UID as my Mobile Number. An Open Letter to UIDAI

An Open Letter.

To,
Mr. Nandan Nilekani,
Chairman,
UIDAI

Dear sir,

Let me jump straight to an outlandish idea and then delve into the whys and hows behind it:

Why not have the UID number as the defacto mobile number of an individual?

- So if my UID is 999123456789, I can simply print it on my visiting card and folks can call me on it.
- This is truly a mobile number for life. So as a customer, I will have a mobile number that will never change.
- Gives me a very valid reason to get a UID number asap.

UID = My Mobile Number for Life.

Why?

Aadhaar is slowly but steadily progressing in its mission to provide a unique identification mechanism for this country. This dashboard for instance shows 8 million cumulative enrollments in the last 8 months which I think is pretty impressive.

As the UIDAI website notes, the Aadhaar model clearly aims at attaching two attributes to every individual in this country-

a. a unique numeric identity and
b. an authentication mechanism.

This has very very profound implications on the way things are done by most of us. Aadhaar has already laid out its plans to work with its banking partners towards extending their reach by becoming the sole and minimum criterion for getting a basic savings account, which is a great fillip to the Financial Inclusion agenda.

The one thing I have learnt to value a lot above most other virtues in my past 3 years at Eko has been the value of simplicity. At Eko, we simplified the financial identity of a customer by providing it the customer's mobile number as a transactional alias and ensured that all transactions were done as simple number dialing -today we can claim that the choices have worked for Eko, where we have processed over Rs. 15,000,000,000 in cumulative volumes- way more than what all the other 'mobile banking' initiatives in India put together would have handled in the same period.

So,

Why not make things simpler for a few billion people, now that you've anyway embarked on this ambitious journey?

Why not provide a mobile access number to everyone, rich or poor? This could be a good utilization of the Universal Service Obligation funds with the Dept. of Telecom which I guess is well worth over Rs. 25000 crore!

How?

In India, TRAI had mandated the following mobile numbering scheme in 2003:
XXX-YY-NNNNN
where,
XXX= Mobile Operator
YY= Mobile Switching Center
NNNNN= Subscriber Identity

However, in January this year, 2011, Mobile Number Portability was launched. MNP essentially made the mobile operator and switch lookup as described above- redundant. Since launch, nearly 10 million customers have opted to change their operator while keeping their mobile number!! This clearly shows the need for an operator neutral numbering scheme. I think the 12 digit UID number neatly fits the bill.

How do we do this? Maybe, in a similar way MNP was rolled out; I guess the Telecordia solution for MNP already has some provision to achieve this. Another approach could involve UIDAI/ its nominated partner, maintaining a national master mobile switch (just as NPCI maintains a national financial transaction switch). Lets call it NMMS.

During Aadhaar enrollment, the customer is anyways asked to provide a mobile number, UIDAI would, from that point on, maintain the UID-Mobile Number mapping and the telecom operators be mandated to push any mobile number changes to UIDAI. This database could be used to seed the NMMS.

Aadhaar also does mass enrollment drives at places where not everyone might have (or be able to afford) a mobile number. At the end of such an enrollment drive, UIDAI could provide the entire block/ list of such customers enrolled to the highest pre-bid telecom operator which operates in that region. The telcom operator gets thousands of customers in one shot, which lowers their cost of acquisition and enables such 'no-frills' customers while UIDAI gets more customers in since it is now also seen as a mobile number provision drive  (Lets face it, the grandest successful 'inclusion' project so far in India has been the telecom inclusion project driven by the telecom operators in India with over 600 million customers already enrolled. The need to communicate is perhaps the biggest implicit driver!)

Dear sir, I'm sure you'd agree that its time to move the focus from thinking about 'allotment' of UIDs to mass utilization of the same. The more use cases there are and the more compelling these are, the more will be the adoption of the UID. Mandates and rules can only take an initiative so far; Only by addressing the innate needs of people can this initiative truly expand to its true potential.

I've been an ardent fan of your vision for this country and the ambitiousness of a project like UIDAI. I hope this crazy idea finds some resonance with your thoughts.

Regards,
Anupam

The Mobile Handsets Family Snap

I have been reading and thinking of how the mobile phones have changed our lifestyle. A typical morning starts thus: Office dress? Check. Car keys? Check and finally- Mobile Phone? Check... Reached the main gate; something seems amiss. Oops, forgot wallet! More intriguingly, its interesting to think of how the mobile phones themselves have changed. The way mobile phones have developed in the past three years has been unprecedented. 

In this post I'll attempt a silhouette of this handset super-family snap and try to outline their places in the family.

