Crazy Guide to the Internet

What does Gridstone Research do? If an Equity Analyst asks this question, the answer we give is what our home page says,

Using cutting-edge technology, Gridstone assembles, analyzes and structures unstructured company information into financial data, guidance, operational data and structured text. Information that could take hours to assemble is available at your fingertips, at our website or directly in Excel.

This describes the end-user benefit. But for those who are interested in such matters, it still doesn’t answer the question of what we actually do. To explain this, I will heavily lean upon an excellent post on ReadWriteWeb, by Alex Iskold. The post is called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web.

Wikipedia describes the Semantic Web thus

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

The Semantic Web and associated standards like RDF and OWL are rapidly gaining visibility. But is it anywhere near where it might produce something of business value? Many commentators believe that it is going to be a long haul. Iskold outlines several challenges with what he calls the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web in another great piece.

The biggest challenge that the Semantic Web is going to face is about what to do with all the existing content. How do the website owners justify the expense related to annotating their content with semantics? And until the content is converted, no useful applications can be built on top of it. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

Might there be another approach then? An approach where someone or some company actually builds the technology to annotate web content with semantics. Iskold calls this the top-down approach

The essence of a top-down semantic web service is simple - leverage existing web information, apply specific, vertical semantic knowledge and then redeliver the results via a consumer-centric application.

Iskold believes that this is not only more likely to be successful in the short-term, it is already happening. He talks about Spock, a vertical search company focused on people.

Consider the vertical search engine Spock, which scans the web for information about people. It knows how to recognize names in HTML pages and it also looks for common information about people that all people have - birthdays, locations, marital status, etc. In addition, Spock “understands” that people relate to each other.

This is very similar to what Gridstone Research does, albeit in an entirely different domain – financial information.

We

Crawl the web. (the SEC website)
Recognize significant numbers (page numbers are not significant)
Understand relationships with other numbers through a taxonomy. (S&M and G&A add up to SG&A)
Understand the attributes of each number ($, millions, US GAAP, Consolidated)

Additionally, we

Recognize named entities
Understand relationships of brands, products, management to companies as well as among companies themselves (competitors, suppliers, customers)
Recognize forward-looking statements
Enable semantic search

In the last two years, we have been busy building the enabling technologies. This isn’t an easy problem to solve and there are many building blocks. But finally, all the pieces are in place. Later this month we will unveil Search on the Gridstone platform. It will be unlike anything you have seen in the Financial domain.

Watch this space.

The monsoon in Mumbai was winding down and Ganesh Chaturthi had just been celebrated when it struck me that this would be a good time to pay my respects to a man I much admire. So, on a recent bright and clear morning, on my way to work, I stopped by at Chowpatty Beach , that small stretch of sand at the start of Marine Drive that is an island of calm in hectic Mumbai.

It was nearing nine that morning and everyone other a few stragglers had finished their morning exercise walk and gone. The few men and women still lounging around the benches strewn along the edge of the beach were, I guess, folks who had no particular place to go or nothing particularly important to do. On nearby Marine Drive, cars whizzed by in both directions, Mumbaites in their usual demonic hurry to get to work.

What I’d come to see was there alright, if anything taller than I remember- nearly ten feet tall and when you add another ten feet for the pedestal it rested on , it was not easy from nearby to take the whole picture in.

There he stood, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, veteran of many a battle, forever impatient to set his country free now caught in an unhurried pose. One hand clutching a book, perhaps the Bhagwad Gita commentary that he wrote when the British incarcerated him for six long years in a tiny cell in remote jail. The other held a walking stick lightly. One foot was slightly ahead of the other as if he was setting out on a march for one of the many causes he felt so passionate about. He stood there alert as if watching carefully all who entered Chowpatty Beach. On Ganesh Chaturti day, millions pour past his watchful eye to immerse the Ganesh idol into the sea here. And as every school boy in India is taught, it was Tilak who thought up the public version of what was till then a private festival to get around a fearful British colonial government prohibition of large numbers of Indian gathering at one place. Early Ganesh processions even carried pictures of Garibaldi the unfier of Italy.

I wonder whether school children get taught nowadays why Tilak was sent for his first spell in prison. It was nearing the end of the 19^th century, Mumbai and Poona were being ravaged by plague which had spread here through merchant ships that traded with Hong Kong. The British colonial administration started forcibly removing plague victims and isolating them in “plague hospitals”. 19^th century science knew of no other solution to plague other than isolating people who already got it to prevent the disease from spreading to others. The high-handed way this isolation was done created an outcry among the population. Things came to a head when the British official in charge of this segregation effort was assassinated in Poona. Tilak was implicated, probably falsely, as a conspirator and sent to jail. All this may make Tilak look like an obscurantist who came in the way of medical progress he was far from that. In the middle of this turmoil, his newspapers in Poona were carrying up to date accounts of what Koch, the German scientist, was doing to isolate the plague virus. I wonder whether our school children are taught to make this distinction about Tilak’s actions- the nationalist who objected to the way citizens were being herded into plague hospitals and the modernist who followed eagerly the progress that science was making in finding an answer to the plague problem.

