It’s official, Bloom Energy has revealed what it has been working on for the past 8 years…and it looks impressive. KR Sridhar the co-founder of Bloom Energy previewed the Bloom Box on Sunday on 60 Minutes. I happened to be watching a DVR’d version of it on Monday and was blown away by it. If it lives up to the hype then its a game changer for the world.
Something that caught my attention was the fact you won’t need to be on the electrical grid if you have a Bloom Box. Applying that logic here in India, that would be HUGE. Since the electrical grid in India is missing most of the time or if you are on the grid the grid is not on. Think I’m kidding, my dad’s village in India get’s about 10 hours of electricity a day…in this day and age. And sadly that is pretty much the story all over India.
The Bloom Box could transform India and solve its age old power crisis. Of course, that would also mean many companies that are building power plants are gonna get body slammed in the process.
So where did Bloom Energy come from? That is an interesting story and slowly being told. To get over USD 400 million in venture financing and stay under the radar for 8 years does not happen often. As far as their first customer Google, not really surprising since the VC firm KPCB backed both Bloom Energy and Google. The lead partner John Doerr I’m sure worked his magic to get several Bloom Boxes to the Googleplex.
So what’s with the title of the post? Think of the song “Boom Boom Pow” by Black Eyed Peas.
UPDATE: Kudos to Bloom’s PR agency for blanketing every medium to get the word out. 60 Minutes interview, Times of India coverage, Engadget live blogging the event…
UPDATE2: It appears Bloom Energy has 2 developmental offices in India, one in Bangalore and another in Bombay . The one in Bombay is located in Vikhroli which is a Northeastern suburb.
The smartphone OS battle is finally starting to take shape and I’ve decided to take a closer look at what the marketplace has to offer. Years ago the most critical thing that people would store on their phones were the actual phone numbers and most likely that got saved to a SIM card. Now, phones a have a wealth of info on them and utilizing some sort of smartphone OS is a must. There is no point in getting a cheap phone and then realizing you can’t sync your data, if the only option is to manually enter in the data…that is a major #FAIL.
From my perspective there are 6 players in the battle to be Number 1, I’ll go through each one:
6. Nokia/Symbian – Wow, these guys have really lost there way. 10 years ago Nokia was the phone to have in Asia/Europe but now they are quickly losing market share. Even more pressing for them is that their Symbian software is withering, no real programmer is programming for the platform. And in today’s environment it’s all about the apps that run on a phone. Symbian reminds me of the IBM OS/2 days – Big company, no new customers and zero apps.
5. Palm WebOS – Not even former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein, current CEO of Palm, can save them. The OS is stunning and slick, but they don’t have a chance with some of the bigger players down the list. They should just open source it and work with the smaller cellphone makers.
4. Windows Mobile – Bloated.
3. BlackBerry – About a year ago, I was singing the “BlackBerry will die in 18 months” song, but I’ve changed my tune. BlackBerry seems to have really put the pedal to the metal and appears to be doing well. I recently had the chance to configure a new BlackBerry for email and it took me 5 minutes, compare that to the first BlackBerry I bought 5 years ago where it took me 30 minutes and my current iPhone which takes about 7 minutes. Kudos to the kids from Canada…welcome to North America.
2. Android – 2009 was supposed to be the year of the Android, that didn’t really pan out. The recently launched Motorola DROID phone is a customized version of Android and is said to be making waves. I expect a ton of new phones from Samsung, LG and HTC to flood the market and bring the prices down, which are currently hovering around USD 400-500 for a phone. The Android Marketplace has not taken off but that’s also driven by the fact that not many Android phones are in the hands of the consumer. 2010 seems to be the year for the Google Gang.
1. Apple iPhone – Beyond being an Apple fan there are some real business justifications for it being the king of the OS. First, they completely changed the game with the app store, this is not only a way to keep people on the iPhone platform but also another revenue stream for them – 30% to Apple and 70% for the developer. Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows have been around for years and not one of them thought about offering a store but once Apple announced, they all announced their intentions. Where Apple excels is that developers not only create programs for the iPhone but also the iPod touch (I believe over 80 million devices combined). Since both devices have the same screen size and resolution the user experience is the same and saves on development costs. Whereas, if you program for the Symbian/BlackBerry/Windows/Android every device is different – screen size, resolution, physical keyboard, etc…which leads to long development timeframes. The iPhone OS still has a way to go in terms of features but is quickly gaining and in the meantime grabbing hugh chucks of the market share.
Once again, with all these options the consumer is the real winner and should lead to lower prices and more features in the future.
