Free business idea:

1. Get hold of a South by Southwest Interactive schedule.  (All you really need is the schedule, although I recommend actually attending the conference, for a variety of reasons that have little to do with technology).

2. Glance through the panel listings until you notice that one programming language is repeated more than a few times.  (You should see it listed with an ironic title, like “Technology X: 5 Reasons it will Get You Laid More In 2010″ or with a technical title that is designed to scare away marketing people: “Technology X; Database Architectures for a Semantic Environment”)

3. Note the technology that gets mentioned the most.  Then, build a landing page that positions you as an expert in the field.  (It helps to mish-mash popular programming terms on this landing page. Try “Technology X On Rails” or “Standards-based Technology X.)

4. Get your first project from an unsuspecting customer.  (it helps if said customer is from a large corporation and is looking for this technology because he also attended the “Get Laid More Often…” panel mentioned above)

5. Post a Craigslist, eLance, and/or oDesk ad for Technology X.  If you’re in India, hire people who claim to know this technology.

6. Screw your client over, when it’s revealed just a week before launch, that the developer you hired also attended a panel at SXSW, and believed that his attendance at said panel qualified him for your project. (unfortunately, it wasn’t even the technical one)

7. Go to SXSW next year and repeat.

This is stupid.

Yet, this is essentially what many development shops do.  We wait for projects that require new technology, instead of investing in them early.   We hope, unreasonably, that a client will approach us with the perfect project: one that is simple enough to learn as we go, but still challenging enough that our team emerges with new-found expertise.

This is a mistake, and every year, it’s killing your potential to increase revenue.

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At Monsoon, we may never be able to rap like the pantless knights but, we still like to think of ourselves as hardcore apple fanboys. We own 3 generations of every Apple product, camp overnight for new product launches and celebrate popcorn-hour each time Steve Jobs gives his keynote.

With every piece of digital loveliness made by Apple, being a part of this brand and culture fits right into our techno-chic lifestyle and gives us endless gratification. But the ultimate high for us is to see our work on Apple products. We’ve been developing applications for the iPhone for quite some time but we recently had the opportunity to work on an app with another one of our favorite partners, South By Southwest. SXSW brings together some of the world’s most creative artists, speakers and entrepreneurs and my business partner Sandeep has previously had the opportunity to captivate audiences with interactive panels on Outsourcing.

There is no other conference that fosters creative growth and networking opportunities the way South by does. Which is why we’re so excited to announce SXSW® Play, the official media discovery app for the SXSW 2010 Music, Film, and Interactive conferences. The app features a wealth of rich media from musicians, films, and interactive panels that will be featured at the festival in Austin, TX from March 12-21. With this app at your fingertips, you’ll never be bored in line again!

Features of the application:

You can download the free application from the Appstore and find out if you’re an Apple fanboy here.

“Experts say this global warming is serious, and they are predicting now that by the year 2050, we will be out of party ice.” –David Letterman

Jokes about climate change may not always garner lasting belly aches, but let’s face it, they tend to be more captivating then scatter diagrams and pie charts. So when the UN decided to collaborate with Monsoon for COP, we wanted to build an application that would be fun and interactive; something even Al Gore would appreciate.

We wanted to leverage the power of touch technology to ensure negotiators and leaders participating in Copenhagen heard voices of those affected by the impacts of global warming. We worked with the UN to create the Climate Wall, an experience that allowed conference attendees to spin a virtual globe and watch real-life stories about climate change.

Sights and sounds from around the globe bear witness to how the changing climate is changing lives. One of these stories takes us on a virtual journey to the Prey Koki forest, located in a quiet corner of eastern Cambodia. The forest has lost most of its cover to desertification and while planting trees, Buddhist monk So Kon shares the impacts of climate change . “Here in Cambodia our climate is changing. It’s getting hotter and the rainfall is irregular. But we believe that these trees can bring rain and help the farmers with their crops and daily life,” says Kon.

In an era where buzzwords like Corporate Social Responsibility and CO2 emissions make climate change feel like a distant paradigm, Monsoon’s virtual globe application brings stories from real people like Kon to your fingertips.

The concept was a success and featured on the home of Seal the deal and the UN. We simply feel blessed that we had the opportunity to make a small contribution in raising awareness about climate change.

See more pictures here.

I’m in Delhi for a few days, recuperating from the intensity of TED India. I met dozens of people who blew me away, slept about 12 hours total over 3 days, and somehow ended up giving two talks!  More on the talks (with video, hopefully) later, but right now, here is a recap of some of the TED experience.

The People

Due to writing/rehearsal time for my talks, I ended up missing more than a few TED talks, which was fine with me: I’ll catch them online, when they’ve been edited and produced for maximum enjoyment. Instead, I prioritized the time I had for meals and parties, where we got to sit down with people like Tony Hsieh, Nandan Nilekani Rohini Nilekani, Jacqueline Novogratz, Scott Cook, and others.  Many of those conversations were better than most of the TED talks I attended (especially an illuminating sourcing discussion with Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit).

