Levy: You’ve also given $42 million to the Long Now Foundation for the development of a giant clock designed to last for 10,000 years. Does that project relate at all to what you’re doing at Amazon?

Bezos: It does fit into my view. Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In these days of booming and lean startups in the internet tech industry, there are only handful of companies that think about long term, 2 to 5 years in to the future. Clearly, Amazon is one of them.

Yes, I work for the company that makes this VPN program, but not hacked it

By the time I got to the venue, it was late (thank you bangalore for the traffic jams).  The impact of billion people+ was felt  the moment I entered the venue.  By the time I navigated my way around people standing with millimeter gap apart, Vinod Khosla almost finished his keynote and Vivek Wadhwa was to speak next.

Vivek Wadhwa(Entrepreneur)

Vivek Wadhwa started off his talk with bunch of statistics on the success/failure of entrepreneurs across different age groups and concluded that people with bald hairs and above age group of 39+ can also venture into entrepreneurs, referring to an earlier statement made by Vinod Khosla that 45 is too old to be an entrepreneur .

He was very very upbeat about Akash tablet – not v1.0 but v 3.0 that he would expect would be out in another year. He talked about various trends, areas to focus on (cloud, healthcare, education, big data, voice recognition, robotics, AI etc). He advised Indian entrepreneurs to focus on serious Indian problems and have a TAM of over billion people instead of building a stupid twitter/linkedin clone or a social media application.

Overall, it was an interesting talk and was entertaining too.

Brad Smit (CEO, Intuit)

Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit started off the keynote with the slide “The only constant that we can count on is the Change”.  It was a very down to earth, no buzz words and highly focused talk. He talked about how a 30 year old company like Intuit survived, while watching other big companies like SGI and Sun Microsystems, who were sharing the same premises, went through some changes that no one expected.

He shared a very nice story on the importance of leaders setting a goal and then moving out of the way:

The story starts with his daughter’s desire to play football. He then with great difficult talks to other interested kids, their parents and finally forms a team. They get all the football gear, identify the court and get started on a fine sunny day. He narrates how the first 10 to 15 minutes of that day was a chaos with all the kids kicking the ball in different directions, fighting over things and all other kid stuff, while the parents are standing/sitting far away and watching in despair.  And after about 15 minutes, the coach walks in with two goal posts and nails them into the ground. Brad says, what happened after that was nothing short of magic. All of a sudden, all the kids started kicking the ball in the direction of the goal post.

His message was simple to the leaders: Define the goal and get out of the way!!

He talked at length about the innovation and how his company went about it, especially the “follow me home” concept where the engineers actually follow the customer (who bought quicken product), watch him install and use.

As an entrepreneur, if there is one message you want to take home from his talk, I would say that would be “Keep customers happy and continue to do that” and everything else would converge around that.

There were whole bunch of tidbits and nice quotes in his talk. Here are few I remember:

To leaders:

• Define a vision that inspires action
• Be a translator of dreams – with references to JFK
•  The job of the leader is not to come up with right answers, but ask right questions…

Other quotes:

• How God made heaven in 7 days ?  He didn’t have to worry about all the legacy, installed base…
• To walk a mile with your customer, you must first remove your shoes …
• The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle – a quote from Peter Drucker
• If you have teams bigger than two pizzas can feed, you have a problem – quote from Jeff Bezos
• Don’t be Intellectually certain, be Intellectually curious.
• Vision is the picture of how things will look when you get there…
• “At 15, I thought my dad was the dumbest person on earth. At 18, I was wondering how fast he learnt in 3 years…”

Pallav Nadhani (Founder, Fusion Charts),  Paras Chopra(WingiFy), Amit Somani (MakeMyTrip), Mukund Mohan(Founder, BuzzGain ), Amit Ranjan (COO, SlideShare)

While the title of the talk is catchy, there were hardly any references or stress on $100 (or the spirit) part of it. It is great to see and nice to hear Young Indian entrepreneurs talk about their experiences and what worked for them and what didn’t. But the way sometimes these talks are given, one tends to believe that as absolute truth.  If what worked for one works for everyone else, then this whole startup learning would be reduced to a mere text book. One must realize that these are their stories and that those ideas worked for them in a given scenario. Take them as guidance, insight, experience but not as instructions.

I kind of felt that the they talked about too many things and spent too much time involving audience. It is neither a workshop nor a talk – sounds like good concept, but there was too little time to do this correctly.

