Intelligent transport systems

I attended the Intelligent Transport Systems trade fair at Stockholm today and was amazed to see the new technologies being developed by dozens of innovative companies, big and small.

Most interesting for me was the technology that lets you analyze videos of traffic. The camera feed is processed using feature extraction and image recognition techniques to read license plate numbers and even find out the type and color of the car! It is also possible to find out the speed and direction of the car. Therefore you just have to install cameras at strategic points in the city and you will not need to set up police checkposts! If you are looking for a blue Wagon R, say, that was involved in a robbery at location A, you will be able to pretty much track in real time its progress through the city, even if the crooks change the number plates! Imagine the data being delivered to policemen on their mobile phones by SMS, in real time. The technology exists!

Now THAT is truly game changing! I love it.

Sthlm

Sthlm - that is the short form for Stockholm. The city made up of fourteen islands.

This evening, driving over a bridge with the imposing King's palace and Parliament on our left, and on the right the building where the Nobel prizes are given out, I wondered what kind of human energy would allow a sophisticated civilization to thrive in this land of dark freezing winters! In contrast, most of India has much less lethal weather.

Yet there is no energetic frenzy here in the people. It is just a quiet efficient country. Most people work only from 8 am to 4 pm (yes!) and 4 to 5 pm is rush hour. People enjoy a lot of holidays, 6 months maternity leave, 3 months paternity leave... and the country is still so much richer than India. Everyone seems productively employed, efficiently employed.

Productivity is the key... We have to make every Indian productive. PROTON is a small start but a good start.

Sweden

I write this post from an office in Stockholm. Outside the skies are gray, the air is cool, and everything is quiet and clean. The office itself is typically Swedish, light colored wood furniture, white board walls, a simple spare aesthetic. The Swedish aesthetic is reflected in one of Sweden's best known brands, the assemble-it-yourself furniture company IKEA.

The Swedes are an interesting people. They are quite international in their outlook, and Stockholm is bustling with people of all colors of skin. Most of them speak English well.

They are also early adopters of technology, as are many other Scandinavians, which is perhaps why the mobile phone giants Nokia and Ericsson occupy this small corner of the world. Some of Ericsson's buildings can be seen from my window. These plain, warehouse style buildings are fitted luxuriously inside, including with indoor swimming pools.

The Swedes have a very open and flat corporate structure. They are proud of the fact that you can pick up the phone and call the CEO of any company and he will probably answer the phone himself or herself and talk to you without arrogance. There is a whiff of socialism in the air, also reflected in the astronomically high tax rates.

The Swedes are famous for the way they make decisions. In the Swedish style of management, everything is consensus driven. There is little place for individual egos or centers of power. "In another country, I can get an okay from the CEO and the deal is done," lamented a Swede at lunch today. "Here I have to talk to the entire management team till they all agree." It is considered all right to have many meetings without a decision. The upside is that when a decision is taken, the consensus is very solid and things move quickly.

The Swedes are known for their love of coffee, which helps them fill up the time in the winter when there is hardly any daylight. They also laugh at themselves for their little good-natured eccentricities, like a love of the "take a number and wait" systems at every Swedish service office.

Please go back to my post on handheld technology

I did not see any comments - perhaps it was because I published a few posts all at once and people only read the latest ones.

Do go back and read that post on handheld technology. I am really looking for ideas there.

Investing in the stockmarket

Over the course of your life, you will probably invest at some point or other in the stockmarket. It is important to understand what the stockmarket is and what it is not. I will outline some very basic ideas below.

The stockmarket is a risky investment. If you invest in a broad-based way (that is, covering many types of companies in many sectors), you have lower risk because while some of these may do badly, chances are that others will do well. At the other extreme, a single stock by itself is quite a risky investment.

The risk also reduces over time. If you think you may need your money at short notice, the stockmarket is not the right place to invest it. Put money in the stockmarket only if you don’t mind leaving it there for 5-7 years.

Beware of people who promise to invest your money for you claiming that they will get you better returns than the market. Even if you escape the Madoffs of the world, remember this: it has been proven that most money managers are no better at picking stocks than monkeys throwing darts. And unlike the monkeys, the money managers don’t work for peanuts!

Be even more skeptical of business newspaper columnists. If they knew how to predict the markets, they’d be retired! I read everywhere these days that “this is the perfect time to buy a house”. Haha, this is definitely some PR money at work.

The only way to possibly beat the market is to develop great understanding and intuition about how things will evolve. Not many of us will get there. A few people like Warren Buffett have managed to beat the market on the average, but even they are wrong once in a while. This is why they do not go and bet all their money on a single outcome. They know that at the future is always a gamble and they gamble wisely.

The investor who is most dangerous for himself or herself is the person who first invested when the market was in a bull run, i.e. rising continuously. He or she does not have the experience of markets that go down and stay down for years. That is why I am warning you – you are lucky to grown up in a time of resilient markets that cannot be kept down for long. But that may also prove unlucky if, by the time you have money to invest, you start to believe that markets will always give you supernormal returns.

There is no free lunch.