Jeetu's shared memory

There are total 6 metro cities in India. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The population in these cities has already saturated and most of these cities are crumbling under their own weight. Their perennial problems are crumbling infrastructure, population (most of it migrants) and lack of skilled resources. All these problems have led to the hunt for 7th Indian metro. ASSOCHAM has analyzed four tier 2 cities to come up with the 7th emerging metro city in India. Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune and Lucknow are the 4 cities looked at.

What makes a metro a metro? These are 8 parameters on which a city is rated as metro.

1. Business environment
2. Infrastructure availability
3. Real estate cost & availability
4. Educational institutes
5. Employment opportunity
6. Social infrastructure
7. Financial services
8. Transportation facility

Of the four cities which were analyzed Pune ranked first for the first five parameters and came up 3rd for the last three parameters. Its overall standing is number 1. Ahmedabad came close 2nd to Pune to being a possible 8th metro. Of the 4 cities Pune has 26 malls and multiplexes, 25 star category hotels,100 (approx) public and private educational institutes.

Pune also has a 80.73 % literacy rate and skilled population. Lucknow  has scored high on the connectivity and transportation facility. Pune came 3rd because of its geography (lack of railway junction). Pune has 3 national highways and an international airport which placed it above Chandigarh.

The one parameter missing in classifying a metro is the political climate. For a city to be truly a metro, it has to attract different cultures, foreign investment  and people from all parts of the country. For these things to happen the political climate in the city or the state is very important. It is true that political climate is cyclical. But if we take the current scenario in Maharastra (Mumbai) the climate is not very conducive for business in general. Ahmedabad and Gujarat has its share of woes. The two cities which stayed away from any political controversies by large are Chandigarh and Lucknow. If we introduce the political climate parameter the ranking would be different. But I still think Pune would come out first as it has taken care of the first 5 parameters. I just hope ASSOCHAM never have to include the political climate as a parameter in their future study’s.

Possibly related posts:

• Traveling in India : The positive side of the story.
• China to overtake Indian IT Industry by 2011: Are you kidding ?
• Bangalore: Best city to do business in the wired world…Really?

Comments

• October 31, 2008, Strong Resume Blog writes: [...] Pune all set to become the 7th Indian metro city [...]
• October 31, 2008, kamal writes: Rightly said Mr. Author.

  Political climate is very important as far as Indian cities are concerned. Because goverment has done little to insulate the very growth environment and policies from domestically opportunistic and internationally idealistic ( Ultimately Cheap mix) politics.

• November 1, 2008, Arun Prabhudesai writes: It will be nice to say “I live in a Metro now”
• November 1, 2008, Hottest Indian Startups review : Trackcut – Social networking meets mobile writes: [...] modes of tracking your location and provide information based on that. Let us say you travel from Pune to Chennai, and you have trackcut’s mobile application installed on your phone. The moment [...]
• November 3, 2008, j sarkar writes: Maharashtra govt. should issue notification, at the earliest, to make Pune formally a metro city. proud to be puneite.

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.

AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. The only big holdout appears to be Facebook, which has its own competing Facebook Connect program. But even Facebook might eventually join the OpenID fold. (Its partners seem slightly less than enthusiastic about deploying Facebook Connect).

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Playfish, a social gaming company that has four of the top ten games on Facebook, has raised $17 million in funding.

The deal shows that the intersection of games and social networking remains a hot sector in spite of the weakening economy.

Playfish came out of nowhere to become a leader in one of the hottest categories of the video game industry. It was founded in October, 2007, and launched its first game in December, 2007.

To date, more than 25 million people have played the company’s five games, the company reports. The company says it has more than 10 million active monthly users.

Will it last? The company’s investors clearly think so. The new round was co-led by Accel Partners and Index Ventures. Playfish has now raised $21 million.

Its record compares favorably to the two leaders in Facebook games: Zynga, which raised $25 million, and Social Gaming Network, which raised $15 million. Zynga has two games in the top ten on Facebook, while SGN doesn’t have any. Interestingly, traditional game companies such as Electronic Arts or Activision don’t have any games in Facebook’s top 25.

The  company was started by Kristian Segerstrale, chief executive of Playfish, who previously ran a mobile games company, Macrospace, for six years. (It merged with Sorrent and became Glu Mobile). Segerstrale says that the brands owned by the big companies don’t matter as much on sites such as Facebook, where playing with your friends and trusting their recommendations for games matters the most.

