René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Although Google had become within 7 years the highest valued company in the world and “to google” as a verb is a commonplace, it would be flawed to believe that the game in search is over. Rob Hof makes a great case in his blog how Alexa’s opening of its platform could shake the existing order as anyone is in fact enabled to build her own search engine using Alexa’s technology, index and hardware through an “on-demand” business model.

Sensationelle Idee aus Großbritannien: Eine SMS, die sich 40 Sekunden nach dem Lesen vom Handy löscht und keine Spuren hinterlässt. Diese Selbstzerstörung entschärft eine Zeitbombe, die nicht nur Promis wie David Backham Kopf und Kragen gekostet hat.

What seemed quite obvious, is now getting McKinsey’s blessing. India’s IT & BPO industry despite getting mature, is still at its beginning. The consultancy estimates that the volume for offshoring would even grow by 10X over the next years.

“Second, as margins come under pressure, companies must be able to continuously improve operational excellence, in addition to innovating and developing new service lines,” added Mr. Sinha, a partner with McKinsey.

One exciting field of innovations to fulfill the prophecy lies in the development of platform-businessed that perform a task on a highly automated level the complement with cost effective labor for those tasks which require manual handling.

That’s my favourite and confirms all the discussions I’ve had in the last week with Indian VCs and PE-companies in Bombay and Bangalore. Not just that India jumped to the 2nd place in Foreign Direct Investment ahead of the U.S., the who is who of of the global technology players are coming in to provide smart money for R&D. The best part of it is that it’s no longer about developing innovation for products “in the west”, but much more on proprietary technology which is fully geared to the increasingly affluent Indian consumer. Take for example Microsoft and Bill Gates’ visit to India last week:

The company also wants to design products tailored for Indians’ “unique needs,” Gates said. In about a year, Microsoft plans to release software for cell phones that lets users send text messages mainly by speaking, using the keypad only to correct errors. Microsoft’s Bangalore lab is investigating software for language translation, speech-driven user interfaces, and computers that can be used collectively by whole villages. Internet TV could also play well in a country where laying traditional cable is too expensive. “India is a place where breakthroughs like this are necessary and will take place,” Gates said.

Slowly, but surely everything what matters is coming together in this great country. Red Hat just announced that they would invest US-$20m in India over the next few years.

India has proven itself as a strategic market for Red Hat and Linux,” said Red Hat Chairman Matthew Szulik in a statement Thursday. “Red Hat will work to grow this market and nurture India’s education of open source and Linux.

That’s really great news and Indian vendors should take advantage of this opportunity aggressively and even more: ASAP. If they get to understand the entire breadth of open source applications, they can offer their clients a great deal by assembling an application out of existing stacks and add value by glueing those various pieces together. This will cut development cost and time to market drastically. I am really very excited about this perspective and do consider building such an expertise myself.

Keine Ahnung warum, aber ich werde oft von Deutschen gefragt: “Verträgt der Inder eigentlich Alkohol?” Ich will die Frage in einem größeren Zusammenhang stellen. Zum einen ist es – zumindest im Süden des Landes – in Indien im ganzen Jahr sauheiß. Hitze und Alkohol vertragen sich nicht besonders, dafür Kälte und Alkohol um so mehr wie man an meinen slawischen Blutbrüdern in Russland sehr gut ableiten kann. Außerdem gilt Alkohol in Indien in weiten Teilen des Subkontinents als “socially not acceptable”, 90 Prozent aller Restaurants schenken keine Alkohol aus und Kinder (die Definition gilt bei Indern bis gut und gern 27 Jahre) würden sich eher die Zunge abbeißen als daheim den Eltern zu erzählen, dass – Achtung indisch-englisch – “I have taken liquor”.

Was mir in der Kälte der bayerischen Adventszeit besonders unter die Haut geht, ist eine gefühlte Stimmung auf die “wir Deutschen” echtes Monopol haben: Gemütlichkeit. Irgendwie erfordert dieser Begriff einen Kontrast zwischen kalt und warm, kalt draußen und warm drinnen. Entweder drinnen in der guten Stube oder dank Glühwein warm an den Innereien. Auch wenn der Inder beim Essen sehr viel kann, die indische Küche ist für mich mit das Beste auf der Welt, so weiß ich eins: Gemütlichkeit kommt in Bombay im Dezember bei 32 Grad nicht wirklich auf. Da kann er also nix der Inder. Und bei der Bratwurst, beim Stollen und beim Glühwein schon gleich überhaupt nix.

