How Rivigo is contributing to the future of internet!

Posted in Hot, Leadership, People & Culture, Technology

For many of us Internet is all pervasive. It is essentially a medium without which we cannot imagine our present day lives. What started as a mechanism to connect several machines has grown to break political and social boundaries of the physical world that we live in.

And it has a profound impact in India too. The impact can be seen in all walks of life – banking, travel, social, politics, entertainment etc. The list is endless. However, the reach and penetration of internet is still limited to the big cities. Not surprisingly, lot of new application development is biased towards places where internet usage is already dense.

internet-rivigo

At Rivigo, we are changing that. Our business model involves thousands of people who are part of the logistics value chain to deliver business benefits to our customers. These people are connected to Rivigo technology platform from many remote places in India. Learning, understanding and using new age technology is how they go about doing their day’s job. And that is mandatory. Rivigo is making technology accessible to people in such remote places and creating a real need for them to be part of the internet.

This is what I believe is the future of internet – connecting people who are already not connected! And Rivigo is just doing that with its technology platform.

Wearables – What Consumers Are Buying

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)

Earlier this year I did a blog post on wearable device market and also created a snapshot diagram of some popular wearable devices. Since then the market has exploded and now there are over 100s of wearable devices out there.

Now, let us look at what consumers are buying. Here is the distribution according to this report –

source – Techcrunch

The growth in the number of companies and wearables that have come up recently and the above data shows an increasing interest from consumers around wearables.

I am also interested in knowing about the frequency of usage of these devices as well any drop-off rate after a period of usage. I believe that to provide the next set of challenges and opportunities for new and existing companies to solve!

Smart Watch – Why I may wear one!

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)

Earlier this year I did a blog post on wearable device market and also created a snapshot diagram of some popular wearable devices. Since then the market has exploded and now there are over 100s of wearable devices out there. Sometimes it is difficult to keep pace with all the new devices that are coming up but there is lot of buzz in the market with Apple launching its maiden watch.

Apple Watch

Why will I use a smart watch?

Let us first compare a smart watch with a smart phone – since it is in some way a step-down version of phone in terms of size and features. Today, consuming information on phone is a 5-step process –

1. Take out the phone from pocket
2. Activate the phone
3. Press the unlock button
4. Type in your security code
5. Open the relevant application

If you are looking for extremely quick information consumption, these steps on phone get in the way. This is where I feel lies the most critical utility of smart watches. Smart watches will serve as extremely rapid information consumption devices.

And that will be my most common use case. I will use it for notification services, calendar services and any other information that I want to consume rapidly – faster than I can do today with phone.

I have frequent need to locate my keys, wallet and my phone. Yes, I do. I expect my watch to act as a locator. And there are already watches like Filip that help locate your kids. I am not a fitness enthusiast but I can understand how smart watches can help with health tracking and provide rapid information about your health data.

I expect future smart watch applications to provide applications based on user profile and certain set of rapid information consumption. A traveler profile – using weather, appointment, flight status notifications or a busy executive profile or a fitness profile. All of them consuming relevant information in the quickest possible way.

Future of Information Consumption

Posted in Hot, Ideas, Leadership

I recently had long meetings involving several hours of technology and market research. Needless to say those meetings were tiring. There is so much of information that is available that it is almost impossible to comprehend every bit of it. All I wanted was an easy way to collect and digest information faster and in a less tiring way.

This is when my I jokingly started discussing about if there is a way we can inject all relevant information directly into our brain – perhaps by taking an “information” injection!

Information Consumption

I see many folks, smart people that I meet suffering from this problem of “information-overload”. There are times when as many as 25-50 browser windows are open on the folks’ machine. I always ask, “When do you have time to read all of this”. And most of them admit that when the browser windows crash, they rarely open that link again. Opening several windows only build pressure – pressure of reading rather than understanding and building knowledge.

But this has to change in future. Today, we are physically limited by our senses (eyes, ear) to consume more information. It is like the current system is built on USB 1.0 data transfer speed and while we need USB 3.0 or beyond speeds.