1. The Young, Bold and Beautiful (TYBB)

Apple created a usability paradigm that was not just incrementally better than what was otherwise available but was transformational. It created and set standards that others have yet to surpass and has created an eco-system that others are trying hard to replicate. A techie may still call the iPhone a duh! phone, but if the queues at Apple stores and the buzz when Steve makes his "This is the most amazing thing ever invented" speeches are anything to go by, thats a killer product.

Google went ahead created a mobile OS called Andriod, where it had no prior experience. Amazingly, it succeeded in creating a worthy competitor to Apple. Actually a lot of manufacturers realized that if they had to compete with The Quick and Dirty pack (read on to know more about them), they needed to adopt an OS that would provide them the competitive flexibility of being able to churn out more designs and faster- Andriod proved to be a good bet. HTC Mobile is a great company that has innovatively adopted Android. Even Samsung has made some bold moves with it.

2. So Yesterday, Yet Trying (SYYT)

Lets start with a pioneer of cellphone technology: Motorola. Motorola literally created this market, saw its culmination and complacence in the Razr series and has been struggling to find its grounding ever since. Its recent forays into the Android with Xoom seem promising- thats officially the tablet space; its certainly lost its ground in the cellphone category.

Nokia has been a corner stone in the mobile telephony revolution that has certainly changed India. Rewind a few years, in the mobile app development world, Nokias used to be the targets for the Gold builds. The first two builds that would come out from most studios would be an s40 and and an s60 build. All the other builds would normally be ported out of these. I'm not sure if the case remains. I guess most studios now focus only on the iPhone version, the Android build and perhaps one for the BlackBerry. I'm sure Nokia still gets a spot, but the point is - its no longer the spotlight. Thankfully, to its credit, India is still flush with the Nokia torch phone (the so called 'made in india' 1100, 1200 series), second hand N Series and third hand S40s and S60 that still make it a majority by existing numbers. Some of its new avatars also seem to show some promise. Again, far from its glory days.

Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Sagem - heard of them lately?

Windows Mobile. The reviews for Windows 7 interface have been rave, but lets face it- these guys have been around for a long time (remember the iPaq days?) and have not been able to make a worthy dent in this domain; very unlikely that they could.

The Symbian OS. Once considered a powerhouse OS designed for the mobile platform, it was a developer's nightmare platform. Sigh, even its parents don't love it anymore! Nokia recently announced that it plans to orphan Symbian and has already adopted Windows (a case of: you're sinking, I'm sinking, lets party and try not sink together?). 

BlackBerry from Research In Motion is one helluva 'ol timer that seems to have been able to stand on its own amidst waves upon waves of assault by dozens of old and new handsets. It seems to have succeeded in packaging itself youthfully afresh, despite its age. RIM bastion has been its rock solid messaging interface, instant push emails to instant messaging- RIM has simply got this spot on, not to mention its messaging friendly key layouts both soft and hard.

3. The Quick Guns. (TQG)

In 2007 (I think) a miracle happened. This miracle was a chipset made by a Taiwanese company called MediaTek. Its SoC (System on a Chip) dramatically reduced the component count, the time taken and the cost of building a cellphone. At the same time, it dramatically increased the number of people who had access to the reference design, increased reliability as a platform and suddenly unleashed a wave of handsets that have swept TYBBs and the SYYTs off their feet.

Another miracle that happened was Shenzhen. Shenzhen is an electronics manufacturing powerhouse. And the scale I've read, is mind boggling. Read this blog to get a feel of its size and this one (also has a video) to read its scale. In India 'China Phone' is a known acronym and customers come asking specifically for it. But Shenzhen has something much more interesting. It churns out three categories of devices: 

1. Original handsets. 

2. Handsets that look like original handsets aka fakes/ phonies 

3. Handsets that are are ingenious. 

Suddenly new models began to get churned out every week and even days! while earlier the So Yesterdays painstakingly churned new ones out every quarter or two.

I'm not sure, but am led to believe that a spate of companies in India owe their origins to MediaTek and Shenzhen. These pack is led here by the likes of Micromax, Carbonn, Lava, Lemon and a bevy of names that just seem to keep popping up. Slowly but steadily, this pack began to corner a significant share of the market which was till now being held by Nokias and their likes (SYYTs) by focusing first on the tier-2, 3 and rural markets. They also focussed on features like music, video, radio and multi-SIM. Despite the fact that on most devices usability sucked, the sheer variety and incredible cheapness seem to have gone their way.

Micromax is an interesting company which I believe is trying to mature from being cheap-shenzhenish-copy-plus-a-few-features phone seller to a new-feature-centric phones churner. One innovation from its stable has been the Micromax A60 'My first Android'- the cheapest and a pretty decent Andriod phone for the masses retailing first hand at about Rs. 6500 when I had last checked.

The road ahead?

