a noob :-)



Just to give you a feature by feature

1. Best speaker .. iPhone and Blackberry can't even come close. The best rival is Sony Walkman

2. Best Design - The white Centro is a piece of art. iPhone may boast all the design credits but Centro beats it right on key pad

3. Touchscreen - Yes iPod is better here but Blackberry doesn't even have a touchscreen. It beats iPhone coz it has both touchscreen and keypad. The best part is that little hole for a stylus. How else would you use a touchscreen while eating or repairing an engine or painting or ....No wonder iPhone folks spend most their time in Nails. Guess what , you can literally sketch on Centro. You can write on top of photographs. Now that is one thing I didn't see in any of the phones thus far.

4. Video - I was so astonished to find Blackberry Curve can't record a video. Even Sony walkman does it.

Now the question is why it didn't click. One obvious reason is they came up too late. They kept on with that bulky hammer like Treo with weird antenna just too long. Blackberry had already grabbed the market with its style.

Whatever be the reason , its just feels bad when a good product fails for want of a good strategy.

Yahoo! to Go

Yahoo! Mobile. Introducing Yahoo! Go 3.0.

Yahoo has uppped the ante with "Yahoo to Go" mobile package. I installed the product on my Blackberry Curve this morning. Installation went good ...only one issue though ... it kicked all the links in my Apps folder (Blackberry and Google ) out to main screen . For a second I thought may be I lost all my applications , but I found them back pretty soon .. No heartbreak :-)

In terms of interface , its definitely one step ahead of Google mobile Apps. The violet theme and PS3/ PSP type horizontal bar makes it looks of next generation. Frankly , it was an iphone kind of thing on my Blackberry.

I tried maps , finance and "one Search". Everything worked fine. One search comes with a voice activated search which means you can press the call button and yell into your phone to search "Pizza". The search results run in a YTG browser interface which is pretty sleek. You can search for ticker symbols and add the stocks from search to you portfolio. The mail interface is pretty much like gmail on blackberry though gmail appears to be lot faster. The GPS (my location) on maps came with in a meter of accuracy. The good thing , I could see all my old destinations saved on yahoo maps. Didn't get time to try Flickr as most my pics are on Picassa.

Now the more interesting part. Yahoo to Go comes woth Yahoo "Blue print". The Development environment for mobile Apps



Developers can download free development kit. Yahoo provides a free QA environment and ton of code snippets.. but who wants to write these widgets any more ? I still don't know a soul who made a living writing widgets......

White Space

When I think about white space (the spectrum that lies between two TV channels) , the first thing that comes to mind is the license raj in India. Before 1980s , most of commodities (cement and steel) were licensed by government. Back then , cement was one of the most scarce resource in India. You need to stand and wait in ques to grab a bag of cement and many times request local politicians / officials for a favor.

The net net was, very poor rate of development , corruption and inferior quality of construction. In a span of 20 short years after deregulation of cement , India today is one of the largest producer of cement and fastest growing economy in world. Private organizations produce best quality cement at a fraction of price.

It kinda made sense to regulate spectrum back in early 19th century when technology was not mature enough to avoid interference. Today more than a billion devices work perfectly well on junkiest 2.4 GHz.

FCC can argue it might lose little revenue for not being able to lease those small chunks of spectrum . How lame !!! revenue can very easily be made up by the new economic activity that will come in by opening up . Imagine a billion wi fi based devices in an year. I guess government makes more money in taxes and other ecosystem activities of 2.4 Mz than it makes by leasing rest of the best quality spectrum to likes of AT&T and Verizon. And goes without saying there is no price for invigorating innovation that we all need so desperately to keep the boundaries of knowledge and human endeavor expanding.

Once again , Google has done the right thing in standing up to the monopolies of our age. This is what makes them a real leader.

The energy Equation

Despite all the engineering and technology, we are nowhere close to nature when it comes to energy production and distribution. Nature produces most (if not all) of its energy thru fusion (think Sun) and distributes without wires. I am not sure but I guess there is no loss of energy when it travels from Sun to Earth as it does not heat the medium (space). If we translate this to mortals' world, we are looking at a fusion based generation facility that would light our houses say some 2000 miles away without a wire .. running a car might be little more difficult :-)

The energy equation has two parts to it. The "Source" and the "Distribution". Electricity for sure is a better mechanism for distribution though its neither loss-less nor wireless (as mother nature). The idea of distributing the energy source (gasoline or coal) itself to the point of consumption  appears so outdated and inefficient on two counts. First it consumes so much energy to move gasoline/ coal across the planet and second it takes just too much time. It will be interesting to find average energy consumed in distributing a gallon of gas v/s the energy produced by it. Isn't it amazing  that even after almost two centuries since Mr Franklin discovered electricity, we are still meeting many of our energy needs thru physical distribution of source (Petro products, coal and batteries) ?

