Municator: Micro Linux PC

cebitvideo.com reports:

This is an awesome product! It is a 146$ Linux computer (Thinix OS) from China that does all the basic things most people need, like browsing (firefox), emailing (thunderbird), instant messaging (gaim), skype, word processing (Red Office), audio/video playback (mplayer), e-learning, all through a very user-friendly very basic interface and is software upgradable. It has got 40GB, a 400mhz/800mhz Godson 2C processor, 256mb ram, 4 usb2 ports, VGA-output, ps2 input, tv-output and weigths something like 400 grams. Their slogan is “Say no to Wintel”.

More information about the Municator can be found at http://yellowsheepriver.org

Tags: software, linux

Global Innovation Outlook

In 2005 and 2006, the IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) 2.0 gathered 248 thought leaders from nearly three dozen countries and regions, representing 178 organizations across four continents for 15 “deep dive” sessions to discuss three focus areas and the emerging trends, challenges and opportunities that affect business and society. This paper is worth reading.

Interesting to note that:

• The new Airbus A380 contains over one billion lines of code
• GM predicts the average car will have 100 million lines of code by 2010
• In comparison, Windows XP has about 40 million lines of code

Tags: software, innovation

eBay India Sells One Car Every 10 Minutes

Report by Sahad on ContentSutra:

Business Standard: Used car business online is taking off if these numbers are any indication. Last year, eBay India was selling 18 cars a day. Now that has gone upto one car every 10 minutes. That's about 400 cars a day, but it's mostly business to business sale. In the b2c segment, one car is sold every nine hours. If you are interested in numbers, the used car business online offers an estimated business opportunity of Rs 10,000-13,000 crore, the report says. The used-car volume in India is only 70-90 per cent of new car sales, unlike in some mature markets where second-hand car numbers are almost twice or thrice the sales of new cars. So used car business holds huge potential.

Tags: eBay, India

VC mood in Silicon Valley

Sramana Mitra writes:

In 2006, the classic venture capitalists have pretty much shunned the notion of risk capital, in favor of growth capital.

Today, there is a lot of activity in very early-stage, built-to-flip venture capital, where from the get-go, the assumption is not to build a company, but to focus on making a quick million or two.

Finally, the entrepreneurs out there who have the ambition to build a real, large, multi-billion dollar company - should know that Silicon Valley has changed fundamentally. Highly speculative, capital intensive deals that require 5-7 years to build, are less popular these days. Especially, if you have a contrarian, one-of-a-kind business idea that goes against the grain of the prevalent trends, investors will ask you to find ways to either diminish the capital requirements, or reduce the startup risks.

Your answer may well lie in that category of “Built-to-flip” or “Built-as-an-accident” deals, from which you weave together a Venture Buy-Out quilt.

Tags: startup, funding, software, entrepreneur, venture

How software entrepreneurs should go about picking which market to target

Dharmesh Shah has some really interesting thoughts on how software entrepreneurs should go about picking which market to target for their product/idea.

In almost all cases, software entrepreneurs should pursue the smallest possible market they can define. The probability of early success is inversely proportional to the size of the initial market.

Read more here.

Tags: Startup, Entrepreneur

Chips For Mini Video Displays

Sahad reports on ContentSutra about a Hyderabad Startup - PortalPlayer:

PortalPlayer has till now made a living by making the chips that process sound for iPods and other digital music players. The company is now making the next leap. It's making "chips that power tiny screen displays on laptops. The mini-displays -- small screens on the outside of the laptop shell -- will provide consumers with instantly available information and even e-mail without the need to power up a laptop. They will make their debut with Microsoft's Windows Vista software later this year".

Tags: Laptop, iPOD

Software VC Outlook

Matt Miller posted a very interesting article on this subject. I am posting some excerpts:

The mood among VCs remains hesitant about enterprise software startups. Competing against today's megavendors is tough. Perpetual license models are a slowly dying business model, but the much-hyped Software as a Service (SaaS) model is still more conjecture than reality in the core software sectors.

