Naukri IPO

After months of speculation and waiting Naukri.com finally and officially announced that it its going public . it has submited its IPO filing with sebi . you can read it here .

Althoug timing is a little odd but still this is really an exciting news for Internet Business in India . Sanjeev has proved that Internet business can make money and to be profitable you don’t really need to have an worldwide audience to serve . you can do it by serving the need to domestic customers also .

i had the opportunity to meet Hitesh and Sanjeev Twice . if anyone deserve this honour than it is this team. i can foresee a Mad rush to invest in all the dot com .can we say that dot com boom 2 has finally started in India . i think now VCs will start looking at companies beyond Travel portals

Critical Q is what will they do with all the money they are raising ? there are two option which easily comes to mind 1) they will start expanding their operations overseas but honestly this doesn’t require a lot of cash they can easily leverage their “Word Of mouth ” Credentials . second is to diversify in other vertical . with jeevansaathi.com & 99acres.com in their stable this seems to be a logical step. I personally feel that 99acres is a good place to focus . in my last assignment at WebPlains (a great company BTW ) i have worked as a salesman in Staffing /recruitment domain . i have seen the clout of Naukri firsthand ( w.r.t to bixee and green hire episode ) .

and with whatever little exposure i have to real estate market i can safely say that stage is all set for infoedge to capture this market . with Naukri going public i think 99acres can get all the attention it deserve and Team infoedge should stop treating it as a step child .coming months will be interesting to watch the action .

Pirates of Silicon Valley-Microsoft steals from Apple

I am a YouTube fan . in the wake of recent turn of event at Microsoft (M$) BillG's announcement to step down and everything else i started sniffing youtube for some videos related to Bill Gates,Microsoft ,Steve Jobs ,Apple . intially i was doing it just for amusement but then i discovered some really serious stuff here .
This one shown here is a clip from a movie based on the story of BillG and Steve Jobs titeled
"Pirates Of Silicon Valley "
its cool , do watch it .

Prashant

News :: July 2008 & Bill will be Out of Gate

So the word is officially out ..Bill Gates ..The Richest man in world and Founder of Microsoft has finally decide to step down from Day to day responsibilities of Microsoft's operations in July 2008 .HE will be assuming more of an Advisory role in the company . he will still be the chairman of the company and its single largest individual share holder . He plan to devote more time to Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Charity work .

This news caught me with surprise i am still in a state of shock .Can People like Bill Gates ever retire is it possible for them ?? I still believe its not . he is a great Business Leader and Visionary and of course in few quarter he is practical also . He may lack Steve Jobs Charisma ,he may not be in news like Jack Welch or Soros for his passionate believe in anything and propaganda around his believe and he may not be able to communicate like Paul Graham but he is in my view the brightest master of strategy world has ever seen in recent history .

Will Microsoft become a lesser company without BillG ? will it make things easier for Google ? Is it just a Smoke and Mirror Tactics to withdraw attention away and saving the company from too much of public scrutiny ?? will BillG's Ghost haunt Redmond ? is the days of Desktop computing over ? are we finally entering in to always on ,always on demand , web ( 2.0) based world .

I don't know . I don't think anybody know for sure . i am sure of two things

#1) It will not change a thing for Google . for a company of the size of google & Microsoft you (Usually ) don't need a competitor to Kill yourself . your weight and foolishness is enough to do a good job of it .

#2)Biggest beneficiary of this move will be MS it self as a lot of hidden talent in MS top brass will come out from the shadow of banyan tree (Read BillG) and will get there share of lime light . it will give a tough competition to any suspecting rival.

#3) Desktop computing will remain a dominant paradigm of personal Computing for a long time to come .

#4) Bill Gates will remain the richest Man for a long time to come .

I am still pondering over the long term implication of this news . will post a full fledged analysis sometime over the weekend. however Joel Spoksky has given an excellent write up on his first meeting with Bill G when he was working with Microsoft . its worth reading. Find it here .

floofy cloud or Aline in Sky

floofy cloud
Originally uploaded by Anosmia.

I am a member of a group on Flickr Called " Window Seat Please" . To day i came across this mystical picture on the board . somebody clicked a cloud from his window seat and some oneelse saw a ghost in that cloud .
can you find out the Ghost or Alien here??

