The world is madly chasing the convergence dream. I believe however the future lies in breaking some of that convergence into basic products – tinker level. The market possibilities are endless in the emerging world. Think of a GPS device that just gives you location and not mp3 and other bells and whistles. Think of a Rs 400 mobile phone with only 2 buttons – receive a paging and send a SOS. The possibilities are endless.
Are any of you working on ideas like these, rather than Web 2.0 conveniences?
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Vamsi,
I think you are quite late to this field…. about 3 years ago there were multiple companies that tried this model… I used to be in industry then and was looking at the utlity of this from the user side. Frankly I found very little use to the data… There are still some 5/6 companies in this field who are trying to get growth capital but apart from the Auto OEM’s ( for the truck carriers) and the oil marketing companies ( for their tankers) few other industries have what logistics professionals call the Value density for goods to appreciate the value add that a device like this brings and the costs
Also I think there is an issue of continuity in the value addition that you can offer…. if I know for once what is the average distance and time taken- based on the database i can anyways hold the driver responsible and with a phone with incoming free at rs. 777 , Rs.1000 a month is a very high figure…
I can go on, but in case you want to discuss pl get in touch with me….
Hi Sanjukt,
I dont think its fundamentally harder for non-Web2.0 businesses (I use the word businesses as opposed to ideas). I guess Web2.0 has the luxury of getting funded at the idea stage – real world businesses probably find that very difficult. But once you get traction (web2.0 or not) its the VCs who will queue up not the other way round.
Vamsi.
Hi all,
I would like to talk about convergence, I understand that the talk here is of wireless services, but anyway check this out.
I had been to a convergence conference quite a few years back in Mumbai, It was like a Tower of Babel, nobody was speaking the same language so to speak, there were hardware people, service providers, talks about convergence at gateway level but what I found out was that there were no two people who could converge on any one of these mentioned nor were they talking about convergence of users which to my mind is most important.
Also this article below could explain what I mean by users convergence.
The beast of complexity
Apr 12th 2001
From The Economist print edition
Stuart Feldman the director of IBM’s Institute for Advanced Commerce states, Quote “Imagine, says the man from IBM, that you are running on empty and want to know the cheapest open petrol station within a mile. You speak into your cellphone, and seconds later you get the answer on the display. This sounds simple, but it requires a combination of a multitude of electronic services, including a voice-recognition and natural-language service to figure out what you want, a location service to find the open petrol stations near you and a comparison-shopping service to pick the cheapest one. Unquote.
Now such services would require a platform where ‘all users and service providers are registered, on a platform to help enabling compatibility and convergence. Not only that it is very important for users to converge, only than can there be all other types of convergence.
Virendra Gandhi
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I have probably touched a nerve here. We see so few innovations in the Real World 2.0 space. It is refreshing to see people working on ‘mundane’ stuff like vehicle tracking. But I wonder, do they have it harder with the VCs than let us say a normal Web 2.0 idea! Not that I have anything against the later. In fact, if people can bring together ‘tinker’ level ideas with the limitless service and fulfillment possibilities driven by Web 2.0 we could be onto the next big things.
I frankly don’t get the mobile phones in India – with all the features. All i use is SMS and phone anyway – but i guess it makes sense to get people to spend more with each replacement – just to be status conscious.
Anyway, all this conversation reminds me of someone on my team a few years ago who designed products for us – in a cognitive sense. His favorite quote was from a jazz musician names Mingus.
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity”.
Apple is an awesome example of making the complicated simple.