Fazit: Wer keine Chance hat, zur kalten Jahreszeite mit fetter Grundlage das Trinken ordentlich zu trainieren, der spielt das ganze Jahr über bei dieser Disziplin in der Amateurliga.

Und wieder mal ein Rückfall in die Steinzeit: Heise soll als populäre Internetplattform für jeden Eintrag in seinem Forum verantwortlich und haftbar sein. Geht’s eigentlich noch? Großer Gott, Richter die solche Entscheidungen fällen, haben nichts, aber auch gar nichts kapiert. So ein Urteil ist ein erbärmliches Armutszeugnis und beweist vollständiges Unverständnis der sich veränderten Realitäten. Ich erwarte von keinem Gericht, welches per definitionem gehalten ist Recht anzuwenden bzw. bestefalls im Rahmem seiner Möglichkeiten auszulegen, innovative Lösungen in der digitalen Welt. Allerdings durchbricht diese Entscheidung die Unterste Mögliche Erwartungsschwelle (UME ;-) um Meilen. In der heutigen Diktatur des Relativismus müsste ich bei meiner Richterschelte zunächst zum Rundumschlag der Abschwächungen absetzten à la “niemand will einen rechtsfreien Raum schaffen” bzw. “sicherlich muss man sich an Recht und Gesetz halten” und “freilich braucht auch das Internet eine Regulierung”. Schöne Sonntagsreden, die leider völlig an der relevanten Wahrheit vorbeigehen, daher spare ich mir den Senf.

Fakt ist, dass sich die Arithmetik der Kommunikation in Zeiten des Internet völlig verschoben hat und durch so ein Urteil einmal mehr versucht wird, mit Rezepten aus der Medienküche der 90er Jahre den (National-)Staat als den Lordsiegelbewahrer öffentlicher Meinungsbildung zu behaupten. Ich ziehe mich ungern selbst als Maßstab heran, traue mich aber doch, daraus ein Beispiel zu skizzieren: Ich sitze irgendwo in Indien, Kroatien, manchmal Deutschland oder egal oder sonst wo. Mein Blog-Server steht absichtlich nicht in Deutschland, und schreibe was ich denke, mal auf deutsch, mal auf englisch. Und? Bin ich deshalb bereits kriminell? Jeder kann sich heute in 3 Minuten bei z.B. Blogger einen Gratis Blog einrichten.

Auch enthält mein Blog absichtlich nicht diesen unsinnigen Hinweis des Landgerichts Hamburg: “Haftung für Links” hat das Landgericht (LG) Hamburg entschieden, dass man durch die Anbringung eines Links, die Inhalte der gelinkten Seiten gegebenenfalls mit zu verantworten hat. Dies kann, so das LG, nur dadurch verhindert werden, indem man sich ausdrücklich von den Inhalten dieser Seiten distanziert.” So was selten Dämliches, denn: Mit dem Hinweis guter Mensch, ohne Hinweis am Rande der Asozialität. Hauptsache die Illusion von Pseudoregulierung bleibt intakt, das freut das deutsche Herz, denn Ordnung muss sein. Ich setze mir dabei keineswegs meine eigene beliebige Maßstäblichkeit, greife aber mit einem gewissen Trotz so einen Schwachsinn an, der im Kern ein basisdemokratisches Instrument wie ein öffentliches Forum zu ersticken droht. Falls alles nix hilft, liebes Heise-Team: Internet-Betreiber-Firma auf den Niederländischen Antillen gründen, Server auf den Britisch Virgin Islands aufstellen und vor allem nicht einschüchtern lassen. In der “Flat World” gilt: geography is history.

Hohes Gericht: Catch me if you can. Schönen Sonntag.

The whole (flat) world is speaking about India as the hotbed for high-quality & low-cost software. Right so. I just visited this week the Infosys Campus on Bangalore’s Hosur Road, leaving the dust of the Indian road behind you gives you the feeling as if you had been beamed on another planet in the margin of a minute. As my client described: “There you see 10,000 people, young, ambitious, rationally driven who want to change the world in a perfectly well-kept knowlegde-breeding ground.”

