The best startup ideas from 2011 (Image credit: Blogsaays.com)

Rafe Needleman at C|net just published an interesting piece on the best startup ideas from 2011. Net-net, he says the following trends made it big through a variety of startups:

1) A focus on bringing technology to the physical world: Products that reach outside the digital realm and enable interactions with the physical world in interesting ways. Augmented reality anyone? Location awareness to tie the information experience with the physical? What about devices like medical monitors and other real world sensors that augment the digital experience?

2) Excellent design: This one is a no brainer. If Apple and Steve Jobs taught us anything it is that well designed trumps not well designed even if the more aesthetically appealing product lags behind on speeds and feeds. In 2012, we remain excited to see how some of Apple’s design philosophy gets “embraced and extended” with PC Ultrabooks. But Rafe’s point is not just about computer hardware. He makes a broader and completely accurate point about design now being super important for the success of a product – hardware or software.

3) Mining data: Both in the consumer and enterprise worlds, data is growing at unfathomable rates. On the consumer end, we have things like photographs, notes, documents, music and videos all moving into the cloud, needing to be searched and organized. And on the business side we have ever-increasing digitization of records and transactions, a larger number of surveillance cameras providing higher quality digital footage than ever before, automated supply chains, enterprise application integration, ERP implementations moving down the chain and into the cloud and so on. There is LOTS of opportunity to mine data and make sense of it.

4) Platforms: True, the platform concept is a tough sell as either a new idea or something that too many people can get off the ground. But if you can build a platform and make it succesful by developing a consumption and supply ecosystem around it, it sure as heck makes for a killer business model with lots of inherent barriers to competitive entry. Facebook, after all, is not necessarily the finest implementation of a social network – just the most powerful and adopted platform of all social networking properties. That’s why Google and others can’t unseat it so easily. Building platforms is IN fo’ sho’.

5) Putting people/consumers in touch with each other: A central theme in the information revolution is breaking down barriers to communication. Theoretically, the Internet puts everyone on earth in touch with any other fellow earthling. In reality, the contact needs to be brokered within a particular context (i.e. education, social networking, commerce and so on). Properties that put people in touch with others and create some value from that contact – whether by enabling consumer to consumer commerce, or learner to learner education – are hot.

What do you think are some additional hot idea memes that took off in 2011? What do you think will stay hot through 2012? We’d love to hear your views.

For more on this, directly from the horse’s mouth, visit C|Net.

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Pepper.pk's Ninja Fruit Bash is their third World #1 App on BlackBerry AppWorld in 2011

Lahore-based Pepper.pk has been in the news quite a bit recently and that’s only because they’ve been doing newsworthy things! They’ve just completed a previously unparalleled feat – their third application, Ninja Fruit Bash, has hit World #1 on Blackberry Appworld. With over 25,000 applications now listed on the marketplace, this is no small achievement if you accomplish it just once. But three times, and that too, within the span of a single year, is just unbelievable.

The Express Tribune has covered their achievement here. And you can learn more about the application at this Pepper.pk micro-site focused on the game. Once can see that the finesse in these apps is continuing to become more and more pronounced. Some of Pepper.pk’s earlier games, like Cricket for the iPhone, got straight into gameplay. But now, they’ve taken the time and invested the effort in doing custom art work to walk gamers through the story behind the game. With some cool opening sequences, an eye-catching micro-site and good gameplay, they’re making waves and continuing the path towards becoming a really top tier product company. We will continue to keep a close watch on Pepper.pk’s future endeavours and wish them the best of luck.

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The Virtual Desktop Platform by VDIworks is a great connection broker and also provides a single place for you to view, deploy and manage your entire Virtual Desktop environment

The Dawn of Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization is all the rage these days, with all the leading industry publications evangelizing its virtues day and night. We’ve tried our hand with numerous VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) products and find that the set of tools are now rapidly maturing. One of the products that’s particularly impressive is the Virtual Desktop Platform (VDP) by VDIworks. In this post, we’ll try to explain why.

One of the core challenges with desktop virtualization has been complexity. The complexity of deploying all the required components, the complexity of managing the environment, the complexity of changing existing desktop support models and workflows to account for the new infrastructure, and so on. One of the sorely missed features in VDI management technology has been integration. In other words, the ability for an administrator to quickly and simply visualize their environment and solve their problems from a single management console. Not everyone has the ability or time to install and monitor six or seven different management solutions just to support their VDI install, but yet, this is what most vendors push you towards. Let us give you some examples.

VMware View

VMware is a leading virtualization provider and has definitely done a great job with their Hypervisor platform. Their desktop virtualization solution, however, has had a slightly rougher start. VMware View is a relatively young product but it has already been reinvented several times. It began life as VMware VDI, and has iterated through several versions under the “View” moniker now. Initially, the solution had lots of performance drawbacks as it only supported the RDP protocol. With the inclusion of PCoIP technology, that problem has been partially addressed. And we say, “partially” because while PCoIP works decently over a LAN, performance over the WAN is still a question mark. In particular, lack of support for WAN optimization appliances is an issue. And the quantum of resources consumed at the server to enable a PCoIP experience is still significant. That said, PCoIP is certainly an improvement over an RDP-only View solution, which, frankly, was a non-starter.

