While procrastinating from doing homework, my mind took me for a wander and I ended up on the following musing. Thoughts?

Google will eat up pandora.com within the next 9 months.

Reasoning: Pandora is a small company, with an intense focus on usability and content customized for each user. It fills in google’s portfolio in music. Its a leader in what it does, and opens a new channel (no pun intended) in a very lucrative space for google’s advertising engine to get to work.

Pandora can benefit from Google’s oodles and oodles of bandwidth, exposure, and dare I say, search? Google already has a great music search. Could they target advertising and distill consumer preferences from who listens to what? It’s certainly a great way to sell music. I can see many record companies already salivating over Pandora.com and its loyal fan base. (Who wouldn’t like Pandora.com?)

Today, I won’t talk about Lootmaar. I won’t talk about entrepreneurship, not about VCs, valuations, exit options or convertible stocks. I’ll talk about imaGynation, human life and leadership. A business plan that I’ve been working on, won the first prize for a 100,000 dollars in the CURES competition.

The company name is ImaGyn. Its business is Cervical cancer prevention in the developing world and it is as of today, not a kludgy prototype, but a funded business that will hopefully one day save the lives of thousands of women. A small dent in the problem of cervical cancer which takes 260,000 lives per year. For this one though, we didn’t want to change the world. All we really wanted was a “chance” to save the lives of 19,000 women in Haiti, Tanzania and Honduras. And now, it may just be possible.

I could talk about the CURES competition, the technology and the judges. I could tell you tales of the underdog winning, but we’ll keep that for another day, another blog entry. Today, I want to talk about Theo Tam. The guy who led the team.

At Duke you hear a lot about leadership. I’ve attended workshops by strategy consultants, US military colonels, psychologists and entrepreneurs trying to demystify leadership. Do you need to be at least 6 feet tall? Do you have to be the smartest person in the room? Do you need to boss people around?

If I’ve learned anything about leadership in the past year, it is that a leader is a person who has integrity. And I think that is what makes Theo an effective leader. What hasn’t happened to us in the past 6 months? We were told by an expert that the technology is no good. We were told by NGOs that they won’t buy it. We didn’t have an engineering team and we didn’t have money. There were moments of self-doubt, weeks actually, when we discovered competition. But Theo persistently pressed forward. He led the team by being honest, by sharing information and by telling each member that it wouldn’t be possible without him. And meaning it.

Why did I continue working on imaGyn despite some serious setbacks? It was just so much fun working with the team. I know, I promised not to say anything about entrepreneurship, but there’s an important take-away here. Start a business with people you can have fun with. You need it in times of despair and self-doubt. You need it even more when you have 100,000 dollars to kick some serious butt.

Over and out.

The goal of imaGyn is to equip clinicians in the developing world with an affordable and effective technology in the fight against cervical cancer. To achieve this goal, imaGyn is developing the cerviScope, a portable colposcope that can be used for timely screening and prevention of cervical cancer. With this product, imaGyn hopes to contribute to the prevention of over 260,000 deaths a year worldwide due to cervical cancer.

Advanced untreatable cervical cancer is a highly preventable condition. The healthcare systems in developed countries have sophisticated and costly screening and treatment procedures that are routinely available to its citizens. However, in developing countries, this standard-of-care is often unavailable or too expensive to make accessible to women in the at-risk population, in this case, women between the age of 30 and 65.

The cerviScope has been designed for use in low-resource settings based on requirements taken from gynecologists in the US and in the developing world. Its rugged and portable form, combined with renewable power, will enable practitioners to take the device into the field, and do the examinations in rural areas. With superior optics offering magnification of up to 8X, the prime design consideration for the cerviScope has been to improve the standard of care for women in the poorest countries in the world.

For the first phase of launch, Haiti, Tanzania and Honduras will be targeted. These countries have some of the highest cervical cancer incidence rates, and are in dire need of support. Our plan is to equip practitioners in these countries with cerviScopes, and thereby improve their diagnostic ability. These cerviScopes would be funded by donors in the US.

The mission of imaGyn is not to change the world. Our modest ambition is to save the lives of 19,000 women in the next 5 years by helping them get access to cervical cancer screenings.

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The company website will be uploaded at www.imagynation.org

Last week, I met Robert M. Price, the former CEO of Control Data. What’s his claim to fame? Leading a billion dollar company, competing head-on with IBM, managing over 45,000 employees, and leading a team that consistently built the fastest computers on earth. Bob spent two weeks at Duke, and I was lucky to get an appointment with him to get his advice on Lootmaar.

Bob doesn’t like the idea of people giving prescriptive advice on strategy. There are enough of those these days, if most authors would have it, you could do almost anything in 7-steps. Instead, Bob reduces much of the fanfare surrounding technology and innovation, by describing technology merely as “know-how” and innovation as “problem solving.”

This definition has two important implications: 1) Technology is not just a bunch of PhDs developing the next generation silicon wafer. It’s also that plumber with a burning desire to make a flush that uses less water. 2) If innovation is simply problem solving, then engaging with customers to understand their problems is the first step.

Now, if you’ve survived through my pseudo-intellectual dabbling into innovation management, you must be wondering how in the world this relates to Lootmaar. It does, my dear Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian. It prompted me to think seriously about our mission, about what problem we’re really trying to solve by developing a marketplace, about how we’ll build a team passionate about problem solving, and most importantly, how we can engage the customer to understand what he really wants.

As a start, I’ve created a survey to understand user requirements. If you’re in Pakistan, please take our survey. As a follow-on, I’ll schedule calls with potential beta users, and ask them about what they want to see in Lootmaar.

Is this innovation? Is this technology? Depends on how you define it, but if it solves a problem by using “know-how”, then I don’t see why not.