Yesterday, Twitter announced they had struck a deal with the largest mobile phone provider in India – Airtel. It will allow users to send a status update to Twitter for only Re. 1 and receive tweets by SMS for free. It’s apparently only a 4 week exclusive deal after which I’m assuming all mobile carriers will offer the service.
I tried the service for about 5 minutes and soon realized how much it sucks…for me. I really don’t want to get over 100 SMS tweets via my phone. I was thinking WTF, what was Twitter and Airtel thinking when they struck this partnership, but then it dawned on me that this is India. And when something is free, Indian’s will figure out a way to use it or monetize it.
The first use of this service would be around stock picks. Since people sign-up for a stock picking service to receive updates this would be an ideal use and free for the person receiving the pick. This is one instance and I’m sure we’ll see many more in the coming months.
The official Twitter @ Airtel site. Doesn’t have much info, which is par for the course for most product launches involving an Indian company.
When I first heard about Mint.com back in November 2007, I thought it was a great idea but wondered if people would be willing to part with their financial data via an online platform. The market has spoken, Mint was acquired in Sept. 2009 for USD 170 million by personal finance software market leader Intuit.
So what is Mint? Mint takes your personal financial data and makes recommendations on your spending habits, investments, insurance, etc… Mint makes money via the service providers who want to sell products to the Mint audience. Simple and Sweet.
To get access to all that financial data they went to a single provider – Yodlee.com and then enticed users by slapping an amazingly simple user interface on the data.
It’s a remarkable story and exit for CEO Aaron Patzer. He recently talked about the journey, the video is below and I would highly recommend viewing the whole thing. I love his quote (about 5 minutes into the clip) about outsourcing the development to oDesk or India…”dead wrong.” The last 3 1/2 minutes are also really good.
Its been a busy week in Indian telecommunications and my frustration with the government grows. After the Indian general elections in May, the press had a love fest with the new government saying everything would change and the economy would be back on track. And one of the first things to get fast tracked would be the 3G auction. News trickled in this week that the much awaited 3G auction for high speed mobile data services would be delayed yet again.
For me the 3G auction should be one of the easiest policies to implement and to show the Congress Government has indeed arrived and changing the way business is done. There are no slums to move nor environmental impact surveys to conduct. The government is acting like most stock markets investors, they want to see those previous all-time highs and then auction off the spectrum. In the meantime, companies are losing revenue and the government is losing out on taxes. It all comes down to money, who gets what and how much – hence the title of the post.
All is not lost for the consumer, this week the government said they wanted to look at implementing per second billing for all carriers as opposed to the current per minute billing. This all came about when Tata DOCOMO launched their service with per second billing. I have a feeling it will happen because Reliance Mobile launched their “Simply Reliance” plan which offers 50 paise (USD 1 penny) per minute for local, long distance and SMS’s. Since Reliance is pretty well connected to the government, they probably have better insight to what policies will get implemented and threw down the pricing gauntlet. The “Simply Reliance” plans reminds me of the AT&T Digital One Rate launched in 1998, that really was the game changer for the US mobile market by eliminating “roaming” charges.
It’s been over year since the financial markets started to collapse and since then we are seeing many deals that might make you scratch your head. The one that comes to mind is Sequoia Capital investing into low incoming housing in Bombay.
Sequoia Capital is one of the oldest and most well connected venture capital firms in the world, they have invested in companies like Atari, Cisco, Google, LinkedIn and PayPal to name a few. It was started by Don Valentine who had the balls to invest in Cisco Systems back in December 1987, which was just weeks AFTER the October 1987 stock market crash.
Back to the low income housing project. Sequoia Capital is investing in Tata Housing which has a project outside of Bombay in Boisar. The flats will most likely sell for between USD 8,000 to 10,000. So why would Sequoia get involved? I’m betting there are a couple reasons:
1. Sequoia Capital is first and foremost a technology VC firm and unfortunately the number of technology deals that are in play in India is a fraction of what they see on a global scale. Which means instead of funding entrepreneurs they have to be entrepreneurial themselves.
2. There is a HUGH potential to streamline the construction industry in India. I’m guessing Sequoia will try and see if they can inject some technology into the process and see how it scales with Tata Housing. If it works, then they can target the entire industry and get a piece of the action. I’ve seen people bring foreign building products to India which are priced 25-50% more then a local product and that just won’t work. You need to innovate within India so you can understand the cost constrains and get the locals comfortable with the product.
If this works out, I would expect them to go after the agricultural space and drop some knowledge there as well.