For TYBB, they need to ensure that they always remain a few notches ahead of the rest of the pack. Youthful looks don't really last that long.

For SYYT, they are bound to be sandwiched from the top by TYBB and the bottom by TQG. They need to ensure that they find their sweet-spots. Real fast.

For TQG, the very fact that they can themselves be engulfed by another TQG clone launched today means that they need to move from being simple phone sellers to value sellers.

Update:

Check out the stats from Business Standard India (http://business-standard.com/india/news/reconnect/432525/) that support this story with some numbers!

Poxed and unpoxed

Apparently, a bunch of Varicella Zoster virus found it convenient to visit my body. Usually they visit kids, guess they'd have made a mistake with my DOB - KYC problems! Its been 12 days since their uninvited arrival and after having riddled me with lotsa red spots, they are about to hibernate in my nervous system in a benign state. It seems anyone who catches chicken pox is destined to live with a legacy of Zosters in their ganglia. The good part (sic) is, my body is now pretty immune to Zoster and co.

Its been quite an experience, doing mostly nothing and being isolated in a room. Had it not been for my BlackBerry, I should have been electronically dead as well. My folks said, since I didn't give my body a break, it simply decided to take one ;). And I got to watch, relatively guilt-free, the entire semi-final and final matches and saw India lifting the ICC World Cup :)

The saving grace has been the venerable Neem tree, 'Azadirachta indica'. As advised by quite a few people, esp my colleague Anand, I've literally been fighting the red spots with some green magic. For almost the entire first week, I'd smeared myself in Neem leaf+Haldi (turmeric) paste from head to toe. I looked pretty much like The Hulk gone terribly wrong in the makeup department. I slept on a bed of Neem leaves, bathed in water boiled with Neem leaves and also ate a few Neem leaves. All that makes it sound as if I was in some exotic organic spa resort- I've never been to one, but can vouch that the results have been pretty good.

So, while I am getting unpoxed, I've been thinking how vulnerable you and I really are (two days ago, a student in my dad's school passed away because of pox he got on a pilgrimage). Most virii, you can hit around, then some random virus hits and you're out, index finger is raised and you've got to walk back to the pavilion- even if you're the mighty Little Master. Inshahallah, the next match awaits :)
Well that is life. It screws you right when you think you have figured it out. - Five Point Someone

A Sachet Story - Epilogue

I had blogged about the ubiquitous Sachet a few months back in a post titled the Sachet Story.

The post also talked about how notoriously popular and unsightly, the discarded Gutka sachets had become on the streets of Delhi.

Well here's the epilogue,

Starting March 1st, no more Sachets to dress up gutka tobacco. Thats a really bold move by the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India considering the massive turnover and influence these companies have.

Times of India

Financial Express

While the move is great from an environmental impact perspective and certainly laudable, I guess it will only force 'innovation' (sic) in the Gutka delivery mechanism- Gutka dispensers maybe?

I have just recently witnessed, at close quarters, the devastating effect of substance abuse and how it degrades the people, families and relationships that it touches. Perhaps a firmer stand needs to be taken considering the simple fact that what our country loses in terms of its resources is way more than what it earns from these industries.

Unfortunately, it is so so easy to ignore costs that are not explicit- someday, it will hit us bad. Thank God, hope is free!

Merry Christmas

Heres wishing the whole wide world a Merry Christmas!

I forget, therefore I am

Let me confess in an understatement: I am not known for my ability to remember. I think I have what could be described as 'working memory' ('RAM' in geek-speak) and very less of the 'long term memory' (the hard-disk type). It is therefore fascinating for me to hear some of my friends rattle out the titles of the books (and even chapter captions!) they studied in 5th grade!

I have been trying to find out more about the way our brain stores information for a long time and have stumbled across many interesting insights. Disclaimers: I'm no neuro-scientist and no one claims to have completely unlocked the mysteries of the mind.

The first insight is that perfect memory is nearly impossible. Its something like this: Imagine our sense organs are digital transducers and that to each frame of sight, sound, smell and touch captured, the brain does some DSP and attaches contexts. These contexts act like keys that could be cross-linked to other such similar contexts. In the cyber-world, a simplistic equivalent would be intelligent tag-labels that could be attached to each piece of media on the web. And like the tag-clouds or page-ranking on the web, the brain keeps analyzing and attaching weights to these keys. I guess each person normally has the ability to assimilate only a certain maximum number of such keys in the top of the stack. Therefore, keys which have a lower relative weight might get pushed way down to a point that they become non-addressable. Thus, to recall information that has been stored in the brain that has its keys obscured in a huge bin of decrepit keys might be really difficult (though for arguments sake- not entirely impossible).