Yet software companies received $4.7 billion in venture capital investment during 2006. That's more than biotech, alternative energy, or any other sector.

2006 looks like it will be a solid year for software investment for two reasons. One, we aren't yet seeing a bubble that is funding a lot of unworthy companies. And two, we aren't yet overfunding hot categories.

New Software VC Economics at Work: A look at the average funding level for software companies shows a decline over the past few years. A more likely explanation is that software companies have become more "capital efficient." It used to cost $7 - $10 million to build a product. Today, software companies can leverage open source components and offshore development to decrease development budgets significantly. A decent piece of enterprise software can be built for $5 million or even less.

On the marketing side, significant cost-effective methods have also emerged. During the Dotcom Era, a software company would spend 10%-15% of its gross revenues on "big-blast," brand marketing aimed at building awareness through advertising.

Open Source: Open source is tricky. The barriers to entry are quite low - you and I could start an open source software company this afternoon if we wanted to. That means the scale needed to have a successful open source company is dramatic. In the "old days," we could close five large sales deals and be in good shape. An open source startup might need 100,000s or millions of users to generate meaningful revenue on maintenance. Few open source companies can quickly achieve the scale needed to be successful.

SaaS: CIOs speaking at a recent conference I attended agree that the perpetual license model is dead, but few have committed any big dollars to subscriptions. Aside from Salesforce.com, what other successful companies have you heard of?

The 2005 data suggests that VCs do have an increasing preference for later stage investments, which now account for one-third of all deals and nearly one-half of all dollars invested (see Company Stage investment chart).

That's why areas like open source databases are looking extremely popular with investors this year. The area is ripe with early adoption and strong contenders. It looks like there will be quite a shoot-out in that market in 2006. Areas that combine two trends are also trendy - open source security or BI play anyone?

Tags: Startup, Funding, VC

Amazon Storage

Michael Arrington reports on Techcrunch:

Amazon Web Service is launching a new web service tonight called S3 - which stands for “Simple Storage Service”. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”.

Pricing is cheaper than anything else I’ve seen: $0.15 per GB of storage per month, and $0.20 for each GB of data transferred up or downstream. This translates to $15 per month for 100 GB of storage, net of any transfer fees (to move that much data on to S3 would be a one time cost of $20).

Novatium's $100 thin client PC

Dan Farber reports on Zdnet:

At PC Forum Novatium Solutions demoed its $100 PC appliance (without keyboard or display, which adds about $75) for emerging markets. The Nova netPC and Nova netTV are based on thin client (server-based, zero administration for users) and mobile phone technology. "We have the guts of mobile phone and use the business model of phone industry," said Rajesh Jain, co-founder of the Mumbai, India-based company. "We reduce the price of the thin client by about 50 percent, moving away from the Intel architecture, and change the business model to suit emerging market customers." It's like a cell phone in square box and a bunch of I/O ports.

The core processor is an AMD digital signal processor, rather than x86 architecture, used in cell phones, and works over LAN, Wi-Fi and broadband networks. (After the session an Intel representative was primed to talk to Jain.) The only client side processing is for the display and multimedia, and the maxiumun video display is 1024x768. The device also supports standard I/0 ports and outputs only 5 watts.

Mass Innovation

An interview with Frank Moss head of MIT's Media Lab, an entrepreneur and former CEO of Tivoli Systems:

What role will startups play in the future?
"I see tremendous economic growth from startups from 10 years ago. Entrepreneurs will go from the 1,000 startup ventures funded in the last 10 to 20 years to ideas coming from people working together in network-based environments, using computers to dream up innovations in a way they never did before. It could be people in developing countries with low-cost computers."


"I think as we experience the problem of aging populations we will need to supply different ways to educate, and traditional schools are not the way to go. We will see technology dramatically change the way kids learn. We will see health care without hospitals. That is where the action will be. Just another tweak to a telephone or a handheld device will happen, but it will not be a major source of growth. That is becoming a commodity."

