Life in Monsoon

Going to office in Monsoon season is just like amazing race. I have seen couple of water logging, sudden traffic jam due to accident or flooding in subway. I think pictures tell more than words in this case.

Besides traffic, I also suffer from slight food poisoning. It is time to remind myself "bottle water only". Though heavy rain brings a lot of inconvenience to us, it reliefs water shortage that some area have limited supply of water last month. But now, no one needs to worry about that, no wonder kids and adults are dancing for the 1st rain.

Recognizing the Poor as Customers in India: Business Success Stories and Examples [Part 1]

Back in my Technopreneurship class a year ago, my lecturer recommended some books to read. One of them is "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" by C.K. Prahalad. I hadn't got the chance to read the book though, until one of my flatmates put the book in our flat's 'private library'.

Well, the book is an interesting read. It outlines many examples of success stories of companies who recognize the poorest of the poor (i.e. those at the bottom of the economic pyramid) as their (potential) customers, instead of thinking that they aren't because they probably can't afford to buy the companies' products. Most of these examples actually happen in India.

Before I move on, here are some statistics that may help put things into better perspective.

India's Characteristics in Brief

• huge population (about 1.1 billion people)
  
• about 72% of them living in rural areas and doing agriculture-related stuff
• 22% lives below the poverty line
  
• 61% literacy rate
  
• large linguistics diversity (at least 10 major languages out of a total of more than a thousand languages) - most of the people I meet can speak 5-6 languages
• more than 100 million mobile phone subscribers
  

With 22% of the population living below the poverty line, if a company recognizes the poor as its customers, that means a lot of customers. But of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. Designing products for the poor doesn't simply mean sacrificing quality in order to reduce price. It means tweaking your product so that it meets the needs of the poor - affordable prices, durability, user friendliness, among others.

During my time in India, through "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" book, the Indian Innovative Summit sessions I attended, and others, I've come across some interesting case studies and examples of what companies and other organizations do here that either empowers the poor or turning them into customers or both.

Here they are, in categories:

Healthcare

• Aravind Eye Care
  While a cataract operation costs about US$2,500 to US$3,000 in United States, it costs only US$50 to US$300 in Aravind Eye Care. However, over 60% of Aravind Eye Care's patients get their surgeries for free. Despite all this, Aravind Eye Care is very profitable.
  
  Why?
  The reason in short: process innovation.
  
  Aravind Eye Care reduces the need for (pricey) specialized doctors in the various phases of diagnosis and treatment before and after the surgery. Dr. Venkataswamy, the founder, developed and standardized the Aravind process: patient care, testing for vision problems, and postoperative work are done by youth from local villages that are trained for one specific task. The doctors perform only the surgeries. With this system, the doctors can perform more than 50 surgeries per day. Every doctor performs more than 2,000 operations per year, while the national average in India is 300.
  
  
• Jaipur Foot
  The cost of a prosthetic foot in the United States: about US$8,000.
  The cost of a prosthetic foot made by Jaipur Foot: US$30.
  
  Yet, Jaipur Foot is designed carefully to meet the needs of Indian customers:
  - it's made from local materials, because the government limits import of foreign materials
  - it's made considering the working lifestyle and culture of the vastly agricultural India: walking on uneven ground, squatting, sitting cross-legged
  
  Similar to Aravind Eye Care, they train the local people to be involved in the various stages of patient care, thereby reducing cost.
  
  More information: Jaipur Foot : Our Special Technology
  

[to be continued with more stories in IT, Energy, etc]

Sources:

• "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" by C.K. Prahalad
• Wikipedia:India, Wikipedia:Indian Demographics
  
• India's mobile subscriber base crosses 400 million
  

Working in an outsourcing team

In the past, I had couple of chances working with outsourcing teams in China and Taiwan. But now, I am working on projects from clients in US and other part of India. So I start to taste the life of working in an outsourcing team. Before revealing my life, let’s have a quick look on Game Outsourcing industry.