Infosys

Most of TED’s attendees were whisked by bus (with police escorts) from the modern Bangalore airport to the Infosys campus in Mysore.  Those who left the country directly afterwards are going to have a very skewed perspective of where India is at.  The Infosys campus in Mysore is spotless and organized like a gated community in Orlando (it even features an Epcot Center dome).  You get this nagging sense you’re on the Indian IT version of the Truman show. While this was a great venue for TED (parties at palaces in Mysore, a beautiful outdoor Greek Theater, and fantastic venues for talks), it often felt contrived.

Sunita Krishnan

Sunita Krishnan is about 4 feet tall, which surprised me when I later met her in person, given her gigantic stage presence. She spoke of her work rehabilitating thousands of sex slaves and her own personal experience being gang-raped by eight men at the age of 15. Sunita’s talk was devoid of self-righteousness; instead, she touched the audiences with simple stories of joy and assimilation that she encounters every day in her work.  Make sure you catch this talk when the video is released.

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I’ll be speaking on a panel held by Stanford professors Richard Dasher for his course “Technology Strategies in Asia Business” on October 1st.

The panel is titled “Managing outsourced R&D in India”, and I’m excited to be joined by Avinash Agrawal (Sun/Stanford) and Bill Ihrie (Intuit).

The class is open to the public – here’s what I know so far:

October 1, 4:15 – 5pm

I’ll update the exact location as soon as I have it.

I’m thinking about rocking my Jahvid Best jersey to the panel. Go Bears.

Over the last 5 years, IT wages have been rising in India.  And for good reason!  Indian programmers are now some of the most experienced IT professionals in the world.

However, if alarmist blog posts are to be believed, this signals the beginning of the end for the still-nascent IT industry in India.   When Indian salaries are higher than American salaries, the incentive to offshore is gone.

Although I disagree with this premise for several reasons (the subject of future blog posts, I guess), I thought it would be interesting to try to figure out when the (cue horror film music) ‘Death Of Outsourcing’ is gonna go down.

So I channeled my undergraduate economics degree (ceteris paribus!!!) to figure this out.

Figuring out salary rates is easy.  But, if people are acting rationally (which economic professors are beginning to realize is a rare occurrence), they will consider more than just cost. Value must be factored into our equation.

Now, value is a subjective thing, but thanks to online marketplaces like oDesk, we can use ratings to understand the general value that customers are getting from the US and India.  We’ll use numbers from oDesk as our example.

For a variety of reasons, this is an admittedly flawed example,  but it serves our thought experiment just fine.

[For those who don't know, oDesk is an online marketplace that connects people looking for IT work with those providing it, like an eBay for IT.]

According to oDesk, Indian workers are paid an average of $11/hour, whereas American workers are paid $17.50.  There is a similar differential in value.  Indians received an average rating of 4.12 (out of 5), while Americans received an average rating of 4.48.

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Watch parts of Sandeep’s panel at SXSW a few weeks ago.

In just a few minutes, he manages to rail against the flat world, Tim Ferris, Thomas Friedman, and people who subscribe to Make Magazine. Well done, angry Indian man.

He also covers the following tips:

• Look for no.
• Save now, pay later.
• Everyone speaks screen.
• Move beyond cost.
• The 24 hour work cycle.
• Small is the new big.

It is impossible to attend a conference these days without a panel dedicated to “Doing X in the Flat World”. Practicing Law in a Flat World. Automobile manufacturing and the challenges of a Flat World. Best practices for Kabuki Stage Make-up in a Flat World.

Props to Thomas Friedman. In 2004, he barely knew outsourcing existed. Then, he goes to India. Instead of locating his chakras and opening a yoga studio in Pittsburgh, he ends up in Bangalore and gets shell-shocked by all the big buildings. WOW! Cisco is HERE?! You guys have computers in India? DSL? Amazing!!

Just like that, every executive in America has an unread copy of The World Is Flat on their bookshelf, and we’re all using a metaphor that never made that much sense.

So, let’s settle things. The world is not flat. It is curvy. Lumpy. Tilted. Full of nooks and crannies. And as a whole, still ROUND.

What’s wrong with the ‘flat world’ metaphor?
Besides my apparent jealousy of Thomas Friedman’s success, what’s so wrong with his metaphor?

To start with, the image of a flat world is all about capability.

Just a few years ago, Friedman made a case that information work can now happen anywhere, thanks to communications technology, skilled labor, and cost incentives.

Got it, Tom. People in India and China CAN do anything that we can do in the US. They have education. Computers. Telephone headsets.

This may have been a surprise to the majority of Americans in 1996. But, in 2007, it sounds kinda like Al Gore inventing the Internet.

Besides, if someone with a name like Tejas Patel or Timothy Wu was in your 3rd grade math class, you are already aware of what India and China CAN do. If Abhishek Chakrabarty fixed your computer last week, you have no doubt about India’s potential.

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Tomorrow, we’ll be blogging live from OutsourceWorld 2006.

Come by and say hi (I’ll be the non-descript Indian guy).