After the much awaited Facebook’s IPO, speculations mounted on what Google thinks ! Without uttering the F word, he said three things -
1 Life is not about your friend count, it is about the friends you can count on.
2 Don’t hit the “like” button ! Meet the people you like and love. Look them in the eye.
3 Take an hour a day and shut down all your devices. Really connect !
Former CNN head and noted biographer Walter Isaacson captured my attention from the moment he walked on the IBM Impact 2012 stage and announced his next book would be a history of the computer age.
Walter Isaacson takes the stage at IBM Impact 2012′s opening general session, where he explained to the Impact audience what he believes are common characteristics shared by some of our greatest innovators.
Today we continue on the healthcare theme in the build up to our Miami event on the 15th May. This post is focuses on Watson which captured the imagination of the public last year by winning the quiz show Jeopardy! and exploring how this could transform the healthcare industry.
Watson is an AI system capable of answering questions posed in natural language.
Sometimes, too much thinking isn’t needed ! You just have to get on and do it !
In whichever way you are involved in a start-up enterprise of any sort, you know that the most valuable insights and advice come not from your mother but venture capitalists. After all, these guys have seen more business world than you have in the initial stages. These are the guys who can be looked at for value add, who can open doors, help you connect with right people in the industry.
The very basic question : How do VCs come across their investment ideas ? Perhaps the word will resonate often in the post – Network. The well established VCs enjoy a good network. And honestly it helps rather than being a lonely bird. It ain’t series of emails over internet. But a good and healthy network where they know the people they know and entrepreneurs constantly communicating, conversing and where they find out right elements.
Woody Allen quoted, “Life is 90% showing up”. So show up ! When you have the opportunity to communicate, do so by being together in a room. Get to meet in person. They will try to talk to you over phone, skype. But the fact to understand is that they try to experience the magnetism and spark of the founder. And that cannot be well assessed over audio or computer screen.
Be very thorough and forthright about competitive landscape. When VCs know more than the person presenting his own idea or business model, it’s a cause of worry. The facts and numbers should roll off your tongue as fluently as uttering I love you to your girlfriend(wife’s out of picture certainly !).
Personally, if you don’t have any experience, approach them with some real progress. Your start-up should have caught many eye-balls by now. If not, think and work harder.
An entrepreneur-VC relationship is akin to a good marriage. When VCs make an investment, they know that the relationship can potentially last for 8 to 10 years. Hence, to have a good partner is crucial. Therefore, get to know who will be on your board. Earn their respect. Generally, it’s one or two investments annually per partner. So if you have the opportunity to meet a person, you’ve got to stand out to be that person’s deal for one whole year. Get to know how much investments they’ve made, how many boards they are on, do they miss board meetings, do they send analysts instead of coming by themselves, etc. Equally important is analyzing their investment history.
If possible, get to know where the money is coming from. The fatness of the investment figure determines the ideology and mindset of VCs and Angels right from the start. If the investment is around 1 crore, they will look for scaling up to a certain extent and sell it to big companies for higher returns to as much as 100 crores. That’s that. Quick sale and no IPO. But when the investment itself is 1500 crores, they will swing for the fences and bypass the early acquisition factors as they won’t matter for huge inputs.
All in all, the conclusion is -
“[My aspiration is] to change the world,” said Dennis Crowley, cofounder of Foursquare. ”If this turns out to be an amazingly big business at the same time, well, that’s an added bonus.” This is hardly what you would expect to hear from a founder who raised $20 million in a Series A from all stars including Andreessen Horowitz. Aren’t these guys supposed to be razor focused on monetization? In a quixotic way, many founders of revolutionary internet companies begin with visions that have no component on monetization. How can we explain this irony: some of the “best” and “most innovative” internet companies–and therefore those with the highest valuations–are often founded by visionaries who are supposedly indifferent to–you might even say disinterested in–monetization.
