Getting Wiki with Jaggayya

Continuing on the changing web...I recently went to Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and read an article I thought I knew something about (a Telugu actor called Jaggayya who apparently was the first Indian movie actor to be elected directly to the parliament)...the page offered an [edit] button and edit I did. I changed the spelling of a book name to make it sound more appropriate. And it took it -- it just took it. The amazing thing was having the freedom to go change something on someone else's territory (in this case, everyone's territory) and make it a wee-bit better - not many things on earth work this way!

Raoism for your career

If you are from Columbia Business School, you must’ve already competed to get into this “most popular B-school class in the U.S.” – for the rest of us, here’s a recent article from Fortune. According to the article, "Raoism," as his devotees call it, uses a system of intense introspection to revive energy and creativity. In a series of eight mental exercises, Professor Srikanth S. Rao explains how to shush the inner chatter and clear the way for career growth. If you want to go ahead and buy his book with a not-so-happening title, it’s here.

The Rise and Rise of Services and Other Stories

Clearly there has been a definite shift to Internet-based service models. The new models are redefining the web and nudging it to what is popularly being called Web 2.0 (read a seminal article on the same – if you like it, you can bookmark it on a service called del.icio.us (which consolidates favorites of registered users like this. And you like having more fun, you can flickr to see pictures of what people think as “cute” or collaborate with your team on your next document over Writely– which Google recently bought). And if you want to see what a hash of Google maps and Craig’s list looks like, go to www.housingmaps.com. And there’s www.audblog.com where you can leave a message on the phone and see it in the next instant on your blog (it’s weirdly cool)! The common factor among all these is that they are the new Web 2.0 - offering all kinds of services now built around what used to be the erstwhile software-only products. This also puts a big question on the traditional beliefs of institutional investors on seeking product-oriented models so that it can scale – here, services scale. The current activity surrounding Web 2.0 involves consumer-centric models – even if it is for the knowledge worker (such as Writely), the models are individual-centric and not really business-centric. Among other things, a business has to be open to collective wisdom (which is impossible if it is a product) in order to be web2-ready. As this new web disentangles and evolves, we will see more models that are business/ industry specific.

Now, let’s take this a step further and add India into the fray. There are certain service-dependent industries (such as retail, finance, logistics, healthcare, telecom…) that lend themselves naturally to this combined model where you not only have services wrapped around software but also need the India-type services to scale dramatically.

All that’s food for thought but here are some thoughts on food: McDonald’s is experimenting with centralizing its call centers in Hawaii (nope, not Bangalore!); so when you place an order for fries on your next drive through, the person taking the order may not really be where you are!

audio blogs

Here's what I had to do to test www.audblog.com.....call a number, hit a few buttons, speak my blog, hit # and I see it the next instant here...the amazing thing was the simplicity.

Space

The ultimate trillion dollar entrepreneurship challenge is on its way even as the rest of the world still runs behind billion dollar opportunities…for some “out of the world” ideas check this month’s Business 2.0 cover story: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/27/technology/business2_guidetospaceintro/. New age entrepreneurs are rushing to start space-related ventures…and it’s completely fascinating. From capturing an asteroid called 3554 Amun, which has $8 trillion worth iron and nickel to cutting short travel time from US-India to minutes…businesses are dealing with space hotels, research labs, elevators (from earth to space), and tourism in full gear. But if you want to travel there first before starting a venture, you can get buy your $200K ticket to heaven from here: http://www.virgingalactic.com/en/when.asp

BPO valuations

Jerry Rao’s Mphasis has an offer from EDS for $382M for 52% - doing some quick and dirty calculations…the valuation must be at $730.76M or 6.3x of revenues, which is way cool and more than that of Office Tiger, which was around 3.4X. Read about the new deal. Here are some past BPO valuations (x times revenues):
Office Tiger: 3.4x
Daksh: 2.6x
Spectramind: 2x
Customer Asset: 1.93x
Gecis: 1.9x
Transworks: 1.3x
Healthscribe: 1.25x