EnjoyTech

Nokia announced mobile email service, Mail on Ovi, currently targeting the emerging markets . Nokia has had great success in selling reliable and inexpensive handsets in the emerging markets. In the countries such as India the consumers never used the voice mail on their landlines and went through the mobile revolution to use SMS as a primary asynchronous communication medium. Many of these users are not active email users, not at least on their mobile devices. If Nokia manages to provide ubiquitous user experience using Ovi to bridge email and SMS on not-so-advanced-data-networks it can cause disruption by satisfying asynchronous communication needs of hundreds of thousands of users. The smartphones would certainly benefit out of this offering and give Blackberry a good run for their money. Nokia completed the Symbian acquisition that makes them a company whose OS powers 50% of all the smartphones in the world. Symbian is still a powerful operating system powering more than 200 milli

A couple of days back Zoho announced that the applications created using Zoho Creator can now be deployed on the Google cloud . On the same day Google announced their tentative pricing scheme to buy resources on their cloud beyond the free daily quota. We seem to have entered into the second wave of the cloud computing. Many on-demand application vendors, who rely on non-cloud based infrastructure, have struggled to be profitable since the infrastructure cost is way too high. These vendors still have value-based pricing for their SaaS portfolio and cannot pass on the high infrastructure cost to their customers. The first wave of the cloud computing provided a nice utility model to the customers who wanted to SaaS up their applications without investing into the infrastructure and charge their customers a fixed subscription. As I observe the second wave of the cloud computing a couple of patterns have emerged. Moving to the cloud, one piece at time: The vendors have started moving the

Steve Portigal sent me an article that he wrote in the Interactions magazine asking for my feedback. Unfortunately the magazine is behind a walled garden and would require a subscription but if you reach out to Steve he should be able to share the article with you. In the absence of the original article I will take liberty to summarize it. Steve has described how companies generally go about making stuff in his “incomplete” framework: Be a Genius and Get It Right: One-person show to get it right such as a vacuum cleaner by James Dyson. Be a Genius and Get It Wrong: One-person show to get it wrong such as Dean Kamen’s Segway. Don’t Ask Customers If This Is What They Want: NBA changing the basketball design from leather to synthetic microfiber without asking the players Do Whatever Any Customer Asks: Implementing the changes as requested by the customers exactly as is without understanding the real needs. Understand Needs and Design to Them: Discovery of the fact that women shove

Nick has a long post about Tim O'Reilly not getting the cloud . He questions Tim's assumptions on Web 2.0, network effects, power laws, and cloud computing . Both of them have good points. O'Reilly comments on the cloud in the context of network effects: "Cloud computing, at least in the sense that Hugh seems to be using the term, as a synonym for the infrastructure level of the cloud as best exemplified by Amazon S3 and EC2, doesn't have this kind of dynamic." Nick argues: "The network effect is indeed an important force shaping business online, and O'Reilly is right to remind us of that fact. But he's wrong to suggest that the network effect is the only or the most powerful means of achieving superior market share or profitability online or that it will be the defining formative factor for cloud computing." Both of them also argue about applying power laws to the cloud computing. I am with Nick on the power laws but strongly disagree with