Who knew wind energy has a mortality rate that mirrors mines and coal plants. Wind-works does.

WindStats has recently re-examined the mortality
data in light of wind’s rapidly expanding generation. The mortality rate
is a function of not simply the number of deaths, but the number of deaths
relative to the amount of electricity generated.

In the mid-1990s, 14 men had been killed on wind turbines or working
with wind energy. Since then six more have died, including the first member
of the public, a parachutist who literally flew into a turbine in Germany.

Total cumulative generation reached nearly 130 TWh from 1975 through
the year 2000. The number of deaths per TWh of cumulative generation steadily
dropped through the 1990s.

The high number of deaths in the USA may be connected to the typically
frantic nature of year-end, tax-subsidy driven installation booms.

The data clearly indicates that the wind industry will have to do
a better job at improving safety if it wants to live up to its promise of
being clean, green, and–benign.

Imagine a car that gives 65 miles a gallon. Its made by Ford! Why cant you buy it in the US? Businessweek has a host of good reasons (below).

1. People’ perception that diesel is awful.
2. Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline.
3. The engines are built in Britain, so labor costs are high.
4. The pound remains stronger than the greenback. At prevailing
exchange rates, the Fiesta ECOnetic would sell for about $25,700 in the
U.S. By contrast, the Prius typically goes for about $24,000.
5. No tax breaks for diesel vs. hybrid
6. Ford plans to make a gas-powered version of the Fiesta in Mexico for
the U.S. So why not manufacture diesel engines there, too? Building a
plant would cost at least $350 million.
7. The automaker would have to produce at least 350,000 engines a year to make such a venture profitable.

Hat tip.

The economist has a good piece on auto fuel.

LNG (primarily Methane converted to liquid form) is used by a lot of public transport vehicles in Asian countries.

Natural gas can be considered as the most environmentally friendly of the fossil fuels, because it has the lowest CO₂ emissions per unit of energy and because it is suitable for use in high efficiency combined cycle
power stations. Because of the energy required to liquefy and to
transport it, the environmental performance of LNG is inferior to that
of natural gas,
although in most cases LNG is still superior to alternatives such as
fuel oil or coal. This is particularly so in the case where the source
gas would otherwise be flared.

CNG is propane fuel. It is considered by some to be a more environmentally “clean” alternative to those fuels, although it produces greenhouse gases, and it is much safer than other motor fuels in the event of a fuel spill: natural gas is lighter than air, so it disperses quickly when leaked or spilled.

Compare those to the hybrid Prius.

CNG car gets about the same fuel economy as its petrol equivalent, but
emits 80% less smog-forming nitrogen oxides. The Environment Protection
Agency rates the Honda Civic GX—the only production car sold in America
that runs on CNG—even cleaner than the Toyota Prius.

image credit: Volvo

Cyndy of Industry standard laments the Web is very US Centric. I think she is more ignorant than wrong.

Granted most startups and services cater to US users initially since they are early adopters and have relatively good broadband adoption.

1. She’s ignorant of the many South Korean and Chinese companies that exclusively to their local audiences.
2. The number of Internet users with broadband in China, Korea and Japan exceeds that of US.
3. The Internet traffic now has begun to bypass the US.

It maybe that Europe is largely focusing more on the mobile web and hence their participation in the Web might be less (which I doubt), but Asia is alive and kicking.

Old but really funny. Its actually more dark humor than light, cos most of it is true.

How many forum members does it take to change a lightbulb?

My favorite:

13 to say “do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs”

image: magazine.uchicago.edu/

I pre-ordered a FitBit. What is it? Its a way for you to track your daily calorie usage & expenditure. I already use Rescue Time which tells me how much time I waste spend invest on facebook. For most people that have to know, this is the best way to track your exercise time, sleep time, time spent on the laptop, yay.

Go get one. Its out in Dec / Jan.

BTW, I am not sure why Yammer won TC50 instead of this device. This is more useful and revolutionary in my opinion.

Rediff has a list of India’s most admired entrepreneurs. The list comprises of individuals at very large companies in India. Here are the most interesting items I gleaned from it.

1. 16 (about 60%) of them inherited their companies. They took their companies from good positions to great positions. Examples include the Wipro Chairman – Azim Premji, Ambani’s, Wadia’s etc.
2. 10 of them were first generation entrepreneurs. They started their companies from scratch and built it within their lifetime. Examples include the Infosys founders, Tulsi Tanti and Airtel founder.
3. 11% of them are in Information technology & telecommunications (Wipro, Infosys, Airtel) etc.
4. Over 80% of the entrepreneurs have their wealth spread across multiple industries and have a Group of companies.
5. No women. That’s sad. I can think of several that are doing an awesome job – Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Archana Bhatnagar of Haylide
Chemicals.

I would love to see the same picture in 2020. With 60% companies from first time entrepreneurs, and 30% of them being women entrepreneurs.

What will it take to get there? a) Determined entrepreneurs b) Mentorship and c) Access to capital.

I can help solve (b) and (c). We need more (a).

I was talking to a friend based in Mumbai today. He works as a product manager at a fairly large Internet company (large by Indian standards).

Mumbai has been the center of endless controversy about “local” language usage and its seems to be civil xenophobia bordering unrest.