Consider Crowley, a dreamer who was fascinated by the idea of bringing a gaming layer to the physical world. Indeed he even wrote his NYU thesis on the subject. And it was this nearly-academic curiosity that shaped his vision for the company. ”We just want to get all these things built… and to put as many pieces in place as possible. After we do that, then we’ll try to monetize,” he explained. ”And if we can’t monetize, at least we will have pushed the world forward a little. We taught people about check-ins. We taught them about location services and about life as a game,” he offered. For Crowley, monetization is literally an afterthought. It is secondary in sequence and importance to product and impact. To understand Crowley and founders like him, it is critical to understand his personal motivations. He values teaching society about a concept. He values helping people build better relationships. And he values pioneering sociological concepts that enable future companies to realize his vision. His passion reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s line: “It is amazing how much you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Yet this attitude–indifference to ownership and IP, a disinterest in monetization–would seem a poor fit for the model of venture-backed s-corps that nearly all of these companies pursue. How do we make sense of the essentially communitarian, visionary disposition of innovative founders in the context of venture-backed companies with billion dollar valuations? Would Martin Luther King have built a megachurch and charged for attendance? Would Karl Marx have required a subscription for his podcast? Would Mother Teresa have billed $500 an hour for a hospital visit? Probably not.
Mr. Chris Cox, VP of Product for facebook, helped answer this question. He said that in certain ways facebook should be a non-profit. Facebook’s mission–”to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”–sounds like it could be the mission of the Reporters Without Borders or the Berkman Center. So why not run facebook as a nonprofit? They ran into a little problem: in order to realize the mission, they needed a few hundred of the smartest engineers, pedabytes of data storage, and world class infrastructure. And to have this, they needed money. And lots of it.
The essential tension is this: in order to realize revolutionary impact from innovative new technology products–even ones with social, communitarian purposes–the business must have a way to monetize so that it can finance the development, roll out, and support of the product. Thus for facebook, monetization became a tactic to help realize the vision of the product–monetization was not an end in itself.
We might even go as far as to say that the success of revolutionary internet companies is partly explained by the absence of monetization strategies at their founding. Monetization ought to emerge—but only as a supporting mechanism to realizing the vision.
For a person seeking career in business, he has to indulge himself into a lot of articles, policy makers’ writings, industry chief’s opinions, etc to gain a vague dimension of what and how it is to build a company from scratch to a strong and sustainable structure.Like others, I had a share of my reading too. But my whole understanding of entrepreneurship has changed for a better cause radically.One comes across terms like fellowships, venture capitalism, sustainable business model, etc.A not so good thinker would obviously follow and try to have a close association of them without a clear understanding of what it takes to approach them.It is a simple four lettered word “IDEA”!
All the terminologies in entrepreneurial world would be a tyranny if one doesn’t know what to do, if he doesn’t have an idea.And with idea i mean business idea which would be worth undertaking (after being processed through rigorous market analysis and surveys) and which would be “innovative”. Though this is not the case with fellowships. One can interact with fellows just for the sake of exposure and their approach and understanding. This is followed by a business model.And if the business is multi-dimensional, one must learn to establish connections among different business models.
IBM’s idea was simple – to create a “Smarter Planet”.What is smarter planet ? It is all about deploying intelligence in data management. This is internet’s age and a consistent change(increase) in information,data is constant. Every company is facing with overwhelming increament in it. So there have to be new insights, new analytics, new intelligence to deal with this explosion of data.And with this data management, it is passionate about bringing fundamental changes in varied sectors like transportation, power, finance, communications, water, healthcare, cities, etc. As much as it is committed to optimize them in their outputs, it is equally focussed to do it in a “Greener” way. For it is most dominant theme for next generation’s customer solutions.
THE BUSINESS MODEL
Factually, IBM was not so cool company in early 1990-2000′s. It was little late in recognizing the “dot-com” trend. While other companies caught up. But IBM ddidn’t want to repeat the failed mondays. So it reckoned the collaboration with small companies mostly bootstrapping ones. IBM did so because it was successful in realizing the potential of growth of start-ups and consequently came up with “Global Entrepreneurship Initiative” GEI. This was a collaboration programme devised to identify innovation hot-pots across the globe with an aim to cultivate sustainable relationship. IBM wanted itself to be more accessible to the smaller companies. The start-ups worth filling the void and which matched IBM’s ideology for innovation propagation had their share.
