TechShup

A Professor from MIT defends Pakistan in a Pakistani gathering at OPEN

It was a surreal sight. Not something you see everyday.

But there it was. A sitting that included about 50 Pakistani Entreprenuers at SAP listening to a Professor from MIT defend Pakistan as a viable entity worthy of consideration when it came to business investment. The questions about Pakistan's viability came from the Pakistanis who in all probability lived in Pakistan for a major part of their lives.

The setting was the all too familiar SAP Cafeteria where this past Friday, Prof. Kenneth Morse, Managing Director at The Entreprenuers' Center at MIT was the guest of honor. He started out talking about Pakistan and business opportunities in Pakistan in a more personal setting with myself, Abdul Rehman (Colleague from OPEN) and Mahira Kalim (A Colleague at SAP). He was very vigorous in the conversations and seemed to have fairly ready answers to our questions which made clear to me that he is all too familiar with them, probably from having heard them before. He was very forthright about his ideas with respect to Pakistanis and Americans skeptical about Pakistan and its prospects. He described them as "CNN Babies" and advised against going after that demographic. In his opinion, it was more beneficial for concerned Pakistanis in the US and elsewhere to converse and exchange ideas with people who are serious about Business Opportunities and who have the real business needs, aspirations and visions to see past a few burning tires in a back alley of Karachi a few days in a year. He indicated that he had been to Pakistan about 7 times in the past 16 months and the last trip was during the time emergancy was declared by the Musharraf government. He repeated that during his presentation and honestly speaking that fact alone got everyone listening intently to his ideas and not color them with the idealism of a business anamoly: An Optimist.

An important fact that was mentioned early on in the presentation was the fact that Pakistani professionals while technically adept, understandably lack the skills needed to sell. This is due to several reasons such as societel norms where selling is not considered a high value skill and where Universities do not focus on honing the competitive skills needed for selling successfully.

Ken focused on primarily High Tech and Higly Rational (Non-Impulse Purchase Selling) selling process. He emphasized the importance of relationship with the customer where the customer's believe that their needs, their situation, their vision, corporate and career goals are understood and shared by the involved sales person (Direct Quote from Ken's presentation). The sales person should be more than a Sales professional; He should be a trusted advisor. Ken also covered topics such as developing a Sales Force and keeping them involved and motivated.

He also talked about Pakistan and the Business Opportunities. Unfortunately, he had few if any kind words for any of the Pakistani Politicians. He reserved his most severe words for Late Benazir Bhutto and her husband who is currently heading the Pakistan Peoples' Party. He was very clear that an image of a corrupt nation is more dangerous for Pakistan than that of a country torn by terrorism and political unrest. He pointed out the two facets of lawmaking that Pakistan can only ignore at her own peril. One was with regards to Intellectual property protection and the other is with respect to rooting out corruption.

Ken was very interactive and involved everyone in the crowd with his witty responses and to the point and at times rhetorical questions. He was extremely animated when answering most specific questions about several different aspects of selling. Ken was thankful to OPEN and SAP for their help in putting this together. To read more about OPEN and MIT partnership please go to: OPEN and MIT Entreprenuer Center

To find out more about the Entreprenuer Center at MIT goto: Entreprenuer Center at MIT

Future of RFID: According to John Williams

SAP campus receives plenty of dignitaries, distinguished scholars and scientists, around the year, who get their brains picked by SAP employees as well as SAP partners, thanks to the Co-Innovation Labs located at the SAP campus. This past Tuesday (22nd of Jan), there was a special presentation by John Williams, Director of the Auto-ID Lab at Massachusetts Institute if Technology (MIT). He was recently named, alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, as one of the 50 most powerful people in Computer Networks. He is involved in a number of other projects for industry, including developing a supply chain simulator for SAP and researching RFID in the home for Microsoft.

The presentation was about the future, when the Internet of Things becomes reality, serialized data (typically RFID and/or barcode, based on EPCglobal, DOD/UID and other standards) can potentially be stored in millions of data repositories world-wide. In fact, large data volumes of serialized information may be coming soon, as the global healthcare industry moves towards deploying anti-counterfeiting standards as soon as 2009. Those data will be sent to enterprise applications through the EPC Network Infrastructure. The data volume, message volume, communication and applications with EPC Network Infrastructure will raise challenges to the scalability, security, extensibility and communication of current IT Infrastructure.

