Following Tolstoy, “All successful startups are alike; each failed startup fails in its own way.” Some startups fail because of flawed product execution. Some fail because of poor marketing. Some fail because they can’t get the right people. Some fail because they run out of money. Some fail because they did not understand the marketplace and the competition.

This story is about an anonymous company that failed for a relatively unique reason: a yawning gap between vision and product concept.

You might think that vision already implies a product concept. Yet actually the same vision can be realized via many product concepts. This particular company’s vision was to automate enterprise knowledge management and distribution. A wonderful vision, but one which could take the form of many different product concepts. For instance, one concept would be to build a monolithic, closed, smart knowledge management system. A very different concept would be to build smart knowledge management widgets that fit into and complement existing knowledge/content management approaches.

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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is proposing, as part of the government’s Digital India push, to make regional language interface capability mandatory on feature phones. These standards are expected to go into effect in six months.

One of the world’s leading localization companies, Moravia, has weighed in with a blog post entitled “India Gets Serious about Mobile Phone Localization“. Unfortunately, this post reveals a fundamental confusion about almost every aspect of this situation: the difference between feature phones vs. smart phones, between language support on phones themselves vs. applications, and between localization of interface vs. content. The post says that India is:

already one of the fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world, and the second largest overall. India’s vast hinterland is smartphone-equipped and hungry for local language content. The communities are cash-rich, and India’s e-commerce companies will have to reach out to them in earnest if they want to stay in the game.

this single paragraph neatly encapsulating all the confusion.

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