Once a start-up earns this tag, it cannot define the value of benefits it gets. IBM makes sure it has access to every genre of research and talent pool it possesses. To broaden this perspective, IBM has tied with universities and incubators across the world. And since India has the largest number of student start-ups, IBM has spearheaded with SmartCamp here. SmartCamp is all about intensifying and high pitching the value of the collaboration. A senseful and state of the art mentoring is provided to the earners. “Rely on mentors, ask questions rather than making statements, learn to establish connection among different business models….”, they say.
But there is a very important part of the strategy to be understood. If IBM finds a company’s offerings is used again and again, acquisition is immediately the next step. So owning the assets is rule of the game, unlike TCS .Whereas Microsoft has the legacy of its softwares, it has failed in venture programmes. Cisco on the other hand, let the companies build their product and eventually come out with customization like a careless mother.And if the association fails due to erroneous, fading energy of the starters, it is gulped down by $ 100 billion revenue company.
All in all, IBM’s entrepreneurship has good business model, idea and composition. It is all about taking care of a baby from start to end with whole head, heart and mind. It has been yielding tangible results but impactful transitions are yet to be seen.
(The views expressed are writer’s own.There has been considerable amount of expenditure of brains, brawn, time, capital, energy, analytic and intellectual power.Feel free to oppose or comply. )
Ok now you have known that float property for center does not exist.It is just for the left and right.So how do we make a block look in center.Well it might be a nightmare for young designers and beginners.The CSS theory of floating is not as complex as it looks.The problem,however,lies in the interpretation of the theory.Enough of bugging,here is the solution-
#container
{width:1000px; height:300px;margin:0 auto;background-color:red;margin-top:0px; }
This is the containing block that is the outer layout of the box.In this box,three sub boxes have to be filled of equal length.Two boxes have to be assigned the float property of left.The elements on their own will get to their sides with the right edge of the second one touching the left edge of the former.Though looks confusing,it is easier to implement.Take a look-
#footer1 { float:left; width:32%; margin:0 auto; height:350px; background-color:#eee; margin-top:0px; border-bottom-width:0px; }
#footer2 { float:left; width:32%; height:350px; margin:0 auto; background-color:#eee; margin-top:0px; border-bottom-width:0px; }
#footer3 { float:left; width:32%; height:350px; margin:0 auto; background-color:#eee; margin-top:0px; border-bottom-width:0px; }
Evidently,two sub=boxes have been assigned the same float property of left.Hence the remaining one obviously has to be assigned the right value of the float property.As simplistic as it is.Cheers beginners!!!
Humans were welcomed to this new year with a 7.0 Richter Scale horrendous earthquake in Haiti,a Caribbean country damaging the human spirit and infrastructure.The center of magnitude was Port-au-Prince with concrete pieces and bodies spread everywhere as if they were scattered like flowers.The Mother Earth again showcased her fury and anger against the growing human exploitation on the nature.The plea and cries for humanitarian needs were recognized by numerous countries and medical,financial aids were dispatched accordingly.
Then it was Mexican gulf oil spill caused by the explosion of the oil rigs causing huge damage to the hue of beautiful
aquatic resources and life.The third largest energy company headquartered in London came into lime-light and was imposed with $ 20 billion dollar fine for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.The Gulf of Mexico was affected with oil and its derivatives for straight three months.The explosion while drilling the rig caused 56 crores litres of crude oil to flow in the ocean.The samples of tar balls and oil were found at a distance as long as 230 kms.
The most widely followed sport on the planet captured the year by its mid life.South Africa was selected over Egypt and Morocco to become the first African nation to host the finals of the World Cup.An ecstatic period of one month,Spain earned the name of the fame with a goal in 116th minute of the final game against Netherlands,three time finalists.Paul,the octopus, who later retired after the tournament and died,made seven correct predictions in the tournament.A legacy to be unfolded like every time,it boosted the sport spirit and brought many cults and cultures together to envisage the oneness and integrity of humans and eliminate the evilness from the Mother Planet.
17 days straight were spent in a coal and gold mine by 33 workers in Chile.The mental and physical mettle of the workers were tested by the depth of more than half a kilometer.A constant supply of food,water and oxygen was arranged through a shaft.But before that,a note was carried to the ground saying”all 33 of us are fine in asylum” thus triggering a ecstatic wave among families of miners.