Despite having addressed some of the protocol limitations, the critical issues View is plagued with today have to do with complexity, expense, VMware-centricity and the siloed nature of the feature-set. Let us explain. First off, it takes quite a bit of time to properly configure the underlying infrastructure required by VMware View. To put it simply, the product is far more complex than what a typical Desktop admin has been required to deal with in the past. Additionally, the costs associated with VMware licenses are legendary for causing sticker shock. You could be looking at anything between $150-$300 a seat in most scenarios. When you think about that higher-end number and consider that you can buy a PC for the equivalent of the VMware View software licensing costs alone, the whole solution seems to appear lose lustre. And finally, View cares only about VMware. If you have a non-VMware Hypervisor in your environment, too bad, you can’t use it to host VMs. So no getting off inexpensively by using Xen for your task workers. You’ve got to use VMware ESXi alone, and you’ve got to pay a significant amount to do so. If you want to use protocols other than RDP or PCoIP, again, you’re out of luck. No support for HP’s RGS or Microsoft’s RemoteFX available here. And then, if you’re bold enough to want a single management console to cater to your servers, hypervisors, virtual machines, users and thin clients, once again, it’s a bridge-too-far. With VMware’s View, you’ll stay limited to dealing with users and VMs. If you want to manage your Thin clients, go do that with a dedicated Thin client management console. If you want to perform inventory of your desktops, go do that with Microsoft or Altiris tools. And if you want health or power management for your servers, try your hand with Tivoli. VMware View is not a complete VDI management solution. It manages the brokering and the VMs, and that’s it.

Citrix XenDesktop

Citrix is the 800lb gorilla of desktop centric remote computing. With its Presentation Server product and its 20 year old partnership with Microsoft, many analysts believe it has a significant advantage over VMware. However, the shortcomings of VMware’s approach are exactly what customers suffer with Citrix too. Now, VMware and Citrix have been battling it out for a long time and if you look on YouTube, you’ll find videos posted by both companies tearing into each other’s products, or showing how a particular task that takes less time on one solution, takes a lot longer on the other. But zoom out and ignore the minutae for a moment. The underlying limitations of high cost, siloed management, vendor lock-in etc. are all the same.

For example, with XenDesktop, you don’t get to play or manage a VMware environment, just as VMware disallows you from managing a Xen instance. With XenDesktop, you don’t get support for a broad set of industry-accepted protocols. Yes, you get RDP and Citrix’s own ICA and HDX, but if you want PCoIP over the LAN, you’re out of luck once again. Just as you have fundamental limitations in what you can manage with VMware View, Citrix’ XenDesktop exposes you to similar challenges. Can you manage Thin clients with Citrix XenDesktop? No. Can you look into physical server performance, deal with power management, do out of band environmentals for servers running your VDI environment? No. Can  you implement traditional desktop management with inventory, remote control, asset notes for helpdesk etc. with XenDesktop? No. And cost? You’re not going to do any better than VMware View. In fact, when all is said and done, you may do worse based on the features/capabilities you purchase.

So the true cost of deploying a solution with either of these solutions ends up being pretty significant. You have to have a helpdesk staffed by clones of Clark Kent himself, who can run six different management consoles to solve lowly desktop issues. You need to invest serious amounts of money into commercial per-seat/per-processor-socket licensed Hypervisor solutions and you need to change your support workflows and your user expectations. So, how is this kind of VDI better than a traditional PC again? If the centralized location of data is the only thing I gain, why wouldn’t I just PXE boot my $300 PCs from a centralized image?

And so we come to the reason why we feel there’s quite a bit of value in the VDIworks VDP product line…

VDIworks Virtual Desktop Platform

Now that we’ve walked you through the beef we have with VMware and Citrix, it will be easier to explain why we find VDP to be a good option. First off, it supports all of the infrastructure you need to deploy virtual desktops. That includes the servers, the hypervisors, the VMs themselves all the way through to Active Directory users and the Thin client devices. So, if I’m a helpdesk tech working a large VDI install in a big company, at least I have a single place to go to in order to get a complete picture of what’s going on in my environment. In a nutshell, I’m spared the Management Console Merry Go’round!

Second, VDIworks isn’t a Hypervisor vendor so they don’t particularly care about locking you in to one brand of Hypervisor. VDP supports Xen, Hyper-V and VMware ESX/ESXi. Actually, they support VMware’s free Server product as well, as they do Microsoft’s Virtual Server product. Now, why is this important? For numerous reasons. If you’re a large diversified company that has business units with some independence in their IT decisions, you will likely have more than one Hypervisor in your environment. If you’re a company that has grown by acquisition, you’ll likely have more than one Hypervisor in your environment. And if you’re a smart IT guy who is not blindly wanting to implement a single solution for every user’s needs, you might be looking at open source Xen as a free alternative for task workers, while investing in VMware with HA and FT options for your higher end users, perhaps. In this case, too, you will have multiple types of Hypervisors. It’s also nice to know that you can opt to change out your infrastructure without changing the implementation (or middleware) on top. For example, if, a year down the road, you decide that Hyper-V/RemoteFX are the perfect fit for you, how easy can you make the transition? If you’re on VMware View, the answer is “Incredibly Difficult!”. With a tool that works with many Hypervisors, you could save yourself a lot of money and prevent the onset of a monumental migraine.

Third, because you can leverage numerous free components in conjunction with VDIworks VDP, such as MySQL databases back-ending the server, or Open Source Xen Hypervisors, you can cut down the cost of the solution by quite a bit.

