You’ve been hearing the buzz. There is talk that we are finally moving to the new One97 building. The excitement is palpable. You can almost feel the gush of adrenalin. It’s not just a rumor anymore. It’s as real as bricks and mortar. The sweet smell of high-octane benzene emanating from the freshly-painted walls. Oh, to touch the freshly-mown lawn, the neatly-trimmed hedges, the dew-spangled grass! Sorry if I’m getting carried away with this but the rumors are nigh. It’s no longer about speculation. It’s official!! We are moving to the new building. After weeks and months of people stopping me in the corridor, grabbing me by the collar and demanding to know, “Are we shifting?”, I can honestly, proudly, and irrevocably say that it’s official. Actually, it’s not really as official as you might think. But the sheer anticipation that it will be official caused me to get busy on google sketchup and do this quick “artist’s impression of what the new one97 office might look like”. Mind you, I have never seen the One97 Office. Not even a photograph really. The only thing I’ve been told is that there will be 4+1 floors. So, let me add my disclaimer here right off the bat. This is purely an artist’s rendition and liable to be way off the mark. Also, please don’t ask me for a 3D virtual-reality walkthrough. There’s not enough benzene in this world that will cause me to create one.
Front view -
Isometric view -
Notice the purple-colored pentunias in the garden? That’s my special touch. This sketchup can also be found on google earth because I geo-referenced to the new office address. Voila!!
It was exactly five months back that Nokia bought Trolltech. See link
Nokia has done it again. It has gone ahead and taken over Symbian as reported here by Slashdot. The acquisition is valued at about 410 million of yankee money.
So why did Nokia do it? On the surface, it doesn’t seem obvious at all. The Nokia-Symbian nexus has existed since as far back as June 24, 1998, when Symbian Ltd. was formed as a partnership between Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion, to exploit the convergence between PDAs and mobile phones.
Now, let’s try to dig a little and see what’s really going on here. Trolltech ofcourse has been characterized as “the biggest little company you’ve never heard of”. Ofcourse, Trolltech’s application frameworks power some of the world’s bestest telephony applications including Skype (Skype is powered by Qtopia) and my developer friends may have heard of Qt (which incidentally has a GPLed version).
Symbian OS is a far superior OS to run on a mobile phone even compared to Linux, because of the way a single processor core is able to concurrently execute user applications as well as the signalling stack. Trolltech’s Qtopia is a great platform for developing apps in. But we’re still not seeing the connection and we haven’t understood the implications of what’s happening in Nokia’s mind. The truth is, we think of Nokia as a manufacturer of phones, not as a creator of operating systems and cellphone applications. So why these impulse acquisitions?
There is a one-word answer to these questions. Android. Nokia, as entrenched as it is in the market, is feeling the heat from that “dirty” five-letter word – Google. Google recently announced the first Android phone. See link . So even though WSJ has described the Android phone as a “giant, delayed flustercuck (that’s a politically-correct way of saying something else btw), Google, being Google is going to take the mobile-space and make it into what it has made cyber-space. Accessible and Searchable.
Just to set the record straight. I’m not putting my money on Nokia + Symbian + Trolltech. I’m actually putting my money on the gphone. We’ve had gmail and gtalk. What makes you think you’re not going to end up having gphones and glives? Also, if you’re going to be asking me my opinion on the iPhone, you might as well be asking Mother Teresa (if she were alive) out for a round of golf. It’s just doesn’t make any sense.
So for those of you that I have had the pleasure of sharing and exchanging ideas with, you would know that I spent most of my professional life in a land far, far away. However, I have had a hard time explaining to my colleagues in India that there really is no such thing as VAS in the US of A. VAS in India is a multi-billion dollar industry and it makes sense for operators (carriers) in any economy to find ways to increase penetration, increase usage, and thereby increase returns by providing value to the consumer. But the cellphone industry in the US is a much more tightly controlled and closed market as compared to Asia or Europe. See link
Part of the reason is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has stifled innovation in the market with its regulations and the carriers have had to resort to lock-in practices such as locked handsets, long-term contracts, and steep termination fees in order to protect their interests. Vendor lock-in is anti-competitive and number portability is no sort of panacea for the these anti-competitive practices.
It is hard for me to explain to colleagues that there is no such thing as CRBT (Custom Ring Back Tone) in the U.S. You only hear a tring-tring when you call your friend. There’s no such thing as SMS Banking alerts. A2P SMS on CDMA networks happens over HTTP (i.e. the SMS travels as an e-mail before landing on your phone). Short codes (although available) are non-pervasive to the point of being non-prevalent.
