A leaf from the Software Engineering text Book for the country

The software Engineering best practices prescribes that even when a small bug is deemed to be resolved by a developer,  the resolution should not be accepted at face value, specially without a a root cause analysis and appropriate test cases implemented to make sure that such scenarios are captured. The main concern is that they don't want the bug to be re-opened. Re-opened bugs are supposed to be frowned upon and any PM will usually make a big fuss of a re-opened bug.

When such care is taken in the software world for a bug, which is not life threatening at most times. I was wondering whether anyone is doing that to our own local issue.

Its been an year since the war has ended.  On the positive side we no longer shed blood in mass scale. Bombs(at times even human bombs) doesn't any longer go off in Colombo, fighter jets no longer does carpet bombings in its own country, people no longer die without knowing which sides bullet they were killed by. Its indeed a very positive change in that sense.I honestly wish the current status quo continues forever.More than that wish that just wishing could make sure that this will continue.

I see that as a nation we had become lethargic about the larger issue at hand and almost concluded that the absence of war as the end of all the problems. During the course of the year we were pre occupied with election tamashas, political soap operas and then of course all the cricket, pushing actions of national reconciliation out of limelight.  We have forgot that this is a conflict that has been going on for decades and thousands of Sri Lankan youth thought that it was a cause, noble enough, to pay the ultimate price for whichever side they believed in. Most importantly end of war I dont think has solved the underlying concerns.

I know some of you out there should be wondering that this guy is trying to create an issue out of no where. Just let me take a simple case to show that the divide is still there.

Usually news papers try to position the stories to please their reader base. The bottom line is that the news paper is a business entity and in order for it to be successful it should supply to the demand. So in a sense the pulse of the society is usually reflected in how the newspapers position the stories. On any typical day take Sri Lankan news papers of all three languages and just by checking the first page itself the completely contradicting voices between the Tamil and the other two language papers would become clearly evident.

I will take the most recent Sunday news papers and show you how divided we are,

 Sunday Times [English Weekly] - Headline item 

Sunday Observer [State run English Weekly] - Head line Item

Virakesari [Tamil Daily] - Headline Item

Uthayan [ Tamil Daily - A regional newspaper for North and East ] - I think this was the headline


Just Check how varied the perspectives are and funnily what appears as headlines in the English newspaper is not even in the foot note of the Tamil papers and vice versa. Just imagine how the difference will be if we take into consideration the Sinhala news papers too.

Now this doesn't mean that we need to impose restrictions and bring back censor, instead we should do a root cause analysis and fix the issues. So that these issues are never re-opened again.

Reversing the market

I have this strange feeling that web has missed the trick on creating a different type of business model. I think probably it is appropriate to call this as “reversing the market”.

When someone wants to sell stuff they probably start a shop and sell whatever they want. So in that case the buyer had to approach the seller and do the buying.   I know that what I’ve said there is not rocket science , that’s what  has been happening for years, that’s the very reason we have millions or billions I don’t know what ever number of shops after doing the marketing of their goods and services playing the waiting game for the buyers to come.       

Then with the advent of internet we have seen that people building a web front to enable their sales, it has gone a bit more and we also see the existence of portals like ebay , where many sellers who list their items and play the waiting game.

When I try to compare these web portals with the traditional way of doing business, the usual ecommerce site selling items of a single merchant is similar to the shops/store fronts and then a place like ebay is similar to a traditional market place, where multiple sellers get together and sell stuff.  All in all, as i see it, by the introduction of the web, we have achieved an innovation in introducing another channel for sales, however we have not changed the status quo of the fundamental model, where the seller lists/keeps the items, does the marketing and waits for the seller.  

Customer is the King

Very often I am told that the customer is the king, but in reality with this business model I see the customer to be more like the prey. When thinking about this waiting game, I cannot stop imagining a big crocodile keeping is mouth open for the pray to come and sit inside it.

