TiE Atiq Raza Talk and Wireless Panel Discussion

It has been ages [ according to internet time 2 years( time since I passed college) is considered ages 😉 ], I listened to a good talk by a sound technical person. TiE had last week invited Atiq Raza a very known personality in the semiconductor industry to give a talk on wireless oppurtunities. The talk was brilliant , you gape in awe of the knowledge of such a person when you listen to him speak. There was a subsequent panel discussion , the panelists were from BlueRun ventures and Nokia Growth Partners. The panel discussion looked more to me like a promotion/ad of the ventures, well there is nothing wrong in that I seriously think that kind of stuff is necessary because that is when more entreprenuers will know about them more. But there was’nt much interesting content in the discussion though, if you keep a tab on the technology market you would know all that they said. But I must admit that the portfolio companies that these two funds are managing are very very impressive !!

Below here some of the notes that I captured in the talk, it is a kind of disarrayed and incomplete. I am not great at taking notes , how I wish Shashi ( best notes capturing I have ever seen in my life) was here 🙂 or I had an iPod to record the conversations.

• 30-40% of startups had indians in them during boomtime.
• Computation & communication is becoming more of a single continuum.( I need to do understand this more, this I have been hearing it again & again not just as buzzwords but from people have real mettle )
• Semiconductor industry which was non existent 40 years ago grew to become a 314 billion dollar industry and projected to be 345 billion dollar in 2006.
• Technology is growth industry. It has its ups and downs. It generates huge profits and revenues but then it also consumes profits. (Warren Buffet never invests in growth industry(they have ups and downs) where the money can decrease,Insurance companies are more suited for him where the value never goes down.)
• Middleclass
  Middle class in India & china are going to exceed the population of US. This is the new emerging market.
• Enterprise is having a whole set of problems – Grid / reselient computing (SOA) is required to solve the problems of thebew enterprise.
• A quadruple play is going to form the dominant play. Video, Music, Voice & Data.
  In these two areas what is going to be important is the addressing of Throughput & Access.
• Markets have inflection points, these are the areas which are to be understood and acted upon accordingly. The infelction point is to be read ,understood & analysed better than the rest to come up with a jaw dropping value proposition.
• Ecnoomic Analysis is highly important,” At the end of the day is thisendeavour going to make money for me
• David & Goliath story ( Startups & Incumbents )
• The advantage of David being small is that he is flexible & fast, because of the size most often the Goliaths are not flexible and fast. Thus david should use his small size as an advantage
• DAvid should have the courage to take on against the incumbents.
• David should have a jaw dropping value proposition ( he should have sling to hit goliath with )
• Goliath being big can crush david so he should be ever vigilant.
• Open source is disruptive, mind blogging, the effort of the community isgoing into it. Margins can be squeezed at the hardware level , the chips are already sold at 5$ which basically consists of the labour and the rawmaterial being put into the chip. A 70 $ MS OS combined with the chip is not going to offer a terrific value proposition especially when the software does not work. Open source should be leveraged to reduce the costs.
• The alchemy of a startup is to create value for its shareholders.

• Only two questions were allowed

  Q to Atiq : Where is the chipset – ASIC going towards.in the future? Atiq: Processor speed is going to increase., check the paper at intel site – platform 2015. A quote from Heary & Patternson 10 years ago – ” There is time that is going to come in the future where processor speed will increase to such levels that memory is going to be the bottleneck and thus determine the throughput of a system”

  Q to Atiq: What are your views on H/W , S/W co design ?

  Atiq: It is old knowledge that chips are to bedesigned within a context. Without context the chips are meaningles

  Panel Discussion

• India not just a cost advantage but a value advantage. The cost advantage which started it all but moving towards a value advantage. There are oppurtunities here in India where companies started now has the potential to become a billion dollar business with in the next3 to 5 years.
• An enterprise segment company requires a local presence but for other consumer services there is no local presence in the market that is needed.so pure indian company does not have any disadvantage if it is operating in any consumer services and it can go easily global.
• Some of the trends
• Convergence of Wireless and Wireline
• Innovative markert
• Rich Multimedia SIP & POC – SIP based handsets will be there next year in the market. Innovative SIP based solutions.. POC is Push over cellphone( Nextel and Now in Japan)
• M-Commerce ( NFC ) In Japan over 300, 000 users have NFC based mobiles through which purchases can be made.

• User interface & Usability – Innovation in these fields voice recognition, speech recognition, OCRs’, rollable displays etc
• Mobile Search is experiencing accelerated growth.
• More touch points to involve in these are location & context.
• Multimedia enhancements.
• TV in mobile Stream based Satellite based Overlay Networks based ( DVB-h) Scope for both broadcast and narrowcast TV on cellphones.