There one quote/insight I liked from an entrepreneur in the audience. I am sure many of us would relate to this:-)

Have multiple options/packages in your product offering. It has the potential to make the customer thinking change from “Should I Buy or Not” to “Which One Should I Buy”

Vishal Sehgal(Founder, Lava), Ashish Aggarwal(Violet 3D), Dinesh Prasad(Qualcomm), Mohan Kumar(Norwest)

I should have read the abstract in more detail This turned out to be a talk focussed on the hardware design for mobile brands. While I tried to listen to the speakers, there was so much of distraction in the hall -people talking loud on cellphones, door opening and closing with loud chatter from outside creeping in constantly. It just a 45 minutes talk – if people can’t give their attention for that small duration, why do they come ? This is something so common I see in Conferences in India. Why can’t we just stop entry/exit after the talk starts? We Indians talk so much about so many problems, but we cannot be self-disciplined.

btw, if you have not heard of violet 3D, check out their website. They have a sexy looking, revolutionary wireless sound system.

Shailesh Patil(Kesari Tours), Gulshan Haresh Bakhtiani(Wellness Forever Medicare), Kumar Vembu(Go Frugal)

It was a good discussion but not sure if it achieved the goals of the panel. The only take away message for IT product vendors was that make sure you profile the customers who are going to use the products as some may have never seen or used the computers.

One interesting observation is that we have seen many stories of entrepreneurs in the software industry where a programmer/developer at the core is forced to learn everything about product management, marketing, sales and financing etc.  But Shailesh Patil’s story was totally different. He narrated his story of how got interested in computers after seeing its use in one of the popular singapore electronics shop in 1985. His Travel & Tours office cost him 60K but the computer cost him 75K. His strong belief that computers would help him serve his customers saw the transition from “knowing literally nothing about computers” to “Learning programming and building all the necessary software by himself”. That’s not a transition one would expect to see in 1985. Kudos to him, his confidence and drive.

This turned out to be “Is this Trend a myth or real” like discussion, rather than insights and understanding of the area. I went to this talk primarily because of Dr Werner Vogel (CTO, Amazon) and Dr Vijay Chandru (Simputer fame)

In the midst of the discussion, there was a topic about how most developers today are looking to become managers rather than staying long in the technical field. It was interesting to see Dr Werner making a comment that the previous CTO of Amazon (before him) went back to the company as a Developer. Looking at the pace of technologies, He also mentioned that he would like to get back to development as he feels that it is hard to be a CTO these days without hands-on knowledge.

That is a sound advise to developers/techies  becoming managers by default, but not by choice.

I donot fully understand the formal mechanics of this but Dorai talked to me about this on several occasions. I happened to witness for about half hour at least.

Idea is that various budding entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to peers and other selected observers. Then the reviewers ask questions, critique, advise/suggest/improve and rate.  It seemed like a very good idea to me. There is a potential for someone to discard an idea outright, but hey, what is the fun/use if everyone likes your Idea.

I liked the energy and enthusiasm in the room.

As I was walking out, it occurred to me that automating this whole process itself is a business idea. And then connect it or integrate ideas like KickStart. It could be very powerful and several other startup solutions could be integrated in – like many life cycle aspects of an entrepreneur’s journey as he sets out with his idea and starts to make a business out of it.  For example, there was this another idea(I forgot the company name) one of the participant was pitching in. For a given space, this company goes and harvests the data from crunchbase and provides variety of analytics such as competitors, addressable market size estimations, investors in that area etc.   This is a good candidate to be integrated into this idea.  And I am sure there will be many such solutions that could be integrated into this idea so that it becomes one-stop place for all a startup needs.   How about that?  Any takers ??

Mahesh Murthy (SeedFund)

If there is one talk that shouldn’t be missed on day 1, that is this. Find out the slides or the video and watch it.

Good talk by Dr Werner. He talked at length about the following 5 aspects of Big Data and stressed the opportunities for innovation in each of these areas.

• Collect
• Store
• Organize
• Analyze
• Share

Anyway you look at it, it is a massive growth area for Amazon.

If you have an idea around Big Data but you cannot afford Data scientists, you should check out kaggle.com – that is crowd sourcing of data scientists for you !!

Dr. Werner also recommended the following book as a mandatory read for everyone interested in Big Data.

The Fourth Paradigm – Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery  Available as free PDF from Microsoft.  Also available as on kindle here.

Dorai Thodla got an award from NASSCOM for mentoring various startups, budding entrepreneurs and umpteen number of college students. I worked with Dorai in iMorph and in previous companies too. He is an amazing guy to work with. He is a firehose of ideas. I wish I could convert even a handful of them into reallity.

