Thomas Friedman on Dell’s Role in Political Stability

Maybe I tend to refer or promote this book too often but it is true that Thomas Friedman raised some very relevant points in The World is Flat, albeit somewhat obvious to those looking.

He has a great chapter where he describes his thesis of how he thinks a country’s political stabilization is becoming linked with the presence of the country in the global playing field, using Dell as a reference.

I thought it was relevant to write this here because a lot of people in their living rooms complain about how businesses in Pakistan suffer the onslaught of political unrest.

— JUMP

Friedman’s theory, paraphrased, says

‘any country who is part of a significant global supply chain will never see wars and other political unrest — the cost of war for them is to lose $MB in money flowing through them’.

He quotes the example of escalating relations between India and Pakistan a few years ago, where the IT industry in India lobbied to the govt to de-escalate the environment. India, because of being part of the global BPO services supply chain, cannot afford political unrest.

So what does this mean for Pakistan? Well it is good to know that the New Economy is such that businesses can infact determine a role in the political stability of a country.

Our job-shops, factories and materials people need to jointly explore creative ways of becoming atleast one stop in some company’s global supply work — maybe we are materials suppliers, part-makers, manufacturing advisors, what have you.

We need to start taking IP infringement very seriously — infringing on global patents confines the business to remain within the country, it being illegal being the other bad thing ofcourse.

This is actually easier than one might think, and I might discuss some short-term entreprenurial ideas for getting there at some time.

In the idealistic, utopian, long-term: local IC manufacturers feed into local part manufacturers into local product designers all involved with international contracts.

IPTV on Broadband in India

GigaOM is one of the mainstream blogs that is covering India in full. What I like about the author of the india section is that it is (finally?) a realistic down-to-earth perspective of things in India, without all the marketing and hype bubble around it.

A recent article is interesting. More interesting are the comments. They make me all that much happier with my MBL connection.

http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/08/29/india-iptv/

Btw, a recent moment of Xen with MBL technical support: Called them at 2am because my home router wasn’t working. Got a cheerful person that helped me through all different possible issues.

When we finally hit on the  solution I thanked him and he says in english ”No problem sir, remember we’re always here to help you”.

That is the first time I’ve heard that sentence from tech support in PK, so naturally I stumbled a few times before saying “come again?”

Usually it’s more like (I’ve heard this literally) “Look - my job here is to facilitate you… and I’ve done that because you were able to call me easily, so I won’t do anything else.”

Yes, step back a minute and read that again. Its a mind-twister. 

MBL should awarded a “person getting it right” award for their support.

Red Herring Magazine Top 100 Asian Companies

I just read Red Herring’s Top-100 Asian Companies list for this year. No Trangos on this one.

In order of the country with the most number of companies that made it to this list:

1- China (33 companies)

2- India (24 companies)

3- S. Korea (20 companies)

4- Singapore

5- Others (i.e. Sri Lanka, Australia, Thailand, etc.)

Not one country from Pakistan — but is it possible that they just consider Pakistan to be a part of the EMEA bracket? (Intel and some other websites do put Pakistan’s region along with Africa and middle-east)

Another notable thing: Indian startup capitals easily surpassing $5M+. That is exected since I have read of more than 4 VC funds established specifically for India, each fund valued at $200M+.

Cybernet thinks Bandwagon?

Cybernet recently awarded a $25MM contract to Juniper Networks to upgrade its core IP network to support MPLS switching.

MPLS networks are almost common now in Pakistan — telcos would use them to offer tiers of quality of service on their networks for different consumer packages (e.g. ‘voice quality network for VoIP’; ‘Internet best-effort quality network’ etc.). Most LDI operators have them.

MPLS lets Cybernet decide how to prioritize different types of traffic on its network. Cybernet is one of the companies I would not have expected to think about MPLS or NGN networks, and I find this odd.

Unless they have a fixed-telephony license from PTA, they cannot  offer VoIP to consumers like WorldCall is doing on its cable network, and Micronet is doing under the Nayatel FTTH project in Islamabad, and — err — what Wateen is doing with FTTx in DHA Lahore, and …well… Brain is offering in Lahore. Not to mention the actual telcos ofcourse.

I like to think people don’t jump on bandwagons. So if it is not VoIP, the best (consumer-based) reason that I can figure for this investment (without delving into NDA territory) is perhaps Cybernet wants to go the anti-net-neutrality route. That means two things:

• Cybernet guarantees better QoS for corporate customers who host their applications on Cybernet data-centers. Thus, if you are a big company that can afford it, you can easily squash your smaller competitors because of guaranteed delivery of packets.
• Cybernet offers tiered services for different types of internet usage for customers. So if you’re a gaming-heavy person, or person who loves Torrents, you get to pay more.

OR maybe all of this is just meant to offer ‘better internet’ for Corporate Customers.

Can anyone shed more light on this?

ATO and factory load Part2

We discussed ATO basics a few days ago.