Before we address any energy issue , I think its very important to understand why we didn't fully adopt electricity as a universal means of distribution. Before we do that , lets first do a broad categorization of usage areas and status of electricity adoption ...

• Domestic (Home and street) lighting - Thanks to Mr Edison, this part is totally with electricity. Though there still are many parts of developing world where kerosene is used as a means of lighting but for academic interest , I guess will assume 99 % adoption here.
• Cooling (Home cooling and domestic/ commercial refrigeration)  - Most of the cooling is electricity based. Be it a cold storage system or air conditioning , electricity is almost the standard.
• Industrial Manufacturing - Mostly with electricity though back up generation facilities are normally diesel based.
  
• Heating (Buildings , cars and cooking) - The story goes bad here. In most of the developing world there is no concept of heating houses or cars. As regards to cooking , people still use all sorts of fossil fuels from jungle wood , coal to LPG. Even in US heating is gas based in many parts though electricity is fast becoming standard. Car heating will remain gas based for at least near future until Toyota Prius hits more powerful battery which again means distributing the source.
• Transportation - This domain is fully with Petro Products. Be it on ground or air travel. Only exception is the railways where electric engines have mostly replaced steam / diesel engines.
  

Invention and adoption of electricity, at consumer as well as industrial level , as means of energy distribution , in itself is a surprising leap of innovation. Its as big an innovation (may be more) as the discovery itself. In some respects electricity is like Internet. Adoption, however, has not been as fast as any of the Google tools. It took us almost two hundred long years and even today its no where close to 100 %. 

There are essentially two main hindrances to electricity adoption. First , it doesn't work well if the consumption point is moving eg cars and airplanes. With exception of Railways , most of the transportation industry is gas based. Second , the poor infrastructure in developing world. Electricity is just not available in most rural parts and wherever its available the supply is of poor quality and intermittent. Many villages in rural India get electricity once a week for 30 mins.

The other key reason for continued usage of gas in transport sector is the beauty of "Internal Combustion Engine" . Nothing really beats the flawless power gain and start of BMWs. Imagine a 16 wheel truck starts and picks up a decent 40 miles per hr in less time then Windows takes to boot fastest PC. No electric motor so far can come even close to the smoothness and maneuverability of a V8 engine.

So where do we go from here .... There are three broad objectives in front of human race

1. Our hunger of energy is going to increase exponentially. We must find more dependable sources of energy. This is matter of survival.

2. One of the way to prolong survival on existing (and future ) sources of energy , assuming no source is bottomless , is to find better means of distribution. Less losses tending towards zero is the goal.

3. Whats the point of finding limitless energy if the planet itself isn't safe. This overriding factor puts a limit on point 1 and 2. Means the source and distribution must be eco friendly.

In view of the current situation and the goals described above , we need to create a short term  ( less than 5 yrs) and lon term plan (less than 15 yrs).

The short terms plan appears to be as under 

• It is in interest of developed world to help poor nations achieve good electrical infrastructure. Ultimately the current resources are finite and loss of resources is loss to mankind . This needs to go beyond country specific agenda. 
• It is almost imperetive for developed world to overhauld their public transport. We need electricity based mass transit systems. We need to tax those Hummers out of the road now. If you really need a car , how about driving at 30 miles per hr in a solar car. Else take a high speed tube to downtown and walk your way to office with a coffee on the way.
• We need more of wind, tidal  and more of solar whereever possible. As much as possible.
• Air travel should be a costly affair. We need to leverage information technology for virtual meetings. 

Howver all these measures might help us extend our survival by couple of decades but they sure can't replace our long term needs for energy. So here is the long term plan 

• Nuclear is the way to go. We need start setting up safe nuclear technolgy right now so that we can harness the benefits in next decade.
• We can run cars on Hydrogen. The question is how to produce cheper Hydrogen. With widespread nuclear energy this may be possible as the cheap electricity could be used to extract hydrogen from water which in turn can fuel our futre road and air transport.
• Why can't ships carry miniature nuclear generation  facilities ?

And the Nirvana , of course,  if to replicate nature's fusion ina bubble and transmit energy without wires. 

Social Networks - Who has it all ?

When we talk of social networks the name that strikes right in face is Facebook (and mySpace). You do have Orkut and Linked-in, in respective areas. Linked-in made inroads in professional world while Orkut is popular in India and South Asia. And then there are ton of others that come and go on daily basis.

Social Networks is probably the hottest contested topic in last one yr. But its amazing that the largest owners of social networking information are sleeping tight. Obviously the big phone companies such as AT&T , Sprint and T-Mobil have all the data. They know who I call , when and for how long. They know my name and address and the name and address of the person I am calling. I and the the person I call , already use online account management at-least for billing and maintenance.

