The Hindu Business Line : Action in the auction arena

Taobao means `hunt for treasure,' in Chinese. A company by that name, Taobao.com, was conceived in April 2003, when seven people, with an average age of 25, came together at a secret meeting in the private lakeside villa of Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba, in Hangzhou.

"In the first one or two months of operations, the seven founders worked more than 10 hours every day carefully studying eBay EachNet's site, debating its strengths and weaknesses, totally isolated from the outside world with no access to phones or e-mail," narrate Winter Nie and Katherine Xin in Made in China: Secrets of China's dynamic entrepreneurs (www.wiley.com).

They describe how Taobao made every effort to facilitate the buying process. "For example, Taobao employed measures to help buyers find what they needed at the fastest speed, reduce their risks, make it easy for them to judge the credibility of the sellers and so on. The design of the Taobao front page, product category management, and search engine reflected their understanding of the habits and preferences of their customers."

While Americans may value function and utility, Chinese are more attracted to the aesthetic features (colours and pictures are extremely important) and atmosphere, the authors observe. For instance, `the eBay killer' adopted a traditional teahouse culture, to emphasise the Chinese experience.

"Informality, congeniality, gregariousness, and familiarity are the features that draw people to the teahouse every day. Taobao's online moderators are called Di Xiao Er, or small shop owners of teahouses, instead of administrators."

Valuable insights for Indian entrepreneurs.

Tacit challenge to technology

How different are technologies used in knowledge management from those used for handling data? Technologies designed for managing data are structured, numerically oriented, and address large volumes of observations, and do processing without substantial human intervention, says A. V. Vedpuriswar in Knowledge Management From A to Z (www.visionbooksindia.com).

"On the other hand, technologies used in knowledge management must deal frequently with text rather than numbers. These technologies are also more likely to be employed in an interactive and iterative manner by their users."

Technology, however, is not suited for handling tacit knowledge, the author adds. Tacit knowledge, as explained in the book, is the know-how that people carry in their heads, including subjective intuitions and hunches. "Personal, context-specific knowledge is difficult to formalise, articulate or record. It is developed through trial and error and best transferred through doing and observing."

Technology, again, cannot create new knowledge, or be a change agent, Vedpuriswar notes. "Changing a company's knowledge culture requires altering basic behaviours, attitudes, values, management expectations and incentives. But technology can expand access and ease the problem of getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time."

He is also positive that technology can raise the motivation to share knowledge. "When people see their company investing time and money on its Web site or intranet for example, they may take knowledge management more seriously."

Useful reference.

Innovation in touch with reality

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do, says Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. "It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential."

Another of his quotes, in The Tech Tycoons, edited by Yogesh Cholera (www.wonderlandbooks.co.in), is that while there is no substitute for innovation, innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either. "We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality," Ballmer cautions.

The book, billed as `the Bible for the technology people,' begins with nuggets of wisdom from William Green, CEO of Accenture. "Shareholders no longer expect you to be best company in your local market, but the best in your industry worldwide," Green reminds.

John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, confesses how the company was started "out of frustration with the employer that we had because we were building great stuff and there was no way that this stuff was ever going to get into the hands of the people who could use it."

What did Pierre Omidyar have in mind, as the founder of eBay? It was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market, he reminisces. "I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business."

In chapter notes, Cholera informs that Omidyar was 28 when he sat down over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually became an Internet super-brand. Appetising collection that is worth dipping into anytime.

Master page

Real-world Web applications, such as those for online banking or shopping, demand a consistent look and feel so as to enrich users' experience of visiting the site, and that is facilitated by a feature called `master pages and themes,' informs ASP.NET 3.5 in Simple Steps (Dreamtech).

"The concept of a master page is all about incorporating visual consistency in Web applications," explain the authors from Kogent Solutions Inc. "A master page contains controls, banners, navigation menus, and other elements that you want to include in all the pages of your Web site. This makes your Web site more maintainable and also avoids duplication of code."

Recommended read for the hands-on techie.

World of virtualisation

Adoption of virtualisation solutions is expected to accelerate for the next few years, says Technology Forecast (www.pwc.com). The quarterly journal (summer 2008) cites the survey findings of Forrester Research - that x86 server virtualisation would increase from half to two-thirds of enterprise IT organisations.

For starters, virtualisation is the aggregation of IT resources and their physical characteristics so as to make them available to applications and users in an on-demand manner. "Virtualisation helps organisations optimise resource utilisation. The resources can be servers, storage, or other network components."

Because virtualisation is en emerging technology, most of the applications running in the virtualised environments thus far are non-mission critical, PwC finds. "However, as the technology matures, adoption will spread to mission-critical applications. It will also spread from large enterprise data centres to small and midsize businesses and desktops."

Knowledge update.

Tailpiece

"The e-mail war between the department heads became so hot."

"That you could almost hear the mails whizzing past, in the hallway?"

"And there were ferocious war cries with every pressing of the `send' button!"

dmurali@thehindu.co.in