Fourth, VDP doesn’t seem to lose sight of the fact that it is first and foremost, a management solution for a desktop environment. Yes, Virtual Machines, VDI, Connection Brokering etc. are all handled, but ultimately what’s being enabled and managed is a complete end-user desktop environment. So, traditional management functions like inventory, health, remote control, delivery of updates, alerts, SNMP, reporting or power management are still important. It’s not good enough to dump this set of responsibilities on yet another management product that needs to be run in parallel. And VDP doesn’t do that. It provides all the traditional systems management functions most desktop admins have grown accustomed to using over the years. In this respect, it is not a siloed or a point product, but rather a solution to an overall problem. The problem being the management of a more efficient desktop delivery paradigm; Virtual Desktops. It’s fine and well being a point Connection Brokering product, or a siloed VM management product, but what truly differentiates VDP is its integrated approach to management and the consequent simplification of the task at hand for IT.

Conclusion

There’s no one-size-fits-all panacea solution in IT. Period. And that is the precise reason why you want to invest in infrastructure that works with other vendors’ products, that’s open, that’s malleable, that’s interchangeable. Not stuff that locks you in. For this reason alone, we remain hesitant about a Big Company solution that causes nothing other than pretty tight vendor lock-in. If you’re considering Desktop Virtualization, check out VDP. You may like what you see.

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Generic brands are gunning for Starbucks' bottled products business. And this can teach us a lot about the power of distribution.

I was in the US on a business trip when I walked into one of my favourite grocery stores over a lazy’ish weekend. This was a large regional chain that has hundreds of locations and huge stores. The variety of products they carry is pretty wide ranging and I usually find I can get everything I need in one trip, so I prefer going there when I can spare the time. Now, one of my regular purchases are those 4-packs of Starbucks bottled coffee that I typically enjoy with breakfast. When I visited the aisle where they stock these, I was greeted by something rather amusing: the big grocery store chain was still carrying Starbucks, of course, but right next to it there were almost identically packaged products being sold under the grocery store’s generic brand. The bottles were shaped almost exactly the same and though the package had different colours, the form factor of the package was identical. But that wasn’t the least of it. On top were bright yellow coupons which said, “Buy one Starbucks 4-pack and get our coffee 4-pack free!”. So in other words, everyone who buys Starbucks bottled coffee would be absolutely crazy not to try this… I certainly did.

When I got home I was initially hesitant to try the generic brand because I’ve tried them a couple of times and they usually don’t pan out so well. And in fact, the first coffee I consumed was in fact the Starbucks brand. However, the next one, out of curiosity, was the generic brand. The moment I took a sip I realized that there was hardly any difference between the two. If anything, I sort of preferred the generic brand. Surprising. Net-net, I was hooked and had been successfully converted! Eventually when they start charging money for the generic bottled coffee I am sure it will be at a 20-40% discount off the highly priced Starbucks product. And most people, I would guess, will have the reaction I just did. Starbucks is in trouble. So what are the lessons to be learned from this story?

First, as I said, Starbucks is in trouble. They have been for a while, but if it is indeed this easy to replicate the Starbucks taste for 40-50% less cost in an identical package, then I think their channel business (i.e. distribution through other people’s stores) is going down. Short them if you like. (Disclosure: I do not directly manage any portfolio in which Starbucks is a component nor, to my knowledge, have any funds I participate in, shorted Starbucks).

Second, this is the power of distribution in play! If you control the delivery to the end customer (and you have a decent product) you can, to a large extent, dictate success or failure. In this case, the grocery chain placed their product right next to the competitive product. They added an incentive (coupon) right next to the product placement so you just couldn’t miss it. And best of all, the margin they make off selling Starbucks is what is paying for the subsidy on the generic brand! So they are using their distribution of Starbucks to kill Starbucks and replace it with a product they own and make *all* the margin on. How’s that for leverage and power?

Third, placement is key and if you can attach yourself to your competition so that when word about them gets out, you are mentioned automagically, then good for you, because you just upped your odds for success. Ultimately, for every brand, there are the pro camps and the con camps. There are the Pepsi lovers and the Coke fanatics. So in large markets, there is usually room for a few players. If you are small and can do something to attach yourself to a large competitor’s messaging, you’ve done yourself and your product a great favour.

Fourth, if you want to enter a particular product category it may make sense for you to enter indirectly by participating in the delivery chain for a competitive product before launching your own. If you can become a trusted delivery vehicle for a particular product, you will own a segment of the customer base. Your success may be due to the product you will ultimately replace and you will learn a lot about what customers like, are willing to pay and need in future. This will inform your own product development process. This applies to physical and virtual goods, like software. For example, if you want to build an ERP solution, how about first becoming an implementation partner for Oracle or SAP. If you can use these gigantic companies to get to a few customers, leveraging the credibility of Oracle, as compared to your own non-existent credibility, you can develop a sense for whether you can get these folks to eventually migrate to your platform when you develop it in future. You will know exactly what they pay, exactly what they like about Oracle and what they hate. You will also know, across your customer base, the 20-40% feature-set most customers use. Don’t waste your time with the 60-80% functionality your clients don’t use. This ofcourse is just an illustrative example. ERP is not an easy area to break into, but you get the point.

Fifth, as the grocery store demonstrates, distribution can be an enabler and important to the success of your products even when you aren’t making a ton of money off the distribution itself. It’s exactly why Apple is so protective of their iTunes store even though it is not – in relative terms – a huge money maker for them. But by owning the distribution they have leverage with content providers, and they use that leverage to make their products the most attractive delivery vehicles for the content. Thus, they gain competitive advantage. How can you think about this and apply it to your business? Can you leverage the power of distribution?

