My Fortnightly column, A Dose of IT that discusses the genomic opportunity for creating a Bio Health Network Kapil Khandelwal QuoteUnquote with KK www.kapilkhandelwal.com

1. c m y k c m y k
Bengaluru ●● Monday ●● 28 December 2009
An option
exchange may
have resulted
in $2.3 bn for
Google staff.
15
Technomics
An US retailer
is taking
orders for a HP
laptop with
Intel’s Core i3.
A YouTube video
says HP’s
motion-tracking
webcams can’t
see black people.
DDCC
The genomic
opportunity
Kapil Khandelwal
G
enomic decoding
of an Indian by
CSIR last week
put India among the elite
group of countries — the
US, UK, Canada, China
and Korea — countries
that have decoded the
human genome.
This is a major mile-
stone for Indian biotech
and healthcare research.
Genetic information is
useful to everybody in
the healthcare and life
sciences value chain: the
biopharma and clinical
development firms, phar-
ma and therapeutic med-
ications companies,
device makers, health-
care providers, and insur-
ance companies.
While it is still prema-
ture for India to think
about enacting a Genetic
Information Non-dis-
crimination GINA Act
that US regulators passed
last year, collaborative
effort is required between
life sciences research and
education, healthcare,
pharma, ICT players and
the government to create
a National Bio-health
Network (NBHN) Grid
that integrates basic,
applied research and
healthcare delivery appli-
cations.
It needs to integrate bio,
imaging, clinical private
and public health infor-
matics that can be lever-
aged to deliver person-
alised healthcare to a bil-
lion Indians cheaply and
effectively.
The NBHN Grid would
serve three key areas of
functional capability.
First, enable contribution
to research and person-
alised healthcare deliv-
ery. This would enable
access and sharing of raw
clinical and genomic
information, be it to
researchers, professors,
doctors, nurses, lab tech-
nicians, planners and
bureaucrats or the patient
himself.
Second, the Grid would
create an integrated
national knowledge and
clinical repository of all
informatics applications
across the sectors.
Third, it would allow
for maintaining and cre-
ating world-class profes-
sionals to serve and treat
local population.
In meeting the Grid’s
functional capability,
ICT players would have
to gear up in several areas
at a scale that the health
and life sciences ICT has
never seen.
These include four key
areas of data sharing;
development of knowl-
edge bases to link
research, clinical and
genetic data manage-
ment; creating ontologies
and semantic web tech-
nologies in different
fields that mean the same
thing but have a different
functional application;
and development of easy
to use software applica-
tions.
A question one would
pose for the ICT indus-
try: why do it in India,
when the experience of
the Western and more
mature health systems
such as the US, UK,
Canada, etc. has not been
very positive?
One, the Indian genome
contains Indo-European,
Dravidian, Tibeto
Burmese, Austro-Asian
and covers 65 per cent of
the world’s population
that has 90-95 per cent
Indian genotype similars.
In other words, any clini-
cal trial or healthcare
treatment if successful on
Indians would be suc-
cessful in 65 per cent of
world’s populate in about
90 to 95 per cent of the
cases.
However, the reverse
may not be true. Hence,
any healthcare or life sci-
ences ICT applications
created and tested in
other human genomic
club member such as
China and the UK maybe
good for their local test
cases but not for the Indi-
an gene, but not vice-
versa. This is the genom-
ic advantage can be lever-
aged by the ICT industry
for global rollouts.
Two, Indian health sys-
tems have not yet
matured and there is a
possibility of greater
adaptability and success.
Three, billions of dollars
that have been spent by
mature health systems
have still not been fully
integrated by ICT. Four,
mature health systems
still have one layer of
complexity — they still
need to integrate their
population genomic data.
Therefore, like the
Unique ID Commission
that is creating an Indian
solution to the billion
scale problem, a national
taskforce needs to be
appointed to look into
National Bio-health Grid.
Kapil Khandelwal is a leading healthcare and
ICT expert. Kapil@KapilKhandelwal.com
A dose
of IT
A dose
of IT
Home-made software to
ease financial headache
’10: Memory
chip short
supply seen
SANGEETHA CHENGAPPA
BENGALURU
Dec. 27: It is that time of the
year when you would like to
take stock of all your assets,
liabilities, expenses
incurred, and investments
made throughout the year.
But wait a minute.
Where do you begin the
exercise? Most of your
investments, expenses, and
credit details may be scat-
tered across multiple
diaries, files, or excel sheets
that you may not have
updated.
Help comes from a Ben-
galuru firm. Starting Christ-
mas eve, Perfios Software
Solutions has made avail-
able a web-based personal
finance software solution
free for retail users.