While most businesses and industries around the world are struggling to get back to their glory days of 2007, one industry that continues to sky rocket is the wireless industry…at least in India. As of July 31, 2009 there are over 441 million wireless connections. I don’t think anyone could have predicted the hugh uptake in wireless, just 4 years ago there were only 70 million connections. Of course, the average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) is a paltry USD 4 a month, but it’s a numbers game – the more numbers the better. I could go on and on about the statics of the Indian wireless market but luckily the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) conveniently provides a mind crushing PDF every quarter that slices and dices the data.
On a more local level, the latest wireless carrier to enter the fierce Bombay market is Tata DOCOMO. It’s a joint venture between the largest industrial group in India – The Tata Group and Japan’s NTT DOCOMO. This will be Tata’s second wireless network in Bombay, they have an existing CDMA network while the new venture is based on GSM.
The question arises does Bombay need yet another mobile carrier? Apparently, the Tata’s feel their is space for one more carrier. With the latest entrant we now have 9 carriers: Aircel, Airtel, BPL, Idea, MTNL, Reliance, Tata (CDMA), Tata (GSM) and Vodafone. The Virgin Mobile brand in Bombay is just reselling the Tata (CDMA) service, almost like an Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO).
So what’s the current selling point for Tata DOCOMO – per second billing and a 3G ready network. That’s not enough of an offer to swing me over as a customer, but if number portability comes into play that’s another story. You could see many people switch over just for the per second billing feature, remember the average bill in India is USD 4 per month…so seconds count. Of course, Airtel and Vodafone could just turn that feature on as well.
The Indian online travel agent (OTA) space became a bit smaller this week, with Travelocity buying out Travelguru. Although the terms were not disclosed the media is reporting the acquisition was valued around USD 9-10 million. The insiders know the true number but typically when a successful exit is announced all the players want to highlight the fact by saying “we returned 5x, 50x or whatever to our investors…blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t see or hear such a statement and honestly that’s not the point of this post. Instead it’s about the current economic viability of the OTA’s and the Airlines. OTA’s are much more then just airline ticketing but I believe they are a large financial component for most OTA’s.
Let’s first start with the product – air travel. It’s no secret the airline industry went through a massive airplane buying and airport construction binge since 2005. With the economic environment we are all feeling the after effects, carriers are delaying deliveries of new planes, newly constructed airports are jacking up their user development fee (UDF) and the aviation turbine fuel (ATF) surcharge is killing everyone’s balance sheet. The UDF is a catch-22, with the decline in traffic, airports want to charge more to makeup for the short fall but this pushes away consumers. With the drop in tax collection, the government needs money as well and hence the ATF is a way to recover some of that tax money. This puts the airline in a painful spot, Air India is begging for a government bailout of USD 2-3 billion to help alleviate the situation. Secretly, the private carriers would love a bailout as well, but I doubt Praful Patel, Minister of Aviation, can save face with the public if he bails out Kingfisher or Jet Airways.
One of the ways the airlines have dealt with this situation is to cut the commissions paid to travel agents. This recently led to many travel agents refusing to book flights for certain carriers since it wasn’t worth their effort. The OTA’s that have high fixed costs and shallow pockets are going to face the music very soon. Most OTA’s started during this binge when the number of passengers traveling in India looked like a hockey stick (J curve) and hence all the VC money thrown at them. Some of the OTA’s have looked at bus and train travel which have very small margins but potentially a hugh number of travelers. But, most of those travelers are not connected to the internet. How many OTA’s will exist in their current avatar 18 months from now? It’s anyones guess.
There was an article today on how Dell was able to juice there sales by USD 3 million thanks to Twitter. My god! I almost think Twitter will solve world hunger and deliver peace in the Middle East. So why all the rage around Twitter? In my opinion it’s the next evolution of search – social search to be more exact.
Today, if you want information on traveling to Aruba you would most likely goto Google and put in some search terms and boom a million pages to go through…oh what fun. In geek terms that is a pull search, you are pulling the information.
Several months ago I let me friends know on Facebook I was looking to travel to Dubai. I got back a bunch of tips and pointers which were helpful but I ended up falling back to a Google search. The next version of search will push the results to you. How convenient would it be if you got several ideas delivered to your email about your upcoming trip to Aruba, such as places to stay, places to eat and things to do. Then you could aggregate the data with what your friends might have recommended.
Another example, let’s say its time to upgrade your grocery getter and you let people know you are in the market for a “4 door sedan around USD 40k.” You’ll most likely get 3-4 comments from friends and then maybe a service like Edmund’s or Cars.com can email you the specific information. That would be a hugh time saver and then if you needed more info you could always go back to Google and refine your search criteria. This of course assumes these services won’t spam the hell out of you, and that is a big assumption.