Finally, what this also reminds us about is that business strategies are unfolding around us 24×7, every second of the day. And we all have the opportunity to witness hundreds of excellent, fair and pathetic models cobbled together in fancy board rooms, in execution right in front of us. The world is a lab, so to speak, and merely with a keen sense of observation we can get dozens of good ideas a day about how to optimize our own business further. I trust that our readership is made up of exactly this type of keen observer who learns and profits from the environment around him or her.

Good luck in your ventures!

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The Karachi Stock Exchange was a star performer this year, showing near 20% gains, twice the Nasdaq and Dow!

Back in December 2009, I had come up with a list of predictions for 2010. I may have gotten a little lucky this year, because many of these predictions were spot-on to an uncanny degree. Here’s how I fared:

Political predictions

I don’t see Asif Zardari making it through 2010. I think he will be deposed as President.

Couldn’t have been more wrong on this. And for the second time in a row. El Presidente has shown himself to be a better survivor than I am a Futurist!

Though many political pundits talk about it, I don’t believe there will be mid-term elections this year. Whatever changes occur will be with individual and will not displace the entire post-2008 election scenario.

And thus it happened. No mid term elections, even though last year many pundits were proclaiming that this was a near guaranteed event.

Gen. Kiyani is scheduled to retire close to the end of the year, but I believe he will receive a rare 1 year extension of service. However it happens, I don’t believe we will see him retiring this year.

This happened too. Though the extension he received was even more generous than I had thought. Gen. sahib will be at the helm of affairs for another 3 years.

The surge in Afghanistan will not work. If not by the end of 2010 then in 2011 the US will have to sit and talk to elements of the Taliban. The commitment of these forces will prove politically costly for President Obama.

Has this not happened to the letter? Now we have news of a Taliban office opening in Turkey which Mr. Karzai has already supported and in fact requested the Turkish Government for. And Pakistan has come out in support of this initiative as well. We all know that the discussions with the Taliban have been initiated by NATO and not from a position of strength.

Security and the situation in northwest Pakistan

As I had mentioned last year, the Army certainly had an operation up their sleeve. What happened in Swat and South Waziristan was the result of meticulous planning that had occured for months prior to the execution of either campaign. I believe these campaigns will begin to bear fruit in 2010 in the form of a reduction in security incidents in Pakistan. While there will be a definite tapering off in 2010, the nihilists will continue to make their presence felt now and then. Unfortunately this is a process which will take a little bit of time to completely unfold. But 2010 will inshaAllah be more secure than 2009 and quite measurably so.

There was a 35%  reduction in the number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan in 2010, as compared to 2009. The number of people who perished in these attacks was roughly the same, but that was due mainly to the terrorists no longer having the reach they once did. The number of attacks in major cities was also markedly reduced. As I said, the process of securing Pakistan in light of what is going on in Afghanistan will take some time, but certainly, 2010 was an improvement.

The military will continue significant presence in Swat, Waziristan and will expand into other tribal agencies, expanding the writ of the government in an area that was always free of federal or provincial law enforcement since 1947. The action being conducted in these areas is certainly against the foreign nihilists who have taken refuge there and those who would seek to support them, but it also marks an expansion of writ into areas where it never existed previously (by design and by a 1947 era agreement which has clearly outlived its relevance).

The gorgeous Pakistan-China Joint Fighter (JF-17) wowed crowds at Farnborough and Zhuhai

In fact, the only agency where the Army has not entered in force is North Waziristan. And there’s a lot behind that, so I’ll avoid the urge to take that segue. The homes of Taliban terrorists have been converted to Girls’ Schools in the FATA area and the writ of the Government has been extended to areas that no central government has ever controlled in hundreds of years.

Pakistan will continue to implement its strategic weapons programs and reap the fruits of investment in tactical weapons development. In addition to the first JF-17 squadron being weaponized and fully operationalized, we will see the arrival of F-16 Block 52 (Yes, there will be no last minute ‘hitches’), additional Saab Eireye AWACS aircraft, significant progress on the FC-20 fighter program, new air-to-air weapons such as the AMRAAM, and air to ground munitions and the Sniper targeting pod. In addition, the missile program will continue at full speed and more details will emerge regarding the 7,000km range Taimur ICBM. Pakistan will, however, not make any official announcements concerning this system. The much delayed Pakistan Navy next generation submarine deal will be finalized – there is a German vs. French situation going on at the moment but this will succesfully be navigated and a firm deal will take shape in 2010.

It is absolutely irrefutable that Pakistan has made tremendous strides forward in national defence. The only item from the list above that did not materialize was the Sub deal with Germany and/or France. In stead, we know hear that the PN is evaluating Chinese submarines. There are even rumours that the Chinese – in addition to providing a diesel fleet – may also lease a nuclear submarine to Pakistan (an SSGN). Too little is known about this thus far to elucidate much further, but things are definitely in the works.

As for the Taimur ICBM, piece parts have begun to fall into place. The most recent Hatf-V tests in December were rumoured to have included a MIRV (Multiple Re-entry Vehicles) warhead, which goes hand in hand with effective ICBM technology.

In addition to the list above, the Pakistan Air force also took delivery of Iluyshin air-to-air refuellers, Chinese AWACS, in addition to the Swedish Erieye aircraft and the SD-10 Beyond Visual Range Air to Air missile made significant progress in its SD-10B incarnation. The JF-17s will be armed with SD-10As for now as the standard BVR weapon, soon to be upgraded to the B model.

