Execution is one aspect of making an idea successful, I would say the other is having a business model.

And the latter is very hard as well. Why? Because it is not obvious how to make money online, especially in India.

The obvious way would be to have freemium models such as Flickr and 37 Signals. IMHO, I believe that this is the only sustainable way.

BUT:

1. How can you make this successful in a country like India where people are NOT used to paying for things online especially on a subscription basis? For example, how many people do you know are buying things online that does not have a physical aspect to it? i.e. most people buy movie tickets or pay phone bills online, compared to how many non-techie people do you know who are paying for Flickr or for online storage or similar services?
2. How do you prevent free websites from eating you up? For example, Wufoo did a great job of both execution, including winning awards and having a clear business model. But I am not inclined to using it because Google Forms is free, has no limitations and is a good-enough surveying option. Google doesn’t make money off of this option but they surely have taken away Wufoo’s lunch.
3. Ideas such as scribd.com, and StockTwits are useful and interesting, but even they don’t know how to make money off of it. Heck, even Google is having a tough time in making money off YouTube.
4. Ad-based businesses don’t work in Asia, or so is the impression that I get. Is there a single web application site, NOT a content site, for India that is purely making a business out of displaying ads?
5. I have a feeling that almost all websites that are popular today and that will be popular in the next 2-3 years will have to have a physical component/aspect to it, whether it is payment collection at your doorstep for BharatMatrimony or Zapak running corporate gaming tournaments. This is something that may not be viable for small companies. Perhaps after 2-3 years, things will change.

Bottom line: Without getting funding, and without a clear path to charge for things, how is it possible to make a sustainable web application?

Is this just me or is this the path that every online startup faces?

Use case

Mom asked me to find out the name of the God in the temple at Gokarna. I just had to visit Wikipedia and find out. She could have done this herself but she’s too intimidated by the PC. The same goes for checking movie listings. And so on.

Hypothesis

What if there was a simple device that has just a web browser. They keyboard is brought up via the touch screen. It has absolutely nothing else. Then, would she use it?

Upside

• Since we can do pretty much everything on the internet these days other than work with hardware, why not a device dedicated for that? Makes it extremely easy for people to use the internet and hence computers.
• Can use available WiFi or uses built-in GSM card for internet access
• For geeks, it is a quick way to use the internet, no need to boot up a full computer.
• What if you wanted to open a Word document? Well, that’s where things like the “Open IT Online” Firefox extension come into the picture.
• It’s different from a mobile phone because it has a much bigger screen. And it won’t cost an arm and a leg like the iPhone.
• The popularity of Amazon’s Kindle shows that a reading ebook reader device can become very popular. But why restrict to just books on Amazon? Why not the whole internet?
  • I would love the ability to pace myself and read stuff such as the O’Reilly Safari instead of being forced to sit in one place.
• With the rising internet penetration in India and the expectation that it will increase much higher, people may not be always comfortable with the small screen of a mobile phone/UMPC nor want to buy a Rs.20K PC, what if there was a device that does the middle ground - a large screen, internet access and, say, <7-8K cost?
  • The cost is not based on reality, just trying to find what would be the right price point.

Downside

• If the Simputer didn’t sell, why would this?
• Hopw is it different from the Chumby?

Bottom line

Would you buy it? For yourself or for someone you know.

(This is a continuation of the “Ideas are Cheap” series).

I was just browsing through this paper on “Generating summary keywords for emails using topics” and was fascinated by its usefulness, especially because it “selects words that describe each message in the context of existing topics rather than simply selecting keywords based on a single message in isolation.”

Imagine if we had a smart email client which will automatically show the summary of the email in a few words rather than simply junk/not junk classification. That would help us a lot to triage our email.

On another tangent, how about an email client that sorts your inbox by importance and not by time? Importance can be automatically determined by how often you reply to the sender, what topics you reply fastest to, whether the sender is from the same company, etc.

We have websites like Amazon and Yahoo! that automatically customize their websites based on our usage patterns, why can’t email clients do the same?