Folck :A New Web Browser

Few days back guys at Folck released a public beta of their much awaited Browser . It was an exciting news for me for two reasons.  One i happen to meet with Chris at barcamp Bangalore and attended his presentation on Micro formats . it was awesome . he  was till very recent past  associated with this project . Now he is a freelancer doing consulting work .

secondly this project was making a very different  and somewhat dramatic bet on the future of browsing as we know it . Since the inception of browsing technology ( Mosaic  Onward ) the approach to developing a browser is pretty much standard . browser was more of a gateway. it was done in a more and more generalised fashion . there was no optimization for any application specific or domain specific usage pattern . there was support for ActiveX,XML,Frames but they were not aimed at any particular user base . that means there was no application level optimization there was no specific browser for E-Commerce or for Usenet or blogs or for video . there was a business sense in doing that .of course if you optimize your browser for one user group you run the risk of alienating with the rest of Internet users . since no single user base was big enough to make this kind of effort commercially viable so it was in  the best interest of developer to make it as Horizontal as possible .

folck is the first browser with this application layer optimization . they have positioned themselves as a browser for web 2.0 crowd who are neck deep in to  social networking and tagging and other such stuff . their tag line says "Browser for You and Your Friends". with its feature for Blogging, Feed reader and photo sharing it surely have some appeal to this user base .  i am hooked on it right now and plan to do so in future but i really wonder how long i can keep up with the inconvenience of using multiple browsers . Maintaining  History , Book Marks ,feeds,passwords  at two places is too much of work .


its really an interesting experiment . do we really need a separate browser for every kind of browsing we do ? can we all the features of folck be pushed in to FireFox by some extension or some plug gin . is it just an heck an experiment or this is a start of a new trend .
well time ahead will be the judge of it . but right now i am captivated by the sleek interface and new features of folck . Kudos to the team .
good luck ...may the force be with you .

Problems with Mobile web

My affair with mobile web application domain is around 7 year old now. I was a little late adopter of a fixed line telephone as our village was not having a phone line. when I get in to college I fell in love with wireless networking .when I was asked to deliver seminar as part of my course curriculum I choose to give a presentation on “WAP: A Tool To Unwire Internet “ . Since that day I am constantly monitoring this domain from the view point of a amused observer, tech enthusiast, user and since last six month or so as an aspiring entrepreneur willing to get a slice of some action and make a small fortune in process.

Jokes apart I honestly believe that Mobile Web domain is the next hot thing in Hi Tech . Forthcoming years will see a hell lot of action in this space. Specially for a country like India where cost of access device (Read PC) is still a bit too high for most of the people . Mobile phone offer a very affordable alternate for internet access.

But something is missing. Even though we have all the tools and conditions to create a mobile web ecosystem. Still we haven’t got the critical mass .this industry has not really reached at a Tipping Point. atleast not yet .

Why?? What is the Problem?

My One Line Answer: “Our Approach to Problem is the Real Problem”

In this post I intend to draft an anatomy of our wrong approach to mobile web application development.

PC Hangover

“ What would you call a device that has a screen, a keyboard, storage for personal information such as contacts, email, documents, the ability to play audio and video files, some games, a spreadsheet program, and a communications capability?
Sound like a personal computer? How about "mobile phone" ? “

Philip Greenspun In "Mobile Phone As Home Computer"

“Think about it... someday there'll be some newbie. He'll register a domain, throw up a bunch of mobile web pages and then someone will hit the site from their PC and get an error... "Oops! I totally forgot about the PC!"
Will it happen? Hmmm. Probably not, right, since that newbie will probably be making the web pages from his or her computer, so they'll obviously try the site from their PC. Mobile Web Pages will be the norm when you can create a complete mobile website from your phone without help from a computer. It's like the web equivalent of a OS bootstrapping. Until you can do everything from creation to consuming from your mobile, there'll always be a PC in the way, and thus the mindset won't change (at least for me). “

Russell Beattie In Mobile Webpage Thoughts

When we think of computing we think of PC , when we think of internet we think of PC as the default device . All our design heuristic are derived from PC World & developing Apps for mobile is perceived as equivalent to Picking up a desktop application and optimizing it for low screen size, low processing power and less onboard memory . And eureka !!! what you have got is a browsing experience which sucks

Both Mobile and Desktop are tow different devices which are used in different manner, the parameter of user expectation are different. So making a rehash of desktop application and trying to push it down the throat of end user will not help.

People(read :We the Geeks) are trying to use mobile web as a glue to fix when desktop web access is broken because of mobility limitation of desktop. IMHO this is the reason why mobile web has not been able to take a life of its own . App Designers /Architects believe that mobile browsing is a way to patch the connectivity glitch , its not a mainstream internet access medium. In spite of the huge success of DoCoMo’s Mobile Data Application in Japan most of the companies (Telcos, OEM, Content Provider ) don’t look at it as a mainstream access device which is not doing justice to the potential it holds .

My Two Cents Advice: Stop looking at mobile web access as a secondary/Ad hoc browsing solution and start building Apps with mobile paradigm in their DNA. It’s not an exercise in optimization, its something we need to do from the scratch.