Techniques that claim to improve memory (eg: mnemonics) actually attempt to attach contexts with higher weight to chunks of information that might otherwise considered mundane- providing easier proxy addresses in a way.

There are exceptions though. Savants with Eidic Memory. There are certain differently talented people whose brains are mysteriously wired to have near perfect or photographic memories. The interesting part is that perfect memory is not as good as it seems (getting perfect scores in all tests sounds pretty cool though). Interesting read (long story) : Autism's First Child. The ability of human beings to forget is an inherent 'ability' and not a weakness. As human beings, we need to be able to forget, forgive and move on. If I had the ability to remember everything, I would probably be stuck in a rut and caught in an endless loop of ecstasy or despair- depending on the nature of some immediate trigger. That would be one extreme of being extremely 'experienced', where previous slightly negative experiences would posture our current actions through 'safe' and non-risky paths. It could kill the adventurer, the risk taker, the para-jumper and the entrepreneur in a person, it could kill the appetite for trying again after repeated failures. Imagine losing something very precious and not being able to forget about it! It would be like having a thousand phantom limbs.

That brings me to an inherent flaw in most computing solution designs. Most computers, networks, devices and robots are designed for perfect memory- more so because the cost of storage is decreasing drastically day by day and its easier to just keep adding up. So if I snap a photograph on my smartphone today and sync it up to my web album- that image is there to stay- forever. If that snap were a part of a bot's learning algorithm, it would be as retrievable a hundred years down as it is now. Google, for instance, will remember all my correspondences, my web interactions and profile for a very long time. I think there is an opportunity in trying to adopt into software systems, human-like methods for forgetting information.

Social web could also benefit a lot by trying to mimic human forgetting systems to tune their privacy settings. Google for instance today stores one's search memory for only N months- now thats a crude way to forget, it must be a lot smarter in what it needs to conveniently forget. A system designed to thus conveniently forget will meet both privacy concerns (to an extent) as well as being functional in a more 'human' way.

Thats the end of my rhetoric that brings me back to me. In conclusion, I do believe, that my ability to forget defines me, my thoughts and my deeds as much as it uniquely defines you! I guess the machines too would follow our forgetfulness in due course :)

Time and Chance

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not [always] to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9:11

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ThinkContacts Thought Initiated Call Proto

Here's an interesting prototype application by Mirko Perkusich, based on the NeuroSky kit that I had blogged earlier about. I guess this is for real!

Triple Honors for Eko - mBillionth, NASSCOM and PCQuest

Its been well over two years since Eko was born; One and half years since it started its journey with the State Bank of India.

Eko today has a great team in place, good partners and most importantly- around 70,000 customers who have transacted over Rs. 25 crore through SBI-EKO Customer Service Points- friendly next door grocers. Slowly but steadily, some of the fundamental principles that its founders believed in, are being validated through positive growth, satisfied customers and transaction numbers.

The journey has been tough- but well worth it! It gives me immense pleasure to share three top honors Eko has just won.

1. The mBillionth award in the m-Business category.
"The m-Billionth Award South Asia 2010 is first of its kind in the region recognising and felicitating mobile innovations, applications and content services delivery. It is to honour excellence in mobile communications across South Asia spread over 9 core categories. The m-Billionth Award is designed as an annual South Asia’s leading mobile content’s award platform towards larger regional Mobile Congress in media and policy advocacy."

2. NASSCOM emerge 50, 2010.

"With EMERGE 50, we have a sharp focus – in the process we have been able to spotlight some really good companies, that were hitherto unnoticed. Plus with the level of detail that we go into with each company has helped us build an excellent dataset – covering funding, cash flows, employees, markets and specializations – for over 200 companies. This has really helped us get a sense of trends in this space."





3. PC Quest, Best IT Implementation of the year. Maximum Social Impact

"Nobody can deny the relevance of IT for enabling business growth today. It has become a crucial part of every organization. However, this achievement didn't come so easily. It required a lot of passion, many sleepless nights, and fire in the belly. Unfortunately, despite all the benefits it brought for the organization, the IT heads and their teams remained behind the scenes. They were the unsung heroes.
To change all that, PCQuest instituted the Best IT Implementation awards seven years ago in 2004. They were created with the sole objective of setting up a platform for recognizing the gut-crunching efforts put up by the IT departments across Indian organizations."

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Neural interfaces again. TED and Emotiv

Neural interface is something I've been upbeat about over quite a few blog posts so far.
The world is still a far way from B2BC, but I'm sure we'll get there soon.
Here's another addition to this topic, this time thanks to TED and Emotiv. Emotiv, like NeuroSky, about which I had blogged sometime in September 2008 provides developer kits to further this interface:



On a different note, some solutions are better simply because they are much simpler.
Check out Pranav Mistry's Mouseless - priceless!



Cheers!