Happy New Year

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year. I always loved leap years. They hvae been very kind to me. Lets see what it has in store for me in 2008.

I know I have been slacking when it comes to blogging for the last three to four months and one of my new year resolutions is to get back to that habit. The worrying factor is that my reading has come down as well and that is never a good thing. Need to catch up on the 1000+ posts in my reader.

Have a good time and enjoy your new year smartly and safely.

Open IOS??

I can’t believe what I just read now. Is Cisco really serious about opening up IOS? Is Don Procter insane?

I think this is just a gimmick to counter the move of Juniper who went ahead and opened their OS. The main reason why I think they won’t do so is security. Internet infrastructure is too serious to be opened up to geeks who could bring down our systems. Serious questions will be raised by consumers.

What do you think?

Proto.in and some ground realities

Even as we are ready to usher in the next Proto.in ( and trust me, it is one heck of a show), there are some realities that needs attention. I happened to read a very honest post by Sujai Karampuri that pretty much symbolizes where we are.

I covered Sloka in the first edition of Proto and I was very impressed that an Indian company could innovate in the Wi-max space. Here is a real product company and it is disappointing to see this state of affairs.

Vijay and I have had a lot of conversations on the so called Web 2.0 and social networking, mobile gaming facades ( and I am not against you guys). These are imitations at best, not innovations. If I am there at Proto.in, I will be asking these questions. Wasn’t Proto.in supposed to get these startups (Sloka, Unleash Networks etc) closer to the VC community? Are the VCs who attend/present clueless about Telecom? Do the VCs have anything in mind when they come over to Proto.in?

Sometimes the tough questions have to be asked!!!

United They Stand

Kind of old news. But it is great to see three top Telecom guys come together and build an unified infrastructure. Now if only BSNL plays ball with them, 99% of India would be covered and would enable further reduction of prices.

The biggest losers would be the infrastructure providers like the Alcatels and Ericssons since instead of having three customers they probably will have only one. Deals are going to be more fair since the vendor has to be flexible across the management of Bharti, Vodafone, Hutch.

What I would like to see though is unified customer service, billing etc. There should be one outlet where I can pay my bills whoever the service provider is, I should be able to reach one contact center etc etc. With number portability almost a certainity now, it is a good move by these three Telecom guys to usurp some market share from BSNL and probably even Reliance.