My fortnightly column A Dose of IT Kapil Khandelwal QuoteUnquote with KK www.kapilkhandelwal.com

1. c m y k c m y k
Bengaluru ●● Monday ●● 5 July 2010
Apple says
iPhones
overstate
signal
strength.
12
Technomics
Dell
addresses
issues with
faulty PC parts
on its blog.
Google will
raise pay to
cover a tax
for same sex
employees.
DDCC
bITs
Nokia aims to
be the best
with Symbian
N
okia is committed to
get back the No.1
position in smart-
phones and plans to use no
other software than Sym-
bian and Linux MeeGo,
head of its mobile solutions
unit said on Friday. “It's my
aim to ensure Nokia stays
as the market and intellec-
tual leader in creating the
digital world,” Anssi Van-
joki wrote in a blog on
Nokia's website.” There is
no denying, that as a chal-
lenger now, we have a fight
on our hands. The first bat-
tle is to bring you products
and services you will want
to own and use.” The
world's top cellphone
maker warned in mid-June
second-quarter sales and
profits at its key phones
unit would be weaker than
expected as it struggles to
compete against Apple’s
iPhone. Nokia also said
2010 profit margin at the
phone business would be
weaker. Vanjoki noted it
would be a tough task to
make Nokia the leader in
smartphones again, but
added the company has all
the assets “to produce
killer smartphones and
market-changing mobile
computers.” — Reuters
PAUL TOMASCH
NEW YORK
July 4: As Rupert Murdoch,
Bob Iger and other media
honchos assemble in Sun
Valley next week for some
fly-fishing or white water
rafting, spirits should be
brighter than a year ago:
stock prices are up by about
a third, after all.
That alone provides the
currency and freedom to get
down to the real business of
the media summit, one that
boutique investment bank
Allen & Co annually hosts
in the shadow of the Pioneer
Mountains in Idaho. For the
past 27 years, the Sun Valley
Lodge has been the spot
where blockbuster media
deals have been hatched.
Even in 2009, when adver-
tising revenues nosedived,
Comcast Corp's co-founder
Ralph Roberts had the
moxie to talk to General
Electric Co Chief Executive
Jeff Immelt about a deal for
NBC Universal.
This year, it could be Walt
Disney Co CEO Iger who
finds himself center stage
amid speculation he may
shop ABC -- something Dis-
ney has denied. Or veteran
dealer Barry Diller from
IAC/InterActiveCorp, who
has said he would look at a
deal involving his Ask.com
search engine.
New media hotshots like
Facebook, LinkedIn, and
Zynga — on nearly every-
one's wish list — are also
expected to attend. As are
Google Inc, Time Warner
Inc, News Corp, all flush
with cash.
“You would think this is
going to be a pretty exciting
Allen event,” said Mike
Vorhaus, managing director
of consulting firm Frank N.
Magid Associates. “Funda-
mentally, the people at that
place, every single one of
them, is worth 30 percent or
40 percent more than they
were a year ago.”
Still, once they step off
their private jets and settle in
fireside, media chiefs may
not be much in the mood for
dealmaking, given jittery
financial markets and fears
the U.S. is heading into a
double-dip recession.
Jonathan Knee, a media
banker at Evercore Partners
Inc, said most executives
remain “gun-shy” and any
dealmaking would likely
involve cable channels or
modest new media plays,
rather than the blockbuster
takeovers.
“The brief euphoria of the
beginning of the year has
been tempered dramatically
both by the recent volatility
in the economy and even the
quarterly results,” said
Knee.
“People are glad it's not the
bloodbath they thought it
might be last year, but I
don't think that any believes
they have permanently
dodged a bullet.” — Reuters
To stop a thief, a Rs 10 tag
At Sun Valley, moods are brighter than before
Did a speeding car just jump out of my cellphone?ANNA EISENBERG
NEW YORK
July 4: Smartphones are
getting smarter. Now some
new models even offer
games or television broad-
casts in three dimensions —
and you don’t need special
glasses to see the show.
Traditional 3-D technolo-
gy used for movie screens
and television superimposes
or alternates two views,
using filters or shutters in
the glasses to select a view
for each eye. This creates an
illusion of depth. But a new
generation of devices, many
of them hand-held and now
in prototype, dispense with
the pesky glasses. Instead,
they use optics and other
technology built into the
display to steer one view
directly to the left eye, and
the other view to the right.
