Project Discussions - Open Thread

Update: Evening Saturday 29-oct

Sir,
There are some demographics questions that I was planning to use from the previous surveys (not reinventing the wheel). Will that be a problem for turnitin?
Regards
M

My response:

Hi M,

We're not using turnitin to check similarities across submissions. Its just that LMS doesn;t seem to have an electronic dropbox facility. Go ahead and borrow from external sources as appropriate. No problem.

Sudhir

Hi All,

Shall compile project related Q&A here. Pls feel free to shoot away.

Meanwhile, spied a rather pertinent piece in the Economic Times yesterday that seems quite relevant to the project and also to some of the topics we've covered in MKTR - notably demand estimation & market sizing.

The Age of low cost

The idea is that low cost computing and connectivity devices have come of age both in terms of installed base and in terms of critical support to break through the chicken-and-egg cycle of "enough-apps to excite market development  versus enough market to excite apps development". I strongly recommend a thorough read from the project and also the course POV.

Here are some nice excerpts:

It took three decades for computing devices in India to reach the 50 million installed mark. The next 50 million will take a tenth of that time. Even then,India with a base of 50 million personal computers now would lag behind China (300 million) and the US (394 million).There is still plenty for room to grow.

Hmmm. Think of the structural breaks and trend upheavels in the sales curve from 1980 to 2015. The growth will likely slow and plateu now but still...

Yet, he's visibly excited about the 1,750 tablet,recently launched by the government and the slew of new computing devices Asus,Samsung,HCL,Reliance and others have rolled out in the last two months.Almost all of them are available around the 10,000 price point."They are good for a web based lifestyle,"he says.Sonali Garg,19,a Chandigarh based Commerce student who shares a laptop with two other siblings is also eyeing these new devices."We can buy tablets with saved up pocket money,"she says.At far away Agartala,20-year-old Bishnesh Das fancies them too."These gadgets will do to computing what sub 3,000 phones did to mobile communications,"he says.

The app side is no less exciting. From obvious uses in the education space to less obvious ones like agriculture. Here are some teasers...

Netbooks for text books - that's the switch technology training company NIIT has done in the last six months for all students in its premier GNIIT course.In the next six months it will migrate all its courseware onto netbooks and tablets."Students won't carry books,but tablets to class,"says Vijay Thadani,CEO,NIIT. [...]
S Sivakumar,chief executive,agri business,says crop management advice can be personalized to individual farmers,if they can video or photo shoot the field conditions and transmit to experts via tablets."Through use of video/photo transmission,price negotiation process can be instant and more effective.Order aggregation for farm inputs will help in streamlining logistics and reduce costs,"he adds.Mass adoption,says Tuli of Datawind,will happen when such devices help users generate business."Today a phone is a commerce tool for all segments of users.Same will happen with computers.When mobile phones hit the market no one thought your neighbourhood small merchant or a rickshaw puller will buy them.Today they all do."

More on how costs have fallen in real terms (the supply curve shifts rightwards bigtime) and the stellar effect that's having on sales and thereby, demand:

More applications and content will make low-cost computing more relevant to consumers.But cost is crucial too.Many expect Mukesh Ambani to be a game changer.ET recently reported that Reliance Industries will unveil a new range of 4G-enabled tablets at 3,000.Such a price point would have been ridiculously low even one year ago.But prices of components like the hard disk,RAM etc have come down enabling manufacturers to come out with innovative offerings.Says NIIT's Thadani: "The real breakthrough has come from Moore's Law: processor power doubles every 18 months and costs come down.There's more power packed in each new generation of computers."Alok Bharadwaj,the president of,Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT) attributes low cost computers to economies of scale and an average decline of 15% a year in component prices.Adds Apratim Sharma,country product manager,Asus India: "We observe 15-20 % yearly drop in cost of same hardware'.You can get a hard disk that went into high end laptops 2-3 years back at lower costs in netbooks or tablets now,he adds.Asus just launched a 10 inch net book at 9,999 with a 250 GB hard disk,1GB RAM,web cam,WiFi and Bluetooth."Three years ago a similar device would have cost double,"he adds.NIIT's Thadani still remembers the first PC they bought back in the 1990s.It cost 1.5 lakh.It had 10 MB hard disk and 5 MB RAM."Now,you get a far more richer device for less than 10,000,"he adds.

That's enough for now I guess. Read it all. Shall add updates in chronological order at the top of this thread (more recent on top).

Sudhir