Generation Gap

Most of the Decision making guys in Telco & OEM are the in Late Forties and they are totally out of sync with the expectation and realities of Young-Hip-and Upwardly mobile user base of Their product . I talked to a Senior Guy of VAS in Leading Telco and he said “Given the Rock Bottom Call Rates Here in India I think SMS is a sheer waste of Time “

In the same Telco I talked to a Sr. Manager (Marketing) {Ex-HLL } and asked him Where/When do you think your customer is most likely to use your VAS Services like GPRS etc . He was at a loss but then said “at Barista/Coffee Day I guess” . He may have a point but one reason why mobile browsing picked up in Japan (and UK to some extent ) and not in USA is that people commute using Public Transport (London Tube & other Train ,BUS .Tram Etc) in Japan and UK but American prefer to Drive their way to work . Now I think its kind of hard to drive and browse simultaneously. People in Telco seems to be totally clueless about it . A classic case of Marketing Myopia.

Now I know and you know the size of market SMS/Mobile VAS represent .if I am launching an Innovative SMS based service I need to fight this Guy in his Late Forties, based on my experience as a sales man I can safely say that biggest difficulty in concept selling is to convince a guy whose generation haven’t “lived” with the problem which you are solving

(As a matter of fact I can’t convince my DAD that its worthy to spend 500 bucks on a pizza. He just won’t listen to me and dismiss my arguments in amusement. ).

Telco might be very swift in adapting to the technology in Equipment .we skipped one phase of Telecom Equipment evolution and moved straight to High Bandwidth OFC Networks. But our business logic is still (mostly) a rehash of AT&T syndrome and we all know that at one point of time AT&T had more Lawyers than Engineers.

Some external Events like SMS Response to “Indian Idol” may give a jolt to these folks once in a while and they may realize the size of opportunity but they are totally incapable of doing it in a proactive manner.

My Two cents Advice: Voice is Dead (Remember the Line in a Cell phone Commercial “…..And You Can Also Talk”). Stop Idealizing AT&T and look at NTT DoCoMo and try to do in India what they have done in Japan . That’s where the future is.

Walled Gardens & Traffic Policemen:

“Most big companies have some kind of turf to protect, and this tends to warp their development decisions. For example, Web-based applications are hot now, but within Microsoft there must be a lot of ambivalence about them, because the very idea of Web-based software threatens the desktop. So any Web-based application that Microsoft ends up with, will probably, like Hotmail, be something developed outside the company.”

Paul Graham In Hiring Is Obsolete

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves? )

:Juvenal, Satires, Roman poet & satirist (55 AD - 127 AD)

This in my opinion is the most damaging aspect of mobile web . Because it has got something to do with an external dependency. From Telco’s to OEMs , From Regulatory bodies to VCs everyone is somewhat biased toward the Big Companies and no body actually give a damn to entrepreneurs .

Things are different in Traditional web application space . If you come up with a good application & execute properly than you have a fair chance to be successful. Because nobody can stop your customer to come to you and consume your services. There is very little external dependency, not for the most part.

But here in mobile web where Pipes are monitored and controlled by the Big Brother (READ: TELCO) you are literally at the mercy of the whims of Telco. The moment you are profitable the Telco mafia knock at your doors for extortion. Even Google’s Of World are not immune from this.

Conflict over revenue sharing between Content providers and Distributors (Telcos ) is another area where there is a ugly exploitation is rampant . In Japan most of the time content provider get as high as 80% of the revenue . here in India the providers cut is 30% at the most . Why ??

Telco says that this is because most of the content is not available in India are very much a commodity. Ringtone, Wallpaper, screensaver etc so it makes sense for them to squeeze it because there Rival Telco can easily copy it next time. Point taken .

We the entrepreneurs are to blame for this. There are very few genuinely New Application in this space in India . One of My Friend who commute through DTC had a tough time finding out the availability to Bus on a various routes . She asked me can’t she SMS her location & destination and some application send her the schedule and Bus number of the next DTC bus available. Truth is it can be done .very easily she only need to send her destination as Telco knows her location anyway and DTC Schedule is more or less stable . So why don’t we have a service like that yet??

Because

1) the skeptic Telco guys will say that folks will prefer to ask bystanders than SMS. (Alright ADD Inter-state Traffic and Railway schedule to it).

2) We are busy making ring tone L

Cell Phone OEMs are another “Partner in Crime“here. After more than a decade of cell phone usage there is no standardization in the market .we are not unanimously agreed even to the battery and charger format. Which should be obvious as charger is a non strategic thing .

Point is that Its not that standards are half baked or they are evolving . the reason is that proprietary implementation is a way to hold the customer in a Mousetrap .but on the flip side in the absence of a unified standard developers are always confused about how to develop an application to have maximum foot print.

My Two Cents: I can’t say anything which they don’t know already . They seems to know the PC History and are aware of the benefits of standardization but it seems that they are afraid of end up being IBM.

This is my take on some of the problems which are associated with Mobile web wonderland. I wanted to write about the VC side of story also but refrained from doing so because I will be looking for the funding soon .

As always your comment and feedbacks are welcome and awaited

Larry Page Video

Came Across this Video clip of Larry Page , giving tips to aspiring enterprenuers . it gives a glimpse of how much measurment centric this guy is .Cool .
worthy watch .

click here to see it

Have a Great weekend !!!