What if At&T launch a social network where in I could see all the people I called floating as my friends. And then on top of this if we could stick our photographs :-) Of course, some people will cry foul on privacy. They can opt out of this for now, to realize later that nothing really is private in today's world.

Obviously this is not gonna happen. Companies like AT& T can't even capture my address book. It will be too much to expect AT&T set up a social network. So what is the next best that can happen. Some new kid on the block can develop a cool application to pull your cell phone call log into Facebook or Orkut. You might see the options of adding the person you called to your social network(s).

Till then , Social Network is pretty much manual invitation game or at best scavenging email contacts.

Gandhi and Innovation

No one walked for a political purpose before Gandhi. Dandi Yatra was the first of it kind when Mahatma took a hundred mile walk to protest new "Salt Tax" imposed by then British Rule. In India, walking is very common, even today for religious rites, but walking for a political protest was totally unheard of. The innovation clicked with Indian masses as there were hardly any means of transportation in rural India. First time a leader reached the villages and involved them a greater mission. People used to walk for getting fire wood , for getting water and for daily chores. Now they were walking for freedom.

The idea has since been used in so many things. People walked for peace. They walked to fight Cancer and Aids. They walk to save the planet.

Same is true for principles of non -violence. Again the age old doctrine preached by Mahaveer and Gautam Buddha, was deployed for the first time in politics. Again the idea gelled with Indian masses who by default are non violent.

Innovation is about taking an established principle and deploying them in a totally new arena. The key , however, is the relevance , timing and execution. Walking and "non violence" worked for Indian masses but were totally alien concepts for British rule. British administration was left pondering. They had all the prep work done for someone willing to fight them. But how do you handle a protester who loves you ? How do you suppress a non violent protest ? What is there to suppress ?

Gandhi leveraged Indian culture to fight most powerful empire ever. Used non violence for fighting (look at the contrast) . One can argue if Gandhi brought freedom for India but we know for sure that Salt Tax was withdrawn after Dandi March :-)

Specs for a Dream phone

Here is what I think a good cell phone will have .. i think the tech is already there ..its just a matter of time

• First of all , it should have real Skype, Gtalk and Yahoo Messanger . By real , I mean , one should be able to talk .. it doesn't make sense to text on cell phone thru these messenger applications ..
• It should have two cameras ..one on front and other at the back . The one at back should be mega pixel cam for photos and video .. one at front should be the web cam. Idea is to use web-cam during conversation.
• Goes without saying that it should be able to hook up the home wi fi router .. just in case you need better speed and wi fi is available .. Switch should of course be seam less ..means if you are wireless carrier and want to switch to wifi .. it should happen without dropping the running call
  
• Once the video call is on .. you should be able to stream it to your HDTV again thru your home network .. essentially en extension of media server on phone .. (it can be done later if its asking too much) ..
  
• Blue tooth stereo headset is pretty standard now ..
  
• Of course we need at least 32 gigs to store all the video chats in addition to music, movies and pics
• You should be able to send video mails ..
  
• Play movies online from iTunes or Netflicks.
  
• All the voice and video thru skype or yahoo should be under data plan .. I wonder why anyone will have a voice plan after this !!!

I dont think the question is if this can happen or when it will happen .. The question really is "who wil make it happen .. Is it going gto be iPhone , Blackberry or Windows mobile OR Android .. Nokia & Palm ..I guess not ..

Linked PSP to PS3

Whenever I start thinking Sony has run out of ideas , it surprises me with something new .. Yesterday one of my son's friend walked in with his brand new PSP. My son who is a Nintendo fan (despite having a PS3 at home ) was pretty impressed with PSP. ..

As the things settled down , we took close a look on PSP. Connected on USB, registration was flawless. It automatically created an access point on PSP for connecting to PS3 .. What amazed me was

• I could turn my PS3 on (from standby mode) thru inernet (or directly )
  
• Once PS3 was on , PSP was gone .. all I had was PS3 xbar on PSP
  
• Technically I could do anything that I would otherwise do on PS3
• Shutting down PS3 was easy and fast
  

Downsides

• MotorStorm didn't play ..said PSP doesn't support it
  
• I didnt have any PSP games on PS3 ..so couldn't run any game
  

Despite downsides ..I think its a great integration step forward .. PSP seems to have amazing networking capabilities.

Best thing , it impressed my son over Nintendo DS light .. looks like I will be able to save my PS3 :-)

eBay Desktop - Debate on Browser v/s Thick Client

eBay Desktop

World appearers to have gone full circle with introduction of "ebay Desktop". One can argue that the "eBay desktop" is based heavily on web technologies , but the point here is Not technology ...

Couple yrs back they claimed end of "client server" world .. Mantra was Be in Browser ...who would install those 250 mb thick clients ?

