About Network Neutrality And Walled Gardens
The network neutrality debate is an exceedingly complex one. At its heart, network neutrality aims to ensure that all services are treated neutrally on a network, which is a noble-enough aim, but one that is not realistic if you know how the internet functions in the real world.
Behind the scenes, on any network, connecting from point A to point B is never as simple as finding the shortest route between the two. Depending on a number of factors, even machines on the same network may or may not take an entire roundtrip around the globe to get talking to each other.
This, by itself, renders half of the network neutrality argument pointless: the network has never been neutral, nor will it ever be due to a variety of factors.
Where network neutrality does have a role to play is in terms of exclusion than differently priced service levels.
If an open network (like a DSL connection) can ensure that all services are available on it on a best-effort basis on it at a baseline level, it can be deemed neutral.
There should not be a problem if the ISP should choose to negotiate peering with a content company that allows it faster delivery/access from point A to point B.
The crucial difference is that the companies are allowed the freedom to negotiate a premium service level between themselves, while allowing the baseline to continue as it is for everyone.
If the ISP were to degrade baseline services based on a lack of payment between the ISP and a service provider, that would mean that network is no longer neutral to all players.
This post was largely prompted by the recent bits of news about Airtel's promotion of YouTube's IPL stream to a 2mbit link and the walled garden internet access on the MTN mobile network.
Walled gardens don't really get into the entire network neutrally debate as long as they are not promoted as an open network. If you do advertise connectivity only to a certain bunch of products, it is fine by me.
You get what you pay for. As it has been the case with Airtel Live so far. What I would have a problem with is if they advertise an open network and deny access to other sites.
Read MoreStarting Up: How Hard Is It Really?
After being out of a regular job for well over a year now and now slowly moving into what can be called doing a start-up, I have to say the feeling is very similar to the year 2000 when I started working for the first time in my life. It was the fag end of the dot com boom and the onset of the bubble being burst at that time. The feeling was eerily similar — high potential, high paying domain having had the rug pulled from underneath its feet. The digital domain in India feels no different at the moment. There is paucity of ideas, there are a handful of winners and there is an overwhelming stench of defeat and listlessness. A lot of the feeling is quite justified — we needed a significant course correction, one that was brought about by the unintended consequence of the global financial crisis — but a lot of it is not justified either.
In the midst of multi-million dollar valuations, payouts that dreams are made of and other assorted vanities of the charmed world we inhabit, it is quite often easy to lose perspective of the larger picture in life. A lot of the thoughts behind this post were triggered after reading this post, on how difficult it is to do a start-up. For people accustomed to a particular lifestyle, going from a regular salaried life to doing something on your own can be a difficult proposition. Then again, how difficult are the things mentioned in that list? A vast majority of the world's population live without even the downgraded lifestyle mentioned in the post. For that matter, most can't even dream to have that downgraded lifestyle. It is as simple as that.
See, I am not someone whose heart bleeds for every poor person in this world, but I don't also have the illusion that what we are doing in terms of start-up is some epic struggle. A lot of people in the world work 13-14 hours a day under the most trying conditions without even knowing the words IPO or what an exit would mean. Yes, most of them are not creating the next Twitter, Yahoo! or Google, but if sacrifices were all it took to do a start up the world would be teeming with success stories. Yes, there is a lot of risk associated with doing a start up, but it is not the end of the world, nor is it earth-shattering. For most parts, it is like everything else in life with an associated risk factor that you try to negate to the extent you can negate.
The larger point to the post is the sense of gloom out there because funding has dried up, VCs are not spending a great deal of money in the digital sphere and there are a lesser number of people looking to break out on their own right now, compared to two years ago. It is not that the opportunity has gone away with the disappearance of the gung-ho sound bites. The opportunity is still there, but the opportunity to make a quick buck is certainly not there anymore. The joyride is over for most, but India has never been a nation of joyrides. It has taken a lot of balls to make things happen here, having not had it easy has not stopped many so far.
Think about it – someone like me, who belongs to a strictly middle class upbringing is the son of parents who earned much less all of their lives than I did in my last job. Yet, they managed to 'innovate' enough, even with limited cash flow, to buy land, build a house, a cycle, scooter and a car (yes, the Maruti 800!) educate two kids and still have something left to take care of themselves in their old age. If going lean for months on end is what a start-up is like, there is a whole generation of middle class parents who are successful entrepreneurs. And better still, they did it in an environment where opportunities were scarce and the going was tough. But you don't hear much about their supreme lifestyle sacrifice.