The F-16 Bl 52s were delivered on time, the JF-17 squadron is impressing people within the country as well as without. They participated in a static display at one of the world’s most famous airshows at Farnborough, in the UK, and then wowed crowds at China’s largest air event in Zhuhai.

Technology Predictions

There will be a near-breakout level of success with a Pakistani based mobile software company. At least one company will claim 250K users for its mobile products by the end of 2010. It is very likely that two will.

Pepper.pk announced that they have over 1 million users using their software products, but what’s more, Pepper’s Photo Editor software for the Blackberry made it to World #1 on AppWorld. So not only was there a breakout success, Pakistanis were literally on top of the world as far as this area of technology is concerned. I’ve never been happier at being right about something! More great things will come from Pepper and many other Pakistani technology startups in 2011 inshaAllah.

Netsol will see its fortunes improve in 2010 from a share price perspective. Hovering now at around $1, they can expect to be at least 25% better off by the end of the year.

Netsol fared even better! They are ending the year almost 50% up, at 1.50. They traded as high as $2 in 2010!

2010 is going to be a really bad year for Palm in terms of adoption of the Pre. I had predicted in 2008 that the Hail Mary piece of technology demo’d at CES fail for Palm. It has almost happened, but not quite completely yet. Palm will be relegated to a fourth tier player at best and 2010 will mark a signifciant reduction in its brand equity and influence.

I covered this one earlier this year… Palm got sold to HP and for not all that much. It’s Intellectual Property portfolio (patents) was probably worth 60-70% of the price paid by HP. So the operational parts of the business and the products themselves got valued at almost nothing. The good news is that HP will continue Palm products and may even be coming out with a Tablet leveraging the WebOS platform. Let’s see how it fares. Either way, let’s be clear that the Palm logos you see now don’t represent the good old Palm we knew and loved. That Palm is gone forever.

The Apple Tablet will be released and it will be a major hit. Even though I don’t like Apple, I will buy it  It will be iPhone OS based and will not have the full functionality of a Mac. eReader apps for it will be absolutely killer and very successful.

“Apple Tablet”… what a blast from the past! We all know now that the “Tablet” I spoke of in December 2009 ended up being the massively successful iPad. Yes, I bought it, and the product didn’t just achieve success, it launched a new market for similar devices. eReader apps were in fact a killer app, with Zinio launching digital magazine subscriptions straight to the iPad, and Apple itself showcasing iBooks as a major attraction. And aren’t you impressed that I even got the OS right? The iPad is indeed iOS based and not derived from OS X.

Windows Mobile 7 will come out in 2010 but will not be ‘all that’. It will take several updates and major enhancements to improve it. It will not reverse the market share trend away from Microsoft based phones that has taken hold over the last few years. Android will be the biggest gainer on the Smartphone side and will continue to whittle away at the Windows lead. Microsoft will undergo some pain in this area in 2010.

Yes, Phone7 did launch this year and thus far has sold about 1.5 million devices. In comparison, 300,000 Android devices are being sold every day. Phone7 may still impress, but certainly it hasn’t been a 2010 winner. Android, as I had predicted, went from 5% to 25% market share within a year! It is the biggest tech success story of 2010 in many ways.

ARM based devices and cheaper laptops will start to chip away at Netbook growth. There will at most 20% growth in the Atom based Netbook segment. A market which went from 0 units in 2007 to close to 40M units in 2009.

Netbooks slowed down immensely in 2010. In 2009, about 36.3 million units shipped and according to estimates in 2010 the number will be 40 million. As I had said, growth would be under 20%, and so it was. In 2011, this growth will decline even further.

Nokia is not being succesful in its move from basic and feature phones to truly smart phones. Their UI development and OS skills are not in the top 3 at all. I think this will be Nokia’s downfall… as smartphones become less expensive in markets outside the US, fewer people will choose Nokia as it will no longer provide the best experience primarily due to software reasons. From the low end, Samsung and LG feature phones will continue to become better thus providing competition to the traditional Nokia feature phone niche. All in all, 2010 will see other mobile companies grow at the expense of Nokia.

Wouldn’t change a thing even if I wrote the above earlier this morning instead of last year. As you can see from this IDC report, Nokia indeed lost market share. Samsung launched Bada, focused on foreign markets and the lower end of the smartphone cost spectrum. LG continues to grow. And from the top end you have the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone7 appearing as significant challengers to Nokia.

I was wrong on this one last year, and this is almost too easy for 2010, but then again – you never know! The Software Park Tower in Lahore will be completed and will become fully operational in 2010. It is going to be too expensive sq ft cost wise for most companies so move-ins will be slower than expected.

The building’s done, but rates are super expensive and I think move-ins will be few and far between until something is done to incent companies to move in.

Financial and Economic Predictions

The S&P will show a better than 7% gain in 2010. The Dow and NASDAQ will also come close to 10% gains.

The Dow was under 10,500 at the end of 2009, and is just under 11,600 now. That’s a better than 10% gain, as predicted. The NASDAQ went from just around 2,300 to over 2,650 at the end of 2010, that too is better than 10%. The S&P went from about 1125 to 1260 which handily beats the conservative 7% projection I made.

The recession in the US will be over officially – it technically is already – but you’ll hear common people saying it. There will be a net reduction in the unemployment rate in 2010.