From where I stood beside Tilak I could see that Tilak’s gaze would have taken in the row of glitzy shops that have sprung up across the road on Marine Drive: a Levi jeans shop, a Renault car showroom, one for Arrow shirts, an immensely popular outlet of Café Coffee Day that is packed at all times of the day or night with young trendy, jeans-wearing college students. What would Tilak have made of all this? When he died, in 1920, it was far from clear whether or when India would wrest Independence and Tilak till his end was uncompromising in his demand for Swaraj. But he was also the man who in 1880 had co-founded an English medium school in Pune, “The New English School”, and an English language newspaper, “The Maratha” .

For that matter what would Tilak have made of what some environmentalists say- that the immensely popular Ganesh festivities that culminate in thousands of Ganesh statues being immersed in the sea cause environmental damage. The Ganesh statues were, in Tilak’s time, made of harmless clay and painted over with vegetable dyes, but present-day versions are made of plaster of paris that, environmentalists say, contains gypsum, sulphur, phosphorus and magnesium and are painted over with chemical paints that contain mercury, cadmium, lead and carbon.

Tilak, ever the modernist, would probably have led another movement, this time at the head of the environmentalists who suggest that permanent idols made of brass or stone be used, that a symbolic immersion be done so that the same idol could be used again the next year and oppose the use of thermocole and plastic in decorations. And, ever the great activist, he may have carefully watched the immersions from his vantage point at Chowpatty to make sure that these socially important directions are followed.

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com

It is early January here in New York and the weather had no right to be as warm and sunny as it is today. By any account it has to be freezing and below zero Celsius and the streets have to be speckled with dirty, melting snow puddles. These pigeons that we see hopping along in the square ought to be hiding from the cold in a warm nook of some building. The streets are bustling with people. This is not a sight for early January. People ought to be indoor and the streets ought to wear the deserted January look.

I find myself strolling back from lunch with a prominent technology guru of a prominent Wall Street bank.

“I have finally figured out what ‘one lac’ means,” he had said to me.

“How come?” I asked, genuinely surprised. There have many things I have tried explaining about India to our western friends, but not our numerical system of ‘lacs’ and ‘crores’. I thought we had left that safely behind in favour of ‘hundreds of thousands’ and ‘millions’. The term ‘lac’ had seemed so archaic. But here it was, back in the world’s headlines with the ‘Rupees One Lac car” from the Tatas.

“I believe what the Tata’s are unveiling today, their Rs one lac car, is going to change the way the world looks at Indian companies,” my tech guru friend had said.

“When the Indian software industry, made its mark,” he had continued, “the rest of the world had understood how they did it; Indian programmers were a tenth as expensive as programmers in the West. Then the Indian rupee steeply devalued from Rs 8 per dollar in the mid-1980’s to Rs 45+ per dollar in the mid 1990’s making the cost competitiveness case even more compelling. But the Rs 1 lac car is different. They will get to this target not by using cheaper labour or cheaper materials available only in India. They are going to get to this by bringing into play product design skills, consumer insights, management systems, perhaps even a new business design. In other words, they are going to compete on capabilities not resources. That’s why it is sending a shudder down the spine of many Western executives, not just car industry executives.”

As I walked back to my office my mind strayed to other such moments in industrial history.

Take, for instance, Richard Arkwright’s successful effort in the early part of the 19^th century to make machines spin yarn of a quality equal to or better than that spun by skilled, hand spinners in India. His innovation made yarn cheaper and thus made cotton cloth woven from it affordable not merely by the very wealthy and it had been till then. What Arkwright did was not save labor costs by using machines instead of labour because any such savings were more than offset by the cost of equipment and factory buildings… His real innovation was in the design of work such that workers would all congregate at a fixed place of work (a “factory”) and thus work for predictable hours and under tight supervision as opposed to working odd hours at home. Superior work organization allowed output to be dramatically increased and made cotton yarn widely available, a feat that home-based spinners could not achieve. The rise of the Western world was predicated first on this idea- the use machines to do at one central place what hitherto human muscle power had done in decentralized home based activity. Then came the use of chemistry to make synthetically and in plenty materials that had been hitherto available in nature in restricted quantities and in varying quality levels and consequentially at higher prices. Thus indigo from India was synthetically produced and became available in vast quantities and at a fraction of the price of natural indigo; aspirin, hitherto distilled from the bark of willow, was similarly synthesized and millions of ordinary citizens benefited.

Henry Ford created another revolution when he launched his Model T car and brought cars within the reach of ordinary people. He did this by deploying “mass production” techniques- a new system of arranging a sequence of metal working machine which did repetitive operations reliably and which could be supervised by the illiterate, unskilled immigrant labor coming off the impoverished farms of Ireland and Southern Italy- the only kind of labour available to him at that time. Ford’s “big idea’, mass production, then got deployed in a wide variety of metal working industries and made such objects like the sewing machine and bicycles affordable by all.

The “big idea” behind the Rs 1 Lac Tata car is this- an Indian company, has dreamt up a management system and a business design to build cars that are affordable by people who had never dared dream of owning a car..

The real message of the Rs 1 Lac car is that in one stroke, it is showing the way to Indian managements that a new era awaits- one where you compete on superior management capability leaving behind decades of attempting to compete on cheaper labour or cheaper natural resources.

Its like the early coming of spring after a long cold winter.

End