Just imagine a world in which, when you wanted to buy a camera you go and write a note and hang it on your own door and wait for the sales people to come and present the options and the customer like a real king looks at the options and picks the best one. I know probably you have already started to wonder, is this guy out of his mind? Can the sales people just go around checking each house? You would think that whats the amount of land to be covered, and how long can a buyer wait, blaa blaa

Now because of these arguments, it true that this model is not practical in the traditional way of sales. Quite understandably the model is not practiced in the sales of usual commodities unless the buyer is buying things of great value.

But in the world of web it’s quite a practical thing, imagine a site where you go and publish whatever you want to buy and then the sales people come and give the offers and you make the decision to buy based on that.

It is very handy for stuff like buying a SIM; getting a bank loan, getting an insurance package …you name it.  Obviously for the SIM agent or bank loan executive or the insurance agent, the place where people are listing their need for the service is a heaven and they will automatically come to the site and make the offer to get their sales commissions, so these stuff can be the starting point for this “reversed model” and I am pretty sure later on others will follow suit and come to the party.

It’s actually reversing the market, in a traditional world it’s like going to a market place and you put up a board with your shopping list and expect the sellers to come and sell you the stuff. In the old school of thought its stupid, but in modern times its practical. It will be absolute buyer power and the customer becomes the real king!

So the need is to have a portal where the requirement listings are done and get the sales agent to join the party. I am just fascinated by this model and I can see an unbelievable potential in it. Anyone interested in a start up? This is one for you! Let me know your thoughts on it. Would love to hear!

Holy Noise

I live in a country which is very ‘religious’ to the core. People are pretty confused about the difference between religion and culture/customs. There is always a lot of comparison between religions; naturally this has led to competition too. The people who assume that that they are practicing different religions have drawn up some funny competition parameters. These people have assumed that placing statues at all the corners and increasing the volume of the loud speakers from the places of worship to be a way of showing the power of religion.

Loud speaker volume game gets even more ‘interesting’ when you have two rival religious places next to each other. You can observe the noise being increased to unbearable levels from both ends at the same time. Best part of it is when some of this actually continues throughout the day. Funnily as a kid I used to think that the preaching’s being done live and the clergy doing it should be very tired. Later I got to know that I was wrong, even those who have put up the noise find some cotton wool and stick it into their ears and happily asleep, while the people in the neighborhood suffer.

This is one of the logics very hard for me to understand, has any of these religions in their scriptures asked people to use loudspeakers and boom this noise? Why cannot the followers just tell others that this is nuisance? Is it a religious treachery if you talk about this in public?

I for one being a Hindu, with whatever little knowledge that I have about Hinduism is sure that getting into this trap of competition with other religions is actually causing more harm than any good. I see it as a deep disrespect that we can do to the religion of ours. For god sake, if you have a personal score to settle with the others use something else and leave out the name of the religion!

Kasurina Beach

Kasurina beach at Karainagar in the Jaffna peninsula is arguably the best beach in Sri Lanka. Its on of those places naturally gifted and luckily left untouched and unspoilt upto now.

Its white sand beach surrounded by palm trees. The water is very shallow for around 100 meters from the shore making it ideal for a safe dip or two in the ocean
Last few months as a team we have been caught in the obesssion of blue ocean strategy and our set of guys ended up trying to make out different tag lines for the beach, some wanted to call it the ideal blue ocean, others wanted to call it the uncontested beach, few more wanted to call it the untouched beach, then we had a smart cookie who wanted to call it the virgin beach!
Those who want to visit it make sure that you take care to make sure that you dont behave in such way that it spoils the beauty of the gift of mother nature!

The day I choose to walk alone!

Then people used to call me urulai (equivalent in English is barrel), I was supposed to be bit of a stout kid, very strange, but supposed to be true. People used to always ask my mother where she picked me up from, ok, I accept that they still ask that!

Coming back to the story, I was about four years old. That’s the age at which parents used ( I think they still) to put their children into a Montessori, on one fine day I woke up to be told that I am supposed to go to a Montessori and was advised to be a good boy at this place! I got a bit of attention on that particular day and also few days before the lead up to this day from my parents and people around. I didn’t know why, but I think I enjoyed it!

