Glimpses 2011 - The Technology Year

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Here is the review of 2011 technology oriented headlines that made waves globally as well as in India.

Twitter proves its worth to the world

Year 2011 was the all important year when social networking proved that it was about more than trivia, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry playing vital - if disputed - roles in organising everything from the Arab Spring to the London riots.

In January, as news broke of the shooting of an American congresswoman, Twitter proved its worth as a rolling new service. It also came under pressure from the US Department of Justice to name users connected with Wikileaks - this was also a year when social networks had to circle the wagons as governments questioned their motives.

Nokia's burning platform

In the battle for the fast-growing and very lucrative smartphone market, there has been one clear loser - Nokia. The Finnish global handset maker dominated the mobile phone industry for years, but by this February was watching Apple and Android race away with the profits and market share. In what became known as the burning platform memo, Nokia's new boss Stephen Elop told his staff just how bad a pickle they were in.




Taking a cue from the ongoing tablet war -  the government of India had announced that it is helping the IT ecosystem in bringing out the cheapest tablet – ‘Aakash’ for Rs 2500.



Resurgence of India’s dotcom bubble

Suddenly there is a lot of focus that is being given to the dotcom regime. We have ecommerce focused dotcoms like Kyazoonga.com, cleartrip.com or redbus.com  
At a time when much of the global economy is getting stuttered, technology companies in India are still managing to attract plenty of excitement amongst investors. In addition to this, India has also become a hot destination for Google, Facebook and Linkein.

 

Google gets social

Google remains the most successful new technology business of the last decade, churning out ever bigger profits from its domination of search-based advertising. But its attempts to be big in social networking - the biggest phenomenon of recent years - have stuttered.

Google+ was its latest attempt - a direct challenge to Facebook,offering users more refined privacy settings and innovations like live video "hangouts".


Steve Jobs leaves the worldly abode 1955-2011

The death of Steve Jobs was undoubtedly the technology story that attracted most interest this year. It was an opportunity to assess the life of a man whose determination to force his company, his industry,the whole world, to come round to his way of thinking had both positive and negative consequences.


Jobs' death was announced a couple of days after the rather lacklustre launch of the iPhone 4S, where many felt his successor Tim Cook had failed to shine. Having been rather harsh in my own assessment of his performance, I then realised that I had been unfair to a man who must have been under enormous strain. Hence the apology.


3G network rollouts. This year, all major Indian carriers and several of the discount regional ones were busy rolling out their faster 3G networks. This tech offers different speeds, strengths and weaknesses -- so what the 3G experience means to consumers will vary widely by carrier and location.



BlackBerry outage and continuing RIM decline. For several years,even after the first iPhone launched, Research in Motion's BlackBerry line of phones was the 800-pound gorilla of the U.S. smartphone market. This was driven mainly by business users, who were attracted to the phone's advanced messaging and encryption features.

But BlackBerries also grew popular with U.S. consumers as a lower-end "smart-ish" phone that generally was more affordable than iPhones and higher-end Android phones, and widely available on no-contract plans.Then, on October 10, 2011, RIM experienced its longest and widest outage. Users lost access to their e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger,and some lost Internet access, too. It began in Europe but soon spread elsewhere, eventually affecting the United States and other global geographies as well.

The company had already fallen on hard times, and was struggling to retain its market share and increase its relevance by attempting to update its technology. But as Imperial Entrepreneurs notes, this particular outage has probably cost RIM everal large corporate accounts. Also, RIM may have to pay back some fees to carriers as its users jump ship to other platforms. RIM's stock price dropped severely in 2011 and shows no signs of rebounding.


Google’s bid for handset maker Motorola Mobility — it’s biggest ever at $12.5 billion — ramped up the rivalry between the company and tech rival Apple. The acquisition would give Google critical access to Motorola’s extensive patent portfolio and raises the possibility that the Android software maker may get into the hardware game.


Social media took a front-and-center role in the Arab Spring and other social protests this year, as organizers used products such as Twitter and Facebook to set up meetings and deliver their messages to a worldwide audience.



On the other hand, Facebook faced a lot of changes and challenges in 2011, from its privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over changes to its network settings to its ambitious new scrapbook-like layout of user profiles. Launching ahead of the new format, Facebook also announced "frictionless sharing" partnerships that allow users to opt-in to linking services such as Spotify to their accounts for automatic sharing.



In the month of April 2011, Sony suffered a massive breach in its popular PlayStation Network that allowed the theft of names, addresses and possibly credit card data belonging to 77 million user accounts, in one of the largest Internet security break-ins ever.