Unemployment went down a mere .2% from Jan to December 2010, as shown here. There’s still a long way to go. The recession is technically over and the markets performed well, but until unemployment is reduced significantly, common people will continue to feel the pinch. I was only half right on this one.

The KSE, having recovered more rapidly than expected in 2009, will show more modest gains of in the 10-15% neighbourhood in 2010.

Well the KSE was the star of the year, showing better than a 20% gain and hitting a multi-year high. It did twice as well as the US markets. There’s something to be said for the fortitude of the Pakistani markets!

The Pakistani Rs. will continue to trade between 82 and 86 to the USD through the year.

Well, here’s the list of daily closes and we stayed under 87, so there you have it!

In summary, of 18 predictions, I was completely wrong on one (Asif Zardari) and half wrong on the US recession (ordinary people have yet to feel the effects of the technical data). Probably my most successful year of predictions thus far! And hopefully I haven’t jinxed myself by saying that.

So, stay tuned for the 2011 predictions. Watch this space!

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WindowsPhone 7 : Too little, too late? (Photo credit: CNET Networks)

The decline of Windows Mobile in the last few years is one of the most confusing, frustrating and inexplicable tech stories of the past decade. After becoming *the* smartphone operating system, besting Palm, Handspring and even RIM, Microsoft apparently went into a coma. They failed to keep up with emerging competition, like the Apple iPhone, and while competitors refreshed their platforms quickly, Microsoft couldn’t churn out a single meaningful update to the Windows Mobile OS. Apple went from zero to about 30% market share in a few short years and launched 4 major updates to its hardware and software platform. In all this time, Microsoft’s Mobile division could barely muster a sickly 6.5 upgrade forWindows Mobile and a few misdirected projects such as Microsoft Kin. A project which, frankly, was destined to fail from day one due to its complete lack of a well defined audience, the absence a single meaningful differentiator and its uninteresting implementation.

The problem that plagued the Kin speaks to a larger malady that now afflicts Microsoft. What vision is the company executing to? Who forms the focus of the company’s products? Earlier on in their history, Microsoft did amazingly well by executing to the crystal-clear mantra of “A computer on every desk”. They mercilessly drove down prices of computing platforms by commoditizing the hardware and allowing customers to experience an equivalent experience regardless of whether their machine came from a no-name whitebox supplier in China, or an over-engineered IBM workstation class system. They fueled media, information and workflow convergence on a single platform and made the PC the most important tool of the post-industrial age. Remember Bill Gates’ aggressive push for technologies such as CD-ROM? Microsoft, though never  a bleeding edge technology leader, was definitely an efficient engine that churned out release after release and quickly caught up, embraced and extended and made things fit in its overall vision.

So, where is the Microsoft we knew and loved (or at least feared)? What we have now appears to be a lumbering behemoth that is undoing itself by refusing to make important bets and executing to them ferociously, as it once did. While Windows 7 on the desktop is a welcome change from the perpetually-under-assault Vista, a *lot* more needs to be done. Windows 7 hasn’t made the PC interesting again… and unless Microsoft wants its bread-and-butter business to whither away, it will need to figure out a way to do nothing short of that. The PC has to be cool again. It has to be unique and different again. I can check my email on my smartphone, and watch streaming video on an under $100 set-top box. I can browse the web on an iPad and keep up with friends on Facebook on a host of devices. What major capability does my PC give me? As it stands today, it is limited to being a content creation system based largely on its larger form factor, and increasingly less so due to its performance advantage over other devices. This is not enough. The PC must do something no other platform can do. And whatever that unique set of features are, they should apply uniquely to the PC, at least for some period of time.

As things stand today, it is becoming clear that the mobile platform is the primary device of interest for consumer and most business people. Almost all information (or content) consumption - which probably occupies 80-85% of our time - will be done on these devices. PCs may continue to exist for a while of course, but as devices best suited for content creation… a task that occupies a small segment the the time an average user spends interacting with information devices. So what has Microsoft been able to do for this growth segment? As I earlier pointed out, their early success might as well never have happened since they frittered it all away and basically have to start from scratch. The promised WindowsPhone 7  is, in fact, just that sort of a product reset. What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can win back some interest and start to build a viable Mobile business again. So far, from what I see, the feature differentiators are minor and much of the functionality that existed in the old Windows Mobile (6.5 and before) has gone away (e.g. cut and paste) simply because WindowsPhone 7, as a complete re-write, has nothing at all to do with the versions that were released prior. WindowsPhone 7 has to do something amazing either in software, or in conjunction with hardware, that no other mobile device can do. And without that, it just won’t be noticed in the flood of  Android, iPhone & Blackberry devices.

Here is an example of how Microsoft is attempting to position WindowsPhone 7 - as a more efficient presenter of information. But does this sort of differentiation have any real merit? Isn’t this just like a custom home screen, also available in dozens of open source and paid apps?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFAUTy4wizU

When I see weak attempts such as the above, it makes me cringe. I just don’t think you can push a new Mobile OS - and a non-free one at that - based on trivial features like these. Wouldn’t Microsoft have been better served by something completely ground-breaking… like integrating a Photosynth client on the phone and launching a flagship handset with a built-in micro-projector? Can you imagine the sort of buzz that would create at a launch event? You would take pictures with your phone, Photosynth would use the 1+Ghz processor now commonly found in handsets to immediately stitch the images together and then the integrated pico-projector would show the stitched synth on any flat surface. It would wow the audience no end! And that’s the sort of thing that gets you into virtuous cycles and domino effects. Also, Photosynth is uniquely Microsoft’s. A lot of work has gone into it and its . Plus, the integration of a pico-projector would have been a bit harder for everyone else to follow suit with at least for a few months.