Then I was taken to this place and handed over to a teacher (at that time she was the second most beautiful person I had seen, of course my mother was the benchmark). It was the first day not only for me, but I think for the other kids too, I couldn’t understand why all of them were crying. Father told me to stay with the teacher till mother comes to pick me up, so I didn’t mind hanging around at this place till mother came. I didn’t have much to do, the teacher was too busy trying to handle the cry babies and I was their seated all by my self looking around. Then I noticed that there were people near the gate and the other kids were allowed to leave the place. I went near the gate to look for my mother, I was too short to see through the crowd and identify my mother. So I opted to just casually get out of the gate and search for my mother in the crowd. Later I got to know that parents were supposed to point their finger at the child and the security uncle was supposed to allow each child to go out of the premises. But I didn’t know any of this, when one of the other children went out I too opted to go out and look for my mother.

I couldn’t find my mother in the crowd. So I had a simple option of walking back home. I came out and walked along the Odeon lane then walking around the mara tree junction, and then took the short cut behind syberia to enter the school premises; from that point I knew the place very well, so didn’t have any problems in reaching the school quarters which we lived in. Only the walk upto mara tree was new. I think the distance between the Montessori and home was obviously less than 2 KMs, so no big deal!

I walked in to the house and saw that my mother was just getting ready to go somewhere, from behind I called her amma and expected her be very proud of me for making her work cut out, instead rather to my utter surprise all hell broke loose. She was surprised, stunned and now gave me an earful for coming alone. She knew that I was scared of this character called as nona(nona was the name they used to refer to a mentally retarded lady who used to to beg around that place, and when ever she sees a lady she called them “nona” to make her plea, I was told that she used to catch little children and take them away) and bereted me asking me “what would have happened if nona had caught you?”. Then my dad was informed about this episode, he had his set of questions to ask and then lot of advice, I think they informed to my Montessori teacher the next day. People around made it around to make it look as if I had given a slip to the Montessori on the first day itself and got home. Now this became one of the points that people at home used to introduce me to others, so that they can be better aware of me L

Later on when I grow older I got to know the “seriousness” of the my actions, the Odeon lane was supposed to be a very isolated place and worse than that the mara tree junction was notoriously known by people to be a place where after beheading human skulls were placed on display during that insurgency era. But how am I expected to know all this??? (probably If I was fed with this data in my decision making process, it might have been a different decision)

But it’s me, what I can do; I had all the logically innocent reasons to carry out those actions, but just like today even then, people never accepted that I was innocent. Lesson leant for life; all though I am innocent people will never accept it! ;)

Why not an open source application store!

In my last post I talked about the Mobile Long Tail and the need to eliminate the incremental cost of per new application. Anyhow eliminating the variable cost per application doesn’t completely enable a long tail. It solves only half the puzzle.

A golden rule for long tail is that when you have unlimited selection makes sure it can be easily searched. This is what Amazon, Netflix and others had done. Made sure that they provide a mechanism in which products can be easily searched and shared by the customers. After the unprecedented success of the app stores, most of the mobile client application providers had started to build their own application store.

Some interesting mobile client application stores
Apple App Store , Android Market , Nokia Ovi Store , Sumsung App Store,

JK ,pointed me that google wave is supposed to join the bandwagon very soon!

Now all these long tail models both telco and other industries need provide some common features like, searching, filtering, rating, sharing of products. Isn’t it a waste for each of these people to be developing all these common features over and over again? hSenid Mobile has decided to release the full code base of the application store under GPL.

mChoice Vishma

We have commenced the requirement discussions of the mChoice Vishma, which is the project name of the open source application store. Now we have the high level idea on where we need to get to and the team is getting ready with some proposed UI interfaces, so that it will be used as the basis for community discussions.

Face to Face Meet Up

The Vishma face to face meet up will happen on the 17th of February 2010 at GMT 1.00 PM to 2.00 PM.
That is,
Barcelona Time - 2.00 PM to 3.00 PM
Singapore and Malaysian Time - 9.00 PM to 10.00 PM
Sri Lankan and Indian Time - 6.30 PM to 7.30 PM
Follow the http://soltura.hsenidmobile.com to find the online login details to the session.

Bringing the Long Tail to the Telco Applications

OK, let me start by defining the following terms for people to understand my post/s better.

