Subscribers are Over-rated

All these years, I have heard a lot about how India is an awesome destination place for mobile application/product vendors because of the huge subscription base. The 50 million, 80 million subscriber base per service provider makes all vendors lick their lips thinking that if they can even take a 10-20% of that pie, they would make it big.In fact I have had the chance to review quite a few business plans which goes on the above surmise.

I have always been convinced, subscriber base means nothing in India. And the reason for that is because even though there are so many existing consumers and likelihood for even more in the future years, the problem is that the revenue per consumer is so less that even huge volumes do not mean a whole lot of profits. And I have been harping about this for a long time. Service providers DON'T pay upfront and the model widely used is managed services/revenue sharing, which means the cut that goes to each of the vendors involved in the overall solution is so less that sometimes it is even negligible.

This is the reason why you don't see a whole lot of Telecom product companies in India enroute to success. Yes there are the Jatayu Networks/Saskens of the world, but they are more the exception than the norm and I am making an educated guess that they survived because of their international orders and not because of local sales.

Today, Sunil Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Airtel has issued an interview where he says
the Indian Telecom sector has reached a stage where prices could not decline further and would only firm up in the future. I am one of the better users of Airtel ( I pay a huge monthly fee, make international calls, roam around a bit), yet my bill is still close to 40-50$. So think of the millions that have a cell-phone only for incoming calls (incoming calls are free in India) and pay a very nominal monthly fee. Bottom-line is when analysts take about the subscriber base in India, they would need to consider two kinds of bases. The one which gives a decent ARPU (Average revenue per user) and one which is dismal. That would give a more truthful picture.

At the same time,the only people who will benefit because of the huge volumes are those companies that are looking to load-test and benchmark their products.Nothing is as good as testing your product in live scenarios and if yours has withstood 80 million subscribers, it HAS to be good. India, sadly, as of today is more a testing ground than a viable market.

I believe the subscription rates are going to rise and that is good for the Telecom vendors/service providers. Not so good if you are merely a consumer.

Nortel's take on Cisco-Microsoft Partnership

Tehrani has posted Nortel’s Tony Rybczynski reaction on Microsoft-Cisco partnership. What it tells me is that Nortel is not concerned too much about the new found love between Cisco and Microsoft.

It stems from the fact that Steve Ballmer made it very clear that they were on the same page with Nortel and were natural partners. Must have something to do with talks about Microsoft making a bid at Nortel. I predict it's not going to be too long till we see a formal bid by Microsoft to buy Nortel!!!

Third Party Voice Control

There are enough mechanisms and more ( like JTAPI, TAPI) etc which allow you to write applications that can do third party call control. My question is, are there mechanisms to do third party voice control?

Let's say that there are two ip phones which are controlled by your centralized IP PBX. Now I can write applications that can do a makecall(), answercall() etc on these two phones. But media will be to/from these phones. What I want to do is makecall() from one phone, but have the media terminated somewhere else.

I don't want to connect and then do a transfer, that would be a round-about way. But having said that, if there are no other ways to do it, then this would be the way to take. Let's come to the scenario where this would be useful ( would this be the next killer app?)

Let's say I have a dual-mode mobile phone with wifi and let's say that termination to a TDM line ( mobile/landline) is cheaper or has better quality through the GSM network. Or it could be as simple as I have way too much free minutes available during the weekend. Now, it is obvious I would be carrying the phone all the time. What if my wife is sitting somewhere else and wants to call somebody through my mobile GSM connection? Assuming she is connected on the Net, she should be able to reach the wifi enabled side of my phone and should be able to make a call out through the GSM world. But the media coming in should go to the softphone she has in her desktop/laptop rather than to the mobile I have.

The media will take the following route. Laptop->wifi side of mobile->GSM network->end user and vice-versa. This is more like a three party conferencing, only thing me sitting in the middle am not doing it, rather the third party is doing it. This would be the reason why I am looking for ways to do third party Voice control.

You don't need things like Skypeout minutes and you don't have to be with the phone to make/receive calls. Say, I forgot to carry my phone. No worries, all I need is an internet connection and I can still use my phone. Something like a pc-anywhere on my mobile phone, only simpler and easier.

Cisco Microsoft Collaboration

I was talking with one of the thought leaders/industry observer in the Unified Communication space and he came up with an interesting theory as to what areas Cisco and Microsoft can collaborate.

