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.
Understanding the new “social” consumer behavior
November 6, 2008
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.
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.
Re-thinking your online presence
August 22, 2008
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 ?
Twitter poster mashup
November 9, 2007
Nice concept ! The new Twitter poster from Spanish company Come and Click Networks provides a mashup of Twitter users sized relatively to the influence of each Twitter user, based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets the populars make.
These posters are now available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan, in addition to a global poster on the front page. Now this is a nice concept and goes to shwo how mashups can surface up a lot of important information.
However I wonder what would be the real usefulness of something like. It’s eye candy! yes, no doubt about that, but could this lead to a digg style user rating mechanism in Twitter ?
How do you think this can be leveraged and can you build a business opportunity through this mashup ?
Barcamp Bangalore 5 on Nov 17-18,2007
October 29, 2007
Update : Participant registrations for Barcamp Bangalore 5 arenow open. Please go ahead and register at http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/BCB5_Registrations.
It’s time to Bar camp again, this time around, the winter edition is happening on the 17 & 18th November, 2007 at IIM Bangalore.
Registerations are not yet open, but watch out this space for more. As with every bar camp, it’s by the people and for the people, so YOU can play a very important role in shaping how BarCamp turns out. You can contribute in many ways – ideas being one which everyone really appreciates. For instance you could participate in the logo contest which is currently going on.
If you company would like to sponsor BarCamp Bangalore 5, leave me a comment or check this page for some of this event’s sponsors. If you are going to be at BCB5, drop me a message and we can catch up at the event.
Is Facebook the 5th most valued Internet company in the US ?
October 29, 2007
This is a very interesting snippet of information. The table on the right says it all, of course it is heavily based on the valuation from the Microsoft deal, which happened a few days back.
The $15 bn evaluation makes Facebook No. 5 on the most valued pure Internet based companies in the US. Only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon have larger market capitalizations than Facebook. This is quite incredible, considering the other honchos on this list.
The list of other top valued firms are below and Microsoft of course tops the list. Quite amazing that Facebook is valued more than AOL, MySpace and a bunch of other long timers.
Image courtesy : Techcrunch
Microsoft beats Google to win Facebook deal
October 25, 2007
After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative
of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.
The deal makes Microsoft the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.
The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.
My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.
Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum
More coverage below
Social networks and their prospects for the enterprise
October 18, 2007
Social networks are quite the buzz in 2007, with more and more people waking up to Facebook and MySpace, as they feel these networks are changing the way they manage and maintain their relationships.
Facebook and MySpace continue are leaders in this segment, and it looks like for the first time Facebook might actually be gaining more popularity.
To me, it seems quite obvious why more and more are favoring Facebook. Going beyond the consumer space, it offers much more features to the business community to network and showacse their products.
One of the key aspects of Facebook’s success has been due to their open architecture and the ability for the dev community to create apps on top of Facebook. Facebook currently has an entire category of business applications with over 227 different applications offered today, none of them built by Facebook itself. This is a new value proposition to corporates, moving from the old paradigm of creating groups or microcosms within a social network for their particular organzation.
Using the new open architecture, companies can actually showcase their products to a wide audience of engaged, tech savy users willing to use some of these biz apps in their everyday life. Life Zoho’s Office suite Facebook app which allows you to access your documents through Facebook. Their is a lot of opportunity for a company like Zoho to leverage this – for instance linking Zoho Calendar into Facebook so that you can link up your events from Facebook into your main Zoho Calendar which you use at your company.
Or probably have contacts imported from Zoho CRM, and network with these contacts on Facebook ?
Business applications for Facebook include offerings from well known companies such as eBay, Zoho, Jobster, and Blue Nile that offer integration with their home sites and data. There are other small business apps which provide To Do lists, appointment management, managing business cards etc. Other popular business apps include virtual stock exchanges, job finding widgets, and small content management packages.
But an interesting trend is that, none of these business apps have a user base which is close enough to other popular Facebook apps. Is this because social networking as a concept has not been understood by corporates or probably they haven’t realized the need for having a Facebook presence. Whatever the case is, Facebook with it’s open architecture is definitely moving us towards the “Web as a platform” era and this holds out a lot of promise for large corporations in advertising, media, CRM, and other departments in traditional businesses.
How do you think Facebook can be better leveraged by the business community ?