Then there are the entrepreneurs — ranging from the millionaire panwallah next door to the numerous businessmen out there. They have lived thorough the license raj and lot of them have prospered, as many as those who have burnt. You don't hear them speaking much about the tough times either. Risk is a part of living. There is risk in getting out of bed too, for, as the Gauls would tell you, the sky may fall on your heads. Everyday people invest, innovate, transact and follow the entrepreneurial spirit in the normal world in different ways. The chap who collects garbage from my house makes 3000 rupees a day reselling all that he collects. A local money lender I know gets returns on his principal that most investors cannot even dream of.
They all have risks associated with what they do, but we seldom hear about them in blogs or tweets. As I am writing this, it has been a constant struggle to not attack the start up ecosystem for all its flaws. But what I will say is that the opportunity is still out there. Yes, the way we have gone about it so far has largely been shown as a dead end, but that is where you need to correct our course and move in a different direction. Do not give up. We are a country that has come this far because of our ability to persist and do 'jugaad'. We are the nation of the imperfects and the chaotic. It is tough going at the moment, but ignore the easily trotted out stories of gloom or delight. It is time to do what we do best – put our heads down and work quietly away.
Read MoreMangling Data in Elgg
Typically, all data in Elgg has inbuilt access information attached to it. This little piece of information, along with the enabled/disabled flag, determines to a great extent if you can actually access a piece of data and change it.
Knowing the different ways in which these combinations can work can make a developer's life much easier.
1. access_show_hidden_entities
This a hack in the core itself, but one that you can't do without. This will enable you to access entities that have been disabled. Users, when they are not fully registered (email not verified), will be marked as disabled by Elgg, if you need your internal functions to access these entities, this method comes in pretty handy. Do keep an eye out for future Elgg releases, the team has specifically asked not to use this code in plugins, so use it at your own risk.
2. Get/List all entities
There are times when you would want non-admin users to access bits of data stored within Elgg's data model. This is also valid in cases where you want to list data that is not owned by you. Most of the front end usage won't require this, but there are situations where this is required like a heavily moderated website where it makes sense. In those situations, you can set $is_admin to TRUE for the duration of the get/list entity call and reset it to whatever the original status was.
if(isadminloggedin()) {
$astat = TRUE;
}
else
$astat = FALSE;
global $is_admin;
$is_admin = true;
#your get/list calls
$is_admin = $astat
Do use this very wisely as you don't want regular users running around on the site with full admin privileges.
Permissions check allows you to write to entities that you don't have permissions to access. Kind of beats the whole purpose, right? But there are cases where this is very much valid, like in case of objects that are to be shared between restricted set of users. Again, this is a function that should be used with a lot of care and cross checked for contexts and conditions in which it is allowed to operate.
Read MoreYear In Review: Mobility
2009 was the first time in so many years that I desperately wanted to change my mobile service provider. It started with the problems I was having with Airtel once my phone connection was changed from corporate billing to personal billing. This number has been with me, in my name, for close to 8-years now and it was a bit crazy to know that every time the billing changes, they register you into a new customer ID, forcing you to start fresh from credit limits and whatnot. This just fails on so many levels on rewarding customer loyalty. Thankfully, for them, the other providers are no better.
There were not many other changes on that front. I have stuck steadfastly to Nokia E71 as the platform. The phone is getting a bit long in the tooth now and as the joke goes, even the milkman has one of these nowadays, but it is built like a tank, works reasonably well and I have gone through only a single intentional factory reset to fix the regulation Nokia sluggishness. At its current price levels the phone is a great value-for-money proposition, only if we could slap something like a decent operating system on it, than the mindlessness called S60.
Usage of the phone is limited largely to voice (~70% for local outgoing calls in billing), lower single digit percentages in text and data is covered by the Rs 99 plan which has a bundled 250 MB per month free usage limit with it. I do intend to change my call plan, which should see a marginal drop in total billing. Data will remain the same since I've not felt the need for the Rs 500 unlimited plan and I've never run afoul of the 250 MB download limit.
One significant switch that has happened through the year is my switch away from the paid applications in the GPS segment. I've tried all three paid products — Nokia Maps, MapmyIndia and Satnav — and found all to be weak in different ways. The Nokia license is really expensive even if the UI is the best of the lot, MapmyIndia search is useless (which is a crucial part of a GPS app, especially when it can hook up to a server to do the same) and Satnav, while cheap, suffers from both problems. Besides, it does not work on my E17 with a QWERTY keypad. The winner this time around is Google Maps and it is a pity, because I will more than happily pay for the licenses and I don't want Google running every part of my life, but it is an opportunity lost for the others. For my normal travel, I got myself a Mapmyindia Lx device.