But no, Microsoft is instead betting the future on a slightly better home screen. Ok, then. Let’s see how this plays out.

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Alexa shows MillatFacebook to be a complete flop, initial media-fuelled spike notwithstanding

Who can forget the recent controversy involving Facebook, some cartoons and a religious figure deeply revered by muslims. I don’t want to get into the details because they are not important. What is important, however, is the lessons we can learn from our ridiculous reactions to things we should really be ignoring. Nothing good comes from idiocy, and the MillatFacebook story illustrates this well.

To briefly recount, MillatFacebook, an abysmally (and illegally) named website tried to capitalize on the anger against Facebook when appeals by thousands of muslim members to Facebook management regarding sacrilegious material fell on deaf ears. Some Pakistani PHP developers who were obviously religously motivated, decided that it would be a great time to capitalize on the hullabuloo and launch an Islamic themed Facebook equivalent. Since their naming and marketing skills were apparently as lacking as their UI and programming skills, they decided to name the website, “MillatFacebook”. Forget the fact that this is about the least imaginative name anyone could possibly have come up with, or that it inherently contradicts the whole purpose of a social network by putting up exclusive boundaries (i.e. the “Millat” reference). It also happens to be a trademark violation and hence, illegal. But perhaps the founders of MillatFacebook believe that piracy and trademark infringement in the Name of God is all fine and well. Why Facebook hasn’t shut them down beats me. It could be an exercise in allowing an idiot to strut about the stage exposing his idiocy than denying him and enabling him to claim martyrdom.

As we have often seen, bad UIs and poorly written PHP code combined with abysmally poor english do not a successful Web 2.0 property make. MillatFacebook is no different. While it initially rode a wave of interest simply because the idea of a rebellion against Facebook caught the fancy of several journalists and media outlets, once left to its own devices, MillatFacebook ended up where it should have been from day one: the doldrums. The graph I’ve included in this post makes the point quite clearly. A short, brief spike on the back of media interest and then an equally sharp decline into nothingness.

Here are some lessons I think we can learn from the MillatFacebook story:

1) Anger is not a business model. Simply creating a website to spite someone and thinking that it will become the Next Big Thing is ludicrous and just exposes the fundamentally underdeveloped cognitive skills of those behind the effort.

2) If your stuff sucks, no amount of media coverage can save you. If an innovative, compelling and interesting website had received the amount of coverage MillatFacebook did, you would have seen a very different graph. MillatFacebook is a ridiculously laid out, poorly conceived and poorly executed website. In other words, it just sucks. No amount of press coverage will save such a web property.

3) Social means open. If you insert closed definitions like “Millat” into the inherently open concept of a broad, all encompassing horizontal social network, you get what you deserve: Failure. Who in their right mind would want to invite friends of other faiths to befriend them on “MillatFacebook”? What’s next? DeobandiFacebook? AhlehadithFacebook? Chalk one up to being absolutely brain dead.

4) In matters concerning technology businesses, God does not take sides. And if He does, the side he took just proved counter intuitive to many. Just see the graph above. Enough said.

5) Dogma and bias is not a shortcut to excellence. In order to achieve technological excellence, we will need to reform ourselves; at the personal and societal level. We will need to open our minds, chuck cheap conspiracy theories out the window and LEARN. We will need to appreciate the accomplishments of others – whether in America, Europe, Japan or China – and think deeply about what is fundamentally wrong with our society that we cannot claim even a fraction of that level of achievement. We will need to get off our a$$, embrace the open flow of ideas, shun dogma and myopia and accept not only the progress that has been made all over the world, but also the *way* in which this progress was achieved. We need to completely separate our work from our faith – a subject which is personal!

Innovation stems from openness. Acceptance and appreciation of other people’s ideas and achievements, regardless of who they are. From breaking down mental boundaries and barriers, from shunning exclusivity (religious or otherwise) and from a pursuit of learning and excellence powered by our human capacity, not by incantations and other shortcuts.

This then, is how I see the ludicrousness that is MillatFacebook. How about you?

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Cisco's Home Energy Controller is a much-needed product. Let's see how it does in the days to come.

One of the most significant challenges facing mankind at a global level is the environmental catastrophe that will surely materialize if we fail to transition towards a more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy infrastructure. The statistics are staggering. With increasing per capita energy consumption in the developing world, a gargantuan overall energy footprint in the developed world and a propensity by all to use dirty sources of energy, we’re certainly heading for trouble.

There are two parts to the equation; cutting consumption - and that especially applies to the developed world - and building clean, renewable sources of power. Cisco’s new product addresses the first problem, and I’m super-excited about it!

The somewhat unimaginatively named “Home Energy Controller” is a follow-on to the recently announced Cisco Cius Android tablet. The new device will also run Android, provide a touch interface, access to an app-store, multimedia playback and now ubiquitous web browsing capabilities. However, in addition to the more usual fare, the HEC device will also interface with smart meters, thermostats, switches and power panels using both 802.11n and the low power Zigbee wireless standard. This will allow the HEC to measure energy consumption, lower extra usage in parts of your home which are not presently occupied, and otherwise reduce the energy footprint based on environmental or calendar triggered criteria.