“We think there is a tectonic shift away from games as a product to games as a service,” Segerstrale said.

London-based Playfish has launched both an in-game advertising platform using the AdSense for Games solution from Google, and it has launched a virtual goods transaction business as well. But Segerstrale said in an interview that it’s too early to predict when the company will become profitable. The company has created game development studios in Norway, Beijing and London, as well as a sales office in San Francisco.

Kevin Commoli, a partner at Accel in London, said that his company believes the game sector is still hot in spite of the economic turmoil.

“This is a part of the entertainment world where people are spending more and  more of their time,” Commoli said. “I don’t think the social gaming sector is going to suffer at all. I don’t view this category of social games for the mass market as a fad.”

He said that Playfish was an attractive investment because it owned its own game properties and its own game development studios.

Segerstrale said games on Facebook and other social networks are a return to the roots of games, when people enjoyed sharing fun experiences with friends via playing cards, board games or bowling nights. The company’s games, such as “Who has the biggest brain?“  have become popular through viral sharing, Segerstrale said. The game was the company’s first, debuting on Dec. 18, 2007. It offers brain-training puzzle games in logic, calculation, memory and visual processing. In the last three months, the play time for the company’s games has gone up from 1 billion monthly minutes to two billion.

A couple of weeks ago, Playfish debuted its first game, Bowling Buddies, on MySpace. Segerstrale said the company would use its money to expand its reach to new platforms, develop more titles, and expand its studios.

It’s a good start for Playfish. But it will likely take a lot more hits before the company becomes profitable and before its revenues become a source of concern for the traditional game industry.

CANBERRA (Reuters Life!) – The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

Wishing everyone a joyous, prosperous Deepavali!

Good opportunity to setup greetings for all your friends on Zook.

1. Find a good SMS Forward

2. See the details page

3. Click to set a greeting for a friend – we’ll deliver it for you.

In good times everyone wants to be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google’s Open Social, and Flock closing its extension site – these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don’t have monetization wired in are only good for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization.

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Last week Flock’s community manager Evan Hamilton emailed all developers who had submitted extensions to Flock to announce that Flock will no longer support most of the extensions hosted on extensions.flock.com.

The justification was that Mozilla was doing a better job hosting and promoting the add-ons, and the majority were the same for Flock and Firefox. Since Flock does not have enough resources to support the extension site, Evan announced the decision to “cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system”. (Note the keyword ‘fat’, it will be important in the rest of the post).

In itself this move was not surprising. Flock’s team has just released version 2.0 of its social browser and has other battles to fight. IE8 is coming out soon with innovative features. Mozilla is racing forward with Ubiquity and the upcoming Geo-aware Firefox 3.1. And Google threw its hat into the browser ring with Chrome, so competition is getting tight. For Flock to be a player in the browser market, it needs a razor focus on building a base of diehard fans. Extensions are not helping much in that respect, they’re an expense, so it was logical to cut them.

Facebook Platform – The Big Up and The Big Let Down

When the Facebook platform was unveiled in 2007, it was called genius. Never before had a company in a single stroke enabled others to tap into millions of its users completely free. The platform was hailed as a game changer under the famous mantra “we built it and they will come”. And they did come, hundreds of companies rushing to write Facebook applications. Companies and VC funds focused specifically on Facebook apps.

It really did look like a revolution, but it didn’t last. The first reason was that Facebook apps quickly arranged themselves on a power law curve. A handful of apps (think Vampires, Byte Me and Sell My Friends) landed millions of users, but those in the pack had hardly any. The second problem was, ironically, the bloat. Users polluted their profiles with Facebook apps and no one could find anything in their profiles. Facebook used to be simple – pictures, wall, friends. Now each profile features a zoo of heterogenous apps, each one trying to grab the user’s attention to take advantage of the network effect. Users are confused.

Worst of all, the platform had no infrastructure to monetize the applications. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived on the scene and looked at the balance sheet, she spotted the hefty expense that was the Facebook platform. Trying to live up to a huge valuation isn’t easy, and in the absense of big revenues people rush to cut costs. Since it was both an expense and users were confused less than a year after its glorious launch, Facebook decided to revamp its platform.