The apps that have remained on my deck:
Opera Mini 4/5. (sustained heavy usage, for mail mostly. I don't use push email)
Google Maps (sustained heavy usage, mostly within the city)
Nokia Sports Tracker (Tracking my walks/run)
Gravity (Tweeting, usage trending downwards now)
Putty (Rarely used, one of those things you have with you for the 'just-in-case' scenarios)
Read MoreFour Things
One of the toughest things to accomplish as a largely one-man-show is to get things done on time. There are too many distractions, way too many things to chase after and a majority of the times things just don't go according to plan. Couple all that with a month-long vacation which shreds apart any bit of work discipline you've had before, the result is a list of things-to-do that pile up and task bankruptcy looms large on the horizon.
Previously, I have resorted to quite complicated task mapping and GTD strategies to get through things. Ever since I got back from the vacation, each of those strategies seemed to stop working, especially since my already despicable ability to multitask has undergone another round of depletion. Thus was born the Four Things strategy to getting things done.
Four Things is very simple. It is easy to understand and implement. It is rather self explanatory: you pick four things every day that you want to accomplish and the time you want to allocate for them. Of the four, three are largely static. You can't avoid cooking or exercising on most days. The same goes for work. So all those get slotted into the three things. The remaining slot goes for activities that don't get repeated on a daily basis. This could include going sport climbing, catching a movie, going out drinking etc.
The larger idea is to get comfortable doing these simple plans on a daily basis and finishing them as a rule every day. The simplicity of the method ensures that the overhead of measuring/mapping is significantly lower in this. As you get into the habit of doing the Four Things subconsciously, you can increase it to five, six or any number that you are comfortable with. Focus more on execution than planning and maintenance. Let us see how it works for me in the long run.
Read MoreThe Indian Digital Opportunity – Build For The Next Three Years
One of the rather interesting outcomes of having been largely out of the loop for close to a month is that it helps you differentiate better the stuff that determines what wheat is and what chaff is. Unfortunately, in the digital domain in India, there is much more of chaff than wheat. I will dig deeper into the numbers when I have a bit more of time to spare, but for the time being this will be posted mostly as a rant.
It was yesterday, during one of our regular conversations on the state of the industry, that I told Nikhil that even for the successful large digital players in India, the scenario is not all that great. There is really little upside to being in the business right now, even if you are on top, for it is near-impossible to accomplish scale in the business beyond the numbers that are already there. And even at ~20 crore INR per quarter, those numbers certainly don't look that great, when you can see that the addressable opportunity won't allow for more than, at the most, half-a-dozen players on that level.
Outside the internet domain, the only sector that offers some kind of respite is telecom. Even here the scope is really limited with horrendously high entry barriers and shrinking margins. The poster child of the past couple of years — mobile VAS — does not look all that great these days and the segment itself is now looking ripe for major consolidation as margins shrink and IP-related costs spiral out of reach. Take VAS out of the telecom equation and the picture becomes rather dreary. If you allow people to use phones only for their basic purpose – to make and recieve calls – the industry size would shrink dramatically. And the trouble with add-on services is that they tend to be rather temperamental and hard to sustain at low cost in the longer run.
Saying television is a mess is an understatement. Even though everyone still wants to start a channel, less than a handful have any chance of ever being on the path to profitability. Most don't have a lifeline that goes beyond the hope of being acquired by some larger player or being made the potential conduit for a foreign player to come to India. Most of the news channels are running losses and mired in debt. And the best part is that none of this still makes it easy or cheaper to start a channel, so the disruptive opportunity is also non-existent, without even taking into account that the software production houses that service most channels are roughly the same handful.
Obviously, none of the powers to be will admit to most of what is written above since it goes at the heart of their raison d'être. But we do need a rethink on how to up the addressable opportunity that can actually be addressed from now to the next five years. Let us admit it, the current opportunity size is just way too tiny to justify the kind of money being burnt in trying to say that it is a future-looking investment. None of the current products really have much appeal even in semi-urban areas. So, addressing the rural areas does not even come into the picture here.
For any company to be successful in the next five years in the digital domain in India, it is necessary for them rethink everything they do from the ground up. It is unlikely that the current scenario will change in the next 2-3 years. We need to use that opportunity to build for a different India and also invest in products that will aim to open up the marketplace, than to keep building clones of western products that have a hard time finding sustenance in the existing market place. It needs thought, leadership and strategy that is different from what we have known till now. It would be interesting to see if that ever comes around.
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