My India

by Nitin Badjatia on July 29, 2009

in India

I saw this photo collage over at Om Malik’s personal blog and it stopped me in my tracks.  This is the India that I love, the India that I miss when I make the all-to-short trips that have become the norm in the last two decades.  Bhanu Sharma’s photographic journey across India is simply amazing:

Billion Shades of India from Bhanu Sharma on Vimeo.

It’s been too long since I made a real trip to India

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Rethinking target markets

by Nitin Badjatia on June 28, 2009

in Cloud Computing, Microsoft

Image representing GigaOm as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, has an interesting post on GigaOm today.  An excerpt:

Self-Service Nation: Why Targeting Small Business Is Good Business

While the 80-20 rule can be very powerful, the reality is that many of the costs associated with building, supporting, distributing and selling technology products have dropped dramatically in the past decade. Yet many enterprise technology executives are operating as though the cost of distribution hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. In the coming years, I expect startups to increasingly target the massively underserved small- and medium-sized business (SMB) segment by taking advantage of the arbitrage between actual and assumed costs of sales. Self-service sales models will be a key element of these startups that will forever change the face of the enterprise technology business.

As he further explains in his post, there is a significant nascent market at the small business level that has, up until now, been left for Microsoft to dominate. Smart SaaS players, as well as others that do not have legacy enterprise software DNA, are best positioned to successfully target this market in coming years. I think companies like 37Signals are already flourishing here, and serve as a great source of ideas and experience for anyone looking to tap into a greatly underserved market.

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How Microsoft extends the R&D model in India

June 26, 2009 India

Image by Marc_Smith via Flickr

Navi Radjou has an interesting post on how Microsoft approaches it’s global R&D over at the Harvard Business blog, excerpt:
Microsoft Reinvents Its Global R&D Model – Navi Radjou – HarvardBusiness.org
What impressed me most about TEM is its staff members’ multidisciplinary backgrounds. In addition to computer scientists and engineers, TEM also [...]

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Amazon is slowly starting to open up the Kindle

May 26, 2009 Hardware

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A few months back I wrote about the need for Amazon to begin ’socializing’ the Kindle.  Another item of frustration that I forgot to mention in that post was the inability to pull my notes and highlights from the kindle via the web.  I As of this morning, however, Amazon [...]

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Ratan Tata gets it

May 14, 2009 India

For all the buzz that Tata’s release of the Nano received last year,  the long term impact of the company’s new venture may be even greater.  The sprawling Tata empire, loosely held together by Ratan Tata, recently announced a plan to build affordable housing for India’s burgeoning middle class.  Here’s an excerpt from BusinessWeek:
Tata’s Nano Home: [...]

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Change

May 4, 2009 Administrative

Image via Wikipedia

I can’t believe it’s May ‘09 already.  You’ve probably noticed that this weblog has been pretty silent over the last three months.  This has to do with several significant changes for us.  Those of you who follow my twitter feed know that I’ve actually been very busy during that period.  The short story, [...]

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