However, if you look closer to what Infosys, Wipro, TCS and their smaller likes in India are doing, then it turns out that the major focus lies on software services. This means, there is either a company which wants to migrate an internal mainframe system to a web-based solution, wants to build a comprehensive steering-system for its manufacturing plant or have code written as an Independant Software Vendor (ISV) from abroad. The latter would usually provide the architectural design, the specs and especially take care of marketing, distribution and sales of the final software product.

The logical question one would ask: What does India, given its experience and talent, do in software products itself? The answer is quite sobering: very little. A recently published study by the Indian Institute of Bangalore (IIM) reveales that only 3 percent out of the currently US-$ 17.3 bn account for software products – the majority still for services. The only namable examples of successful products come from i-flex and an other newly released banking solution “Finacle” by – surprise, surprise – Infosys, though.

Why is this so? I had the opportunity a year back to listen to an interesting stage discussion of venture capitalists during a Nasscom-event where they went into cultural and economic aspects. If you look at the cash-flow scenario, then software services are a decent business. Based on the projects you have, you know how many people you need and how many you will charge at the end of each month and if you have a decent customer, too, money will flow month by month into your bank account. Now, let’s compare that to a software product: From the experience-background of Indian vendors, building software as a product is a different ballgame alltogether with its user interface, 100 percent customer-centric usability and an appealing design. There Indian programmers stand right at the beginning of their learning curve for that. Yet, what is more from a financial stanpoint: You need to invest a lot upfront: the development first, but then add a cost-component of factor 2 to that for packaging the software with manuals etc. and then finally another factor of 4 for marketing cost. This adds to an upfront investment which can be six times higher than the pure development cost – according to the numbers which the VCs had thrown into the room. Then, and only then, you begin generating cash when the first sales kick in. However, the you lose money as well if the product is a flop and you are carrying the entire business risk of failure. The VCs, without exception Indians themselves by the way, explained that first Indians are not to such an extent risk takers, second lack the expercience and third – like almost in a vicious circle of both – therefore don’t receive the necessary funding for such endevours.

Fortunately, the situation is about to change. I had lots of exciting discussions with Indian VCs in the seed- and early stage just this week who were much more bullish than a year ago. One, the Indian entrepreneur has by now learnt her ropes, two, around 50.000 of Indians with long tenure in the US or UK have come back to India to start businesses in the last few years. And ultimately, just today in the newspapers, India has pushed forward to place 2 of the world’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI); so there is a good amount of hungry cash to be invested.

From all the also partially ambiguous discussions which I have had, one projected development stands out unanimously: India might leapfrog the “classic” online-penetration via desktop and notebooks and instead develop the mobile phone as THE central device for connecting up to the web. Obviously, there is lots of potential for great software products and applications for the mobile. Rest of the world beware, my guessing: many of them with the leverage for global scale.

Like people tend to say in Bangalore when they screw up something or know that they did not do too well in something: “Sorry, sorry, boss, but there was a problem with ABC”. Replace variable ABC with “bullshit” for lame excuses. So now it’s my time for the long silence on my blog to say: “Sorry, sorry, boss, there was a problem with the internet.”

Believe it or not, coming back yesterday from Goa to Bangalore all phone and fax lines in my office, including the DSL for the internet were dead. Dead as dead can be. When I went out for dinner, I saw a few guys standing in front of these connection boxes on the street which act like a network hub for the famous “last mile” in telecommunication for the households/customers attached. I spontanously asked them: “Are you from Airtel (=my telco provider)?” – “Yes, Sir, there is a blackout of the whole quarter, we are woking on it.” Now today morning, one of my lines resurrected, the other, more important one with the internet, still no signs of life. Called their customer care and have to admit: Great service that these guys are performing and Deutsche Telekom could learn from a lot. Super-structured, super-result driven and super-customer-centric. They promised that the problem would be rectified till the evening. So it did, otherwise I would not be able the post this.

20 minutes back the respective phone rang, alive and intact, the voice of the Airtel technician rang like a sweet melody in my ears. “It’working now, we rectified it. Some people had broken into our connection box in the street and stolen the cables. So 500 connections were dead since yesterday.” Incredible India. And: “Sorry, sorry, boss, but there was a problem with the internet”.