All about Proto.in

As we get closer to the Bangalore edition of Proto and the excitement builds up for India’s premier startup event,  here’s an awesome conceptualization about Proto.in by the folks from Pictualize.

Date : Jan 23-24, 2009

Venue: Nimhans Convention Center

Btw, if you haven’t already registered, now’s a good time to do so, go ahead and register now.

Is the entertainment industry recession proof ?

Makes me wonder as I look at Yahoo! Buzz – year in review 2008.  These are the top 10 search terms in Yahoo search.

1. Britney spears (Music /Entertainment)
2. WWE (Sports Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama (Politics)
4. Miley Cyrus ( Entertainment)
5. RuneScape (Online gaming entertainment)
6. Jessica Alba (Movie star / entertainment)
7. Naruto (Entertainment)
8. Lindsay Lohan (Movie star / entertainment)
9. Angelina Jolie (Movie star / entertainment)
10. 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.

1. Gambling on TV / in casinos.
2. 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

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.

Understanding the new “social” consumer behavior

I just finished going through the Consumer experience report, from Razorfish a survey which has documented the online behavior and characteristics of more than 1,000 “connected” consumers on the internet. This was refreshing to read in the midst of all grim news and presentations from VC firms and the layoffs in internet firms.

The Consumer experience report looks at:

• People’s life online and their exchanges and networks that they build on the web
• Changing consumer behavior heralded by Web 2.0, UGC and the voice of the consumer
• what is the real impact of the “social web”;
• Key drives for transactions and purchases on the web
• and who is really using the mobile web and what are they doing.

The survey report is nicely documented and gives several key insights into online consumer behavior. If you are building a consumer internet product, it would suggest you go through this report.

Here are some thoughts I found encouraging, with potential for building opportunities on

• Search as the start of most online experiences
• Increasing importance of user experience design and designing for the “Facebook generation”
• Emergence of online video as a rising star and increased adoption across demographics
• Accelerated adoption of social media technologies at a breakneck speed – Increasing popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other social technologies which connect people and enable conversations
• Peer driven search and search from social recommendation sites driving digital commerce
• Market for smartphone is growing and adoption of online mobile services nascent
• Growth of mico conversations and social media tools like twitter -”I don’t remember how I kept in touch before!”
• Increased use of widgets which mashup data from various sources and can be accessed on the web and mobile
• Increased demand for data visualization and enabling users to track their activities over the social web.

So what are your thoughts on the report ? If you run an Internet startup, what are you doing to leverage this ?

You can download the entire report in PDF from here.

Understanding spatial search

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.

Startup strategies for handling the economic downturn

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 ?

Security vs. Usability

I have been using my ICICI bank credit card for over thryears now. I encountered this weird error this morning while paying my bills on visabillpay. (Click image for a larger view)

Alright let me set context.

This is a page which ICICI bank brought up while doing a credit card transaction on Visabillpay. This page asks me to register my credit card online with ICICI bank using a Internet banking pin number.

So I have seen this page multiple times on this site but always opted out as I don’t have my interent banking pin number. So today I did the same thing and opted out of registration by clicking on the “No, thanks Don’t activate my card now” link, but this is the message I got.

“You have exceeded the number of opt-outs for this card. If you decide to opt-out even now then bank will decline your transaction.”

I was astounded. I had no clue of what was happening. The bank never told me that I had a fixed number of opt-outs from registration. Now I can’t pay my electricity and water bills.

Here’s how this scenario could have been handled using better product design

• ICICI bank should have told users the number of opt-outs they have. This could have been in the form of a counter which is very prominent on every registration request screen.
• Educating the user about the advantages of registering their credit card. In fact ICICI bank is mandating this for higher security and to prevent online credit card fraud. Educate your users by telling them the benefits of doing a particular action and then lead them to this action.
• Forgive your users which they don’t do something that’s needed, after all they are users!
• Send users warning alerts as their opt-outs are nearing to zero. ICICI bank has my email address and my mobile number.
• Get customer care to call users.

Forgive, educate and lead to action – simple but powerful.

What do you think ? What you faced this issue ?

China Internet and Web 2.0 trends

The slide deck below has some really great information on Internet and Web 2.0 trends in China, a market that most of us are not really clued into. Thanks to Trendspotting for putting together this data packed slideshow.

Here what I find most interesting and insightful from the information

• China has the largest internet user base in the world to the tune of 253m users. They also have the largest mobile subscriber base of 574m.
• China has a very health internet user sex ratio comprising of 47% women
• IM, Online music and Online Video/movies are the top three online channels for Chinese youth
• Out of the top 5 sites in China based on traffic, Yahoo China (No.5) is the only international player out them, others are all local players.
• Chinese participation in Social media sites is higher than the global daily average.
• Bulletin Board Sites (BBS) are extremely popular
• The Total online ad spend per internet user in China is only at $8, however the ad market has heated up and is growing at 50% with increased ad spends due to the Olympics
• Internet censorship and moral policing are very common in China, in fact 85% of Chinese approve government internet censorship.

So what’s your take on the Chinese internet market ? Do you have more insights ? What do you think are future trends in China ?

Re-thinking your online presence

Does your brand or company have a website ? I’m pretty sure it does. Well if you thought that it’s the end of your online presence, then it’s high time you rethought your web strategy. You might be running a highly successful offline business, but your social media strategy can be a game changer.

If your brand or firm is not participating in Social Media using tools that include a collection of blogs, wikis, forums, photos and videos sharing sites, then you really don’t have an online presence.

These days Social Media such as forums, wikis and blogs in particular are playing a notable role in influencing the buying patterns of consumers. Often consumers look for opinions, user experiences and reviews on such sources before purchasing a product. Detecting influential nodes and opinion leaders and understanding their role in how people perceive and adopt a product or service provides a powerful tool for marketing, advertising and business intelligence. Look at these insights from a very comprehensive research study by Universal McCann.

• 73% of online users read a blog
• 57% join social networks
• 45% have started a blog
• 83% have viewed a video online
• 39% subscribe to RSS feeds
• 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs

I find the last insight extremely encouraging, and I hope that this will encourage you to rethink your brand’s online marketing strategy.

What are your thoughts ? If you are running a highly successful offline business, how are you leveraging social media as a touch point with your customers ?

Image Courtesy

To new beginnings!

As most of you know, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to join a startup. I will be starting from Monday, 21st July 08 as a Product manager with a stealth mode startup based out of Bangalore.

I am really looking forward to this new gig and am sure that the startup experience is going to be one roller coaster ride with many twists and turns. Above all, I think that it will be a great learning experience for me and can add a lot of value to my career.This somehow seemed to be the perfect time to juggle things up in life and I got a great opportunity.

We have a small team of around 10 people and I am really looking forward to interacting with each of them and for some great times ahead. I will of course miss all the folks from ADITI and the fun we’ve had together.

So here’s to new beginnings, Cheers!