So what do we have so far? We have a whole economy which has an over-capacity of under-utlized 2.5 G networks. We have an economy which will probably not move to 3G anytime soon. Even though the FCC has auctioned off the 700 MHz spectrum, Ma Bell’s kids will try to protect its turf and lobby for regulations to kill new entrants in the market. AT&T and Verizon have cornered most of the 700 MHz band spectrum and Google has managed to push for open access, i.e. letting any device use the spectrum. not just the ones that the carriers make you buy. What does this mean? It means that Android phones are going to become prevalent.
Here’s a link that explains the 700 MHz dealio -link
Jargon. We use it. We flaunt it. We coin it. We are daunted by it. We are bombarbed by jargon every waking minute of our lives. So being on the cutting edge does have its downsides. Or so it would seem. Until you realize that jargon can be used as a weapon also. To intimidate your poor unsuspecting colleague with whom you just had a heated discussion about the merits of n-channel MOSFETS for NAND gated SoC designs into conceeding his point. See what I just did?
Anyhoo. As I was saying. The lower transconductance and parasitic capacitance of NMOS means that the leakage currents are reduced for APR in DSM-VLSI. No really. This means nothing to me too but atleast that left you speechless.
Then, there’s the sort of lingo that actually gives you street-cred instead of just making you sound like a bookish nerd. These are the sorts of phrases that you would actually use to sound really suave at conferences and tech-mixers. Here’s a few you can feel free to use – co-creational configurations, adaptive emergence, iteration overheads. Yes, I grant permission to you to use them under the CCL. That’s the Creative Commons License, you ignoramus (that’s French for really, smart person).
So you’re probably already getting my drift and where I’m going with this. But imagine the sheer consternation of someone that isn’t used to the acronyms that are bandied about in the telecom world. Why would someone not be familar with the acronyms in the telecom world, you may well ask. Well, it could be because that someone had never had a chance to work in the telecom world. Hmmm, you say. Is that possible? It’s a long shot. But it certainly isn’t impossible. Well…this could go on for a while. But let’s just say for the sake of the argument, that there may be a few souls out there that are not cognizant of the plethora of acronyms that mobile operators use. What then? It’s for exactly such people that I have prepared the following glossary of acronyms -
ARPU – Average Revenue Per Unit , BHCA – Busy Hour Call Attempts, BS – Base Station, BSC – Base Station Controller, BTS – Base Transceiver Station, CDMA – Code Division Multiple Access, CLI – Cell Location Identification, CPP – Calling Party Pays, EDGE – Enhanced Data-rates for GPS Enhancement, GPRS – General Packet Radio Service , GSM – Global System for Mobile Communications, HLR – Home Location Register, EIR – Equipment Identification Register, IMEI – Internation Mobile Equipment Identity
Disclaimer – This blog post started out as an essay on corporate philosophy and why corporations need philosophies but somewhere along the way, it turned into an existentialist’s view of personal philosophy.
We hear it all the time. It’s all been done. All the good ideas are taken. The dice is loaded. The playing field is skewed. The opportunity cost is too high. Operational costs are rising. Margins are falling. Throughput is throttled. There is a bandwidth crunch. We say it to ourselves even though we know we can win. We say it even though we know it ain’t true. We say it, not because we believe it but because we’re afraid to take the leap, seize the day, take the metaphoric plunge into the proverbial deep-end. It hasn’t all been done. But the pieces are all there. Every task, every project, every action-item our our electronic to-do lists can basically be broken down into known, manageable entities. Joinable pieces. Conjunctionable verbs. So what life and work and work and life boils down to, is this giant systems-integration problem. How do we join the pieces? How do we connect the dots? How do we find the missing links? How do we fill in the blanks? It’s these hows that we basically have to answer when we are faced with challenges. So it must be a good thing that there are challenges that we have to face. For it is in the coming-to-grips with the challenges that we are able to define ourselves, define our identifies, define our character and define who we are and what we are capable of. It is in the course of the trek to the peaks of the mountain ranges in our heads that we find, in our minds, the valleys of faith, the orchards of truth, and the streams of clarity, of epiphany. It is in the sum of the forces that we fight. It is in the doing of what we know is right. It is in the heart as much as in the mind. If the heart’s in the right place, the mind will find sight.
A lot of people have been asking the question. What is Oorja? What do they do? Is it a company? Is it a separate entity? Is it a part of One97? Why are they called Oorja? A lot of rumors and myths have also started evolving due to the watercooler discussions around these profound and timeless questions. In an effort to dispel the myths and also to quash all the rumors that have been spreading about the real nature of this abstract, yet real manifestation of the wave-particle duality of some of the most fundamental subatomic particles in the unvierse, the Oorja team (yes, there is an actual Oorja team) has decided to reveal-all in what is surely one of the most splendid, magnificient, ostentatious and bordering-on-decadent show of viral promotion known to man – the release of a t-shirt. So, without further ado, we present to you…the t-shirt designs for Oorja -
These are not for sale. They are exclusive prints for employees only but they are branded as the “Severe Entropy” line.
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