As you might already know, last week Steve Balmer and John Chambers decided to set aside differences, as they call it, "for the better good" ( Read "destroy Asterisk") and work more closely so that they can offer meaningful solutions to the end customer. Based on the discussion I had with the gentleman mentioned above, it became pretty evident that Speech recognition is one such area where they most probably would work together.

Microsoft had a pretty vibrant Speech Recognition development team until one of the senior guys Kai-Fu Lee defected to the other side (Google). People who had been following that story would know of the legal battle that took place between Google and Microsoft when Lee left Microsoft. What is not commonly known though is that Lee was the chief evangelist of the Speech Recognition practice in Microsoft and most of the innovations in MS-Speech was his brain-children.So Microsoft kind of lost steam when he quit. They were already way behind market leader Nuance and this did not help their case. But it looks like they have started to become an active force in this domain. From what I hear, some releases are on the way.

Now about Cisco. Cisco has been way behind in the contact center business and even way behind when it comes to self service technologies ( IVR). Their product suite that includes IP IVR and CVP largely depend on Nuance for the speech recognition platform and licenses. So let's say a customer wants Cisco CVP with speech recognition. He ends up paying a lot for Nuance licenses and since there is nobody really to challenge Nuance's position, they have been having a free ride so far.

This is where Cisco and Microsoft could get together. Cisco, like a lot of other Microsoft products, could OEM MS speech and include it as part of its platform. What MS speech lacks today is credibility/customer base and if Cisco can OEM it, it would be a good start for Microsoft. It would help Cisco because the cost to the customer is less and a better value proposition. If Steve and John are going to put their money where their money is, Speech technology would be a good place to start!!!

Most Companies Don't Understand Call Center Business.

It has become the norm these days that if you are a player in the IP communication space, you think it is just a natural progression to cater to the Call Center needs. And looks like Skype is no exception. Let me get this out on the onset. IP Telephony is NOT the same as IP Contact Center. If you have agents on IP phones (be it Skype/Cisco phones) it does NOT mean you have a contact center solution on IP.

I don't blame companies that think "Hey, I have a softphone that can do voice/chat. I think I have a call center solution". Why, because I used to think that too in my previous assignments. Now that I am with a predominantly focussed Call Center solutions provider I understand that there is a vast difference between me making a VoIP call and an agent doing the same.

This is how the progression should be. Companies that have vast expertise in Call Center technolgies ( be it the traditional TDM ACDs/IVRs) must lead the way and adopt IP as their underlying platform not the other way around, where IP companies start providing contact center solutions. The problem with the latter is that, they are just "emulating" the older solutions and as far as I can see there is no real innovation.

Yes, Presence based ACD ( i.e an agent transfers the call to the subject matter expert based on the expert's availability) is something only an IP solution can offer and I am sure this was based on the presence model that IMs used to offer, but still these applications are the exceptions rather than the norms. For example lets take Cisco's ICM ( Cisco's ACD). What does it do that an Avaya AES or AIC does not do from a feature set point of view? Answer is nothing. So where is the innovation?

Now coming to what triggered me to write this post. In the news-item mentioned above, Skype is offering live-chat to customers. OK, so what is so great about that? Who does not give that? What is so "intelligent' about that? The customer gets to speak to the subject matter expert. Again, so what? It also says that Skype will provide configurations to switch between Audio/Chat windows. That shows how primitive the thinking is. Have Skype's people ever gone into a Call Center and had a chat with the floor managers? The first thing they want is an unified screen. Any novice will tell you that. What are the integration touch points that Skype provides? Do they have connectors to MS CRM, Siebel CRM? Or are they going to provide even more "configurations" to switch between three windows!!!!

Enterprise Telephony will soon merge into Contact Center Telephony. I envision that happening in the future. But not today and the people who would need to drive it are the experts and not the novices.

Buzzworks & SearchtoPhone : Same Apps in two different parts of the world

I know what Buzzworks are trying to do, since they demoed their product in Proto.in. I have been intending to write more on their product but never got around to it. Today GigaOm has a piece on a company called SearchtoPhone and once I read what they are upto, I thought it was time I wrote about Buzzworks.

Basically, this is Buzzwork's premise. You want to reach one of your neighbourhood services but you don't know whom to call. So you call up a number and do a voice search ( through open source speech recognition) and the centralized software searches for the most likely candidate and calls them up for you and you get to talk to the guy whose service you want to use. But from what I see, SearchtoPhone is more or less similar except for one bit that the author neatly summarizes

Using voice recognition and knowledge of your location, Search-To-Phone determines merchants or service providers who might be able to help. These businesses receive calls from Search-To-Phone and listen to your recorded job request, decide if they want to talk to you further, and place a call to you via Search-To-Phone. Your phone number remains private.