Wow !! Flickr Goes Gamma

Holy God !!

Just when i thought Flickr is the perfect photo sharing site on the web they got even better .Now they are more addictive and  deadly . From Beta they have gone Gamma :-)  . In Gamma version of their  service  they have added a lot of new features.Like activity history and connection status  .

Long standing problem of not being able to track who has commented to which photo and who has replied to my comment is solved . 'Flickr is  more useful and intuitive than ever before


Good Job !! I Love Flickr !!

Google Trends : A Glimpse of The "Database Of Intentions"

Sometime back  google launched a new service called Google Trends  .  With this service you can choose any topic or keyword  and google will tell you  how many times and by which geographical area  a search  is being done on it . Now  you can see the graphical distribution of search magnitude over time line .You can also see tabular  representation of search  in terms of geographical  distribution .

its a funny and addictive service  i tried to find out search frequency for Sania Mirza. compared search frequency of Nokia ,Motorola,Sony .

Bill Gates  & Larry Page and a Lot more .Mostly nasty one  . It was very informative . Specially when you look at   the part of the world from which the query is being done ?

Want to know sex is searched more at UAE or USA ? well  go find out find out :-)


Alright it is a cool application . But implication of this service is far reaching than just people like me doing it just for hack & fun  of it . We know that google keep a record of every search being done  through its site . you can track it right up to the IP address from which the search is done .

I n his book "The Search"  ,  John Battelle   (Co Founder of Wired  )" call this Log of search as "Database of Intentions" . Every google user  fear the day when what he search for is known to the world . whether we admit it to our self or not  but we are practically naked in front of Google. With Google Trends this database of intention is open ,Although at a very very coarse granularity level .

You can't  find what your Friends are searching for, But you can find out what an average person in UAE or US Or UK or India  is searching for . This can be  an explosive tool to study whats going inside a society , whats cooking and whats is being bottled up where . With this  raw , unedited and first hand info about citizen's  preference in a given geography  our precept ion of a country and their culture may change drastically . for the first time  Its not a Ministry  of tourism or Foreign affairs telling us about the country . Its the summation of action and intentions of their citizen . isn't that a real disruptive piece of info .

Kudos to Google Team for this breakthrough  . Their  mission was to organize worlds information . with Google Trends they are one step closer to providing  Actual  information to world . Still there are something which is scary , can this be treated as a factual data for forming opinion about a country (Eventually it will , some folks are quoting it already) .

Coming months will be interesting in this respect . I am keeping my fingers crossed

SPHERE : A New Blog Search Engine

Prayers are answered ,Well at least sometime !!

Yesterday only  i was having an IM Chat with my friend Mukul about the lack of a decent Blog search engine.We discussed  why Google Page Rank is not a suitable way to sort result while searching  blogs . We both agreed that world desperately need a Google of  Blog sphere .

Surprise !! Today  i stumbled upon SPHERE. its a new Blog search engine launched by Scott Kurnit , Founder of About.com .

Tired of all other options, i decided to gave it a shot . i punched in my Fave keywords to test its accuracy .

i tried "Mobile Web Application","entrepreneurship" ,India,web 2.0,sling box,Paul Graham , Funambol,start up, telco ,revenue model in web start up etc.

i have done google & Technorati search for these keyword so many times that i know most of the result in first 02 pages .  

 surprisingly sphere threw up some very very interesting, relevant results. although there is a significant overlap in the results still i am impressed by the accuracy and relevance of SPHERE.
its worth the trouble of doing a search in 3 sites.  
one reason of this freshness and relevance of the result might be that Page Rank has been around for long enough time that people have learned to manipulate it to some extent . entire cartel of SEO has evolved around this .

So main challenge for Sphere will be to maintain the sanity of there search algorithms  and always be one up with SEO Crowd . Every body in SEO world  is busy tinkering with google but the moment Sphere will get a large enough Fan Following (Which It will Get eventually ) SEO's will focus on it . it will be interesting to see how Sphere team deal with this .
Still my Exp Today is Great . Hats off to the Team . Good Job  Scott !! Congrats .

 

Going TO BarCamp Bangalore

BarCamp Bangalore is only a day away . i am all very excited to be there .response to barcamp here  is phenomenal ,around 200 folks have registered at the wiki . action on barcamp Bangalore mailing list is something i never seen before on nay group . looks like it will be a great day .


if you are in Bangalore than  don't miss it for world .


see you folks

--
Prashant 

 

Google Calendar

 

Blogsphere is abuzz with the rumor of the launch of Google Calendar tonight. Its said to be an Ajax based application to manage and share  Your Events, schedule and Contacts etc. some screen shots are available here. After Writely this is another Frontal attack from Google to Microsoft's Dominance in Office Productivity application.