Glasses-free 3-D effects
are easier to produce on a
small, portable screen than
on a large, stationary one,
said Paul Semenza, a senior
vice president at the market
researcher DisplaySearch in
Santa Clara, Calif. That’s
because the viewer can easi-
ly adjust the angle and posi-
tion of the display by hand
to take best advantage of the
3-D view.
“You can put yourself in
the sweet spot,” he said.
“That easy, intuitive adjust-
ment viewers can make is
one of the reasons that this
technology will probably
succeed in the mobile
space.”
The devices offer extra
drama for sports broadcasts.
Footballs or baseballs “seem
to pop out of the display as
through they were headed
right toward you,” said
Chris Chinnock, president
of Insight Media, a market-
ing research firm in Nor-
walk, Conn.
On mobile devices, 3-D
works well for advertising,
he said. “The 3-D process
can throw the spotlight very
effectively on an icon or
product,” he said. Cans of
soda, for example, can
emerge dramatically from
the background.
Samsung Electronics
introduced its 3-D W960
touch-screen phone in May
in South Korea, and cus-
tomers are already using it
to watch TV shows and
music videos, said Eunju
Hwang, a spokeswoman for
the company in Seoul. The
retail price is about $150,
but prices may vary among
carriers, Ms. Hwang said.
Other companies have also
announced glasses-free
mobile 3-D displays, Mr.
Semenza said. At a video
game industry trade show
last month in Los Angeles,
Nintendo, for example,
demonstrated a 3-D portable
game device that requires no
special eyewear. Nokia has
demonstrated a 3-D cell-
phone, he said, and Hitachi
is selling a 3-D phone in
Japan. The market for glass-
es-free, or “auto-stereoscop-
ic,” 3-D is small right now,
Mr. Semenza said, but will
grow rapidly as the technol-
ogy is incorporated into lap-
tops, notebooks, digital
cameras, camcorders, digi-
tal picture frames and game
devices. The company is
forecasting that about 1.7
million glasses-free 3-D
units will be sold worldwide
in 2011, including about 1.3
million 3-D mobile phones.
— NYT
A 3-D phone from
Samsung.
Google to buy
travel software
company
G
oogle Inc plans to
buy one of the
Web's key providers
of airline travel software
for $700 million, potential-
ly raising new antitrust
concerns for the world's
largest Internet search
engine. Google said on
Thursday that it had agreed
to buy privately-owned
ITA Software, in a move
that Google said would
allow it to improve the way
consumers find flight and
fare information online.
“What we're going to do is
build new flight search
tools that focus on end-
users,” Google Chief Exec-
utive Officer Eric Schmidt
said in a conference call
with analysts and members
of the press on Thursday.
He said that Google had no
plans to sell airline tickets
to consumers and that
Google planned to honor
all existing agreements that
ITA has with its partners .
— Reuters
3G in modern
healthcare
KAPIL KHANDELWAL
3
G is a mobile
telephony cellular
system that follows
on from the 2G mobile
communication system,
is extending its capabili-
ties through a new com-
munication infrastruc-
ture. The name "3G"
implies a new genera-
tion. However the gap
between 2G and 3G is
not as marked as it was
between 1G and 2G with
the shift from analogue
to digital. I am wonder-
ing why did the telecom
companies spend INR
67,710 crores bidding
for the 3G licenses at the
recently held auctions?
To me this seems a bit of
a paradox. Smart doc-
tors, healthcare ICT
players, entrepreneurs
and consumer's consider
this, the best business
models, as per the futur-
ist George Gilder and
the author of the Gilder's
Law (Gilder's Law says
bandwidth - the capacity
to transmit information
across fixed or wireless
telecommunications net-
works - will double
every six months), waste
the era's cheapest
resources in order to
conserve the era's most
expensive resources.
When steam became
cheaper than horses, the
smartest businesses used
steam and spared hor-
sexs. Today the cheapest
resources are computer
power and bandwidth.
Both are getting cheaper
by the year (at the pace
of Moore's Law).
Google is a successful
business because it
wastes computer power-
-it has over quarter mil-
lion servers powering its
search engine--while it
conserves its dearest
resource, people.
Google has fewer than
10,000 employees, yet it
generates $25 billion in
(current run rate) sales.
So do we consider some
radical shifts in the way
healthcare will be deliv-
ered in the future? Some
of this is already under-
way in the offshoring
and real-time healthcare
delivery models over the
web or 3G. We have
doctors like Dr. Kalyan-
pur in Bangalore who
have leveraged this in
creating teleradiology
delivery solutions to
hospitals on the other
part of the globe-a pure
radiologist labour cost
arbitration model.