Perfios claims to erase two
major pain points faced in
the handling of finances —
it aggregates all your
finances in one place and
provides a 360 degree view
of all bank accounts, cred-
it/debit card transactions,
mutual fund investments,
equities transactions, fixed
deposits, insurance premi-
um payouts, assets such as
real estate holdings, art and
antiques.
Better still, you do not
have to painstakingly enter
all your transactions manu-
ally, because Perfios will
automatically fetch the
transaction details from var-
ious financial institutions,
categorise them and create
insightful reports, compute
your capital gains, derive
your income tax related data
points, send you alerts and
reminders on payments due
and give you investment
information on the compa-
nies of your choice.
The firm says that security
of transactions will not be
compromised since the
financial credentials fur-
nished are not stored on
company servers but are
encrypted and stored locally
on the user’s machine.
Users will be encouraged
to share read-only pass-
words and not their transac-
tion passwords with Perfios.
The company cannot access
accounts in financial institu-
tions unless one explicitly
uses the auto-update feature
in the tools menu or a Smar-
tUpdate feature.
“It took us 18 months to
develop Perfios, after which
we invited regular tax pay-
ing people, high net-worth
individuals, wealth man-
agers, and chartered
accountants to use Perfios
for a year and fine-tuned the
software based on their
feedback,” V R Govindara-
jan (Govi), director and co-
founder of Perfios Software
Solutions, said.
“We use the security cer-
tificate from Verisign that
enables us to transfer data
securely to and from the
user’s machine. While the
software is available for free
for retail users, institutional
users such as wealth man-
agers and chartered account-
ants have been using Perfois
on a subscription model for
the last six months. They
pay us Rs 1,500 per cus-
tomer per annum,” he
added.
Govi had earlier co-found-
ed Aztecsoft, an offshore
product development com-
pany that was acquired by
MindTree last year. Soon
after, he decided to build an
India-centric personal
finance product.
This was something even
an established accounting
software firm like Tally hes-
itated to develop. “We have
examined this space multi-
ple times over the last 10
years but still haven’t been
able to figure out who will
use a personal finance solu-
tion,” Bharat Goenka, co-
founder and MD of Tally
said.
Intuit, the $3.4 billion per-
sonal finance software firm,
which managed to margin-
alise MS Money (Microsoft
withdrew their product from
the market 2 months ago)
had also announced that it
would launch a customised
software for the Indian mar-
ket by June 2009 but hasn’t
done so yet. Managing
director of Intuit India
Umang Bedi remains
tightlipped about when it
could be launched.
Govi is confident that Per-
fios will turn profitable in 18
months. Plans are on to
ramp up the company’s
headcount from the present
14 to 65 next year. “We are
currently looking for a one-
time VC funding. There-
after, we will not require any
more funding,” he says.
The founding team
includes Debasish
Chakraborty, CTO, and
director Santosh Nair.
VR Govindarajan of Perfios Software Solutions wants to play Santa for people struggling to manage personal finances. — Shashidhar B
We have examined
this space multiple
times over the last
10 years but still
haven’t been able
to figure out who
will use a personal
finance solution.
Bharat Goenka,
MD, Tally.
the other view
London, Dec. 27: Memory
chips for computers are
likely to be in short supply
by the second half of next
year as consumers demand
more capacity and compa-
nies embark on a delayed
drive to replace PCs, indus-
try tracker DRAMeX-
change believes.
Prices for DRAM chips,
the most common type of
computer memory, have
stabilized over the past two
months after rising for most
of the year as recession-
struck chipmakers slashed
capacity and capital spend-
ing, causing shortages.
DRAMeXchange forecast
on Thursday that shipments
of PCs would rise 13 per-
cent next year, driven by
notebooks, with 22.5 per-
cent growth to 160 million
units, and pared-down net-
books, set to rise 22 percent
to 35 million units.
“DRAM will likely face a
serious shortage in 2H10
triggered by the hot PC
sales,” DRAMeXchange
said. “The DRAM price
decline will likely be eased
in 2Q10. That is, DRAM
vendors will have a great
opportunity to remain in
profit for the whole year.”
Top U.S. memory chip-
maker Micron on Tuesday
delivered its first quarterly
profit in nearly three years
as rising prices lifted sales
beyond expectations.
DRAMeXchange forecast
that 2010 capital expendi-
ture by DRAM vendors
would rise 80 percent from
this year’s record low to
$7.85 billion, rising to $10
billion to $12 billion by
2011 or 2012.
