One of the grass-root thinkers of the Modern World is Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad better known as C. K. Prahalad.He left us on his heavenly journey on April 16 2010. The world lost one of its brightest brains. He gave us a gem in the form of a book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

One thing that this universally proved is that poor or the less privileged is not a burden to the developed nations or to the UN but rather an untapped market. The approach to this market is pay as you go.

A recent research by McKinsey & Company suggest that "Fully 2.5 billion of the world’s adults don’t use formal banks or semiformal microfinance institutions to save or borrow money, our research finds".

But it would be great if on this unbanked population geographic map we overlay the Micro-finance growth market.I am sure the maximum growth in Microfinance will come from areas that have the maximum density of unbanked population. The success of Micro-finance is a great academic and economic case study which re-emphasize the fact that the underprivileged is the largest economically untapped segment.
market.

Now something from the technology and services world. The theme of 2010 is Cloud Computing. Research estimates put that by 2010 approximately 2/3 of IT infrastructure services will move into in this virtual world.

But what this clutter is missing is that the quickest and biggest market for cloud in this recessionary market is the Start-up community. In this trying times when VC's are very selective in seed funding. Cloud computing will be the biggest compliment to Start-ups.

As the initial capital commitment is less the Start-up can use this Pay as you go services more effectively.The opportunity is for all large IT infrastructure companies, VC's, and vendors who shy away from start-ups. If the delivery model can be tuned as systematic investment plan keeping the operations cost low, the profit from catering to start-ups will be massive.But as in Micro-financing one has to due some basic credit assessment of the borrower so also in SAAS services one has to do the basic credit check. The idea is to sell less in quantity and more in volume.


The analogy is that Start-ups are at the bottom of the pyramid when it comes to financial attractiveness of services sector, where as a SAAS model of hand-holding will be a massive boost to the community.

What is common in SAAS, Microfinance and CK Prahald is that they showed us the road to success need not be always in selling to the high and mighty.

The road ahead for companies will be to adopt and accept the fact that to be successful they cannot ignore the underprivileged in our case the start-ups.

CK gave us an idea that has just scratched the surface of new ideas and we have miles to go...

What's the difference between Absolute and relative ? Most of us will say, its very easy to explain with some example. Let say as on 21.02.2010 my height is 175cms that's an absolute statement. My brother is 180 cms. I am shorter than him by 5cms that's a relative statement. So the summary is, an absolute statement is actually a fact and relative statement is a comparison .

But hold on. My height on 21.02.1987 was 90cms. Which is a fact, so this absolute. Now there cannot be two absolute statement i,e my height is 90 cms and 185 cms . But they are facts, but they are dependent on another variable in this case time. So every absolute fact is actually a relative fact when it comes to time.

Lets extend this fact. Sun is at the centre of the universe this is an absolute statement. But just go back 500 years and most of the world believed in the opposite fact that earth is at the centre of the universe, until Nicolaus Copernicus showed us light. So when we compare the fact of 2010 with a fact of 1450, the earlier fact is correct relatively.
So the summary is a thing is absolute only when we compare it to another parameter.

Just observe things around you and you will start thinking all absolute things are relative in the long run.

The perfect world. Its amazing when we wait to do things that you want to do , but the elements are not perfect to do. Lets say I want to go to cinema ,but since we don't have the right group or friends circle who love the same genre of cinema , I will most likely avoid going to that movie.

So we wait for the perfect world when we want to do things , when every thing is as per my expectations. Unfortunately we will get such rare scenarios where every element will fit to your expectations. If we summarize it will be called a Lucky world.

We all know luck is a rare phenomenon. So if you want to enjoy the moment go and have it rather than wait for the that perfect world.

My personal experience, you will have a more perfect moment or lucky moment if you do that act rather wait for things to be perfect.

Water Scarcity


When I was a kid , I learnt that Air, water, food are three basic things to survive. I grew up, the fact remain same, only that all the three are getting short in supply for people like me.

I picked up water because Air and food scarcity are two extremes for me to comprehend. Any ways coming to water scarcity , a lot of people are still under the impression that 71% of the earth water bodies. No only 3% of of that's 71% is suitable for human drinking. So if we have 100L water bodies for 100 people only 2.13L is suitable to drink rest is ocean water.

Anyway to learn more about the scarcity read this World Health Organization (WHO) presentation
.

Facts:
We are quickly exhausting fresh water bodies, as population is increasing rapidly or demand for water is increasing and supply is choking
Abuse of water in developing country is mind-boggling, soleley because of awareness

Solution:
The general public needs to made aware , why , how and where we should conserve water.

E,g
Cost-effective recycling of water
Rainwater harvesting

Use twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, to spread awareness about creating drinking and saving drinking water.
Pool your ideas, link with people, synergies communities working with people.

Do you see anything common in communism and open source technology?

Is the technology front also getting divided into capitalist and communist? I am market driven guy. But when it comes to technology I think open source has some of the ethos of communism. Unlike the political success of communism, open source is strongly challenging the paid software market. Why ?

I think the answer lies in the concept that technology evolution is driven by creative introspection . And open source acts as springboard to all the major creative techie brains to unleash there outputs.

How the end-user adapts this tussle will be an interesting trend to track?

Will cloud computing be supporting open source?

Which products require placement?

Which products require placement?

I saw the 3 Idiots movie for the second time and this time internalise some things from marketing product perspective.

I am not writing this to share any Gyan, but with questions for which I am seeking answers. I will refer to two very short scenes from 3 Idiots and leave them with two open ended questions.

Scene 1:Aamir and Madhavan breaks into Boman Irani’s office to steal question paper.If you observe the scene when Aamir puts the question paper back in the envelope, he applies gum on the seal to close it. The gum bottle was turned around, to not display which brand it was but by seeing the typical blue bottle with black cap, you recognize it as the Camlin Gun bottle that you may have used n number of times. Now the question is why did even without seeing the name on the bottle, I can identify the brand with the blue bottle?

I made some observations:
•There is no such brand as the blue bottled Camlin gum that has created such strong brand recall.
•Its been able to do this brand recall simple by being an unchallenged product for a long time
•But will it hold on to its market share since , non-sticky adhesive rollers are fast capturing the glue market


Scene 2: When Mona Singh (Kareena Kapoor’s sister) is helped by Aamir and friends to deliver a child using suction cap on a TT Table

If you observe Kareena, show an animated video demonstration of how to deliver a baby using a suction cap. Now the video is shown as a video on YouTube.

Mind you YouTube is not product placement but is acknowledged as a Media Alliance. To make this scene logical YouTube was the ideal platform to extract this demo.

In all likelihood the production team of 3 idiots must have approached YouTube , to use the latter as an ideal platform to extract the delivery demo video as that will make the scene more authentic. My search in YouTube using key words like Suction cap enabled delivery didn’t fetch that video.

Now the question is here is a brand that was needed by movie to make it look its scene authentic. Don’t’ you think this is exceptional? As normally product run after movie banner to make there product placed e.g. Airtel, Reliance BIGTV etc did in the movie.

My observation is that utility of a product in this case YouTube makes the brand indispensable.