Interesting to see two companies in entirely different parts of the world coming up with similar ideas at the same time. Had they been big companies, this is when the litigation would start :) Of the two, SearchtoPhone has a slighter edge because the caller maintains his privacy. Having said that, it shouldn't be too long for Buzzworks to incorporate this feature as well.

I don't know about what powers SearchToPhone's software. But in case of Buzzworks it is open source all the way ( Asterisk, openSER and oopen source Voice recognition software). So I am going to take an educated guess that Buzzworks would be the cheaper solution.

The problems I see either of them facing is that they have to work with the service providers and that requires lot of time and patience. On the technology front, I am not a big fan of Voice recognition software ( yes, that includes leader Nuance as well) and the accuracy is not something I would bet my life on. Buzzworks would have more problems because they are powered by open source ( not sure how stable that would be) and secondly, the dialects/languages in India are so much and I would be surprised if accuracy is more than 20%.

Two companies that I surely will be following for the next few months.

Irony : India fights China using the Chinese Model

Rumours have been flying around on this for sometime now but has just been made official. DoT ( The Department of Telecom) is planning to setup a Testing and Certification wing which will monitor security compliances to which all telecom operators in India have to comply by. The first rollout of these compliances will be setup as early as early 2009. Whether you are a private or a public operator you would need to pass these security tests to operate in India. This recommendation closely resembles the Chinese model where operators/equipment vendors have to adhere to strict norms. China's Information Technology Certification Centre enforces these norms.

The government can say this is to prevent "all" hardware/network vendors from accessing their systems through back door channels. But the bottom-line is, it is to prevent the Chinese vendors from doing this. They are not concerned about Alcatels or Cisco's of the world. They are more worried about the Huaweis of the world which has the Chinese government's backing. China, a rising power, has a lot of countries nervous ( including India) and they believe China might use the back-door channels to cripple Communications in case of conflict. The release says

DoT is concerned about the advent of 'new names' in the equipment vendor space which are of 'suspect origin', but extremely competitive in cost with regard to Telecom tenders.

This is specifically targetted at Huawei. What Huawei typically does is, off loads the network/communication gears to the Telecom provider for literally no cost and has an agreement that the Telecom provider can pay in say 10/20 years. This obviously has caught the attention of the Indian government and the security compliance is just a beginning. I foresee more stringent laws coming.

The compliance would include removing any inbuilt remote diagnostic facility in the equipment. This would be a major blow for Product companies that are planning to build NOCs ( Network Operating Centres) to monitor their products across locations. This would increase the cost of support, since resources have to be 'on-site' throughout.

These extra tests and support would mean more money spent and it remains to be seen who is going to take the brunt. It is very unlikely that the equipment vendors are going to take the hit, and I say this because the equipments are already given to these Telecom vendors at throw away prices. I know of a case where one major networking giant had to give an eighty percent discount on its products to convince one major Telecom provider in India to buy it. So they will not bear the brunt. And we know the Telcos never take the hit ( Is it just me, or are they turning to be the next-gen Oil Companies?). So it might be the end consumer who might be forced to shell out more.

It needs to be seen how badly the consumer will be hit. On the brighter side though, if you are in the Telecom testing space, this is bonanza time :) Interesting times ahead!!!

In-Flight VoIP

Russell Shaw reports that maverick Sir Richard Branson might not be too averse to having VoIP in Virgin Atlantic/American flights.

And the considerate man also said, if it is introduced, it is quite likely it would be restricted to the last couple of rows to preserve other people's privacy. While we are it, can we restrict children to the last couple of rows as well :)

TPG Meeting

As mentioned before the Telecom Professionals Group met yesterday in Cream Center ( a nice little place on Chamiers road,Chennai). This was more of a goal setting meeting than a technology meeting ( Yup, Techies can try their hand at something other than nerd talk as well :) ).

The meeting revolved around what we as a group are trying to achieve out here and how do we get there. As the first step, we are opening up our group to include more people interested in Telecom. You could be a student, you could be a professional in any other field. But if you feel you want to know more about Telecom and you want to discuss things with like-minded people, you are welcome to join. There is no membership fee as of now and all you need to come with is an inquisitive mind.

