Sunday Posts

  I recently spoke at an Education Conference and was asked to comment on what is likely to happen in Higher Ed sector post-pandemic. My presentation was about four key changes. I am not sure it resonated with the audience - I very much looked the odd historian trying to talk about the future - but I sincerely believe what I mentioned. Therefore, it is wothwhile to record these observations here, before they were completely forgotten, even by me!  My broad point was that pandemic, traumatic and game-changing as it has been, is not the only force changing higher education. Otherwise, after the infection numbers start falling and we start facing safer again, everything would have gone back to how it was earlier. However, a number of things happened in the last few years, which, taken together, would have a profound effect on how we live now. Before we attempt making a prediction about what happens to Higher Ed, it is definitely worth taking stock of what's changed. Here are some...

TechCrunch reports a slowing of EdTech investments in the first five months of this year ( see here ). The period in question is perhaps too short to pick up a trend, but this may allow us to think through some of the issues on the table. For example, what kind of EdTech is really going to change things? The EdTech business is a slow one - someone told me that you will need 36 visits to an university to sell them a piece of technology, and make it 72 if it is a new idea - and indeed, most investors and entrepreneurs, believing the trade press perhaps a bit too much, are already feeling disappointed that the things do not change as fast. In fact, not just this piece of news about slowing deal flow, but also the big successes - like Lynda.com - tell us a story of continuity, rather than change.  The big investments in EdTech going to video perhaps tells us that while technology is being adapted in the classroom, and people are learning themselves, the ways of doing so are c...

We consume a torrent of data as we live, and we produce the same too. However, the more we produce details of each little step we take to live, we obscure the little data more and more, such as feelings and pleasures of human exchanges. The Big Data, the faster, bigger and more complex stream of data, does not so much chronicle our life as much as it changes it. While the technologists and marketers of various descriptions celebrate its arrival, it is time to pause and reflect how it changes us, our lives and institutions, and further, what it means to be human in the age of big data. One would wonder why big data is any big deal, as data gets bigger with every passing generation. As our networks grow, we know more; our storage technologies get cheaper and better, and we store more. Having lived in the age of floppy drives and 4kb memories, the big leap into megabytes was as significant as moving from cheap gigabytes to plausible petabytes. While the rhetoric is that the torrent o...

2010 is going to be an interesting year. It seems that the current recession was bad, but much less worse than what it could have been, or was expected to be. Growth is returning now to Euro area, as well as in the United States. A course correction has happened in China, and by boosting the domestic demand, China has returned to growth. Indian economy is growing too, and it seems that they have also escaped the worst effects of recession. Recession forced a spectacular political change in Japan, and it may alter the course of politics in many East European nations, but otherwise, we may all emerge from this by middle 2010. This is not to say that the party can begin any time soon. This recession caused many imbalances, which has to be corrected. The government has expanded its role in haste, and there is no clear plan underpinning it. Rather, the governments across the world intervened hoping, like a bad venture capitalist, that an exit strategy will arise. It is unlikely to happen. B...

The election dust is all settled. There is indeed no final settlement in politics, and today's victors and vanquished can change positions almost overnight. But while everything is transitory, there is one enduring truth, politics is cruel on people and parties who refuse to learn. And we shall see. The results of this election lead to continuity, in governance and in political equation overall. Except in one state, that is. Indeed, West Bengal just experienced a mini-revolution. After 32 years of Left Front rule, this is suddenly the first time when the opposition has done better than the ruling left front. No one expected this. In fact, the Left Front expected a better show from opposition - there was a palpable voter fatigue - but they were benchmarking the opposition performance 1984 - 16 out of 42 seats. This result, 26 out of 42 seats, reducing the communists to an insignificant 24 seats in the parliament [which is the all India tally of the left parties], was unforeseen. Thi...

Is going nearshore a strategy which will help lift the fortunes of the embattled Indian BPO industry? Seems so, as one can clearly notice the rising public sentiment against offshoring of jobs when the domestic opportunities are drying up. Earlier, the economic logic that this keeps the cost of service cheap was good enough; but today an organization employing overseas workers may appear insensitive and overtly motivated by profit, not a good thing when such public goodwill is so necessary for ongoing existence of the business. We have noticed that there was a premium attached to 'UK Call Centres' even before the recession hit. However, most people did not care. Though this was a slightly more sensitive issue than buying Chinese toys in the supermarket - manufacturing seemed remote and people preferred lower prices on goods - this was okay. However, as the recession bites and everyone suddenly knows someone who got affected, this uneasiness about services being offered by ov...

A Linkedin group discussion pointed me to a new possibility - that Amazon actually targeting their new version of Kindle, which is supposed to come out with a bigger screen and better everything, to the textbook market. Yes, rather than the newspaper market. I have not seen a Kindle yet - this has not been released in the UK - but read about this on readwriteweb . I know of the talk, mostly on CNBC - that Amazon Kindle will do to books what iPod has done to Music - and I am waiting eagerly to lay my hands on one. However, targeting at the textbook market is an interesting shift of strategy, and this made me write about this immediately. Accordingly, this post is not about Amazon Kindle. I have not seen it yet, so I can not comment whether it is worth its $300 price tag. I did think the idea is novel, a new generation ebook reader which comes with wireless connectivity and newspaper subscriptions to download. I think the newspaper men also saw this as their deliverance. I read Wal...

I am reading Howard Gardner - Five Minds For The Future - where he talks about the essential abilities that will be required in the coming years. Somewhat similar in theme with Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind , this book does not relate to Professor Gardner's celebrated theory of multiple intelligences, and deals with human abilities and approaches. To sum up the argument, Professor Gardner lists five essential abilities - (a) to have a discipline, which implies a disciplined way of thinking and looking at the world; (b) to be able to synthesize, which indicates an ability to integrate disparate information and operate at an aggregate level; (c) to be creative, which is about the ability to see new possibilities and pursue it with a discipline; (d) to respect, as the world becomes diverse and our ability to respect and accept differences become critical; and (e) to conduct ethically, to set a moral standard of behaviour and adhere to it. Indeed, one can see the need for a spec...