The Airtels and Aircels
of India who have
emerged winners in the
3G bid will develop dif-
ferent services based on
location information as
killer applications for
3G. These services
could range from those
that support health,
transport or entertain-
ment to those that sup-
port data-mining to
obtain information for
non-solicited communi-
cations. The use of loca-
tion-based 3G health
services is set to become
an important part of
healthcare delivery.
Positioning technolo-
gies could make it possi-
ble to track vulnerable
individuals in real time
to ensure their safety.
However, post 26x11,
fear of terrorist attacks
may lead people to
restrict exchange their
privacy for a feeling of
security. In the short to
medium term, Airtels
and Aircels of the world
stimulate 3G commer-
cialisation so that they
can evolve towards 4G,
consolidating 3G as a
backhaul infrastructure
supporting a multitude
of co-existing applica-
tions, and continuously
incorporating emerging
standards and technolo-
gies,. Coming back
Gilder's Law, the cost of
band width in India is
becoming cheaper by
the year. Inspite of hefty
cost of acquiring 3G
licenses, Airtels and
Aircels of the world may
be forced to sell their 3G
data services virtually
free or bundle them with
their core mobile offer-
ings. I am not sure when
the Airtels and Aircels
of the world will break
even or really make
profits on their 3G
license bid for the cir-
cles in India. A Winners'
Waste! Smart doctors
and healthcare providers
can use this cheaper
bandwidth and connec-
tivity resources to con-
serve their costly clini-
cal capabilities in
rolling virtual 3A (Any-
time, Anywhere, Any-
thing) doctors, consulta-
tion and allied health
services and 3G would
enhance such health
applications. For exam-
ple keeping a patient in a
hospital bed costs over
INR 20,000 a week
whereas caring for them
at home costs a fraction
of around INR 3,000 a
week. This represents a
substantial margin for
anyone providing a 3G-
based health monitoring
service. Models like
these are already work-
ing in the NHS in the
UK. With 3G, Gilder's
Paradox is already
working in healthcare!
Welcome to 3G doc-
tors and health without
boundaries!
Kapil Khandelwal is Director and CEO,
EquNev Capital, a niche investment bank-
ing and advisory services firm
and a leading healthcare and information
communication technology (ICT) expert.
A dose
of IT
A dose
of IT
Obama doles
out Broadband
grants
U
.S. President Barack
Obama announced
on Friday nearly
$800 million in loans and
grants for the build-out of
broadband networks to
reach homes, schools and
hospitals. The grants and
loans, which will be
matched by another $200
million in private invest-
ment, is part of Obama's
roughly $800 billion feder-
al stimulus package, which
includes $7.2 billion for
broadband expansion proj-
ects. Obama said the 66
new infrastructure projects
will directly create 5,000
jobs — Reuters
SANGEETHA CHENGAPPA
DC | BENGALURU
July 4: Even as wafer thin
margins keep Indian retail-
ers on their toes, the rising
instances of shoplifting and
employee theft are forcing
them to focus on technology
solutions that enhance their
operational efficiences and
combat theft without adding
to labour costs. While Asian
retailers lose 1.2 per cent of
their revenue to employee
theft, shoplifting, cash theft,
financial fraud and internal
collusion, Indian retailers
lose 3.1 per cent of their rev-
enue to shoplifting, theft by
employees, administrative
errors and vendor fraud,
reveals the 2008 Global
Retail Theft Barometer,
Centre for Retail Research.
Vasanth Kumar, Executive
Director, Max Retail India,
which has a 26-store foot-
print across the country and
current turnover of Rs 200
crore says “We incur rev-
enue losses primarily due to
shoplifting and employee
theft, and in some instances,
due to vendor fraud and bar-
code errors. However, we
have managed to keep our
revenue shrinkage levels
below 1 per cent because we
have deployed EAS (Elec-
tronic Article Surveillance)
solutions such as, EAS tags
for all our merchandise
including shirts, tops,
trousers, fashion accessories
etc. These tags have inbuilt
sensors that trigger an alarm
from the EAS pedestals that
are built into all our store
entrance/exit points, if a
customer walks out with the
intention of stealing.”
Max Retail sources these
EAS tags from the Indian
arm of $18 billion ADT, a
division of Tyco Internation-
al, the world’s largest elec-
tronic security company.