It was decided that some of us are going to blog at our TPG site on a more regular basis. People from various walks of Telecom are going to be blogging there and that is one site you would need to bookmark. Ram is in the process of creating accounts for some of us, and you can expect feverish activity on the site from early next week.

Also, we are planning to have one of us ( or somebody from outside) give a tech talk on Telecom in the next meeting and we are planning to make this a regular feature in our meets. This is something I am looking forward too and I will keep you all informed as to who the speaker in the next meeting is going to be.

These are some of initial goals we have set for ourselves and if this interests you can register to this group here.

iLocus Top 10.

As most of you would be aware, iLocus is running a series on the Top 10 that established VoIP. In the recent issue they have asked the readers to post their comments on who would you think be the 10th on the list. Go ahead and leave your comments there.

For me it has to be one from the list I compiled few months ago. Anybody else, I wouldn't be too pleased. It is time these people/organization get their dues

2G spectrum for Sale?

Economic Times reports that Ministry of Finance ( hopefully with the consent of Ministry of Telecom) is pushing for the sale of 2G spectrum. What they are recommending is having a fixed fee model or an auction system through which the operators can bid for the spectrum.

The finance ministry hopes that this would enable effective utilization of resources. The operators, since they are paying for this, would pursue new technologies or improve existing ones since they have to get an RoI. This is the thinking of the ministry of finance. As of today, the operators pay an entry fee for 2G, but subsequent allotment of resources is free. A committee has been set to price the spectrum and the result of this will be out soon.

The CDMA guys are the major proponents of this because they feel cheated since the licensing model entitles GSM operators 6.25 MHz of free 2G whereas the CDMA guys get only 5 Mhz. The next few weeks ( till the committe comes out with its recommendation) are going to be quite interesting and it remains to be seen whether Reliance ( CDMA provider) can uses its political clout to get this done.

Have you Registered for the DNC campaign?

Though there are a whole lot of issues where CDMA and GSM operators in India don't see eye to eye, one thing they plan to colloborate on is to run a campaign to educate their subscribers on the DNC ( Do Not Call) registry. Am I the only one to see the irony here? They are calling people to let them know they won't be called if they register for DNC :)

This registry is supposed to become active in September ( I am a little skeptical of the date because I first heard that it was going to be active as early as April). Call Centers that use Outbound Dialers need to start looking at this database. I know for a fact that Cisco's Outbound solution caters to this. As a matter of fact, I think any Dialer company that has sold its product in North America would already have this. The companies that might be affected are the ones that cater to just the Indian market ( like for eg. Drishti Solutions)

Anyway I still don't have information as to how to register for this online. I need to register for this asap. I am done with people offering me great personal loans and credit cards.

Telco to offer Insurance?

The things Telcos do these days to retain their subscriber base!!! BSNL, one of the leading Telco in India is offering a non-life insurance cover to all its 40 million landline subscribers for an extra 1 Re a month.

BSNL has been losing subscribers at an alarming rate ( mainly to Bharti Airtel) and this scheme they hope will stop the outflux. I assume BSNL will bear the rest of the premium. The second stage involves them extending this offer to its mobile subscribers.

Let me do some Math here. In general for an insurance cover of Rs.50000 a year ( 1200$), you would need to pay a premium of Rs.200 ( $5) a year. Now Rs.1 a month translates to Rs.12 a year, the rest Rs.188 has to be shelled out by BSNL per year per customer. This makes no business sense to me. Yes, I appreciate the noble cause where everybody including the poor in rural India get a chance to be covered. But how does BSNL plan to make profit?

Having said that, Insurance premium is a volume game ( more people you have, lesser the premium) and if anybody can play the volume game, it is the Telcos in India. With nearly 70 million subscribers ( landline + mobile), I am sure they can twist the insurance partner ( in this case State Bank of India, though BSNL retains the right to have multiple partners if need be) to reduce the premium rates.

Let me throw out an interesting thought. If this is the precursor of things to come, would Telcos enter retail as well? Bharti-Airtel ( taking a leaf out of Walmart's book) is almost there with it ELP ( Everyday Low prices) scheme. Reliance has a very strong retail/telecom business. So what if they come and tell me ( Bharti is my landline/Broadband/mobile service provider) that I get better deals in their retail stores because I am a subscriber. Now THAT would make me stick to them for ever!!!

Are we going to see a Telecom M & A spree in India?