You can view a video that explains the HEC concept here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0-H6K6u7-M

For more information, see this Computerworld article, or this Engadget post covering the new device. We’ll be keeping a close watch on how the new Cisco product evolves and whether it is indeed the first in a wave of energy efficiency and management products that can be adopted by end users without requiring governmental or utility company buy in. I certainly hope that’s the case! It’s high time we stopped waiting on others to act and took the initiative ourselves.

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Tab switching on iPad's Safari browser is plain stupid... tabs reload even when they're not supposed to!

For those of you who are not fully up to speed with the plot, Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley try to escape the Island in a stolen sailboat… no wait, that’s the wrong plot. We’re not talking about Lost here, we’re discussing the iPad! So, last week I told you about the iPad I bought and promised frequent updates on what my experiences using it were. Well, I have an update today. There are a number of things that are getting in my way and I keep reaching for my Laptop every time I stumble across one of these idiosyncracies – which are mostly artifical limitations, by the way.

To recap, my last post covered three gripes:

1) No front facing camera, hence no value as a handy Skype video phone
2) No Flash, hence most websites with interactive content don’t work
3) Not-so-sweet keyboard, including the mysterious case of the missing PgUp, PgDown, Home and End keys

Today, I’m adding to the list. Here’s the additional stuff I’ve discovered which I just gosh-darn hate!

1) Safari works oddly; when you switch tabs, it refreshes an already-loaded tab thus making you lose any text you might have typed in the text box, and generally making the entire experience slower than it needs to be. The darn tab is already fully loaded and rendered, why do you have to reload it? No obvious answer.

2) If Safari doesn’t understand a file, it won’t download it. Even if you have other apps on the iPad that might be able to make use of the file, too bad! They just won’t download. This includes archives… see 3 below.

3) There’s no way to download and view some of the most common attachment types in the Email app. For example, if you get a .zip or .rar attachment, too bad. There’s no way to decompress it and no way to view it. I even tried a third party app, but that requires a URL source for a .zip before it will download and view. And of course, I can’t provide a URL .zip source for an email attachment! This is a huge issue. I get a lot of attachments and many of them are large .zip files. Not good at all.

4) The iPad can’t charge off of a PC’s USB connection, like the iPhone and other mobile devices. I guess the reason is that the big batter on the iPad requires more current than what a standard USB port will deliver. But still, couldn’t they trickle charge it?

5) PDFs won’t directly open or import into the iBooks app. You have to go through a laborious and not-so-guaranteed process to convert PDFs into the Apple-adopted .epub format before the book will show up in iBooks. In order to do this, you have to download an app called Calibri on your PC or Mac. So getting a simple PDF to show up in iBooks requires a lot of extra effort and the use of a desktop/laptop computer!

6) No GPS. Therefore, Google maps and other location based apps are pretty hobbled. Apple did deliver a GPS chip on the iPhone 3GS but took a step backward with the iPad. I’ve tried determining location a number of times with the tower signal strength method the iPad uses and it’s pretty lame. You’re off by hundreds of meters typically.

I’m continuing to play around with the thing but I am running into a lot of these limitations. Definitely not a replacement for a Laptop! I’ll keep pottering about with my iPad and post frequent updates regarding my experience.

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The Palm Campus (Image credit: Palm Corp.)

This news doesn’t make me particularly happy, because a great, innovative company that pioneered the handheld market has been gobbled up today for a paltry sum that may be less than the value of its patents alone. But I have to say, I did see this one coming. Almost two years ago I predicted that Palm would launch a Hail Mary piece of technology at CES and would expect its fortunes to turn… but that this hope would not materialize. About 5 months ago I predicted that Palm would lose out to the smartphone competition and would meet some form of doom in 2010. Lo and behold, both predictions came true. Palm didn’t shut down and go bankrupt, but then companies of its size that don’t have massive debt exposure seldom do. What did happen is that Palm was effectively picked up arguably for less than the price of its assets and it is now part of the HP behemoth. To put things in perspective, HP’s annual revenue (not market cap!) is about 100 times greater than what it paid to buy Palm. How’s that for scale…

So the question is now that Palm is part of HP, what will HP do? Will HP continue its partnership with Microsoft when it comes to mobile devices and phones? Will we continue to see Windows Mobile powered HP iPaqs? With the new HP tablet around the corner, will that run Windows, Windows Mobile 7 or Palm’s Web OS?

Clearly, HP has strengthened its position viz Apple with this buy. An HP tablet or phone with WebOS probably has a better chance of success given the accolades WebOS has received for usability. The biggest challenge that Palm was unable to surmount was simply attracting developers to the Palm ecosystem and getting WebOS apps developed to deliver the kind of variety of options the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Android, does. Perhaps with HP’s deep pockets – over $15B in cash on hand – and a massive partner base, this can change. If there’s on thing HP should focus on post acquisition, it is the developer eco-system.

Where this acquisition does become somewhat challenging for HP is that HP has never been a software company. Yes, they’ve built software, but it’s always been “that other thing we do”. Never the focus. With the Palm acquisition, the battle is not going to be fought so much over the device as it is over software. Unless HP changes its way of thinking and positions itself to truly leverage the software assets it is picking up, WebOS will go to waste, and with it the potential of a new mobile application eco system.

The future of HP/Palm is going to be interesting. First, let’s see how quickly HP is able to integrate this acquisition to enrich its current product line. There is talk of the HP tablet being equipped with the WebOS, and personally, I’m keen to see it in action!

And with that, a final salute to the great pioneer, Palm Computing. The King is dead. Long live the King!

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