The short of it is that India has a national language – Hindi. Its mostly spoken in the north of India. Each state pretty much speaks its own language and are close to 15 major and hundreds of minor languages. There’s a little bit of the Lexus and the Olive tree in most states. Southern states like Tamil Nadu & others staunchly prefer their own regional language and pretty much ignore or refuse to acknowledge any Hindi. So, the default becomes English, which is spoken by many of the literate. Many Indians that migrate to other states from their home state dont quite learn the local language & customs at all – which is the big beef of the “locals”. There’s a fear among the locals that their traditions, customs and values (and most importantly their language) will get overwhelmed by English.

My friend lamented that most Indian Internet startups have very little “local knowledge & language” advantage because we are so heterogenous. The top Internet properties in India by # users are mostly global, since the “literate” Indians know English. That’s served us well in the backoffice outsourcing, but unlike China where Sina, Alibaba and QQ dominate the web thanks to their largely Chinese language content.

What is local knowledge (besides language) and how can startups in India use it to their differentiated advantage? Here are some examples of successful, and I would love some more examples outside of India (maybe Europe) to help understand this.

1. Shaadi leveraged the knowledge that Indian parents tend to have significant leverage on their kids marriage and launched Shaadipoint to help parents look for prospective brides and grooms for their kids. This is different from the 10000+ dating and match.com variants in the US and other places.

2. A local Indian real estate 2.0 startup leverages their knowledge of local districts and suburbs to build a manual / automated database of real estate properties.

My bigger question  is: What’s the future hold for the largely speaking English Indians vs. the largely Chinese speaking China? Is it important that we teach our kids local language and customs to preserve them or look to integrate in the global economy. I know the easy answer is do a bit of both, but its not practical.

The economist wrote a piece on my friend Sridhar from Zoho. There’s a quote which caught my eye – As Mr Vembu puts it: “The India or China price will effectively become the world price.”

These are my first reactions and thoughts and I may change my opinion as I think more about this. As a software entrepreneur and from India, this is the MOST scary thought and prediction ever. I am not saying this wont happen, or may not happen, but its absolutely awful for the software industry if it does.

First to understand what that means, the “price” paid in India for software is non existent. Same for China is my guess, but I cannot confirm. A significant portion of the industry is bootleg software. India does not in general value software. That is because the “price” paid by Indian companies. So what are the ramifications if what Sridhar says does happen?

1. Innovation becomes minimal to non existent: Its fairly relatively easy for Zoho to tell their engineers to copy and
paste the functionality that’s in Word, Saleforce.COM, Webex etc. (Side note: Most would argue Microsoft and Google are not innovators, but fast followers, so that makes it a good model).  Innovation is underwritten by profits from products that are priced at market price NOT cost of development. If the rest of the world pays the India price, there’s a) no incentive to innovate and b) no return for the risk taken to break new ground.

2. It would lower the standard of living overall. If developers in advanced countries dont see a premium for their talent and creation, they wont spend the time and effort producing good software. The cost of living (even in a place as inexpensive as Idaho) is a lot more expensive than most places in India. If you get paid about $7-$12 / hour (more than minimum wage but not by that much) then its a race to the bottom, because that’s what Indian developers get paid. The annual 20% increase stories notwithstanding.

I admire Sridhar for all his accomplishments, and think he’s been a great role model for many Indian software entrepreneurs. Pricing your software not on what the market would bear but more on what it costs you to build it is not the right way forward for the software industry.

I talked to a few entrepreneurs the other day looking for funding. The have bootstrapped their company and have done an excellent job getting their company to a point where a venture investor can put money to accelerate their growth as opposed to funding product development. I was extremely impressed by their market understanding, commitment to the cause and the traction they had gotten with literally no marketing budget. It spoke volumes about the problem they were trying to address and the product they built.

I sat down to do the “introductions”. I explained my background and gave them an opportunity to give me their background. The first one said “I have a fairly boring background”. Those were the first words out of her mouth.

Now I understand and appreciate modesty and understatements, but this was over the top on the other end of the spectrum.

The amazing part was her background was great awesome. She started early at a very high profile local software company, grew up the ranks, and did extremely well at a fairly male dominated industry to achieve a very commanding position, but she chose to downplay it. Maybe because it had nothing to do with the current venture, or maybe because it was in a different industry, but that’s not the point.

I am very aware of the Indian (and also German BTW, but more on that later) approach and culture that expects you to not blow your horn, but I dont think it does any justice to the potential investor for you to say you had a boring background.

Here are my tips on introducing yourself and your background:

1. Talk about tangible accomplishments. What you did on any project that grew revenues, delivered returns, or saved money.

2. Discuss unique experiences that changed the way you view things. Put them in perspective to what you are trying to do next.

3. Share some customer experiences (bigger names better, name dropping is okay here) and how what you did helped them.

4. Relate skills that you gained which are relevant to the new role / position you are fulfilling.

5. Highlight about your ability to either work in a team environment, grow strong independent high performing teams or your ability to bring people’s different opinions from different backgrounds together.

I believe you can do this in 90-120 seconds with a sentence max (and you dont have to cover all 5 points) on each area. What do you think? Am I off base?