This bring us to two key point to watch for 

1. ) With Calendar Google Will be Entering in to the phase of putting the Active Data /Business Data of users on their server. I am looking forward to see that How Comfortable an Average Biz user is with the idea of the Enterprise Data on Hosted Server? In my view, given the strength of their brand, doing this should be easy for Google,

2. If Google is able to pull a good act out of calendar thing it will be natural to move in to the project management and scheduling. so will Google  try to invade the domain of 37signals. I think Google will probably bid for it. This will be an interesting play to watch 
   

I am keeping my fingers crossed .

BarCamp Bangalore

Sorry for the break in the Discussion about the buying habit of Big 5 of Internet world . there was a lot of action in personal life (change of job to be more precise ) so can't blog much  .

 

Now the latest news is that After success of BarCamp Delhi this time India's silicon valley Bangalore is going to host BarCamp . its scheduled for  Saturday, April 22, 2006  (9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.)

 

you can check the details at the wiki URL for the wiki is

http://barcamp.org/BarCampBangalore
 

 

response was too great we run out of space . due to constraints we got to close the registrations  after 100 participant and 30 sessions .

 

will keep you guys posted about it .

 

What Does Big Boys Wants to Buy? Part –1

 

Every aspiring entrepreneur wants to come up with the next killer application. But the question is what is a killer app actually? How do you validate that your application is a killer app? A common rule of thumb is if any of the Big Guys (Read Google, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, Ebay etc) wants to buy you than your application can be a killer application?

Success for a startup approximately equals getting bought. You need some kind of exit strategy, because you can't get the smartest people to work for you without giving them options likely to be worth something. Which means you either have to get bought or go public, and the number of startups that go public is very small.

If success probably means getting bought, should you make that a conscious goal? The old answer was no: you were supposed to pretend that you wanted to create a giant, public company, and act surprised when someone made you an offer. Really, you want to buy us? Well, I suppose we'd consider it, for the right price.

Paul Graham In "Ideas For Start Up"

With this thought in my mind I begin to explore what the big guys of Web 2.0 would like to buy? This proves to be a Holy Grail. Especially when we have the example of EBAY buying Skype with out any possible synergy between their lines of business.

So I thought lets compile the data and do some crunching to predict who may wants to buy what. J . I begin by analyzing what ultra cool Google might be interested in buying? What's there in Google shopping list? I will analyze the buying pattern of all the three big boys in subsequent posting.

Lets start with Google 

I found a complete list of acquisitions made by Google at wikipedia . Even in Pre IPO phase Google was always scouting for good start up. But post IPO its acquisitions are more widely know and good news is currently Google is on a Shopping Spree .at first glance they all look like madness and without any master plan. But on a deep analysis you can find some strange pattern.

Surprisingly most of the acquisitions made by Google are in the category of "Shadow Applications " very few of them are in the front end? Only a very Few of the companies were bought in order to enter the new business (Read: Picassa, Pyra Labs, KeyHole Outride etc).

Most of them were just applications which can strengthen the existing product offering which are not in leadership position in their respective markets.  Something likes a steroid for a dull application in Google Basket.  Like Deja which was bought to re launch Google Groups. "Applied Semantics " which was bought to develop contextual advertising like Ad Sense and Ad Word. They paid 102 Millions for net semantics. Later on they acquired sprinx to enhance these contextual Ad services.

Zip Dash was bought to provide a revenue stream on the top of Google Maps.

Reqwireless was acquired to avail Gmail on wireless devices .

dMarc Broadcasting was acquired to extend advertising onto audio channels.

Writely was acquired to provide online web based word processor

Baidu was acquired to get a geographical reach in a niche market.

Cut a deal with AOL to get a lot of user base, which stick to Default.

 

There are many more. But I guess this list is enough for the purpose of discussion

So? Does that Looks like a totally random selection with out any coherent logic? It looked like this to me initially. I thought money has got in to the head of folks at Google. Predicting what Google will buy is not easy.  Can I do it? 

Honestly I can't but I can find some common characteristics, which are present in all these firms and try to extrapolate from the data. We can only point in the general direction of the next buy of Google.

With all these data I set down to do crunching and finding a pattern, super imposing one model after another.  (Actually I had dinner with one Investment Banker last night so I am still under the hangover J).

Sadly I still can't shout Eureka! So I share my finding with you and trust "wisdom Of Crowd " to help me.  So you go thru the details I have given here and come up with your own predictions.

I will post my analysis some time soon during the day or tomorrow.  Now it's Time to Go Back to work J.

stay tuned

 

Saad's Photo Stream

During bar camp i had a chat with Saad . i don't know much about him other than the fact that he is a NID Grduate and a ace Photographer . he can do wonders with camera . check out his Flickr photo stream here  
if some body is intrested in my flickr photstream he can find it here

 

How was Holi For you Guys ?? Last few days have been exceptionally hectic a lot of good and sad things happened but now its past . will resume regular posting soon .

