MADAM 2 - Genesis of an amazing new tablet. Customer strategy.

Today, I'll talk about the customer segmentation strategy of my new tablet.

The thing about the tablet market is that it is an expensive market to enter. Apple is dominant and is able to garner both premium pricing due to the design and OS ecosystem, and lower sourcing cost due to its massive scale.

Others, over the years, have struggled mightily. The big ones like HP just gave up, ASUS, Acer and so on have struggled, Blackberry Playbook is a bit of a joke. Was there a Motorola tablet? I don't even remember, xoom or something, right? The smaller companies tried too. There was that Singapore based tablet that vanished, there was that Techcrunch crunchpad debacle, and I've also heard of this company called Notion Ink that had 100 employees at one time and after 5 years have no viable product. So, we know that this is a hard market to enter. To make money, we need to sell in big volumes, hope to keep sourcing cost low, and make money.

As I like to tell everyone, you need to know exactly who your customer is. In our case, it's everyone - doctors, engineers, students, hipsters, grandmothers (we will have dual rotatable cameras so grandma can see two grandkids at the same time) and all others.

And therefore, to make sure we reach that market, I've decided on the following three extremely important design consideration.

1) My tablet will be rootable - in fact, it won't work properly out of the box at all. This is a brilliant move in engaging the community and as everyone knows, their grandmother, doctor, dentist and others can easily root their tablets and compile OS'. I'm amazed no one thought of this before! It is critical that users be able to customize their tablet.

2) I believe slim tablets are passe. In fact, after spending hours poring over design, we've decided to take a fresh perspective on tablets. And you, my dear reader, get to glimpse at this beautiful concept.... and we call it "double bezel bombshell" -  concept pictures coming soon (and real pictures coming soon after that)

3)  An Awesome "middle kingdom screen" - this is our new partner and we will introduce them soon. The MKS, as we call it fondly, is a cross between a laptop screen, a retina screen, an e-ink screen. It's not quite as vibrant as retina, not quite as bright as a high-res laptop screen, not quite easy to read as an e-ink screen  and that's where our genius lies. You can't quite watch a movie happily (we assume you've customized your video player with kubuntu and bigbuntu), the books won't quite be as good as a kindle, the working quality won't be as good as most other tablets, but NO ONE ELSE CAN DO ALL THREE, YOU GET IT!!

This is the differentiator! And this is something our customers have always wanted, a truly mediocre experience.

So, with those design principles, we've been busy. In my next post I will introduce you to two of our close partners, true game changers.

Announcing...The JKS-MADAM 2, the only competitor to iPad

My fans have been waiting for a long time for this announcement. I have been working feverishly on various elements of JKS-MADAM 2 to take a fresh perspective on the whole tablet development concept.

Since the 2nd world war we've seen various development in computing, but what is clear is no one has achieved singularity. Not cingular mobile, not Einstein, not Apple. Borne of a strong desire to change the market, I first had to conceptualize my vision statement, and after much thought and study of various companies vision statement, my brilliant marketing department (with my help of course) came up with this:

"We aim to transform the computed transformation landscape by schrodinger imaging and technicrystallizing such that every aim of singularity is achieved. We will take our customers on a journey of quantum characteristics, especially the uncertainty principle, while we dazzle with world with synergetic multi-scopal transformational serendipity. We are young at heart but ancient in capability. We will change your lives"

Clearly, as you can see, anyone will find it easy to understand what we do, and that is exactly the point.

Once we achieved this, it was time to think of a transformational product. But as my idol Steve jobs said, nothing without focus on design, and that's where this new journey began. In the next post, genesis of MADAM 2.

And hold on to your panties, the pre-order announcement will come in a few posts. I invite all leading technical companies, especially light reading, to begin speculating and get ready to interview me. I limit all my interviews to questions about my visionary capabilities and what I think of the world 5 years from now.

Week 5...and MADAM is near.

Week 5. Silence.

Anyone know what's going on? drop me a mail.

“Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!” - April 5 2012, Rohan Shravan, “CEO” of Notion Ink.

No shame, not one bit.

Fear not friends, I'm busy getting an announcement ready for the best tablet that will never be made, the JKSAUR MADAM tablet! You can copy cells from one to the other! you can workflow and even funeral directors can build apps on my app! It comes with a revolutionary software never made called HO, imagine the possibilities with inbuilt voice recognition control, for e.g. you could say 'what's up ho?', and we will also be introducing the greatest comic store. Anyway why am I rambling, wait for an official announcement in the next couple of days, we also have plenty of partners signed up!!

Week 4...

So, week 4.

"Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!" - April 5 2012, Rohan Shravan, "CEO'' of Notion Ink.

Nothing in last 4 weeks. And they were back from "Hibernation" and wanted to keep us busy reading on weekends. Once in a while it would be nice if they didn't mislead.

"Our mission is to promote and pursue community based development, and this is the only way we can work on simultaneous projects." - Rohan Shravan, January 2012. hey can someone show me how they're promoting and pursuing community based development in Adam 2?

Week 3...

http://notionink.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/back-from-hibernation/ - April 5.  "We are back from hibernation now! Sorry for the break (much-needed on our end). Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!"

3 weeks now without a post.  Guess they went back to hibernation after 2 exhausting weeks.

Credibility? pssht, who cares about useless concepts like that, right?

tablet opportunity can be as big as a billion dollars in 5 years!

http://www.lightreading.in/document.asp?doc_id=220713

Latest interview with Notion Ink's Rohan Shravan. I love the softball questions, and how you read so many words and learn so little. But here's two things I learned

- "The product is near completion" (but no timeline when it will be release

"The tablet opportunity can be as big as a billion dollar for us in the next five years." - Right. Just like how it was going to be 100 million dollars as he said 2 years ago.

