Is the entertainment industry recession proof ?
December 3, 2008
Makes me wonder as I look at Yahoo! Buzz – year in review 2008. These are the top 10 search terms in Yahoo search.
- Britney spears (Music /Entertainment)
- WWE (Sports Entertainment)
- Barack Obama (Politics)
- Miley Cyrus ( Entertainment)
- RuneScape (Online gaming entertainment)
- Jessica Alba (Movie star / entertainment)
- Naruto (Entertainment)
- Lindsay Lohan (Movie star / entertainment)
- Angelina Jolie (Movie star / entertainment)
- American Idol (TV / entertainment)
Note that 9 out of the 10 terms are entertainment oriented, a trend which is similar to 2007.
Wonder if this is a reflection of Yahoo users or whether the entertainment industry is recession proof ? What do you think ? (Note: Britney spears is worth $110 million)
There are two beasts in entertainment which I feel when legalized in India, could change the face of entertainment and prove to be a great opportunity for startups.
- Gambling on TV / in casinos.
- Pornography on TV.
What do you think ? Any ideas for killer startups in this space 
? (or should we say hot startups )
Featured on the Product Management View
November 7, 2008
It gives me great pleasure to announce that I will now be guest blogging for the Product Management View – a blog focussed on product management and strategy , run by world class product managers from various backgrounds and vast experience in this field.I am pleased to be associated with them and look forward to some great discussions over there. Thanks to Stewart Rogers from PM view for making this happen.
My first post for the Product management view is about maximizing product value through effective feature prioritization. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic and having some great conversations.
The PM view also tracks major webinars on product management, you can sign up for a webinar remider service and here’s the handle to the RSS feed.
Where your apple taxes go
November 5, 2008
One for the apple fanboys! Love this one.
Understanding spatial search
November 4, 2008
So what is spatial search ?
In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.
Why is spatial search important ?
This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location.
So results for the search query – “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.
The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map – which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.
While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.
The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.
my100floors.com is currently in closed beta, leave your email address on the site and drop me a line here or on twitter and I will make sure that you get the invite.
FailCamp – learning from other entrepreneurs about failure
October 24, 2008
FailCamp’s idea is simple – get a bunch of inspired people together and enable them to learn from each other and from other entrepreneurs who have battled (or give in to) failure in their startups.
This is a wonde
rful initiative and I am keenly looking forward to this event in Chennai.
Here are the event details
Date and Time – November 16,2008
Venue – Tenth Planet, Chennai. (Looking at pics, venue seems to be super cool! and an interesting company – they do outsourced projects on open source technologies)
Registration - FailCamp Wiki
If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment here or over on my twitter stream.
Top Ten Disruptive Technologies
October 21, 2008
Following is Gartner’s list of Top ten disruptive technologies for 2008 to 2012
- Multicore and hybrid processors
- Virtualisation and fabric computing
- Social networks and social software
- Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
- Web mashups
- User Interface
- Ubiquitous computing
- Contextual computing
- Augmented reality
- Semantics
What do you think ?
Google Chrome and Pranayama
October 14, 2008
Off topic, but couldn’t resist blogging about this.
Baba Ramdev’s (a yogic guru from India) effort to connect with tech geeks and urge them to take up pranayama (meditation). Awesome marketing and product position I must say!
Google Chrome and Prananyama and Baba Ramdev
Image Source : Dead President
The Wall street meltdown
October 13, 2008
Nice video which captures the Wall Street meltdown, now we do know who started the fire
Remixed version of Billy Joel’s fame “We didn’t start the fire”.
Startup strategies for handling the economic downturn
October 11, 2008
The slide deck below from Sequoia Capital is some solid advice about dealing with the entire economic crisis and recession from a startup standpoint. If you are an entrepreneur in any part of the world, I am sure there’s something useful for you in this deck.
In fact, the slides below give a good synopsis of the entire problem in the US and global markets and the effects which they have had on the global economy and how startups need to deal with new challenges and realities. I especially like slides 46-55, which are strategies which startups can adopt to get past the tough times.
What do you think ? If you run your own startup, what’s your strategy in dealing with the tough times ?