Email clients have been around for so long, can they become smarter than a sorted grid with folders?

P.S. While email is the big fish, there is a lot that can be done for personal information management.

This is a continuation of the Ideas are Cheap series.

We all know how much disparity there is between computer science courses in engineering colleges in India and real-world coding skills.

So how about a training institute that fills this gap?

I’m sure the first question is that how is it any different from NIIT? The difference is that it is about programming skills, not about technology. Skills such as:

1. Reading large amounts of code - which is what really happens 90% of the time in big companies
2. Debugging - again, maintenance and bug-fixing are the major tasks in any reasonably sized company
3. Deployment - a hugely underestimated skill/process
4. Unit testing
5. Performance engineering
6. Security aspects
7. etc.

The best part is that this can work very well with open source. I’m thinking more in terms of the Synovel/SpiceBird model where a for-profit company is working on open source code.

This means:

• Students get to learn real coding skills and get to see the impact of their code real-time
• Company profits because the development is being made on their main products and not simply throwaway run-of-the-mill projects.
• Open Source means interested students can continue contributing even after they “pass out” of the training institute.

And how different is this from Google Summer of Code? GSoc is meant for college students who are already good hackers whereas as this training is to help people become good hackers.

There are tons of ideas that can be taken up and that would be sexy enough to interest students:

1. How about an open source desktop search application that runs on Windows?
2. How about creating an open source equivalent of Microsoft OneNote? (or at least a converter from the proprietary .onenote format to any other open format)

Interestingly enough, the training institute can grade students on their hacking skills and eventually become a resumé goldmine for companies that require uber-coders such as the Yahoos, Googles and of course, the startups.

If someone is doing a training programme like this, let me know. I can join as a student.

It’s that time of the year when proto.in fever spreads. And the ideaworm has got to me.

Inspired by Vijay Anand’s “Ideas To Toss” series, I thought why not start my own occasional series as well? I’m calling it the “Ideas are Cheap” series. The name is a take on the common proverb “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is Everything.”

So here’s the idea for today:

Can we have a business where the users can customize the hardware that goes into their phone?

This is not a new idea. We are just applying Dell’s business model to mobile phones. If Dell can do it for desktops and laptops, why can’t it be done for mobile phones?

The customization can range from how much memory you want, whether you need a camera or not, etc. to choosing the color and the type of body (candybar or flip or other form factors) and so on.

The range of customization possible depends on the capabilities and costs involved in the assembly process. For example, users may be able to customize the phone by having a name for a special button called ‘Mom’ (or ‘Dad’ or ‘Son’ and so on) that is hotwired to call you. You can gift this to your corresponding loved ones. The advantage is it becomes a wonderful ‘personal’ phone and becomes easy-to-use for technophobic people.

The implementation will be challenging. For one, desktops and laptops can be assembled because of the plug-and-play IBM PC architecture as well as because the operating system easily adjusts to changes in the hardware. AFAIK, mobile phones are not built that way as of today and requires some configuration in the software based on which hardware features are present and which are not (please correct me if I am wrong). Making the software easily adaptable will be a major feature.

The other interesting part is to build a factory that facilitates this. It is very hard to build a supply-chain system for such a factory.

The good part is that the technology could be built on top of OpenMoko - after all, this is the kind of ideas that FIC (the sponsors of the OpenMoko project) had in mind in creating a mostly-open-hardware and open-source-software mobile computing project.

Personalization is one of the buzzwords that is supposed to make the big moolah for companies these days, and allowing people to customize a device that they carry around all day definitely has potential.

End credits: This idea was part of a random discussion between Ramjee and myself.

On a different tangent, there are lots of ideas waiting to happen in the software. For example, it’s not only Apple that can do an App Store for their phone, this can be done for this platform too. Of course, we’ll have to start off a holy war of choosing that one linux distro…

Perhaps similar ideas can be done on top of the Asus EEE PC as well?