The potential there is enormous. Apparently, for instance, If 1/3rd of all cells phones incorporate RFID it would create  800 million users since there are just about 2.5 Billion Cell Phones in use around the world today. Here is what it would look like. Any item, no matter how small or insignificant would be trackable and at no additional cost. So basically this is tracking at a flat rate. Both Tracking and positioning of assetts and products is a huge deal. RFID in this changed form could work wonders to help that.

As opposed to the HF (High Frequency) that NFC works with today, there is now an UHF (Ultra High Frequency) that amenitizes the inconvenient.

Currently there is also a CVS Authentication (Code Verification System) which is being used by
Phillip Morris to track their cigarette packs in order to ensure that they don't end up in the wrong place and remain in the market that was intended for them. I did not know this but apparently there is a huge market for this because of the counterfeiting that goes on. According to John's data Counterfeiters are the third largest producers of cigarettes in the world.

Here is the very interesting bit among all the interesting ones:

MIT Research did some simulation for how much data is being managed by a registry on an hourly
or daily basis.

Here is what they found out:
The data transfer was about 772 GB to the registry every day.
That is about 9 MB/sec as far as bandwidth is concerned.

That blew me away! Maybe I don't have the perspective for huge amounts of data but that was way too much for me. And this is limited simulation. Can you possibly imagine what it would be like to track each and every piece of product that gets manufactured today.

John then switched over to talk about Concurrency and Coordination Runtime technique (CCR) that came from Microsoft and was created to counter the problems of debugging Distributed Computing. This is being used in a simulator which has been used to analyze the movement of around 20 million items per day through the healthcare supply chain. This simulator is a result of joint research b/w MIT and SAP.

The Idea with CCR (port based) is that the port is an abstraction, its not real.

As the Port is activated by data it runs on its own thread. More than 7 million ports can be handled on a simple dell 620 notebook. That is because this port is very lightweight. It does not consume CPU unless there is data and total weight is no more than 175 bytes.

John also talked about the Pedigree document as well which is the information containing document that has Data about the product as it goes through the supply chain with an RFID. It is this document that is set to have a facelift done with various strategies for e-Pedigree and the simulator discussed above. 

All in all, a very enlightening session with bundles of good information. I spoke with John after the presentation and he seemed like an eager soul ready to connect. It is very gratifying to meet someone who gets so passionate about exciting stuff: IDEAS.

OPEN - Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs and Professionals

OPEN has contributed to my experience and network here in the Valley. It is a vibrant community that is well known for its energetic events.

What follows is a plan that was recently announced by the President, Dilawar Syed, for the first half of the year 2008.

Networking Events

• Networking Mixer with Pakistan Tech Companies (Jan. 22nd). Co-organized by Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), the event will feature emerging tech companies, who OPEN SV is introducing to potential partners and customers in the Valley.
• Monthly Industry Mixers. This is a new concept to OPEN SV. For this spring, OPEN has planned 3 mixers dedicated for semi-conductor professionals, early-stage entrepreneurs and Pakistan university alumni.
• Spring Panel Series (March 13^th) will feature a timely topic: Platformization of the Web: Building Your Company on Facebook, Google or Yahoo! 
• OPEN FORUM 2008, OPEN's top event of the year is planned for June, 2008. This will be OPEN SV’s 5th Annual Conference! Planning kicks off in a few weeks. Please stay tuned for details and how you can contribute at http://www.opensiliconvalley.com

Mentorship Programs

• Monthly workshops, starting with '10 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make' (Jan. 24^th), followed by women-focused ‘A Balancing Act: Family, Work and Social Life’ (Feb. 20^th)
• Monthly Mentorship Breakfasts (for January, Mahmood Panjwani hosted a small group this week and shared his experience as a CEO who commutes to Silicon Valley from Dubai)*

* I attended the event and wrote about it in the blog entry titled "Interesting Breakfast"