"We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop, and bootstrap the way they learn outside of school. We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning."

Thumbstacks - Web PowerPoint

Michael Arrington reports on Techcrunch:

New York-based Thumbstacks is a bare bones but functional application that allows users to build presentations online and present them via a permanent URL. It uses both Flash and Ajax - it uses Flash if its installed, and defaults to Ajax if not. Click here to see a sample presentation.

IPTV in Mumbai ...

Contentsutra reports:

The Economic Times reports that MTNL is going to launch its IPTV services in June. If that happens, MTNL will be the first operator to launch IPTV in India. Times Broadband is MTNL's content partner, and the operator can tie up with three more companies for content on a 30:70 revenue sharing basis, the report says. The services will be kicked off in Mumbai in June and in Delhi in July. To start with MTNL will offer 120 channels and video on demand, and the monthly rentals could be in the range of Rs 300-500. MTNL is a state-owned telecom operator which offers services in India's two biggest cities - Delhi and Mumbai.

$SMS$

Ajit Jaokar quotes Tomi Ahonen: "Total SMS revenues in 2005 were about 75 Billion USD. To put it in context, Hollywood box office is a bit below 30 B USD. Global music industry revenues are about 35B. Videogaming, consoles and all software are about 40. And the total value of all laptop computers sold in 2005 was about 65 B USD. SMS alone earns more than any of those industries.... And SMS is still over 90% profit. Do we love this industry or what?"

Samsung 8GB phone

Engadget reports of the new Samsung phone:

Introducing the SGH-i310 smartphone from Samsung with 8GB of capacity. With 2 megapixel camera, microSD slot if you want more than 8GB.

Barcamp in New Delhi

Gaurav Bhatnagar reports from New Delhi:

I would love to attend conferences but I am just too poor (right now...) to be able to afford such luxuries. So what can be the next best thing? How about organising one yourself? Well, its not a conference. Actually its an "un-conference" and its called Barcamp. Like the wiki says, BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

The theme of BarCampDelhi will be "Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff".

bozo explosion

Very interesting (and relevant :-)) post by Guy Kawasaki:

It's depressing to watch a mean, lean, fighting machine of a company deteriorate into mediocracy. In Silicon Valley we call this process the “bozo explosion.” This downward slide seems inevitable after a company achieves success--often during the years immediately following an IPO. The purpose of this article is to prevent, or at least postpone, this process in your company.

The first step is to determine whether a bozo explosion is happening. Here are the top ten signs of bozosity to help you decide.

1. The two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic.” In addition, “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense.

2. Management has two-day offsites at places like the Ritz Carlton to foster communication and to craft a company mission statement.

7. Time is now considered more important than money so you have a company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service. Moreover, the first thing that employees show visitors is the company cafeteria, health club, and pet grooming service.

9. An employee is paid to do nothing but write a blog.

11. You have a layer of middle management who worked at big-name companies (usually consumer goods) who like to call meetings and designate “project leads.”

High-tech paint will block cell phone calls

Jon Van reports in Tribune:

A company called NaturalNano is developing a special high-tech paint that relies on the wizardry of nanotechnology to create a system that locks out unwanted cell phone signals on demand.

"You could use this in a concert hall, allowing cell phones to work before the concert and during breaks, but shutting them down during the performance," said Michael Riedlinger, president of NaturalNano of Rochester, N.Y.

His firm has found a way to use nanotechnology to blend particles of copper into paint that can be brushed onto walls and effectively deflect radio signals.

Sony's Net Juke Hi-Fi system

Sony introduces in Japan a new Net Juke Hi-Fi system with a 40GB hard-drive dubbed NAS-D5HD. The Sony Net Juke NAS-D5HD allows uses to directly load music downloaded from the web onto portable music players without the need of a PC. The NAS-D5HD features a 4.3 inch color display to browse stored music and shop for new tracks on Sony's music store. The system supports ATRAC and MP3 music.