Tag: India

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

My latest article published in India Telecom Brief on the patent wars-

 

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

Why are Apple, Microsoft and Google spending billions to acquire patents? Recently Google, maker of the largest selling mobile operating system, Android decided to acquire Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion dollars, giving it some 17000 patents with another 7500 patents pending.
Meanwhile some months ago, a consortium led by Microsoft, Apple and Research in Motion (maker of Blackberry) bought 6000 patents by Nortel Networks for 4.5 billion dollars.
These are only the defensive moves in these patent wars. In offensive moves, Microsoft has sued HTC, Barnes and Nobles, Motorola for patent infringement over them using Android operating system claiming some aspects are patented by it. Though Google does not earn any money directly from selling Android, ironically Microsoft is earning money from Android vendors including up to 5 dollars per handset from HTC.

Read the full article at http://www.indiatelecombrief.com/from-the-editors-desk/51839-patent-wars-in-mobile-software

 

Related–

A brilliant infographic  from George Kokkinidis at Design Language http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1473307539 sums all the absurdity up- where almost everyone is suing everyone. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

 

 

 

England rule India- again

If you type the words “business intelligence expert” in Google. you may get the top ranked result as http://goo.gl/pCqUh or Peter James Thomas, a profound name as it can be as it spans three of the most important saints in the church.

The current post for this is very non business -intelligence topic called Wager. http://peterjamesthomas.com/2011/07/20/wager/

It details how Peter, a virtual friend whom I have never met, and who looks suspiciously like Hugh Grant with the hair, and Ajay Ohri (myself) waged a wager on which cricket team would emerge victorious in the ongoing test series . It was a 4 match series, and India needed to win atleast the series or avoid losing it by a difference of 2, to retain their world cricket ranking (in Tests) as number 1.

Sadly at the end of the third test, the Indian cricket team have lost the series, the world number 1 ranking, and some serious respect by 3-0.

What is a Test Match? It is a game of cricket played over 5 days.
Why was Ajay so confident India would win. Because India won the one day world championship this April 2011. The one day series is a one day match of cricket.

There lies the problem. From an analytic point of view, I had been lulled into thinking that past performance was an indicator of future performance, indeed the basis of most analytical assumptions. Quite critically, I managed to overlook the following cricketing points-

1) Cricket performance is different from credit performance. It is the people and their fitness.

India’s strike bowler Zaheer Khan was out due to injury, we did not have any adequate replacement for him. India’s best opener Virender Sehwag was out due to shoulder injury in the first two tests.

Moral – Statistics can be misleading if you do not apply recent knowledge couple with domain expertise (in this case cricket)

2) What goes up must come down. Indeed if a team has performed its best two months back, it is a good sign that cyclicality will ensure performance will go down.

Moral- Do not depend on regression or time series with ignoring cyclical trends.

3) India’s cricket team is aging. England ‘s cricket team is youthful.

I should have gotten this one right. One of the big and understated reasons that the Indian economy is booming -is because we have the youngest population in the world with a median age of 28.

or as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% hovers below the age of 35. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India’s dependency ratio should be just over 0.4

India’s population is 1.21 billion people, so potentially a much larger pool of athletes , once we put away our laptops that is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_UK

 

the total population of the United Kingdom was 58,789,194 (I dont have numbers for average age)

 

Paradoxically India have the oldest cricket team in the world . This calls for detailed investigation and some old timers should give way to new comers after this drubbing.

Moral- Demographics matters. It is the people who vary more than any variable.

4) The Indian cricket team has played much less Test cricket and much more 20:20 and one day matches. 20:20 is a format in which only twenty overs are bowled per side. In Test Matches 90 overs are bowled every day for 5 days.

Stamina is critical in sports.

Moral- Context is important in extrapolating forecasts.

Everything said and done- the English cricket team played hard and fair and deserve to be number ones. I would love to say more on the Indian cricket team, but I now intend to watch Manchester United play soccer.