Why outsourcing

Similar to other business, outsourcing aims at giving higher flexibility and better cost saving. One aspect of outsourcing in game industry is on artwork as huge amount of content and artwork are needed in next gen games. Artwork outsourcing gives flexibility in volume by handling spark of short term demands. One presentation in GDC shows that Vituos Games, an outsourcing studio, helped “Test Drive Unlimited” to produce 100 cars in 6 months. In addition, outsourcing helps bringing different skills, like cinematic, localization into projects adding flexibility and dynamics to small core team.

Who outsource

It is seen that outsourcing can be found across the industry, from large studio to individual who want to build a game on his/her own idea. Due to different level of experience, there are a wide variety of requirement and deliverable. Well established game studios can provide a set of structured documents and tools, while individual may start everything from scratch.

What can be outsource

From the directory of outsourcing.org, game outsourcing industry seems cover most of the areas, including, game design, illustration, graphic design, level design, music and sound effects, game development, testing and localization.

Where can we find outsourcing team

Extracted from http://gamedevmap.com/, you can see game studios are all over the globe and outsourcing teams can be found from US to China and different regions have their whole strengths and weaknesses. Lewis Peterson, President & CEO, 7 Studios, listed 4 regions including, Eastern Europe, India, China and Taiwan and commented that China and Taiwan are relatively more all-rounded, while Eastern Europe and India have strength in art.

Risk

Though outsourcing is a common practice, not all the cases are successful. Companies/individuals consider outsourcing part of their work may need to consider, i) hidden cost, ii) communication, iii) resource integration, iv) asset management, v) deadline and scope management and vi) resource control, like team composition. It is necessary to have a check, like visiting, due diligence, small trial run and continuous communication before committing fully.

Best Practice?

Rajesh Rao, from Dhruva, a Bangalore based game outsourcing studio listed Top 5 what went right

#1 Long Term vision and co-operation

#2 Adaptive to change

#3 Good Client involvement, including provision of dev kits and game builds

#4 Clear Guidelines

#5 Client visit for project preparation

These only cover a bit of the game outsourcing industry. I want to end this blog by sharing life and learning working in an outsourcing team

i) Fighting time zone - Eastern Time (US and Canada) is GMT -5:00, while IST is GMT +5:30, i.e. 10.5 hours in between. In a simple put, their 9:00 is our 19:30, so we have quite late meeting starting from 19:30 till 22:00+ or early morning meeting.

ii) Adapt to different culture – Honestly, I am quite happy with that as the team is very multinational and we can learn from different cultures. Back to business, it tends to be less rubber and rely more on documents and written confirmation.

iii) Working with multiple projects and clients at the same time – As mentioned, outsourcing give flexibility but on the other hand, for outsourcing company to be profitable, they need to have multiple projects and keep everyone busy. So most of the staff are multitasked and it imposes challenges to project management.

I hope you enjoy that. I will be in Pune this weekend. See you~

Glåd midsommar

First, I would like to thank Juliana for giving us the chance to contribute our thoughts in this blog. I would like to start things off on a lighter note by describing our brief trip to Dalarna:Rattvik for Midsummer day. The happiest and brightest day of the year before it gets darker again. Althoughthe weather was bad(raining) in the morning, we enjoyed an extremely good evening with the sun setting at only 10:10pm.

To summarise, Dalarna is the place to be in Midsummer as people gather there to celebrate the traditional midsummer processions which consist of raising the Maypole. Afterwhich, was followed by a tiring 1 hour folk dance around the pole which we thoroughly enjoyed.

The day ended by the cosy cottage and "enjoying" pickled harriers. The taste was horrendous to be honest. It smelt like sewage and taste worst in your mouth. Just breathing your own breathe, makes you will feel like vomiting.

A short and pleasant beginning for my first blog post. Like what Vik has mentioned, we will describe both our experience and skills learnt during our time in Stockholm so stay tune for more exciting posts... Once again, please approach any of us if you have any requests. We are more than willing to help.