Industry leader Samsung
would spend $2.6 billion, it
predicted. Fellow Korean
chipmaker Hynix said on
Thursday it planned 2.3
trillion won ($2.2 billion)
in capital expenditure next
year. — Reuters
NewYork, Dec. 27: Fire-
fox evangelists have
something extra in their
stockings this holiday —
their Web browser has
surpassed Microsoft’s
entrenched Internet
Explorer surf software in
popularity.
Sort of.
According to the ana-
lytical firm StatCounter,
its surveys indicate that
Mozilla’s Firefox version
3.5 had a 21.93 per cent
market share at the end of
last week, compared to
21.2 per cent for
Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer 7 and 20.33 per
cent for the latest Explor-
er, version IE 8.
But it’s apparent that
Explorer still commands
the browser market when
you total users of other
versions. (StatCounter’s
charts are interactive and
you can change the vari-
ables.)
Nonetheless, Firefox
advocates can cheer that
figures do show that
Internet Explorer is los-
ing marker share over all,
falling from 68 per cent
last year to 55 per cent
this year, Wired notes.
— NYT
Some cheer
for Firefox
evangelists
Tavi Gevinson, who writes the Style Rookie blog, at an
Alexander Wang show in New York.
ERIC WILSON
NEW YORK
Dec. 27: Not everyone
thought it was adorable in
September when a 13-year-
old wunderkind blogger
named Tavi was given a
front-row seat at the fashion
shows of Marc Jacobs,
Rodarte and others.
Her feet, in designer stock-
ings, did not quite touch the
ground. Within a matter of
months, Tavi Gevinson, the
author of a blog called Style
Rookie, was feted by
designers, filming promo-
tions for Target, flown to
Tokyo for a party with the
label Comme des Garçons
and writing a review of the
collections for no less than
Harper’s Bazaar.
The arrival of Gevinson, as
a blogger, ruffled feathers
among the fashion elite.
Anne Slowey, who has spent
decades climbing the edito-
rial ladder to a senior posi-
tion at Elle, dismissed the
teenager’s column as “a bit
gimmicky”. And in an
instant, the subtext in her
complaint was read by
dozens of Gevinson’s fans
as an example of the tension
between old media and new.
As a relatively new phe-
nomenon in the crowded
arena of journalists whose
specialty it is to report the
news of the catwalks, fash-
ion bloggers have ascended
from the nosebleed seats to
the front row with such
alacrity that a long-held
social code among editors,
one that prizes position and
experience above outward
displays of ambition or
enjoyment, has practically
been obliterated. After all,
what is one to think —
besides publicity stunt —
when Bryan Boy, a pseu-
donymous, style-obsessed
blogger from the Philip-
pines, is seated at the D & G
show in Milan between the
august front-row fixtures of
Vogue and Vanity Fair, a
mere two positions to the
right of Anna Wintour?
“There has been a com-
plete change this year,” said
Kelly Cutrone, who has
been organising fashion
shows since 1987. “Do I
think, as a publicist, that I
now have to have my eye on
some kid who’s writing a
blog in Oklahoma as much
as I do on an editor from
Vogue? Absolutely. Because
once they write something
on the Internet, it’s never
coming down. And it’s the
first thing a designer is
going to see.”
Perhaps it was to be
expected that the communi-
cations revolution would
affect the makeup of the
fashion news media in much
the same way it has changed
the broader news media
landscape. At a time when
magazines like Vogue, W,
Glamour and Bazaar have
pared their staffs and under-
gone deep cutbacks because
of the impact of the reces-
sion on their advertising
sales, blogs have made
remarkable strides in gain-
ing both readership and
higher profiles. At the shows
this year, there were more
seats reserved for editors
from Fashionista, Fash-
ionologie, Fashiontoast,
Fashionair and others, and
fewer for reporters from
regional newspapers that
can no longer afford the
expense of covering the run-
ways independently.
But it is somewhat surpris-
ing that designers are adjust-
ing to the new breed of
online reporter more readily
than magazines, which have
been slow to adapt to the
demand for instant content
about all things fashion.
Blogs are posting images
and reviews of collections
before the last model exits
the runway, while magazine
editors are still jockeying to
feature those clothes in
issues that will be published
months later.
So it is not without reason
that some editors feel threat-
ened, or that seasoned crit-
ics worry that they could be
replaced by a teenager. The
designers who once quiv-
ered before the mighty pens
are now courting writers
from Web sites that offer a
direct pipeline to potential
customers. Sure, magazines
and newspapers have started
their own blogs and tweets,
but reading them, you often
sense a generational discon-
nect. — NYT
Bloggers crash fashion’s front row