 
Prashant

 

Problems With Advertisement As A Revenue Model

Sometime back (Last Saturday to be more specific) I gave a talk at BarCamp Delhi about “Web 2.0 & Power of Default “. I discussed how customer accepts what is offered to them and live with sub optimal solutions. I explained how this tendency of default is spilling over to Internet applications also.

Audience response was good (Well, They were listening ). Some folks asked questions pertaining to the default factor & its implications. But strangely most of the Questions come out from the slide where I mentioned, “Web 2.0 Requires a Revenue stream other than Advertisement “.

Well honestly I haven’t prepared much about that point . Much of the answers I gave were more of the gut reactions & reflexes that were not backed by “coherent “ logic.

So here I will attempt to bring some coherence in my arguments about why I am not comfortable with the idea of having Advertisement as the [only] source of revenue.

What Are Advertisements? : A Tool to Grab Your Attention

Ever heard of the term “Attention Economy”? No? Ask any veteran of Advertisement world. This is a pillar of Advertisement (Now onward “Advr.”) world.

Attention Economy is the whole cartel of Advr. Folks trying to get your eyeball, you’re mindsapce, your attention and getting paid for it. They put up an Advr. , You look at it; if it is good you talk about it to your friends and somewhere down the line this convert/translate in to you or your friends purchasing the stuff. It’s a chain reaction for which you are the starting point .So it all depends how good was the Advr in getting your attention.

In narrow sense of word the parameter for measuring the efficiency /Quality/Effective ness of an Advr is, it’s ability of distracting us from what we are currently doing and make us pay attention to the product it is pitching.

This makes Advr. Unsuitable for some type of applications. It’s ok to look at an Advr while you are relaxed, or not doing something, which require a focus attention of yours. In short if your intended application or website offer a service which can be accessed in a “Sit–Back & Relaxed “ mode (say photo sharing, social networking, chatting and even Blogging J) than perhaps having a few Advr link on the side bar is not a bad idea.

But the moment you want to do something that require you to “Sit-Up & Stay Focused “ than most of the folks don’t like the idea of having an intrusion of Advr. That partly explains the reason why out of so many companies in Web2.0 space ,only 37signals.com is not having a Adv supported business model .Because the nature of application require them to do so. and 37signals is having a substantial user base that actually pay for the service.

There is one more and very interesting aspect of this story,

During the debate at BarCamp someone from the audience said

“ I won’t mind having a few Ad-Sense hyperlink in the side bar if that can enable the service provider to give me the service for free. Its perfectly fine with me.”

What that gentleman was trying to say was that he would put up with the annoyance of having Ad Sense link, as long as application is free. He will simply ignore them. He will not click on them .its fine with him

Yes Sir! It is absolutely fine with you. And you are not alone, World is full of people like you. But if I am a small time service provider, it is not fine with me. If you come to my site and don’t contribute to revenue even after a long time of steady usage of my service than I will be in trouble.

If you look at the ratio of “Page View “ and “Advr Click” for Big Portals, you will see the truth. God save you if you are a small time operator for a niche segments.

Problem is compounded with the rise of “contextual, Text based, Advr service” like Google’s Ad -Sense, which pay you only for clicks. Now than you can’t even get the benefits of “Eye Ball Time” of those “Banner-Ads” On Which a user might never click but which can generate /convert in to a sale in offline world.

Say an Advr of Pepsi or “All Clear Clinic” .

So if you want to make a “Sit Up “ type of application what are we left with?

a) Simply make some thing people will pay for. J
b) Keep a basic version for free but not “Advr Free” so that user can try it
c) Give a lot of feature in Paid & “Advr Free” Version.
d) Let both Free & Paid Community interact with each other.
e) Keep your subscription fee very low.
f) You can even think of starting a sort of referral scheme which award you a certain point on every joining and after amassing a certain numbers of point you are automatically upgraded to a Free “Paid Version”.

OR Else

You can keep giving every thing for free and hope that one Fine Day Google, Yahoo, EBAY & MSN will try to out bid each other to acquire you. Good Luck.


Problem With Portals:

You can argue that Companies (Read : Portals ) are making Money this way. Isn’t it? Doesn’t it validate the model?

Yes it does. But only partially, only for some players, some very big player .Big players are hard to replicate. There can only be so many Yahoo and MSN. While making plans for your businessbig portal are not good data points.

“Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy Millions of dollars worth of Advertisings on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter-- stimulating another round of investments in startups.”

Paul Graham in “What Bubble Got Right?”



Now be honest to your self and calculate how much chance does your company have to be next yahoo before you burn all your cash? If you think it has a fair amount of chance to do so, than you might as well take yahoo as a data point.

Problem with portal model is that aiming to be a horizontal portal like Yahoo, MSN is like competing with Boeing & Airbus in bidding for a 100 Year Lease of all aircraft of Lufthansa. There is very little room.