The real question is whether Twitter is a part of the overall long term social search solution or just a temporary blip.
When Twitter was created over three years ago no one seemed to care, but in the past 6 months it’s gone from obscurity within the tech community to mainstream overload. I’ve struggled over the past month to write this post, because I’m not sure if Twitter is the next big thing or just a temporary distraction. With each passing day I find myself leaning towards the next big thing as I see and hear more people jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.
What makes Twitter different from the rest? Two big factors that are helping Twitter at the moment:
GDP is contracting worldwide and hence there is less “stuff” happening. This gives people more time to try new things and hence Twitter and Facebook are enjoying a “hockey stick” growth pattern. Thus, many users entering random thoughts into “the matrix” as I call it.
The Twitter API is simple to use. The guys at Twitter have made a platform that can pull data and allow people to aggregate, repackage and reuse the content.
From a business model perspective, Twitter seems to have all 3 segments rolled into one platform. Quick refresher course in dot.com lingo, C=consumer, B=business. Sorry to take you back but it was the easiest way to break it down:
B2B – Currently, there is no fee for using Twitter’s API but at some point they could charge based on how much data you want to pull and how quickly. If you are StockTwits you would want millisecond access to the data, others might need hourly access.
B2C – Many companies are using Twitter for customer support, press releases or to disseminate other information.
C2C – Allows people to have an open conversation and allow people to jump in if the topic is interesting. This is where search.twitter.com comes in handy to find content.
So, how do you benefit from Twitter? That’s the beauty you can use it any which way you want and not feel confined. I know some people that tweet every waking hour and others that tweet once a week. I mainly use Twitter to share links to business articles which others might find useful.
How are people in India using Twitter? It’s not as widespread as it should be considering over 400 million mobile users and over 8 million being added monthly. Since the founder of Twitter, @jack, designed the architecture around an SMS type usage, I’m hoping within a year the uptake will be much more as people become aware of the service. Anyways, the people that are using Twitter in India are doing some great things for different markets.
B2B
?? – If you know of anything that is targeted for the Indian market, tweet or e-mail me
B2C @DeskAway – SaaS project collaboration tool. They are using it to for support, product announcements, etc…
C2C @missmalani – According to her Twitter profile she is a Radio DJ, Party Animal and Mumbai’s Gossip Girl. In essence, she is a one person marketing machine @gulpanag – Actress based in Bombay, tweeting about random thoughts @deepakshenoy – Based in Delhi. All things related to the Indian equity markets @kaushikgala – Based in Pune. Tweets about Indian equity markets and the venture capital field @sm63 – Based in Bombay. social networking and most recently was Twittering the IPL finals match @pjain – Based in Delhi. technology, finance, apple, etc…
Some others that are using Twitter only for input and not following others, which is such a waste:
@Rahul Gandhi – He is following nobody, but has over 1,900 people following him. Fail. @ShashiTharoor – Following 3 people and over 3,300 followers. Fail.
I’m surprised that no big tech exec is tweeting from Bangalore or a big Bollywood star. The CTO of Cisco, Padmasree Warrior tweets and of course everyone knows Ashton Kuther does as well.
It’s official, Bloom Energy has revealed what it has been working on for the past 8 years…and it looks impressive. KR Sridhar the co-founder of Bloom Energy previewed the Bloom Box on Sunday on 60 Minutes. I happened to be watching a DVR’d version of it on Monday and was blown away by it. If it lives up to the hype then its a game changer for the world.
The smartphone OS battle is finally starting to take shape and I’ve decided to take a closer look at what the marketplace has to offer. Years ago the most critical thing that people would store on their phones were the actual phone numbers and most likely that got saved to a SIM card. Now, phones a have a wealth of info on them and utilizing some sort of smartphone OS is a must. There is no point in getting a cheap phone and then realizing you can’t sync your data, if the only option is to manually enter in the data…that is a major #FAIL.
When I first heard about Mint.com back in November 2007, I thought it was a great idea but wondered if people would be willing to part with their financial data via an online platform. The market has spoken, Mint was acquired in Sept. 2009 for USD 170 million by personal finance software market leader Intuit.
It’s been over year since the financial markets started to collapse and since then we are seeing many deals that might make you scratch your head. The one that comes to mind is Sequoia Capital investing into low incoming housing in Bombay.
There was an article today on how Dell was able to juice there sales by USD 3 million thanks to Twitter. My god! I almost think Twitter will solve world hunger and deliver peace in the Middle East. So why all the rage around Twitter? In my opinion it’s the next evolution of search – social search to be more exact.
When 