The latest release of Facebook, which was released in July, makes it nearly impossible for new applications to take advantage of the network effect. Now users must first install the application, then find it under the application menu or one of the tabs, then check a bunch of boxes to add it to their profile (old applications are grand-daddied in). Facebook has sent a clear message to developers – the platform is no longer a priority.

Google’s OpenSocial and The Me Too Syndrome

Apparently Google was threatened by the Facebook platform. Its quick response was OpenSocial, the open platform for social applications. Unlike Facebook, which was proprietary and closed, Google’s was open to everyone. When OpenSocial was announced, techies raised their eyebrows – it looked raw and unpolished. Some of the existing iGoogle container APIs were mixed in with a new contact sharing library. But, being Google, a lot of people signed up to support it.

Fast forward one year later and how much has been done? Well some companies did implement some elements, but the overall buzz died. Why wouldn’t Google put more resources and marketing behind it? Because now it doesn’t matter. The Facebook platform play is over and so the marketing strategy called Opensocial is not a top priority for the search giant anymore.

Why Apple’s App Store Will Be Different

Next we turn to the latest platform getting buzz, Apple’s iPhone App Store. At first glance it’s much like Facebook, but in reality it isn’t. Firstly, the user profiles aren’t visible – you can’t see applications installed on your iPhone. Each user can decide which apps to get, based on a simple review-based dashboard. There’s no promise of a massive network effect, although there’s a simpler user experience.

Importantly, Apple wired the monetization into the App Store right from the start. Sure there are free applications, but for companies that want to invest resources and play on the iPhone for a long time, there is an instant, simple opportunity to monetize. Note that paid applications get priority listing in the App Store, which is no accident.

Apple took care of the most important part of the equation – the transaction. It was also able to insert itself in the middle and recoup some costs associated with building the App Store. In the future, if it takes off and sustains the growth, App Store will ring in significant revenue for Apple. Jobs and his team were smart to wire monetization into the platform at the outsert.

The Future of Platforms

Where does all this leave us? Certainly it’s absurd to say that having Web platforms is a bad idea. Yet we’re left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization. Here are some questions that companies need to ask themselves before delivering a platform:

• Why are we building a platform?
• How will we monetize this platform?
• Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
• How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
• Can we support the platform for years to come?

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook’s momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

Let us know what you think about the opportunities to plug into major platforms? What are your thoughts on the recent platform dynamics that we have witnessed?

Discuss

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Yahoo Chief Scientist Jan Pedersen recently wrote a short position paper, “Making Sense of Search Result Pages” (PDF), that has some interesting tidbits in it. Specifically, it advocates for click-based methods for evaluating search result quality and mentions using toolbar data to see what people are doing after leaving the search result page.

Some extended excerpts:

Search engine result pages are presented hundreds of millions of times a day, yet it is not well understood what makes a particular page better from a consumer’s perspective. For example, search engines spend large amounts of capital to make search-page loading latencies low, but how fast is fast enough or why fast is better is largely a subject of anecdote.

Much of the contradiction comes from imposing a optimization criterion … such as discounted cumulative gain (DCG) … that does not account for perceptual phenomena. Users rapidly scan search result pages … and presentations optimized for easy consumption and efficient scanning will be perceived as more relevant.

The process Yahoo! search uses to design, validate, and optimize a new search feature includes … an online test of the feature … [using] proxy measures for the desired behaviors that can be measured in the user feedback logs.

Search engine query logs only reflect a small slice of user behavior — actions taken on the search results page. A more complete picture would include the entire click stream; search result page clicks as well as offsite follow-on actions.

This sort of data is available from a subset of toolbar users — those that opt into having their click stream tracked. Yahoo! has just begun to collect this sort of data, although competing search engines have collected it for some time.

We expect to derive much better indicators of user satisfaction by consider the actions post click. For example, if the user exits the clicked-through page rapidly then one can infer that the information need was not satisfied by that page.

For more on how search engines may be using toolbar data, please see my previous post, “Google Toolbar data and the actual surfer model“.

For more on using click-based methods to evaluate search results, please see a post by Googler Ben Gomes, “Search experiments, large and small” as well as my previous posts, “Actively learning to rank” and “The perils of tweaking Google by hand“.

By the way, rumor has it that Jan Pedersen left Yahoo and is now at A9. Surprising if true.

Update: Rumor confirmed. Jan Pedersen is now at A9.

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