“The EAS tags cost
between Rs 10 to Rs 150
each and EAS pedestals
which start from Rs 50,000
and cost more if it is bun-
dled with video surveillance
and video analytics solu-
tions are well worth the the
investment” added Vasanth.
After working on a distri-
bution model in India for
over 13 years, ADT made a
strategic decision to invest
$500 million over the next 2
years in emerging markets
including India, Brazil,
Middle East and China, with
India getting the lion's share
of the investment.
Beginning with the estab-
lishment of the Centre of
Excellence in November
2008 at Bengaluru which
currently has a team size of
100 engineers, ADT is
working on solutions ‘for
India in India.’
“We have created India-
specific EAS tags which are
slim and can be stitched into
the saree and remains hid-
den from sight behind the
price label. We have also
created smaller, sleeker,
reusable, stick-on strip tags
which go into high-end
packaged merchandise like
kids toys.
They are also used on
expensive perfume/liquor
bottles, Gilette razors,
DVDs/CDs, purses etc.
Source tagging at the factory
itself is gaining immense
popularity with our retail
customers here. Overhead
thermal sensors that sense
human temperature in a par-
ticular area, informs retail-
ers where customers linger
on longer, so that they can
place their merchandise in
those areas” said Ramesh
Jayaraman, General Manag-
er of ADT India.
More important, the com-
pany makes sure that specif-
ic tags work with specific
detachers, which makes it
difficult for people to break
them apart.
Other interesting applica-
tions for EAS tags in India
for ADT are libraries to tag
books, 3D movie glasses
with embedded tags pre-
venting theft, and BPOs
which lose 30 per cent of
their high-end headsets to
employee theft every month.
“We are currently looking
to develop EAS-RFID solu-
tions, where EAS will take
care of theft prevention and
RFID will help to capture
data of articles such as jew-
ellery for instance.
Data on a jewel’s gross/net
weight, its price, wastage,
VAT charges etc is incorpo-
rated in a tamper-proof
RFID tag which the counter
salesman scans and reads
through his handheld PDA
reader in a few seconds,
enabling customers to
quickly browse through an
entire range of ornaments in
a few minutes. RFID solu-
tions can also help to sub-
stantially reduce stock rec-
onciliation time, allowing
for better customer service
by staff in jewellery stores.
Currently, the manual
process of stock reconcilia-
tion every morning and
evening takes anywhere
between 35-40 hours per
week” added Ramesh.
The company is also devel-
oping wireless video moni-
toring solutions for cus-
tomers that have offices in
remote locations across the
country and battery backup
for devices which work on
ADT's Intrusion Detection
Systems (IDS).
“In India electricity works
in different phases, so if a
chain of stores in multiple
locations works on different
phases, we have to build a
system that will enable our
IDS to work across all phas-
es” explained Ramesh.
He pointed out that Indian
enterprise customers use
ADT's Electronic Access
Control (EAC) solutions pri-
marily for time and atten-
dance logging unlike in the
US, where it is used primari-
ly for integrated access con-
trol within one building and
between several buildings of
an enterprise in that city,
country and all its global
offices. “We see a huge
opportunity in India for our
solutions ranging from anti-
theft systems, EAS solu-
tions, fire alarms, emer-
gency breathing apparatus
to video surveillance sys-
tems, security alarm moni-
toring, electronic access
control and fire suppression
systems” he said.
While ADT has identified
several target verticals, its
focus currently is on Infra-
structure, (Power, Oil &
Gas, Airports), Commercial,
including office buildings,
financial institutions,
IT/ITES, Pharma and Con-
tract manufacturing facili-
ties. Until last year, the
Engineers in the Centre of
Excellence in Bengaluru
worked on global solutions
95 per cent of the time.
Today, 30 per cent of their
time is spent developing
local solutions. “We are
looking to acquire 5-10
Indian companies in the
electronics security space,
for which we have set aside
$2 billion. I am hiring a per-
son who will come on board
next month. He will dedi-
cate all his time to M&As”
said Ramesh. “We will ramp
up our manpower, Indianise
existing solutions and get
into local assembly to
reduce cost to service the
price-sensitive Indian mar-
ket” added Ramesh.
Ramesh Jayaraman, General Manager of ADT India, displays strip tags in his left hand and EAS tags in his right
hand. —R Samuel
News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch
at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council on ''Rebuilding
Global Prosperity'' on November 17, 2009 in
Washington.
india
innovates