Finally,a shaft was lowered down to rescue all of them.While the operation being successful,the concerns over safety norms of mining were raised and made stronger.The miners were accoladed for their valor and mettle.
The year that was of disclosing secret cables,the year that was of opening Governments,the year that was of “Wikileaks”.A non-profit organization relying on the secret sources worldwide to publish material of political,ethical and historical significance.The Times magazine quoted that Wikileaks could become as important a journalistic tool as Right to Information Act.Julian Assange,founder of the entity which was targeted by many Governments and public institutions,was trialled in court of London on the allegations of Swedish national of sexual assault on two women.
It has released around 1.2 million documents from it year of launch 2006.Lately,the companies which withdrew their support to Wikileaks have been the target of hackers and furious supporters of the organization.Their sites were victims of Distributed Denial Of Services(DDoS) which is a way of making a website crippled through large number of requests of its web-pages.It has been into limelight for its disclosure of Afghanistan war related cables.Since then,many Govt. have been opened.Consequently,its infrastructure has been constantly targeted and founder threatened.On which,the website’s blogspot noted that any one who sent out threat emails will be tracked down and trialled upon.Actually,it has been the strongest forces of the year.
With consistent rise of tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul,the issue was mostly on the head page of the newspapers in the late life of the year.The clashes and warships dating back to 1999 and 2002,North Korea has been focussing on nuclear warheads.The North Korea’s leader Kim Jong II has been sick and his heir Kim Jong un is believed to be establishing his reputation as a leader.The rising tensions and conflicts around nuclear ambitions of North Korea has been a major cause of South Korea panicking and making it think that its northern geopolitical frontier is set to have a war close in the future.The countries have been noted as saying to be prepared for the war and the ambition of crushing down the other seems no poor.Many foreign help has been sought with China,Russia,US trying to calm the issue in vain.The human wrath is not seeming to end among each other.
While it is only the rule of the nature that evil if overflown from the bottle of earth,has to be emptied a bit to maintain the balance of the stability.And that is where the earthquakes,tsunamis,human clashes,tensions over nuclear warship take place.The quality of human life has to find its way for a cleaner and greener earth.But for that quality,it is never gonna be a cake walk because egoism continues to be the covering of the human psyche.Hence,nothing can be perfect,to make things perfect is the ultimate goal of the life,to succeed,to prosper,to be happy and good.With this hope,we welcome the year 2011 with great aspirations to make things perfect,the way they are wanted.Because it is what you leave behind for the next generation and if that is not the case,wont you be called selfish?
Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. and Bharat Electronics Ltd. are top two PSU’s(public sector undertaking) which top this year’s 100 most spenders in R&D. BHEL at No.2 and latter at 11.The concept can be compared to the saying “a stitch in time saves nine”.
Statistics have shown that the increment in revenues are tremendous while investing in research and development.These companies follow the tagline “Spend Today,Earn Tomorrow”.Indeed its true,they have bagged orders worth crores of rupees and even they have been exporting the technologies earned through R&D.While it is only recently that many companies are realizing the importance of it,the Govt. run companies have recognized this years earlier.Leave aside the pharmaceutical companies because the sector itself is research driven.
BHEL
It was established in 1956 with the collaboration of Soviet-Union technology,they would export it and the firm would develop it as per the Indian markets.Post-liberalization era in Indian economy,when all the customs were lifted in power sector,firms like GE(General Electric),Siemens refused to collaborate for their own-profits.This was the time when BHEL recognized that it needs its own calibre in R&D.
The figures have shown that copyrights and patents have been filed per day.With R&D facilities attached at all its 14 centers,it has spent 2.4% of its revenues in it.6723 crores were earned when 829 crores were infused in research.Some key achievements of BHEL in context of R&D are-
Bharat Electronics Ltd.
When we talk of defence technology,we talk of BEL.The firm is largest supplier of equipments to defence sector of the country leaving giants like Wipro,TCS behind.It has invested around 5.4% of its revenues in R&D.A huge revenue stream is generated by constantly investing into research arena.Some key highlights are -
It is evident that one who has edge on technology stays ahead irrespective of the field one is in.Innovation drives businesses.Whether it is product or service oriented,creativity and differentness is the punchline.For these all,research and development are very crucial.