There is a time for every type of technology & every type of venture. If you are there at that time you can click. Not after it, Nor before it. Portal was the model of Web 1.0 world now have a good number of portal.

Similarly Blogging might be the hottest Application today, but it is not a brainchild of Payra Labs alone. Long before Web 2.0 and all this hype, a company called PointCast came up with the idea. It was way ahead of its time.

So think about it what type of application you have? Can you replicate the Portal phenomena? & Can you make Portals of World Buy you? And can you do all of these before you run out of cash. And deiced.

Endnotes:

I have not suggested any solution to the revenue problem here. I have tried to provide a framework for discussion. I am looking for an answer myself because as an aspiring entrepreneur this is the first question VCs will ask me.

This makes me wonder why this Advr mindset is still prevailing and why people still see it as the only source of revenue on net. After all 1999 is not that far in memory lane?

I think part of the reason lies in the history of Advr & Internet it self.

From the inception of the concept of Advr. It has been very hard to measure “Return On Investment “(ROI) from the capital expense on Advr. (I.e.: Can you tell how many people drink Pepsi because they saw an Advr of Pepsi in Playboy or Times or WSJ?) .

Internet is the only medium where this problem is solved to a certain extent. This is what Advr World has learned from Internet.

What has Internet learned from Advr World?

Well if you can get enough folks to Advertise on your publication you can sell your newspaper on a cost that is absurdly lower than the expense & still you can make a lot of money.

But ironically while most of the newspaper charge you some thing? Geeks have taken this to next level and they are giving their newspaper for free.

Looking forward to you comments!!

The Itch, The Denial & The Muse

What are our desires? What on earth does they stand for? Why some of them snowball in to passion or obsession and other dies very next day? Is there logic behind this seemingly random process?

Sometime back I wrote a Blog post about loosing the desires of child hood as we grow up? In that post I provided a cursory view of the problem. Why we hold back our self from doing what we want to do .Be it Starting a Venture or Going to North Pole or Asking the girl out for coffee? Why some time we can do it and sometime we can't?

Ever since that posting I was thinking about it .I used to think that the solution lies inside us. It's a fight within me. It's all about overcoming my fears, insecurities and uncertainties and there is no external dependency. Starting a Venture require a mental require to cross a mental gap which is up to me to do. Outside factors can't help much, at least not in any Positive manner. I need to be a lone warrior in this quest.

I was wrong. I realize it while I was sitting at BarCamp Delhi.

There are external factor. Three of them. Survival and snowballing of any desire depend on these three factors. Can we control them? Yes. I think so. You have done it in past albeit unknowingly.

These three triangulating forces are

a) The Itch b) The Denial c) The Muse

The Itch:

Itch is the desire /wish/ dream it self. Every desire start as an itch. Small but not ignorable. It holds our attention and occupies our mind. We have to do something about it. It offers us an opportunity to do something, something original, something new. It is more like mythical siren's lure.

We go through this daily .we find many temptations inviting us to explore & trying to start that itch. We notice a new café on our way to work and feel like checking out the stuff there. We see "Rang De Basanti " and time feel like fighting out the whole god damn system (although its momentarily) .We read that in Dec 2005 alone 40 Million mobile phones were sold in India and we think can I make some thing that these user will pay for? .We stop at HP Gas Filling station and wonder whether sania is looking at me? J

Some of our Itches are just long standing needs vying for attention. A sort of incremental desire. In tune with the current rhythm of life. You always wanted to check that café but can't squeeze enough time for it. But some time our itch constitute of something, which doesn't fit in out rational scheme of things. We are afraid to explore them. A sort of disruptive desire out of harmony with your current life. This type of itch is hard to kill and we feed them.

How to know which type of desire you are having right now? Well that's very simple just think what is stopping you to explore that option? Is it constraint of time, money, geography or energy level?

Or you are afraid of the idea, does this idea contradict your past, your surroundings, if implemented successfully will you be looked upon as most unlikely person to pull it? You don't doubt the potential of idea but doubt your own capability to do justice to it. Are you afraid of being laughed at if you fail in the pursuit? Can you sleep now?

If it is any of this case than there is a fair chances that this is an idea, which is a disruptive idea. Legend is when Sabeer Bhatia and jack smith came up with the idea of Hotmail. Than both of them were not able to sleep that night. They were afraid. In retrospect it looks funny. Why would they be afraid?

Because the moment you come across something big ,you are pulled in to two opposite directions by the forces of Denial and Muse. It's like a black magic and for sometime nothing makes sense. Still you can't escape because these forces are playing inside you.

The Denial:

"In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions.Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems.It's obvious why: problems are irritating. They're problems!Imagine if people in 1700 saw their lives the way we'd see them.It would have been unbearable. This denial is such a powerful force that,Even when presented with possible solutions, people often prefer to believe they wouldn't work."