Telco application – This is not the usual mobile application which is installed on the mobile phone. Instead what I refer to as a telco application is the program which resides somewhere in the operators network. One popular kind of the telco application is the voting application, which is the application that receives the text messages when you send an SMS to vote for your favorite star in the American Idol or its local variant like Super Star and summarizes the results and shows it to the relevant people.

Value Added Service (VAS) providers – They are the people who come up with the concept of the application and give it as a service to the subscriber base. For example in the case of American idol or its local variant the media house is the VAS provider.

Killer Application – In this context it’s the Killer Telco Application, which give a lot of $$$$ to the VAS provider and of course the operator.

Understanding long tail

The concept of Long tail[1] has revolutionized the way we think about business. In the good old days traditional sellers had a constraint in the form of shelf space\storage space. Further they had to incur a distribution cost with respect to each product they wanted to sell. Let’s take a simple example, just look at the book store around the corner, they have a constraint in the form of shelf space, hence when a book was to be placed on display they have to consider the opportunity cost of it. So they usually make the most rational decision of filling up the shelf space with the best sellers. This was and is considered the accept business wisdom when dealing with traditional stores.

With the introduction of the digital economy the market boundaries and constraints started to change, for players like Amazon who started with the concept of online web store, did not have the shelf space constraint, for them shelves were replaced by a database entries, hence shelf space had been reduced to a few kilobytes of storage in a machine lying at some corner of the world. So they no longer worry about finding out whether if a book will be a best seller or not. They just store up information about all books, which included books which were deemed to have been termed either “commercially failed” or books which had a geographically distributed small reader bases. The result of the digital economy has been staggering they are finding their revenue to be dominated by the non-best sellers! This prompted a publication “GoodBye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail!”[2].

Telco applications - current situation

Telco applications are currently pushed by the operator. Operators due to the incremental cost per new application [includes the development cost of the application, marketing cost of the application, testing, configurations and of course the maintenance cost] consider the introduction of each new application to be a business risk! So they need to do a feasibility analysis and justify the business case, develop the application and then bring it to the market. So as a consequence of this cost they are on the lookout for killer applications. Ideally they want to each new application to be a massive hit among the subscriber base.

As a side effect of this existing process we find that the telco applications of today are either provided by the operator, a corporate house or an IT vendor. Although it’s hard to digest for some people, to be honest the amount of people who are available to innovate and bring new application concepts within the current space are very much limited. Even if a new idea comes up justifying it as a business case might not be the easiest. So the chances are that we might be killing some of the hit applications while it’s just a concept.

Let me try to compare the telco application to the book store example, in a traditional market space the book shelf was a constraint, with respect to telco applications having an incremental cost per application is a constraint. In the same way book stores were earlier trying to guess which are the best sellers and offering those to customers. In the same way on the telco network currently telco’s as per their available market intelligence decides on picking telco application concepts which they expect to be the next killer application.

Do we see a similarity between the current telco application model and the non – long tail business model?

In the current market context if my old boys union/alumni association wants to create a SMS digest messaging application which sends a message with the weekly update of activities, we might not be allowed to create this application. In the current context it’s almost obvious that it would not be considered a killer application.

But isn’t the non introduction of this sort of an application a revenue opportunity denied for the telco?

Mobile Long Tail

So the bottom line is that if the long tail is to be brought to the mobile network, we need to have a business process coupled with the required technology to eliminate the incremental cost per application. When cost per new application is zero, you don’t have to do an analysis to see whether if it’s going to be a hit or not. Instead of trying to play a guessing game on deciding if an application will turn out to be a killer or not. It would provide the operator with an opportunity to just bring the application to the market and see how it performs. Further if the application has zero incremental cost, even if it generates a few messages per year it can still be considered to be profitable. So now even my little Old boys’ association application might be worth for the operator to try out.

This is the business model we are looking at in mChoice Soltura! But for some readers the big question might be “how can the operator achieve zero incremental cost per application?” Keep following us on soltura.hsenidmobile.com as we unveil how we achieve it!

References
[1] The Long Tail by Christian Anderson
[2] "Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail" by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail