Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Posted 4:07 PM by Anurag

Info Dump

I am dumping sundry info here that I have come across of late. Thats what blogs are anyway: dumping ground for heaps of information.

# Skype's radical technology
-----Original Message-----
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 06:40:19 +0530
From: "R.K.D"
Subject: Skype's radical technology and marketing threaten the very foundations of telecom

Dear All
Way back BillG is his book " The Road Ahead" mentions of the Death of Distance in Telecom..He saw the vision where the both Audio and Video has to be FREE and Telecom Organisation organisation will have to survive on value add on services ..

-----Original Message-----
From: "Anurag"
Rightly said, RK. VoIP is gonna change the way voice communications are conducted currently. It is one of those disruptive technologies whose time has come.

It is a highly specialized field, and there are only a handful of (Skype-like) products available in this domain. One such happening product is actually an 'Indian product' in this space: VQube! Its from Esqube Comuincation Solutions Pvt Ltd. (Cranes s/w has invested in Esqube). Product can be downloaded from download.com.

I know the founders very closely. Lemme know if anyone is interested in (business/demo/etc of) this product.

#A history of ringtones fFrom NewYorker magazine article
"In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could "ring"-our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call-or it could play a single-line melody, like "Für Elise." If you've ever heard a cell phone bleep out Beethoven without the harmony, you'll understand that this wasn't much of a choice. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced "smart messaging," a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences-melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment-that they could forward to friends using smart messaging.

Those familiar with Linux, the freely available, open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds, another Finnish programmer, will not be shocked to learn that Paananen, in a nationally consistent fit of altruism, put Harmonium on the Internet for anyone to download, thus passing up a shot at becoming a billionaire. Companies called aggregators, which collect and distribute digital content, capitalized on Paananen's innovation, using his software to create what is today known as the polyphonic ringtone."

# Billion Dollar Babies from MSNBC article. Infosys and Wipro achieved $1billion mark last year, approx in 14 years. Not bad!
"Relative youngster Google has been lauded for reaching $1 billion in sales in just six years. Well, Amazon did it in four, Yahoo in five and eBay achieved it in seven. Compare those companies with Wal-Mart, which aged to 18 before it could slap the phrase, "the billion dollar company" on its annual report; and McDonald's took 24 years to hit the benchmark. Of course, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon piggy-backed atop the World Wide Web, which exploded in a relative eye blink."

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