Paul Graham In "Ideas For Startup"

" If anything can go wrong, it will definitely go wrong " :Murphy's Law

The moment you come up with a world changing, paradigm shifting, curve jumping, and rain making idea. The force of denial begins to show you every reason why this will not work. It seeds you with worry, apprehensions and doubts. You worry about loosing peer acceptance, you worry about home loan EMI, you worry about kids & if you are an American you worry about Health insurance also

We are conditioned that way. I admit you need to do some amount of forward thinking but too much of it kills any zeal you have for moving ahead. What denial actually do is, it make us incapable of trusting our guts. You look ahead when what you need to do is to squint in future. You can't see or predict future by looking ahead. Horizon is the limit. You need to squint and denial makes you incapable to do that. It hibernate your brain with cold logic.

Itch is about warm imagination. Denial is about cold logic.

The Muse

I can call for souls from the heaven & ghost from hell, So can you.

That is not important, what is important is, Will they come?

William Shakespeare In Hamlet

Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb. You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don't make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

Hugh Mac load in "How To Be More Creative"

Third factor that do the trick is the force of Muse. The out of the world inspiration. Some sort of goal, some conquest beyond the stated purpose of the endeavor. It could be anything proving your self, making money, revenge, world domination, nirvana, moksha, to be one with the universe or any such thing.

Painter draw portraits of long lost girlfriends, composer create symphony for lost love. Emperor erects Taj Mahal. They were not just painting, composing or building a monument. They were serving a higher purpose.

Near to home NRN created infy not for just creating software and make profit . perhaps his muse was to show that you can create a world class ,profit making commercial enterprise in India by ethos of wealth sharing and respect for individual . he has given a human touch to capitalism "

E Sreedharan did Metro to prove that A Govt Project can be done with highest quality and execution standards . it is not just a mean of transport . it stand for the hidden potential of all those great potential of great minds locked in the govt. machinery . its a muse for them .

I have seen that for much of the time people take seemingly irrational maneuvers because there is muse factor. They are inspired. The whole cartel of seminar and networking meeting industry is catering to those folks who seek company of like-minded, enterprising folks.

It is a type of positive self-feedback. Remember we used to put up all those posters and banner in our rooms during college. We were looking for muse. Strange we don't do it now.

So if you want to wrestle and overthrow the forces of denial then feed the forces of muse. A muse inspires every great idea. None of the great idea, invention, and accomplishment was approved by the peer group. Create your own muse.

Read, meet, discuss, analyze, deduct, conclude and make a jump .

May the force be with you.

Notes From The BarCamp

i had a Great Day @ BarCampDelhi . I attended  some great presentation and brainstorming  session on everything which is web 2.0 . there was talks about     " Ruby On Rails" ,Ajax ,Structured Blogging, Adword , Bootstrapping a Software start up , Testing  web application  ,Mobile Web Application , Knowledge Management .  i did a session on "Web 2.0 & Power Of Default "  looking at the Queries i received i can safely say that  the  presentation went ok . 

 

Right now i am sitting in perhaps the 13 th  or 15 presentation of the day and surprisingly  i am not tired .  Truly speaking i am just listeinign to the talks which is being delivered by the  speakers here . i think it will take me another week or two to properly digest the learning i had today .

 

 

As i sit here i realize that there are enough people here who wants to share . they want to share the knowledge ,experience,stories and compare notes . the free flowing format of the  conference is a great enabler . atmosphere is conducive to idea . More than anything  this BarCamp Today has cemented my desire to launch my venture someday .   i found a lot of aspiring , established and "one time " entrepreneurs and Some VCs and some Technical reporters  for old media :-)

 

People always tell me that entrepreneurship is a lonely journey . you are on your own till you be some body and than there is always  lonely at the TOP
Events like BarCamp allows a Peer Meeting  of Entrepreneurs . look forward to next BarCamp

 

 

will post the snaps and other details  of BarCamp  soon !!

 

 till then take care

 

Long Live Entrepreneurship

 

--
Prashant

 

Blogging Live From BarCamp Delhi

right now i am sitting @ Adobe  Systems ,Noida attending the first ever barcamp in asia . start is good so far . it is the kind of  get to gather  i was looking for .

right now Mannik is giving a presentation on "Ruby On Rails " . there will be a lot of session on various  hot web technologies . seems like it will be a great day for learning .

will keep you guys posted

--
Prashant Singh

www.knowprashant.blogspot.com
 

BarCamp in Delhi .

Good News!!!  BarCamp is coming to Asia and Delhi is going to host it . it will be on March 4 ,2006 at   Adobe  Dev Centre in  Noida  .

 

you can get more details at

 

http://barcamp.org/BarCampDelhi

 

 

I am All Excited about attending  BarCamp ,Delhi  . its a different kind of technology  conference .where a lot of budding, established and aspiring entrepreneur , geeks and evangelist meet to discuss their  views on technology trends and other stuff .

hope to see you guys there.