 

 

 

 

 

Credit Downgrade of USA and Triple A Whining

As a person trained , deployed and often asked to comment on macroeconomic shenanigans- I have the following observations to make on the downgrade of US Debt by S&P

1) Credit rating is both a mathematical exercise of debt versus net worth as well as intention to repay. Given the recent deadlock in United States legislature on debt ceiling, it is natural and correct to assume that holding US debt is slightly more risky in 2011 as compared to 2001. That means if the US debt was AAA in 2001 it sure is slightly more risky in 2011.

2) Politicians are criticized the world over in democracies including India, UK and US. This is natural , healthy and enforced by checks and balances by constitution of each country. At the time of writing this, there are protests in India on corruption, in UK on economic disparities, in US on debt vs tax vs spending, Israel on inflation. It is the maturity of the media as well as average educational level of citizenry that amplifies and inflames or dampens sentiment regarding policy and business.

3) Conspicuous consumption has failed both at an environmental and economic level. Cheap debt to buy things you do not need may have made good macro economic sense as long as the things were made by people locally but that is no longer the case. Outsourcing is not all evil, but it sure is not a perfect solution to economics and competitiveness. Outsourcing is good or outsourcing is bad- well it depends.

4) In 1944 , the US took debt to fight Nazism, build atomic power and generally wage a lot of war and lots of dual use inventions. In 2004-2010 the US took debt to fight wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and bail out banks and automobile companies. Some erosion in the values represented by a free democracy has taken place, much to the delight of authoritarian regimes (who have managed to survive Google and Facebook).

5) A Double A rating is still quite a good rating. Noone is moving out of the US Treasuries- I mean seriously what are your alternative financial resources to park your government or central bank assets, euro, gold, oil, rare earth futures, metals or yen??

6) Income disparity as a trigger for social unrest in UK, France and other parts is an ominous looming threat that may lead to more action than the poor maths of S &P. It has been some time since riots occured in the United States and I believe in time series and cycles especially given the rising Gini coefficients .

Gini indices for the United States at various times, according to the US Census Bureau:[8][9][10]

  • 1929: 45.0 (estimated)
  • 1947: 37.6 (estimated)
  • 1967: 39.7 (first year reported)
  • 1968: 38.6 (lowest index reported)
  • 1970: 39.4
  • 1980: 40.3
  • 1990: 42.8
    • (Recalculations made in 1992 added a significant upward shift for later values)
  • 2000: 46.2
  • 2005: 46.9
  • 2006: 47.0 (highest index reported)
  • 2007: 46.3
  • 2008: 46.69
  • 2009: 46.8

7) Again I am slightly suspicious of an American Corporation downgrading the American Governmental debt when it failed to reconcile numbers by 2 trillion and famously managed to avoid downgrading Lehman Brothers.  What are the political affiliations of the S &P board. What are their backgrounds. Check the facts, Watson.

The Chinese government should be concerned if it is holding >1000 tonnes of Gold and >1 trillion plus of US treasuries lest we have a third opium war (as either Gold or US Treasuries will burst)

. Opium in 1850 like the US Treasuries in 2010 have no inherent value except for those addicted to them.

8   ) Ron Paul and Paul Krugman are the two extremes of economic ideology in the US.

Reminds me of the old saying- Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Both the Pauls seem equally unhappy and biased.

I have to read both WSJ and NYT to make sense of what actually is happening in the US as opinionated journalism has managed to elbow out fact based journalism. Do we need analytics in journalism education/ reporting?

9) Panic buying and selling would lead to short term arbitrage positions. People like W Buffet made more money in the crash of 2008 than people did in the boom years of 2006-7

If stocks are cheap- buy. on the dips. Acquire companies before they go for IPOs. Go buy your own stock if you are sitting on  a pile of cash. Buy some technology patents in cloud , mobile, tablet and statistical computing if you have a lot of cash and need to buy some long term assets.

10) Follow all advice above at own risk and no liability to this author 😉

 

Indian Business Schools Alumni try to grow more equal

A message from one the IIM (Indian Institute of Management) alumni networks, just an example of how any global organization should make extra efforts to make things more equal- and (thus position their brand for a differentiated place for attracting talent)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Management

The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), are graduate business schools in India that also conduct research and provide consultancy services in the field of management to various sectors of the Indian economy. They were created by the Indian Government[1] with the aim of identifying the brightest intellectual talent[1] available in the student community of India and training it in the best management techniques available in the world, to ultimately create a pool of elite managers to manage and lead the various sections of the Indian economy.

