Wirkle at Mobile Monday Delhi on Jan 20, 2007

The second Mobile Monday of the Delhi chapter was organized in Noida on Jan 20. Wirkle was one of the proud organizers of the event and I had the opportunity to talk about what we do at Wirkle and our vision ... yup, thats me.

My presentation was centered around whats going on in the mobile web and what does the future hold for us. Today, the mobile web is a happening space with lots of stuff happening all over the globe. Lets discuss some of those.

• The conventional web - i.e., viewing existing websites on the phone ... opera mini is by far the leader in this space. I think the opera mini is one of the best mobile browsers around, however, given that the web as it stands today was designed for the PC, the experience that you would get on the phone can never be as good.
• The mobile web - i.e., all your wml, chtml, xhtml websites that are specifically designed for the phone. The user experience therein is definitely better than conventional websites but there is still room for improvement. The reason I say that is ... people often have to resort to mobile apps to provide that level of usability, e.g., despite there being a mobile portal to access gmail ... they had to come up with a mobile app for gmail. If we analyze that in a little more detail ... I think this comes up from that fact that the mobile markup languages have their roots in html and html was never designed for the phone.
  
• Mobile Applications - Mobile applications provide a highly usable interface to access content, however, they don't give you the capability to access any content. Those are specifically designed for a particular type of content and one can only access that.

We at Wirkle have our own vision / technology for the mobile world and all of our products are centered around that. Take a look at my slides below ... and see if they make sense to you.

Wirkle at Comsware 2007

Yeah, yeah ... I know you folks have already read this on Sunil's Blog and Harsh's Blog. You think this old news now ... well, yes and no. The news is old but what I am writing here will be new information, so read on.

Im writing this on my way from Bangalore to Delhi ... on the way back from Comsware. We are also presenting at Proto.in the coming weekend, Sunil is flying down to Chennai for that. You are also going to hear us speak at Mobile Monday Delhi ... and guess what, we are one of the proud organizers of that event.

You can tell we're upto something here, but the reality is ... we're experimenting. For the most part till now we have been an inwards focused organization. Sometime back we realized how important is the external face to any company, because thats where the business comes from. Again this is something which Im hoping other entrepreneurs realize earlier that we did.

Now lets talk about the external face, every company has multiple avenues via which they publicize themselves to the external world, conferences, the web, articles in magazines ... and the list goes on and on. Now if you have "x" dollars how do you decide which one of these is best for you.

I don't really have an answer to the above and I think it varies from company to company. For Wirkle, we're trying to get business more than anything else, so in our case we publicize ourselves where we think most of our customers will be.

Coming back to comsware, this was our first exhibit ever ... overall I think it went good, we met lots of people. At the same time, I think it could have gone better. Actually, comsware is combination of research/acad and business, comsbiz was the business segment of the conference and thats where our target audience was. Now the bad part was that, comsbiz was on 9th and 10th, while the exhibits were on the 10th and 11th ... I think the exhibits should have been aligned with comsbiz, that would have made more business sense for the companies exhibiting at the conference.

Also, the exhibits should be where the people are, in case of comsware, the exhibit hall was a little off from the mainstream where the segments were taking place. Later on they did address some of that by having the tea/coffee breaks right where the exhibits were, so thanks to them for taking care of that.

PAN IIT 2006

As promised, I am going to write a little about the PAN IIT conference in Mumbai from Dec 23-25.

It was a grand event, over 5000 attendees with well known personalities from all over India and US. The event was inaugurated by the President of India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. I missed this piece ... remember my flight had got delayed !!!

The first day was more general I'd say, wherein we had people from the Indian govt, UN ... speak about India, the IITs and the challenges that lie in way of progress of the IITs and the nation. Personally speaking I had a tough time networking because the attendees, although all IITians, were from from varied industries, e.g, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals etc. It was hard to find the people relevant to what we do at Wirkle. The second day was good, really good, with 7 parallel segments each with a different focus. The one that I went to was the 6th one ... entrepreneurship - from starting up, to scaling it and making it big. This time networking was great !!! The 3rd day was mostly wrapping up wherein there was a discussion around how IITians could play a role in nation building and a set of action items.

I was one of the volunteers in the first Pan IIT event that had happened in the bay area in 2003. This one was better ... the theme of this conference was more clear, the media coverage was much more and besides the objective was to kick start the effort of nation building which I think is a great cause. Hats off to the Pan IIT team !!!

Headed to Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow

Im flying to Mumbai for Pan IIT 2006 tomorrow, the agenda and the vision for the meet sounds really exciting and hoping to meet a lot of people. More updates on my blog shall follow.

TiE New Delhi (Dec 16) and the corporate ladder

I was there at TiE New Delhi this Saturday, the theme was "Effective CEOs" and Dr Prasad Kaipa was the key presenter.

There was one slide which I thought made a lot of sense. It talks about the 5 steps of the corporate ladder ...

Step1, Individual Contributor - Most of us start out like this in our careers, where we apply our knowledge and understanding to accomplish individual tasks that are assigned to us.

Step2, Team Contributor - At this point in our careers, we apply our knowledge and experience to the team as a whole resulting in success ... not as an individual but as a team.

Step3, Team Manager - At this stage an individual takes the responsibility of executing a task and organizes a team to get it done.

Step4, Team Leader - A leader is a person who has a vision, motivates and inspires people along the lines of the vision and drives the execution.

Step5, Executive - .... to tell you the fact I didn't really understand this much, or maybe it is just that I cannot relate to this, yet !!!

Anywayz ... so Prasad's theory is that, a successful CEO usually goes through all the steps and most CEOs are somewhere between level 4 and 5 ... anything below that, you're probably not ready.

Barcamp Delhi - Talk by the Opera guys and the mobile web

I was there at barcamp delhi this past weekend, it was great by the way, great job done by the organizers.

There was a talk by Sigbjorn Vik, Opera Software, which was really interesting ... he talked about the developments that are planned for the Opera browser, both on the PC and mobile. Some of the things that I found interesting -

- Calendar : On travel sites where travel dates are to be entered by user, usually these days you'd see a calendar pop-up allowing you to select the dates. This is common with almost all travel sites except that all have to make their custom implementations of the same. So Sigbjorn mentioned that they plan to put this functionality in the browser itself so that no custom implementations are required ... now that makes sense.

- xHTML + voice - Having speech to text conversion built into the browser allowing users to easily fill up information on web pages without too much work for the developers who make the website.

... and there were a bunch of other features as well. Now the key thing to notice here is that, at a high level they are trying to put that functionality in the browser which users are likely to use or are already using and simplify the job of the web developers or enable them to do things which they couldn't have done on a browser today.

Now lets look at the mobile side of the picture ... how should our mobile web look like, our mobile web should have constructs that users are likely to use or are already using today. For example,

- if you launch the menu of a phone today you'd see nice icons laid out in a matrix, when selecting one of them you have it blow up in size then you select what you want to do with that from your options menu.

- similarly your addressbook has a list of contacts, and you move up and down between them and use your options menu to perform actions on that contact.

... and so on. Now lets think about it, this is what users are doing ... so why aren't we trying to take mobile web in this direction and instead focussing on optimizing webpages with hyperlinks for phones. The day we look at the mobile web from a user standpoint instead of thinking about fitting HTML pages on phones, the mobile web would be much more successful.

Think about it ... HTML was designed keeping in mind the PC, instead if you had phones come first would HTML be the way it is today?