Mobile phones based business models: An entrepreneurship revolution.

Around 2006, when I was working for naukri.com, naukri came out with a revolutionary recruitment product called “Insta hire”. This product extended online recruiting with cell phones and was an instant hit. I loved this product because it used what I considered was a tremendously potent power to access people who didn’t usually use a PC. Now people outside the tiny population section of PC owners were also available through a simple SMS. And that drastically improved the candidate set for a hiring company and for the candidate. A win-win situation.

You would have seen how cell phones have meteorically grown in India since then. As also seen right here on Trak.in, telecom industry has grown rapidly to add around 800 million users. But what usually goes unnoticed is the multifarious, albeit quieter, revolution that this is bringing with it. You can of course advertise, chat, or even find out cricket scores on cell phones these days, but what is more profound is the change it is bringing to the poorer sections of Indian society. Entrepreneurs are using this opportunity to create value for people who aren't yet in the bracket of the great Indian middle class.

EKO financial services is one such innovative company. It uses a simple mobile phone based operating model to provide banking services to people who don't have banking facilities. This is revolutionary. It allows people with inadequate financial resources to send money back home electronically. I don't know the details about its profitability, but the sheer volume and spread of its impact makes it a revolution of its own. The Tata Nano of the mobile world, EKO financial services has already been recognized worldwide and also in India, as shown by the list of 50 emerging companies by NASSCOM.

Another very interesting development was reported by BBC recently. An organization called United Villages has developed a way to 'empower rural people by providing and delivering products, services, and information'. In simple words, they use cell phones to enable remote sales people to log orders from small and remote shopkeepers in a central database. The centralized warehouse then mails the products to the shopkeeper. The per capita value of this service too might not run into lakhs of Rupees, but the number of people potentially benefiting from this service is huge. A much bigger market will now have access to better products which they didn't have so far, improving their lives in a little, yet significant manner.

I think such offerings have the potential to have an impact similar to what Internet had on us. These offerings enable a lot of users out of the traditional net to have access to almost similar products that are usually available at a premium they can't afford. Also, a lot of people also agree that majority of India might not even end up having a PC at home. They might just skip the PC and invest in smart phones, which could serve the same purpose. Such jumping of a generation of technology was already seen with the landlines versus the cell phones.

With companies already working on improving the cell phone capabilities and reducing the cost of a cell phone, it looks inevitable that more people will continue to gain access to more resources. Add to this the revolution happening with Cloud Computing, which gives easy and cheap access to computing resources, and you have a killer combination in hand.

Here is to a rapidly increasing per capita GDP growth! (Which I think is much more important than simple GDP growth percentage)

 

Why we need supercomputers to be a great nation

Working for one of the leading Supercomputing centers of the world has its own perks. It is a front row view of how the U.S. propels itself to greatness.

The vision of greatness wasn't far away from India either. Pandit Nehru, in his book 'The Discovery of India', talked about how the ancient Indians of Vedas and Upanishads strived for truth. Their quest for understanding what they saw, what they couldn't yet comprehend and which lay beyond the obvious was so inspiring that it led India to its place as a great ancient civilization. This fearless search for answers was captured in these lines of Riga Veda. Fundamentally, it is this fearless, unbridled quest for answers which leads societies to greatness.

In the current context, many such questions lie at the forefront of science. Some of the most complex problems facing us today are such that they are mammoth in their size. From predicting weather to 
Genome sequencing, Looking deep into the universe to better understand it, predicting next disease outbreak, mapping water resources of the country etc. All of these problems involve thousands of parameters effecting each other, and almost always manifest on a massive scale.

Such research not only enables mankind to better address the problems of tomorrow, but it also has an almost direct impact on the economic success of the nation pursuing it. Research done in any field leads to creation of intellectual property in form of research papers, patents and consequently new medicinal/technology products, improved services and many other forms of solutions which in turn make great revenue generators. In today's world, the country with the latest and best computing technology calls the biggest shots in research.

Let me give you the example of my own project. The purpose of Dark Energy Survey is to try to answer the question 'Is there Dark Energy in the universe'. Without going much into details, the universe is said to be composed around 70% of Dark Energy, which is pushing the galaxies away from each other at a pace which is not accounted for by gravitational force. This Dark Energy, if/when discovered, has the potential to change our outlook towards the universe we live in.

Dark Energy Survey will install a huge telescope, which will collect data deep from the universe and send it to scientists. Scientists will then work on the data to find out the deep mysteries of what we call 'Dark Energy'. The data sent by the telescope will contain information about galaxies, supernovae, stars and other heavenly bodies, and would run into Terabytes. This data will then be processed by data intensive processing pipelines which would run 'science' on it. None of this would be possible without a supercomputer, since this needs tremendous computing power.

Consider the case of water management. In India, even in the 21st century we have 60% of our agricultural land dependent on rains for irrigation. And on the other side, not only do we have floods in other parts of the country, but even the fertile Gangetic plains are said to be eroding with soil erosion through flood waters, river water. Then of course, there is the case of severe water shortage. In the U.S, supercomputers are being used to "create a national capability to better predict and manage the behavior of water—and its nutrients, contaminants, and sediments—everywhere in the U.S.". The value provided by this project, both in economic and social terms is tremendous. If such a project could be implemented in India, it can potentially reduce the loss of revenue, soil fertility etc by a huge extent.

For any of these issues and many more, India stands to gain by having a lot more supercomputers in action. Currently, India has only 4 out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. If India wants to actually become a great nation for its people, it must lead the quest to solve the next big problem.

Oh and as for side perks, the worlds first browser was also invented at NCSA. And since you can read this article, I am sure you agree what revolution a browser has brought to the world :)