Recession is here. Almost depression is here. I am using the definition - when your neighbour loses his job, it's recession; when you lose yours, it's depression. I am almost there. So, currently, the world is a fairly bleak place. Devoid of hope first time since Pandora opened her box, almost. We see a fun cycle everywhere: every time a report is published, every time we look at the reality, our heart sinks and share market crashes; then we let it pass, crawl back in hope and let share market rise again. Then, it crashes again. So, Britain now has record number of bankruptcies. Chrysler has closed its factories and have finally gone into Chapter 11. GM will go, possibly, in a couple of months. Car production in Britain has dropped by 51%. Unemployment in the United States is in double digit percentage, so it is in Britain and rest of Europe. My bank helpfully informed me that the interest rate on my savings account has been reduced from 0.5% to 0%. so, doom and gloom everywher...

I am waiting for Chris Anderson's new book, FREE, which is scheduled to release in Britain on the 2 nd of July. Obviously, I, like countless others, found the idea of Long Tail, the last big idea from Chris Anderson, lovable and this changed the way I looked at business possibilities. Countless niche-s making a comeback, and I supplemented it with an interesting study of Microtrends . I obviously read the article last year on WIRED where Chris introduced the idea of FREE. [ Read it here ] Intriguing idea, to say the least, and indeed, if you are incredulous, look at Google. Just that we don't feel comfortable about it. Even the idea that most of world's information may become free does not make consultants comfortable. Does not help the celebrities too, or the newspapers, which are struggling to become unfree . So, it is not an idea people are going to love. But, then, as we know, this is happening. The question is - can this happen in a big scale? Chris Anderson obviously...

I had a relatively productive Monday, which is always good for a crucial week. I have noticed that I work in bursts and a good start helps - as I would have covered a lot of ground by that. I had a long awaited meeting yesterday and if I can follow-up on the ideas and execute things, this meeting will help me a lot to restructure our operations in India. Critically, I have realized that we have to reposition our English offering in India, and offer this more as a skill to complement other objectives - jobs, immigration, professional studies - rather than by itself. We are working to create an international employability course, which covers the critical employment skills, but then we need to do more. I have in mind the international accounting qualifications, which is quite popular among Indian graduates, but given that the accounting training is always tricky, one has to steer clear of regulatory roadblocks to offer such training. Yesterday's meeting will help me to create an int...

Narayana Murthy makes an interesting point in an interview he recently gave - he talks about the culture of execution in India and says our Brahminical Tradition undermines the culture of getting things done. I shall not repeat his words here, but would rather write a personal reflection. I know this observation is very true. Everyone living abroad knows this actually, when you watch how many things you are expected to do by yourself. When I came to Britain, I was soon struggling because I never fixed the electricity at home, never cooked a proper meal and never fixed the water supply before. Couple of years down the line, I had this awkward idea of creating a DIY website for India and I was laughed at, and eventually discouraged, because 'no one who would buy things on the Internet would ever want to do the jobs themselves'. I had the same issue when I was setting up operations in India in my current job. The first things I brought for the office was an electric kettle and...

As I think about the reality of doing a year in the university, one thing surely scares me -the prospect of writing examinations. I was always bad at exams. I have done much better in class but disappointed my tutors in examinations. Truth be told - that had nothing to do with my knowledge or my ability to comprehend. I was not disciplined, an adolescent habit which I corrected since; and I hated doing anything because I have to, a character trait which remained. Whatever is my personal predicament, I think exams are meaningless, a very last century thing. Why make people memorize and write things when everything can be googled? I was reading Howard Gardner [ Five Minds for the Future ] and he makes the point that memorizing comes from the age people did not have enough books. Because it was costly to have a complete work of Shakespeare at home, one would learn to recite him from memory. Because you could not afford to buy an Encyclopedia Britannica , encyclopedic memory was at a premi...

Oracle has made the announcement to acquire Sun, for $7.4 billion dollars in Cash. This is a bit of news. Obviously what dominated the tech circles for last few weeks is the possibility of a Sun-IBM merger, which made sense technology-wise. Till Sun turned IBM down, it looked like a done deal, and it is now emerging why Sun was so confident in the first place. Hopefully, this deal will go through. After the two failed headline mergers, that of Microsoft and Yahoo and of Sun and IBM, one would wait to see this through before making any noises. But, the two companies seem better fit than the other pairs here. Sun and Oracle worked side by side in many projects, and I am sure they are defined the common enemy above everything else. Besides, Oracle and Larry Ellison seem particularly adept at pulling through successful mergers. Oracle has managed to pull through a particularly bitter acquisition battle with Peoplesoft , and followed this up with a successful acquisition of Siebel , both of...

Story as appeared on bbc.co.uk Website ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adobe has secured a deal to put its Flash software into many of the chips that go inside TVs and set-top boxes. It will enable developers and content providers to create applications to deliver web-based content such as news, weather and share prices to TV screens. Flash will be included on most chips -those made by Broadcom, Intel, NXP and STMicroelectronics - but the deal does not cover TVs made by Sony and Samsung. The first applications using Flash are expected to hit TV sets early in 2010. Sony and Samsung already have a number of connected TVs on the market, but they are using Yahoo's rich media platform of widgets instead of Flash. More than 420 million TVs, set-top boxes, and media players are expected to ship globally in the next three years and increasingly they are capable of being connected to the net. Adobe hopes it can get Flash inside many of thos...