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 )
World Usability Day 2008, Bangalore
November 13, 2008
World Usability Day 2008 Bangalore
World Usability Day (WUD) is a global initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, in November, over 300 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the issues central to good usability research, development and practice.
The 2008 World Usability Day focuses on Usability in Transportation focussing on the interaction people and vehicles, the challenges and issues infrastructure and modes for moving around in our environment. World Usability Day 2008 is focused on exploring and creating awareness for several aspects of transportation in Bangalore and in India.
Details
Date : 29th November 2008
Time : 10.30 to 4.30 am
Venue : Yahoo campus (inner ring raod, domlur)
Register to participate on the UPA Bangalore wiki.
If you are going to be at the event, drop me a line in comments below or send me a message on Twitter.
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.
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.
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
Innovation in the enterprise – The leaders
October 7, 2008
I was going through the Innovation 2008 report by the Boston Consulting Group(BCG). The main purpose of this effort by BCG was to understand innovation and efforts taken by enterprise to promote innovation and measure ROI on innovation.
The report gives a very holistic picture on innovation and deals with important issues such as measuring returns on Innovation investments.
Following are the world’s most innovative companies. Find the top 10 here, check the report for the complete list. I was extremely glad to find the TATA group in Number 6, ahead of Nintendo, P&G, Sony and Nokia. This is quite an achievement. Here’s the top 10 list along with the reason for selection
1. Apple – Breakthrough products
2. Google – Unique customer experiences
3. Toyota Motor - Innovative processes
4. General Electric company - Innovative processes
5. Microsoft Corporation - Breakthrough products
6. Tata group – Breakthrough products
7. Nintendo – Breakthrough products
8. Procter & Gamble - Innovative processes
9. Sony – Breakthrough products
10. Nokia Corporation - Breakthrough products
What do you think about this list ? If you were to make a top 5, what companies would it have ?
Security vs. Usability
September 23, 2008
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 ?