Interestingly, I just watched a TED video from Nicholas Negroponte talking about a pill that we can take in future to ingest information. I can’t agree more having discussed about the same idea when faced with the challenge of consuming information rapidly. I feel more and more people are running into this issue and someone somewhere will take up this as an opportunity to find a solution.

How are you solving the challenge of information overload today?

So, what problems does the Internet of Things solve?

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)

In the last article, I provided a very short explanation on the Internet of Things. So, what problems does IoT solve? Some of the areas where the IoT is making progress are

1. Healthcare – Patient monitoring and home care systems

2. Smart grids – Utilities in general but more specifically efficient energy consumption

3. Industrial Internet – Efficient maintenance and energy conservation

4. Transportation – Smart logistics

5. Consumer wearables – Fitness, consumer engagement etc

There are many verticals where companies are beginning to experiment with IoT related technologies and I will be writing about what specific problem IoT is solving and how it is providing value and monetization opportunities.

A short explanation on The Internet of Things

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept where all devices with an on/off switch are connected to the internet. This concept allows multiple devices to work together to complete a task now that they are all connected to each others.

Internet-of-Things

So, what does The Internet of Things enable?

In most cases, this task is driven by automatic determination of human need or to make a smart decision on someone’s behalf. For example, after waking you up your alarm clock notifying your coffee machine to start brewing coffee for you. Or your refrigerator ordering vegetables for you once the stock goes down. What if your car can access your calendar and if you are running late, notifies others that you will be late.

There are many possibilities that can happen when multiple devices can come together. What do you think?

How LinkedIn is reinventing itself

Posted in Analytics, Hot, Ideas, Marketing & SoMe

Linkedin used to be a quiet place where professionals would go to update their profile, make new connections or know about what their friends and peers do from a professional point of view.

What’s new

This is all changing. These days I do notice lot more activities from Linkedin. LinkedIn is sending three types of mails to me on a regular basis.

1. Linkedin message on who viewed your profile.

2. LinkedIn pulse on new articles recommendation on Linkedin.com

3. Linkedin updates on job changes and work anniversaries of your connections. This allows you to stay up-to-date on your connections and “say congrats” much like “say happy birthday” feature of Facebook.

These changes are very interesting and my visits to Linkedin have somewhat increased. I never considered it to be a place to post my new blog articles but Linkedin is now 3rd topmost traffic driver to my website. Instead of a burst in traffic, it provides a steady traffic flow to my blog.

LinkedIn-Logo

What is driving these changes?

So, the real question is what is driving these changes at Linkedin? Let us try to look at some important statistics.

– Linkedin has around 60 million users
– 85% use the free account
– 50% spend 0-2 hours/week

It is clear that Linkedin needs to make people spend more time with them if they want to be able to monetize a huge 85% of their user base. The question then is what should they do? Let us look at some more statistics.

– The 3 most helpful Linkedin features, based on recent statistics are – “who’s viewed your profile (70%)”, “people you may know (65%)” and groups (60%)
– Consider trends in social media. According to Pew Research, 78% of Facebook users mostly see news when on Facebook when they have logged into Facebook for other reasons. They are consuming news against their original intention. This is significant. It reflects human ability to pay more attention to news when it is coming from a known/trusted source.

Connecting data to Linkedin strategy

With this information, it is easy to see that Linkedin needs to do something that will help drive traffic to Linkedin.com. Providing regular mail updates on who’s viewed your profile makes sense. This is what their users have found most useful.

Using the latest trend in the way people consume news on social channels is an excellent way of reinventing itself. LinkedIn is focusing a lot on providing stories and news articles. This will allow them to move to monetization via sponsored stories.

The third piece of the puzzle is to engage users by making them do something when they visit Linkedin.com. This leads to higher page time and can be translated into various monetization and growth strategies. Endorsing your connection and “say congrats” is a good start.

However, this is also an area where much is left to be done. And I think Linkedin needs some sort of user experience refresh to allow them to take this engagement to a higher level.

Snapshot of Wearable Device Market

Posted in Hot, Technology

The biggest trend from recently concluded CES-2014 is that the wearable device market is exploding. There are new entrants from everywhere and their rate of arrival is perhaps greater than the growth of the market itself.