I am hearing from various sources that TRAI ( Telecom Regulator of India) is seriously thinking of relaxing some rules to make Telecom M & A easier. There is a peculiar law ( which I never failed to understand) that prevents a telecom company from holding more than 10% stake in two operators in the same circle.

TRAI is looking to remove this ceiling which I think would be a major step in enabling consolidation in India. At the same time TRAI is keen that we don't see monopolies taking over. There is yet another law that states if two players are looking at M & A, then their combined market share should not exceed 67%. TRAI is not only looking at relaxing the 10% ceiling but also looking at reducing this 67% to 50%. These would counter balance each other.Also I believe there are plans to ensure that the number of operators at any given circle is minimum three.

It is very refreshing to see TRAI being proactive. They understand that Telecom needs more consolidation in these parts of the world and are acting accordingly. It is just going to be a matter of time before my predictions of large M & As starts to become true.

Solid Quarter for Cisco

Cisco has reported its fourth quarter earnings and it is good news all the way. Profit increased by 25% which also meant that they raised their forecast for 2008. That is an investor's delight.

And I don't know see their momentum decreasing anytime soon. Their data network business is booming and they are achieving phenomenol gains in the Unified Communication space. They seemed to be romping over the likes of Avaya and Juniper in this space and they just seem to be getting better with their key acquisitions and partnerships.

Good times for Cisco employees and share holders :)

A grin on Vivek's Face

So why is Vivek of Unleash Networks grinning? Because he has got what most people in the Networking industry dream about. Having Cisco as a customer.

Great news buddy. Vivek has been keeping us informed about some of the stuff he has been upto these days and let me put it this way, you ain't heard nothing yet!! This I believe is going to be the launching pad for better things and I soon hope to see Vivek 'unleashing' some great products.

If I were a VC, I would pick up the phone and be talking to Vivek right away :)

Put on Mute : The Next person

I just figured out what is the most important application I need in my day today life. Putting another person on mute.

Check this out. You are on a conference call ( through a conference bridge). It is a very important call. This is a make or break deal. You and your subordinates are in the bridge taking the call from different locations. You have just about sealed the deal when your subordinate/colleague starts ranting about stuff that you know for a certain fact is going to make things go south. You want to yell at him to stop. But there is no way. He goes ahead and completes saying what he had to say and you are screwed.

How many of you face these problems on a day today basis? I know I do. Unwanted information being divulged out in conference calls. Wouldn't it be great that by a press of a DTMF you can mute the guy? There are a few challenges here. First thing would be how do you know which caller in the entire bridge to mute, as in what is the identification of each of these people in the conversation.

Now, this surely can't be done in a TDM world and SHOULD be possible in an IP environment. Is there any mechanism in any of the signalling protocols ( could be SIP/SCCP or anything) to make an endpoint be just in the 'recv' mode and not in the 'send-recv' mode. Can 3pcc have this kind of control?

As said before, if at all this can be done, it has to be IP. But trust me, I will buy the solution just to have this feature :) Too many goons saying too many things in conference calls is getting on my nerves!!!

Number Portability

Aswath's take on number portability is a definite read. As he has rightly pointed out, the question is who should own the number. The subscriber or the telephone company. The latter owning the number would lead to problems as in the typical case of SunRocket.

But the problem is no service provider in his right mind would give it to the subscriber. That is against the very nature of the Telco company we have come to see. It is quite a long way for that to happen and even then I don't think the Telcos that exist today would take a step in this direction. Upstarts like 'Google Telecom' ( yup, I am one of those who believe sooner or later they will enter the Service provider market in a big way) would probably be the first to do this and force the hands of the other telcos.

Speaking from a Technology perspective, I still have not seen the ENUM movement garnering enough support for this to happen. There needs to be a lot of traction and collaboration in this regards for this to become mainstream.

Pulver's challenge

I am late to this news, but Pulver's challenge to companies to innovate has been making circles for sometime now. His essential question was where are the innovative Voice Services?

And to be honest from all the VAS companies that are cropping up dime a dozen in India, I don't see even one of them providing an answer to his question. Buzzworks who presented in Proto.in came a little close to it. Not a great innovation but a great utility. I have been meaning to write about them, but have been really caught up in other work

Hopefully I should get some time to write about it this weekend. I plan to evaluate their business model, where they can possibly make revenues and importantly the legality in India. ( It was Buzzworks that made me raise a question before on 3pcc legality)

Proto : Day 2 , A summary

Whew, what a day. It was so refreshing to see so many people trying to innovate ( and not exactly just in web 2.0 and mobile) and it kind of inspires you and make you hopeful that an entrepreneurial India is really not too far away.

