Simple Chronicle!

Fred Wilson has a good post on tomorrow’s tech trends from some of the smartest VC minds in the industry.

A lot of focus on mobile technology which I agree with. From my experiences in India, I know that the introduction of the mobile phones has further divided the microenterprise segment into PC users and non-users. Over time phone ownership will continue to expand to include more of the smallest businesses with no fixed address or place for a landline phone. Some research I have done in this area indicates that there are around 44 million of these really small urban businesses in India out of which 61% use mobile phones as opposed to 13% using the PC.

This disparity presents a very unique opportunity. Mobile telephone applications can create and amplify productive communication ties between small businesses and their customers and suppliers. The Short Messaging Service (SMS) is a very attractive option to build a generic platform to bring the PC network assets to mobile users in a cost effective and easily accessible manner. Some interesting solutions are mobile applications that can allow transportation (truck/lorry) drivers in consumer goods companies to lookup customer billing information, get schedule updates on the road. Others include applications that can allow agricultural cooperatives to interact with farmers and vice versa which will allow farmers to register their land with the cooperative, check their output, but fertilizers using credit.

The lowest gas price I have seen in my stay in the US is 67c. After seeing $4.09 on my way to work this morning, I wondered at what price would gas plateau around for some time. I did some digging around and here is what I found:

• CIBC says crude Oil is going to hit $225/bbl and Gas to hit $7/gallon by 2012
• Deutsche Bank says crude would be around $80 to $120 in the next five years
• Goldman predicts that crude will hit $150 to $200 over the next two years

So, 2 out of the 3 reports are predicting ~$200/bbl which translates to $7/gallon gas by 2012. Ouch! Here is an interesting cartoon I found on gas prices:

 Maybe I should get a Chrysler to counter rising gas prices.

There has been a lot of press around Xobni lately. Web Worker Daily published an article on their experince with Xobni for a week. I recently installed Xobni (on my outlook at work) as well and my exeprience did not meet my expectations. 

Pros:

• Xobni search is much faster and more useful than native outlook search.
• Scheduling a meeting using Xobni is very useful as it provides a couple of different options for meeting times.

Cons:

• It slowed down Outlook tremendously.
• It took up valuable real estate space (Note: I have the Outlook to-do bar turned on).

In the end I turned off Xobni mainly due to the cons. My thoughts on what I want:

1. While there are a few useful features in Xobni, majority of the features – such as showing me all the people a contact has emailed, analytics around the times when I receive/send email are not the ones I would use regularly, especially in a corporate environment.
2. In a coprorate environment, what I would really want from Xobni is a better way to manage my tasks in Outlook. Native task management in outlook is really bad. I think this will let many more coporate users embrace Xobni.
3. Give me an easy way to disable Xobni right from the tool, when I don’t need it. (like times when I am on wireless network, in an airport)
4. Give me a way to turn off the feature of showing someone else’s network. Using this feature, I could see all the people my GM emailed – not sure he wants me to see that. This will be a big problem in corporate environments.
5. Give me a better way to read email, not just analyze the data. Maybe take some cue from Josh Kopelman post on feed frenzy. Give us a way to spend little time and get through the needed email every day – that’s what I want.

I have also talked to some other people at my work who have deployed Xobni, their experiences have been similar (sample size of three).

Adrian at Read Write Web has a post on monetizing twitter. An excerpt from the post:

Essentially, this would entail Twitter parsing over the Tweets of a given user, as well as the Tweets of the users he/she is following. Common keywords, themes, and phrases are then pulled from this data and associated with that user. As a result, highly-targeted ads can be displayed based on the user’s network of content (”web design”, for example). These simple text ads would look very similar to regular Tweets, but would be clearly marked as “Sponsored Content”. Facebook employs a comparable strategy through their News Feed, although ads are based on demographic information as opposed to context. These Twitter ads would appear every 20 or so Tweets depending on the frequency chosen by the company.

While this is an interesting approach, I wonder if the ads are going to be obtrusive. I defintely don’t want the ads to be in the way of sharing information. Maybe the model is like what Scoble did – embed the ads in tweets themselves.