Congratulations Dorai.

On the whole, it was useful time spent on day 1. I was excited to see so many young (& old too) entrepreneurs embarking on their journey. We probably are not far away from creating the Silicon Valley like environment for startup eco-system  and hopefully for the development for world class products.

(The biggest disappointment I faced was when I was coming out. Because the parking at the hotel was full, some of us were shown the basement parking of an unfinished building. To my horror, when I was about to take it out my car (other cars too), it was completed covered with fine dust. Added to that it was pitch dark.  Thanks to the innovation of mobile handsets as torches, managed to scrape through. I am sure the organizers could have done better job).

“One day, a poor boy who was selling goods from door to door to pay his way through school, found he had only one thin dime left, and he was hungry. He decided he would ask for a meal at the next house. However, he lost his nerve when a lovely young woman opened the door.

Instead of a meal, he asked for a drink of water. She thought he looked hungry and so she brought him a large glass of milk. He drank it slowly, and then asked, “How much do I owe you?”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she replied. “Mother has taught us never to accept pay for a kindness.” He said, “Then I thank you from my heart.” As Howard Kelly left that house, he not only felt stronger physically, but his faith in God and man was strengthened also. He had been ready to give up and quit.

Years later, that young woman became critically ill. The local doctors were baffled. They finally sent her to the big city, where they called in specialists to study her rare disease.

Dr. Howard Kelly was called in for the consultation. When he heard the name of the town she came from, he went down the hall of the hospital to her room. Dressed in his doctor’s gown, he went in to see her. He recognized her at once. He went back to the consultation room determined to do his best to save her life. From that day, he gave special attention to the case.

After a long struggle, the battle was won. Dr. Kelly requested from the business office to pass the final billing to him for approval. He looked at it, then wrote something on the edge, and the bill was sent to her room. She feared to open it, for she was sure it would take the rest of her life to pay for it all. Finally she looked, and something caught her attention on the side of the bill. She read these words:

“PAID IN FULL WITH ONE GLASS OF MILK….

(Signed)
Dr. Howard Kelly.”

After reading this, I couldn’t help thinking and compare if it is really the case of software eating everything in our beloved country.

In the context of India, let me take a look at the industry examples that Mark talks about in his article and see if software is ruling the world.

Books – While it is known fact today that Amazon would launch the store in India sometime early next year, the only other name one can think of today is FlipKart.com. Beyond the top few cities, I don’t think if anyone knows this brand or uses it to buy books.  Back in 1999, we built india’s first online music store for a startup called Fabmall. We launched the original site in 9 weeks with complete payment integration from CitiBank (This was the first payment gateway implementation for CitiBank also and I still remember the integration issues and debugging them late into night, sitting in CitiBank office in Bangalore).  They went on to add Books, Electronics, Grocery and many more along the lines of Amazon.com.  I remember ordering groceries in the middle of the night to be shipped next day and I thought life was good. Alas, they were too early to the Indian market and couldn’t sustain for long.

What do I do for the books today? I rarely buy from Brick&Mortar stores. Mostly order kindle books and read-on laptop/tablet.  Costs less, delivered faster than any other approach and pretty much any book you can buy. On every count, they beat the physical stores.  Great, but “I” and people like me represent a miniscule percentage of India’s total population that buy books from online stores. Rest of the India continues to buy books from physical stores and probably for foreseeable future.

Music – Same story as books.  While the magnetic tape is dead in top tier-1 and tier-2 cities,  it still thrives in the rest of the population. While the younger generation has switched over to digital music, thanks to the countless clones of iPods, I haven’t seen anyone buying the music online. And where would they buy if they want to ? Internet connection at home is still a luxury in tier-3 cities and below.

In fact, when I asked my sister’s kid recently as to where she gets her music collection from, she looked at me with surprise as if the answer was obvious and replies  “Friends”. And where do these “Friends” get their music from ? The other “Friends”. This is where the Indian Jugaad comes to the rescue   You would find these enterprising guys in every corner of the main streets with a small one-room shop. Some just migrated from magnetic tape copying and CD burning business to digital versions. These guys, who usually have a techie friend (or a friend who knows a techie friend…) that can pirate latest music from torrents, would help you copy the latest music in bulk into your phone/digital player for just few rupees.

Video & Entertainment – Clearly, no one knows about NetFlix in India (except for the people like me who have directly worked with them or people working in MNCs visiting their US counterparts or people who closely monitor technology). Yes, some of us have youtube access and some download torrents regularly for latest movies etc. But to a large extent, it is still the movie halls & TV that dominate the scene. Even the online-ticketing is limited to top tier-1 cities. On the TV front, only now we are seeing some DTH providers transmitting half-a-dozen  or so HD channels.