Global technology majors have been locked in battles over software patents for much of the past year. In December, the International Trade Commission imposed a small ban on HTC devices -- a battle indicative of a much larger war between Apple and HTC and other Android-based smartphone makers. Apple has sued HTC, Motorola and Samsung over copyright infringement, but many of the largest tech companies are scrambling to protect themselves by buying up patents to use as ammunition in the intellectual property cases. Google's acquisition of Motorola was likely largely about patents, and the company also tried
-- and was outbid -- to purchase patents from Nortel.



In a major development, Former eBay head Meg Whitman was appointed as HP's new chief executive in September, succeeding Leo Apotheker, who lasted less than a year in the job. Whitman, known for her work leading eBay and her failed run for California governor in 2010, took over at a tumultuous time for HP and some questioned whether her skills from leading eBay would
translate to running one of the biggest hardware manufacturers in the world.


A screen shot of the Google Plus social network is shown. Google,frustrated by a string of failed attempts to crack social networking,designed the service to tie together all of its online properties,laying the foundation for a full-fledged social network.



Steve Jobs unveiled the iCloud storage system in June 2011. Apple is using iCloud to retain its dominance in the smartphone and tablet markets amid fresh competition from devices powered by Google Inc.'s Android software

IBM achieves great feat and the US based IT heavyweight ‘big blue’ celebrates its 100th year anniversary. Samuel J. almisano, chairman of the board, president and CEO of IBM, is applauded as he rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell to commemorate the 100th anniversary of IBM.



India’s Own Tech Boom Gains Traction


The technology products sector in India, which for the last two decades has been dormant and overshadowed by the country’s USD 76-billion software services industry, is on a steep growth trajectory. India is emerging as a software hub globally with over 2,400 product firms generating USD 2 billion of revenues, according to NASSCOM. Around 1,100 product startups have been launched in the last five years alone with an impressive 22 percent growth in revenues during the period.


The startups are focusing on localized India-specific solutions built around key areas such as mobility, SMBs, e-commerce and education.They are targeting four broad industry verticals, viz., B2C (Business to consumer), B2B (Business to small business), B2E (Business to large enterprise) and B2G (Business to government).


So, what has changed in our ecosystem today that did not exist in the past? Why are more and more product companies starting to emerge now?

there are three key changes that have occurred in the Indian market place. First, there is a strong and growing demand for local products in the domestic market today.


Right from banks to cab services like Meru — all make use of high-tech software and technology to reach their customers. This was non-existent even a decade back. The second aspect is the evolution of the entire IT industry in the back of IT services model that focused on providing people (services) for solving customer problems.

As Indian companies spent more time with global customers, they gained deeper understanding of the end customers’ business and the ability to develop end-to-end capabilities to build products around it. Third,MNCs have been increasingly using India as a base to build global products, which is creating a culture of innovation within the Indian companies.

The funding ecosystem has also seen significant improvement today. The investment community in India largely comprises of venture capitalists (VCs), angel investors and various other state and national government schemes. Indian success stories such as MakeMyTrip, Flipkart, and inMobi have increased the confidence levels of global VCs to invest in Indian product startups.


The emergence of disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility,sustainability and social networking are all adding up in making the ecosystem conducive for product development. The number of engineering graduates passing out of India is growing at more than 20 percent,which provides the required talent pool.


Interestingly, the number of product firms from tier-2/tier-3 cities has almost doubled in the last three years. Over 330 product companies are based in tier-2/tier-3 as of 2011 as per NASSCOM statistics. This trend is because the cost of setting up a product startup has significantly gone down with the zero-capex model of the cloud. The other reason is improved Internet/wireless connectivity (3G, LTE and broadband).

Billion Dollar Companies Emerge

Product companies have finally started to take off in the country. For instance, Zoho’s enterprise products claims to have 15,000 global customers and its web products have 5 million users, according to the company. Zoho, which offers an alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs, generates more than USD 100 million in revenue every year.

Bangalore-based Tringme provides a VoIP telephony platform that handles over 42 million minutes of calls per month and serves over 11 million users worldwide. Founded in 2007, Ozonetel’s flagship offering ‘Kookoo’ is India’s first cloud telephony platform for entrepreneurs and businesses who want to develop their own apps which uses telephony channel.

NASSCOM forecasts that India will have at least a USD 1 billion tech startup per year for the next three years and many more over the next decade. Nasdaq-listed online travel company MakeMyTrip is already valued at over USD 1 billion. The others in the pipeline to join the billion-dollar league are companies like mobile ad network InMobi, online retailer Flipkart, and India’slargest coupon site SnapDeal.

Going by the trend, it’s clear that the Indian IT industry has come a long way since its humble beginning by helping American companies fix the Y2K bug in the late 90s. Given the changes in the funding ecosystem, emergence of disruptive technologies and a cultural shift towards greater innovation, there is no doubt that more products will be incubated from India in the years to come.