Why are these "journalists" so afraid of asking hard questions? I don't know.

Just so you all know, my MADAM tablet opportunity is worth $10 billion in 3 years. I swear.

(the 3 comments to the article, if actually true, would be quite telling)

Two weeks...

"Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!"  - April 5 2012

That lasted all of two weeks. Nothing last two.  Now I wait for a NI knight to come and tell me that what NI really meant was "some weekend in a month and not every weekend because he really didn't say that"

 

Just so you know: This isn't about quicklogic. And one more thing...

I guess need to make it explicit. This isn't about QuickLogic - though if the NI CEO publishes two posts calling them partner it's only natural some attention turns to them.

However, it does seem like they're a pretty interesting, technically highly competent company, and hopefully their new product lines (with their VEE technology, which I've been told and corrected multiple times after my last post, that it is effective and based on a proven background) will significantly help propel them forward. Oh, their pico projector is very cool (here's the actual product link), I might even buy one because I see some real practical usage with it. Now I sound like a salesman ;)

One more thing: WordPress gives me backlinks to threads that link my blog or posts. In a recent TR thread one of them responded to this "partnership" thing with something along the lines of  "the CEO of the company doesn't know everything that's going on."

Uh. Listen to the webcast. The CEO of QuickLogic said that he met with both the NI founders. He said more, but listen to the webcast. Aside that, QuickLogic isn't a huge corporation, and in smaller companies CEO's will almost always have knowledge of the prospect pipeline and how further along the key prospects are to conversion. OK, even if you ignore all this, partnership announcements will almost always have a reciprocal announcement at the same time. Just find me one before today's date. And while you're at it, get me one for TI and Amazon too please.

QuickLogic - Notion Ink Partnership story gets more interesting

In a post a few days ago, I commented on why I'm skeptical of this being a partnership. Over the last few days, this story has become more interesting - so read on.

First, let's look at Rohan Shravan's statements on the Notion Ink blog (bold emphasis mine)

"Our partner for VEE and DPO technology, as you already know is: Quicklogic (image)"

"both of which are a part of a single brilliant package developed by one of our partners (who also holds the trademarks for VEE and DPO). In the next blog we will introduce our partner and what exactly DPO does"

So, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of what the term "partnership" means (as opposed to 'supplier', for e.g. Apple is not my partner because I purchased an iPad.), will infer that there is some sort of a mutual agreement between the companies and they're doing something together.

Now, let's take a step ahead. On May 1st, QuickLogic had its 2012 Q1 conference call. You can listen to the call by registering here. You can read the full transcript here (though the Q&A is not in there). Perhaps it was my blog post, or something else, one of the analysts pointed out about Notion Ink's claim of working with Quicklogic and posed a question to the CEO of QuickLogic about the "nature of the engagement or prospective customer"  (you can listen to it around the time in the image below. It doesn't have a time tracker)



And this is what Andrew Pease, the CEO said (I'm summarizing/paraphrasing - listen to the call for the full detail)

"First of all I was  surprised to see that appear on his blog..... we have no indication of the production schedule..."

He goes on to say multiple times that he has no indication of what the production schedule is. Think again - on his blog, the Notion Ink CEO calls them a "partner", touts the technology, and yet the partner is surprised to see the blog post and has no clue of the production schedule! It seems they unwittingly became a "partner" and they didn't even know that. The QuickLogic CEO does indeed make a few complimentary comments on NI (though he seems to think Adam 2 is for the Indian market) and says  "they're grateful to be mentioned on the blog", of course he'd say that - you don't want to diss your potential customers. Even if they're Notion Ink.

Read that again. The CEO of the "partner" was very surprised to see this on Notion Ink's blog.  Shravan pulled a fast one on this again - think this from QuickLogic's perspective, it is a surprise.

Also, given this is a public company that is trying hard to do well, associations or implications of any potential revenue streams will garner interest. This post on Yahoo finance is an example. And therefore, companies like Notion Ink should at least have the sense to clear their post with the partner company before splashing announcements. Recollect that he called Texas Instruments a "partner" and made a "press release" except that I've never found an equivalent from TI.

And as far as the followers of Notion Ink are concerned, just remind yourself once more if they are being honest in how they communicate. Remember once more that one of their most critical technology suppliers has no indication of the production schedule even at this point.

I will keep you busy on weekends! Oops, I just made that up. And Adam2 will be AMAZING

"Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!"

Er. Weekend's up.

Also, ever wondered why the latest posts have just 10 and 17 comments? It's got to be one of the two things (a) No one is commenting (b) They're moderating most of it out

I'm guessing (b) because whatever is "flowing across" our minds isn't what they want to publish. The cheerleader chicks too seem to have given up on the praises, which is a pity because I much enjoyed their comments.

Since Notion Ink mentioned that they're partnering with Quicklogic, I looked around for a reciprocal partnership announcement or press release from QuickLogic, but I can't find one. Anyone knows where? I mean when I search for "Quicklogic" and "Notion Ink" all I get are... MY BLOG posts. That's crap ;)

And in other news, there's that guy from G Tech Labs proclaiming that Adam 2 will be ... Amazing. So he apparently knows something we don't. I really hope he isn't basing it on plastic models and pictures. Would be nice if NI's partners stopped hyping them until we SEE the product in action, and as I said, it needs to fulfill some lofty promises that have already been made.

Hey, where did Dhyani go? I mean infographs were supposed to be a "long and fun project" out there and we've heard nothing more about it.

Update: Just a quick trip on the web -- publicly available information seems to indicate that  "Dhyani" isn't with Notion Ink anymore. But of what I found, I think this man is quite talented in what he does.