LinkedIn -  I have been recruiting engg people in the past and I know several of my friends who recruit people into IT companies regularly. It seems that no one uses LinkedIn to recruit people although it sounds obvious that they should. We still rely heavily on the middle-men (recruiting agencies) and largely seem to be comfortable.  There are some other reasons, but I hope that this would change very soon (unlike the above)

Some interesting numbers from a different brick & mortar world. RBI estimates that only about 20% of Indian population have access to banking. Even if you take out the people within group of < 20 years, this is very sparse. With a total of about 84K branches (of all commercial and state run banks), only 5% of the villages have access to banking.

I can go on with more and more examples, but they all look like same story.  Our evolution to using the latest technology services doesn’t necessarily follow the steps the developed world has taken, and for a good reason. We probably will bump over several of the steps and catch-up with the latest. Cell phone is a good example.  This is one technology you would see in every corner of the country. You may find it difficult to find post office, internet connection, but you can pretty much expect someone having a cell phone.

But the analogy stops there. Our use of cell phone (again beyond the very small percentage of people who own connected smartphones) is pretty much limited to SMS and voice calls – what it was originally meant for.

I think that the root of the problem is still lack of widespread Internet connection. While we figured out some workarounds (digital music piracy examples), we are not gonna see a cell phone like revolution in other industries without widespread Internet connectivity.  I wonder what would drive this?

Some of us will continue to write software to eat the “worlds” out there, but not here and not now.

But if you are one of those forward looking people and burnt your fingers earlier, you would have probably automated several post-installation configuration procedures. Cloud brings this culture of automation to masses. If you are directly using IaaS service, pre-configured VMs takes care of many of the OS and application stack installation issues (If you are running your application on top of a PaaS (Platform as a Service) service, one donot even need to worry about VMs, as the PaaS platform takes care of them. But PaaS is different issue to talk about – probably for another post).  Now, you only worry about automating the provision your application instance. And this is the crux of this post.

If you really want to take advantage of load-balancing and auto-scaling in cloud, human-driven automation of application provisioning is not good enough. And here are some reasons as to why:

• You want to dynamically add more instances (with some constraints and bounds) as the load increases, but the last thing you want is to wake up your operations guy in the middle of the night and ask him to run the automated script on the new instances before it can go live.
• You have deployed HA using Active-Active  or Active-Passive setup and you need the instances to come back up online automatically right after the failure and switch-over.
• Sometimes instances go down due to bugs or memory leaks. You need new instances to be brought up to continue to handle the traffic as if nothing happened.
• You want to make sure that your system is ready to deal with any unknown failures – as part of this, your QA/Test infrastructure needs to bring-down various application instances randomly and see if the system recovers.

To achieve the above, you need to design  your application instances to obtain the provisioning/configuration information dynamically once it has come up.  There are couple of ways to do this, in the listed priority order:

1. Get it from known location -  In this design approach, an application instance reaches out to the central configuration repository to pull-in the necessary configuration.  This central configuration repository could be your own server serving the configuration or it could be built on top of other highly available cloud services such as Amazon’s SimpleDB.

Discovering the central repository itself could happen via a limited broadcast message (within a sub-net) or by embedding the repository server identification information (as a DNS name for e.g.,) in the application instance image itself.  Most high-traffic sites in the cloud are designed this way.

2. Baked cookies – This is the easiest approach to begin with.  Use one of the VM cloning methods provided by your cloud service provider to create a golden image of freshly configured instance. And use this golden image to spin-up new instances. The only down side with this approach is that with every new patch or new version of your application, you need to re-create the golden images.

Many well-known and high-traffic sites like Zynga and Netflix use similar techniques. Back in apigee days working with Netflix as our customer, I remember they using a mix of both the approaches for different instance types (second approach for soft appliance and the first approach for the application server instances).

Once you have figured out how you can bring up your instances without requiring manual/human-driven automated scripts for provisioning, solving the above use cases is trivial matter of  working with your cloud vendor’s load balancer ( for e.g., Amazon’s ELB) or cloud management system (such as RightScale) to configure for auto-scaling and high availability.

Look at this example on the right. Why would anyone give out so much of information just to access some whitepaper. They are all mandatory. Knowing that most of the whitepapers are vendor solution biased, why would I get motivated to fill in this time sucker?