Now for the summaries of these companies presentation. This time around I don't plan to review each of the companies, since some of them were completely outside the realm of my interest and expertise.

The company that got my attention in the Development Plaform group was BriteSoft Solutions. They are based out of Malaysia and they talked about their rapid Application development tool that cuts doen development time by a huge margin and also enables anybody to develop applications. Now to be fair to them, I am a cynic when it comes to Rapid Application environment since I have seen a whole lot of these who over-sell but under-achieve. It is likely that BriteSoft might be different, but then I got to see it to believe it. I honestly feel Rapid Application development software gets you only so much. Would be more than happy to be proved wrong. It wouldn't hurt if I can be helped to reduce development work :)

Enterprise segment in Proto had some few interesting companies like TISS,AuthMe, Multimedia Display Technologies. Both TISS and Authme had a security play in their own ways. TISS provides a USB based security cover for the transactions carried out on your laptop whereas Authme provides a session based security solution. For me, the latter is a huge challenge because most of these solutions fail when it comes to scalability and heavy load. And I probably might be wrong on this one. But Authme has a very close resemblance to openID. Did anybody else sense that?

Multimedia Display Technologies deal with RFIDs and they have patented technology that reduces the cost of the solution by nearly one hundredth of a cost. If it is for real, I think it is just a matter of time before RFID becomes mainstream. Actually to be honest I thought it was going to get mainstream even earlier when Microsoft decided to venture into it. Cost was a major deterrent and if Multimedia Display Technologies can address that, it is the best of times for RFID.

Next were the Internet.Web 2.0 companies. To be honest, I attended this session with a pre-conceived notion that it was just going to be the cliched social networking stuff but was pleasantly surprised. The theme of Proto this time around revolved a lot around search and more search ( either using web or in the mobile space). Be in Inasra Technologies which 'searches' and gives you the best accomodation or Pennywise Solutions that "searches" and acts as your neighbourhood guide ( through their product Tolmolbol) or Routeguru which in its own way acts as a direction provider. Routeguru solves a very real problem. Something I faced last week. I was in Delhi and had to get somewhere. Now I am not fluent in Hindi and it was a big pain trying to explain to the Taxi driver whom I engaged in the airport to get me to the place I wanted to. He did not know the place, and he had to stop every so often to get further directions. Had I used Routeguru's guide I probably would have known the well known landmarks and I could have told the driver. I am surely going to sign up for the Beta release and see how it goes.

Another company in the internet splace was Minekey. Their product is supposed to make content discovery on blogs and websites way easier and I plan to play around with their widget and see how it works. Now this blog does not allow me to place custom widgets so I probably would need to use my other blog. Genie Interactive Pvt Ltd presented their Voice Mail as an email solution. With the risk of being judgmental, I goto say there was nothing innovative here. Voice Mail has evolved so much in the last two or three years. Enterprise solutions like Cisco Unity addresses more problems and companies like spinvox have been offering this for ages ( And from what I have heard Spinvox was not doing too well on this either?)

Next was the mobile space. Rarefind Engineering Innovations promises to deliver content across mobile phones in such a way that the end user mobile phone does not have to worry too much about the content format, size etc. Now this is where I kind of got confused. In the demo, one guy sent a document to another. When he did this all he specified was the phone number he was sending the document too. Who does the decision making that the user has a specific phone make and so he would have to receive the content in that specific format. Hopefully the guys would read this and clear this.

And then there was BuzzWorks. I am going to discuss this in a later post because I have lot of thoughts on this one. ( Incidentally it was this company that was the reason behind by earlier post).

There were presentations from companies belonging to entirely disparate verticals clubbed under 'New Frontiers'. Thinkworks with their creative Clay Animated movies, Lucid Software with expertise in Non Destructive Testing and Hyper Analytix whose focus area being Semiconductor Design Automation kind of made us realize that there were other areas were innovation was alive and kicking.

That kind of broadly summarizes most of the presentations. As for the actual event itself, it was way better than the previous edition. The presentations were crisp, more professional and to the point. Good job presenters and the mentors who help keep it that way. Other than a couple of presentations that did not have a demo, most of them flaunted their wares and thus kept the powerpoints to the minimal.

The real heroes though were the organizers. Awesome stuff dudes. It was nothing short of spectacular. Hoping for more of these events across the country. Vijay, Kiruba , Amit and team, take a bow.