Everyone , including enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle and Siebel joined the band wagon. No one knows in real terms as to how much money or effort is wasted in webbitizing these mammoths but one thing is pretty sure ..... No one gave a thought as to what purpose application is designed for.

Such a simple thing .. It does make sense to have a browser based lite interface when the user is going to touch the application from different stations ...on the run .... and there is no sensible reason for installing the presentation layer. It isn't rocket science. But if someone is spending most part of his/her day in financials or inventory management, it better be pop up free, stable, fast and "Designed to do What it is meant to DO"

Then came Google Earth .. Some ppl raised an eyebrow,,, hmm the biggest player on web is giving you a thick client to install ..how come ? why ? "Wait a minute" , said Google, "If you wanna run likable 3D graphics , we need to capitalize your desktop resources".

And that is absolutely right... Thanks God Google does the right things.

And then "Second life" denounced the browser. They came up with their own browser thingie ,,,, but guys if you need to install something for a specific application (or game)..thats called a thick client .. ha ha ha .. I run in a browser ..my own 3D browser .. sh sh sh .. no one else uses it ..

But this is not bad .. This is actually a good thing .. There is no harm designing a application specific presentation layer if there is a good reason to do that ..

World is too big for IE or Mozilla ...

Obsolete Skils

Obsolete Skills: Main/Home Page


Someone has put up a wiki to list obsolete skills like "cleaning the head of VCR" .. it took me a while to learn this skill ..alas no more use ..
They are also jotting down all the new skills eg "Spam Control" ..good read ...

Is history repeating again ? PC OS to Mobile OS ....

No I am not talking about British occupation of India and Burma ,, my horizon is only last 25 yrs of computing industry..

Up until early last year , I pretty much convinced myself that the war in OS space is over.. Microsoft got the round .. story has been told and stage closed. Why the hell these geeks keep on coming back with new distributions of Linux every other day , why is Apple hell bent on raring "Tigers" and "Leopards".. Jungle already has a king.... why don't they (gracefully) accept their defeat and focus on something that really adds value for the end users rather than confusing them with more OS options .. who really cares what OS you are running and why should one ?

.. How wrong I was !!

The shift of computing focus from PC to Mobile phone , has opened the old stage once again. New" Show" is on and there are new players this time. Palm , Nokia and Blackberry. Apple is back with iPhone. This is pretty much the same as the shift from mainframe to PC. The new device had opened up many opportunities at OS level that biggies like IBM, HP and Sun failed to understand and capitalize. The difference this time, however, is Microsoft does understand this shift and is not willing the make the mistake that IBM did. And Google is there to compete and give them a run for their money .. with Android.

I think there are two categories of players in the race for OS space on mobile . First being the hardware distributors who are focussed to develop OS specifically for their devices. Blackberry and Nokia are the front runners with very interesting strategies. Palm ,despite being the pioneer, is loosing both focus and steam. Apple is a late entry but a very compelling case (as usual) . And yesterday only I heard Garmin is launching its own platform in Nuviphone..a native GPS device doubled up in a phone/camera. Another key player can be Asus with ePC leading the best sellers charts at Amazon. They still don't have the traditional phone "in built" in the ePC but the wi fi lets you talk thru Skype and gtalk .. I would like to draw a parallel to this with IBM , Apple and Sun of PC era who focussed on their device specific OSs. The way old PC suppliers based their OSs on Unix , most of the new cell phone manufacturers are driving their base OS from Linux (Nokia, Asus, Sony Erricson)

Second category are the likes of Microsoft who focussed only on OS and made it available to different manufacturers/ architectures in PC age , at a lower cost then their own OSs . For Mobile market , Microsoft is doing the same trick. They want "Palms" and "Samsungs" of mobile world running Windows Mobile . Once again Microsoft Mantra is " Take my OS (cheap), focus on your things (hardware) and let me drive the value chain thru integration with third parties."....... Smart haan ... Unfortunately this time there is Google to spoil the party. I was so happy to notice that Google wasn't carried away to get their own handset out (despite market pressures) and opted for a hardware independent development strategy with Android. Microsoft obviously has an advantage here but then Google always surprises analysts. I am hoping Android will not get distracted like "Netware" of old times.

Needless to say , if history really repeats itself, device specific OS guys will once again give in to device independent OS players. That means Microsoft or Google will drive the value chain of Mobile market in coming times. Given the rate of change , the coming times are NOT in decades (as happened for PC market to stabilize). Its in years. I would forecast next two years will hint us as to who will take this round and max 5 yrs will give us a new leader "Value Integrator" in mobile space.

Is there a role for IBM , Sun and HP in this new act ? I guess not . So far they are appearing too bloated to address this nimble act of speed and style. Can they really do something ? I guess YES. They have the resources to and tools to give this world a free , non evil and future proof platform .. question is "How sleek and How fast "

I think the race is once again is wide open ..... May the best player win :-)))