Also, look at the context as to how people find these whitepapers. Rarely, you go to a company and read the whitepapers. I mean, eventually you may do if you like that product or space and want to know more. But in reality, you come across these whitepapers when you are searching or reading some other article or a blog post. People don’t like to change the context and jump in the middle of the article to some other whitepaper and start reading it. I typically, right-click and open it in a separate tab (or download) and get back to that queue when I am done with that article.   And when you are back on to these new tabs, and find that they are all asking you to fill-in the forms, what chances are that one actually goes through them? Nah, I just kill those tabs and move on.

See you lost that opportunity of  few minutes of my time!!

What is surprising is that even some companies who are in the business of security, identity, federated authentication etc  adopt the same ridiculous fill_in_the_form_first approach. Why is that a simple email is not good enough for you?  If registration is so important to access these articles, why not implement OpenId or a similar federated authentication technique.

If the goal is to get as much information about the user as you can before he gets access to whitepaper so that you can send whole bunch of unsolicited spam, then you are already lost.  Nobody likes that. There are better ways of tracking other demographics about the interest level of users on your whitepapers.

He predicts that the cost of IT components (not just hardware, includes software as well) decreases precipitously. Referencing Jevon’s paradox, he also talks about how this results in increase in total IT spend( instead of decrease).

As I was reading, it occurred to me that as the confidence in SaaS applications grow, there will be a significant shift to move more and more enterprise IT applications to SaaS. But in the near future, IT still needs to maintain legacy applications.  Further, with ever growing SaaS applications in every possible domain one can think of, the cost effectiveness of maintaining legacy applications will be a big question, resulting in tighter budgets.

While the hybrid cloud (“application stretching”) solutions can help IT leverage cloud economics for legacy apps, but they cannot be a permanent solution. In the absence of an equivalent SaaS application, the only long term solution is to look for a green field approach i.e., build the application using cloud technologies.   Unless IT upgrades the current app development skill sets,  cloud application development is going to be a tough game to catch up with. PaaS platforms could significantly reduce the steep learning curve. Since not all enterprise applications have the same scalable requirements as that of Web2.0 applications, I wouldn’t be surprised to see newer PaaS platforms hiding all the cloud stuff underneath and provide the familiar enterprise development environment/frameworks. Infact, RedHat’s OpenShift is a good example of steps towards that -  they are probably the only known PaaS vendor with J2EE support. Microsoft’s Azure is another PaaS platform to watch out for enterprises who invested in DotNet technology.

Another interesting aspect to look at is that as more and more SaaS services are adopted by enterprises, there is going to be definite need for IT to develop custom applications that integrate services from many SaaS applications. One approach is look at solutions like IBM’s CastIron. Another approach would be an interesting opportunity in the PaaS area i.e., a PaaS platform focused on integration in the cloud.

“Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.”

 

Source:  Internet – self-improvement meetup group.

Simple, but true for most of us!!

First, this amazing story of Manu Sharma on how he sent a baloon to space and photographed venus for less than $200.  wow!!  Read and draw some inspiration.

Individuals fighting a "System"

• Leveraging clever Deep Packet Inspection to stop censorship of content using "Telex" scheme.

• 33 GB of Scientific Papers uploaded to Pirate Bay as a torrent – apparently in response to earlier indictment of Aaron Schwartz in felony charges for downloading 4.8 million papers from the academic journal database, JSTOR.

• ‘Anonymous’ hackers to FBI: There is nothing you can do to stop us. 

Other Tech News

• The new Top level domains are only going to cause more trademark issues, says Esther Dyson, who was founding chairwoman of ICANN.

• Indian Government blocks leading file-sharing services (yes, including RapidShare, HotFile, MegaUpload etc).

• Google demos search by image.  Watch this. This is going to result in some very interesting applications.

• Faking taken to the extreme: An entire fake apple store in China.

• NotionInk Weathers The Storm, plans on releasing the Adam 2 Android tablet in December. Several months back, I wrote about this. I was eagerly waiting to buy one. Good that I didn’t. They had a good product and took very long to release. They failed to capitalize on their software fixing Android to run on tablets – much before Honeycomb was out. Till date, they donot have Honeycomb build yet. While I didn’t like all the negative publicity that CrunchGear meted out to them, they are right on total failure of NI’s marketing.

• MIT, Harvard use nanotechnology to monitor single living cell in real-time. A nanosensor that attaches to surface of a cell – much like a virus ?  what next ?

• A little bit of history(1 & 2) of how Javascript came about. If you have grown up with web, you would want to know this.