The IIMs are considered the top business schools in India.[3] All the IIMs are completely autonomous institutes owned and financed by the Central Government of India. In order of establishment, the IIMs are located at Calcutta (Kolkata), Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Lucknow, Kozhikode (Calicut), Indore, Shillong, Ranchi, Rohtak, Raipur, Trichy, Kashipur and Udaipur. (My alma mater is Lucknow)

 

IIMs being role models have shared knowledge and skills with other institutions to improve their quality and standards in management education


————————————————————————————————————–
IIM A Alumni Association has been reaching out to the alumni associations of other IIMs to broad base the brotherhood (no offense to the fairer sex. Couldn’t think of a replacement word).

IM Calcutta Alumni Association has been conducting a lecture series and has invited us for the next edition. The topic is “The Unlimited Person”

India’s ambitions today – particulary reflected in the Corporate Sector – are Unlimited. What mind-set does it take to realise these ambitions ? Minds that live in the past or in the future – as too many Indian minds do – limit themselves, their companies and their country.

This presentation gives several examples of our current average mind-set and talks about ways in which an unlimited mind-set can emerge, creating “The Unlimited Person”

The speaker will be IIM Calcutta alumnus Shashi Maudgal, Chief Marketing Officer of Hindalco Industries of the Aditya Birla Group. The date is Friday June 24th at Gulmohar at the India Habitat Centre . Time 7 pm.

We hope you will come for this lecture and benefit from Shashi’s experience and insights.

Jayaraman -PGP ’70 / Sunil Kala PGP ’73 / Salil Agrawal PGP ’83

T. Venkateswaran PGP ’85 / Rahul Aggarwal PGP ’94

Tools for Hackers:Beginners

How to disguise your IP Address from your most wonderful glorious leaders-

From

 

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

Tor Browser Bundle

The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser, and is self-contained. The Tor IM Browser Bundleadditionally allows instant messaging and chat over Tor. If you would prefer to use your existing web browser, install Tor permanently, or if you don’t use Windows, see the other ways to download Tor.

Freedom House has produced a video on how to find and use the Tor Browser Bundle. If you don’t see a video below, view it at Youtube . Know of a better video or one translated into your language? Let us know!

 

 

 

and if you now want to see or check your own website for a Denial of Service attack , download this

http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/

This is the software for which 32 Turkish teenagers got arrested for bringing down their govt websites. Do NOT USE it for ILLEGAL purposes,

because 1) it is hosted on a western website that due to Patriot Act would tracking downloads as well as most likely be inserting some logging code into your computer (especially if you are still on Windows)

2) Turkey being a NATO member got rather immediate notice of this – which makes it very likely that this tool is compromised in the Western Hemisphere. You can probably use this in Eastern Hemisphere country excluding Israel, Turkey, China, India ,Korea or Japan because these countries do have sophisticated hackers working for the government as well.

3) This is just a beginners tool to understand how flooding a website with requests work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/files/

Basically download, unzip the file

Enter URL and click Lock on to know IP address.

use HTTP Method. Make say 1000 threads.

Then press the IMMA CHARGING MY LAZER big button.

Note the Failed Tab tells you how good or bad this method is.

Note – it wont work on my blogs hosted on wordpress.com- but then those blogs had a root level breach some time back. It did work on both my blogspot and my tumblr blogs, and it completely shattered my son’s self hosted wordpress blog (see below)

 

 

Movie Review Ready

Picture of Asin Thottumkal, an Indian actress
Asin- Indian actor

I just saw the Bollywood Movie , Ready (2011) starring Salman Khan and Asin.  Salman Khan has been the Charlie Sheen of Indian Cinema for some time now, and the movie plays up to his charm, slapstick humor and slap full action.

Asin is a great actor, and this is not art for the sake of art- it is art to make the people laugh.

Enjoy it but with tempered expectations that you are in for some stupendous Bollywoodish humor.

Related articles