I wanted to get my head around who’s who in the market and get a single page snapshot to keep track of majority of players in this area. The below picture is an attempt to capture existing and upcoming players.

WearableDeviceSnapshot

The wearable market is broadly divided into fitness, sports and health and there is a big concentration of players in fitness and sports sectors. Some brands are differentiating with advanced offering for professional athletes while few can be placed in me-too category. In the snapshot above, activity tracking includes statistics like calories burnt, steps taken, floors climbed, distance traveled, hours slept etc.

The second way of differentiation is based on how you wear devices – wrist, headband, ear-bud, carry, glasses, clothing etc with wrist devices in majority.The third way of differentiation is based on the social context in which the product is used – individual, family, kids, social, gamification etc. Maybe I should try to create an equivalent snapshot using these two ways of differentiation.

Well, the market is quickly moving towards commoditization, the real differentiation will be in terms of services and continuous usage of the product.

Till then, just go with price and looks and maybe good battery life!

From BYOD to BYOS – A new service model for enterprise

Posted in Hot, Ideas, People & Culture, Technology

These days it is not uncommon for you to access your official mails on your personal Blackberry or Android or iPhone. This is exactly what a BYOD or bring-your-own-device model is. It is quite a challenge for enterprise IT teams to ensure security of network and corporate data every time an employee accesses sales report or downloads sensitive information on his own device.

BYOS

The adoption of BYOD is on rise and a recent poll by market researcher IDC shows that more than half the polled companies support employees using their own device. It is also shown that there exists a positive link between usage of employee own device and employee satisfaction. This is a great news as it can help reduce cost as well as boost employee performance.

From BYOD to BYOS

As more employees start to use BYOD model, the boundary is getting pushed beyond devices to include software and services that employees want to use directly. Today 77% of online adults in US use at least one personal cloud service such as Dropbox (a file sharing service). This consumerization of IT is leading to a shift towards more personal choice and ability to personally select the tools that employees want to use. Many products are moving away from perpetual to subscription based model and offering SAAS (software-as-a-service). So, employees are increasingly selecting what is available. Well, if you represent enterprise IT, there are many challenges that you have to deal with.

Security
This is probably the biggest issue to deal with in a BYOS model. Similar to BYOD, organizations need to worry about if these BYOS services meet their security requirements. Moreover concern around providing access to sensitive data has to be solved before the integration can work.

Integration
Though this is somewhat related to security but organizations need to consider any additional cost of hardware and software that these services might need and how requirements across multiple groups can be managed together.

Support
Just like any service model is built with standard SLA, BYOS is no different. It is important to understand them and know the quality of support should things go wrong.

Future proof
Are the services customization and extensible? It is important that BYOS remains compatible with other IT systems and integration points where they are used.

Just like the forces of BYOD models are prevailing, BYOS is here to stay. We better get in front of it!

Let’s Do Nothing!

Posted in Hot, Ideas

Now the title may sound like a pessimistic advice but there is a case for doing less and not more.

The below is cover page of one of the favorite books that I enjoy reading to my kids. They love it. The idea of two kids – Frankie and Sal, trying not to do anything and ending up spending time thinking and pretending is hilarious to kids and something for all to think about.

do_nothing

In our work life, we are slowly and surely getting slaved by the following 4 M’s

1. Mindless web surfing – This is increasingly taking away lot more time than most people realize. Aimlesslely surfing internet or social web sites and reading articles of no value and not aligned to what you are trying to do in short or long term wastes time.

2. Meetings – A lot has been written about it. Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin wrote a great article on how to eliminate useless meetings.

3. Mail – Checking e- Mails at the dinner table is no longer cool. Many folks can’t go to bed without checking their inbox. Work is routinely carried back home. The problem and solution is widely known – lack of discipline and commitment to generate lesser mail traffic is required.

4. Managing operations – This is the most important one that hurts organizations. Many top minds and executives time is better spend thinking about strategy. Operations help execution of plans but does not prepare company for future. Strategic thinking requires some uncluttered time. When Jack Welch was at GE, he used to spend an hour a day “doing nothing”!

How can we be like Frankie and Sal and do nothing, even for few minutes?