In order to implement ATO, you will naturally go to your factories and ask them to move away from requiring bulk orders up-front, and move towards a long-standing agreement to assemble products according to your customers’ orders.

The biggest concern you will hear from the factories is that of load. “What if you give us 15 orders one week, and 5 the other. What happens then?”

The concern is a very valid one, and infact will be core to any solution. Any solution will be bounded most by the load on the factory, and end-customer price point, among other things.

MS Sharepoint -VS- value — who wins?

Recently, we had to deploy a collaboration / groupware solution internally, and we decided to take a special route.

We took some extra time to study what ‘value’ from a groupware / collaboration solution meant for us — we said “What are basic things we want the groupware solution to do for us? How will we use it to do what we want to do?”

“What tool is actually going to be beneficial for the business, rather than making it slower because the tool is so complex”

After studying a number of commercial collaboration suites such as Microsoft Sharepoint Portal, as well as open-source alternatives such as eGroupWare, we decided to configure a solution ourselves using specific off-the-shelf components.

I have been pleasantly surprised. Read on for the results of our internal solution against what I’ve seen with typical Sharepoint deployments.

My Ideal Employee Series Part 1: Humble Self-Awareness

You are only as good as the team you work with, so I make it a point to surround myself with people better than me. In this series, I will post the qualities I look for in people who wish to work with me.

The first important quality is that the person should know him or herself. It is important to know why.

Specifically, the person should know clearly where the company can rely on him/her to deliver with confidence. The person should have a natural interest to expand his/her own insight of that area, which is seen as passion.

The area does not need to be related to the job either — you could just as well be passionate about unrelated but complementary areas, e.g. a software engineer passionate about process design. Having atleast one passion, however, is essential.

This self-awareness should also be candid, and the person should also know clearly and frankly where he/she would like to learn from others in the company, or the areas where he/she would need help and guidance.

Working relationships begin with a good understanding of one another, and is marked with a frank agreement on whether the expectations suit each other.

There will be passionate people who want guidance in certain areas where I may think that the guidance required will become a distraction for the team downstream. Being able to discuss that honestly however, is a virtue that we should both appreciate. The other person would just be a better fit in other teams.

People who have yet to find their passions tend to see work either as a means to a living, or as a means to explore different areas to decide where to specialize. I have seen that such people always stop their own selves from growing rapidly and from finding their place within a team.

On the other extreme, I have seen people who have brought so much bloated ego to work they have actually refused to work out of principle.

A great idea for Mapping and Navigation Services

One of the basic buildign blocks of an internet based consumer business boom is a good mapping infrastructure. All of our logistics within the country would be super-simple if we had a computerized satellite map to perform route planning on. Many consumer services also build directly on top of mapping.

It depends on the availability of detailed satellite imagery of the country. If we have that, the image processing and GIS on top of it is intuitive. A tiny look at what we have in Pakistan:

In short, the satellite images released to the public in Pakistan are 3-meter accurate (i.e. 1 pixel on screen = 3 meters on the ground), and this is what you see if you look at, say Islamabad in Google Earth. PRDS has built a GIS overlay on this resolution, and this is used by Trakker to provide GSM tracking services for your car, and is also used by a number of logistics companies for fleet management.

But you need a 1-meter resolution in order to get good navigation for consumers — these maps are available at the Survey of Pakistan, but have not yet been released to the public.

Well, good news. You dont need them maps to create a good consumer navigation solution.

Check out this company eDuShi (Chinese for ‘eCity’). They are busy creating accurate close-up 3D models for all popular cities in China, offering navigation services on it.

What’s even better, they show ‘billboard ads’ in those city models exactly where real-life billboards exist, and are using that revenue from ad sales to make the service free for consumers. Brilliant!

The company is two years old, with 180 employees now, and has had $500,000 in funding.

This is the solution that would be great now and today for Pakistan, and I dont see why a 3rd or 4th year college student cannot afford the time to build atleast Lahore and Islamabad. He can then spend the next decade building up Karachi.

Any entreprenuer-in-planning up for it? Anyone?

ATO and factory load Part1

Lean manufacturing essentially started as a means to react to changes in demand in a way that would not result in losses to you and to your suppliers. In one sense, you do this by moving the ‘inventory holding centers’ upstream — i.e. instead of you holding inventories for finished goods, your suppliers, or their suppliers, or theirs, might keep inventory. The rest of the chain just works in a real-time manner to incoming demand.

Parts suppliers — holding stocks of, says, buttons, would be able to assume the risk of holding stocks because they can always sell buttons to someone else if demand for your product changes.

Assemble-to-Order (as opposed to build-to-stock) is one manufacturing process that relies on an agile supply-chain to be successful. ATO can be used to achieve zero-inventory, but most prominently it will help you minimize your working inventories.

After the link I very briefly introduce the benefits of ATO. Without going into theory of how to align your supply chain for ATO manufacturing. I was to start analysing this within the context of Pakistan. 

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