Big Companies & Black Holes

Big Companies & Black Holes: Both have the same characteristic of sucking what ever enters their eco-system. It is difficlut to come out once you are in.

If you really want to disrupt the status-quo join small or start small. Period.

Happy New Year 2010

I Wish You All A Very Happy New Year !!!

THANK YOU !!!

The hierarchy of success

See here...

Getting Things Done

1. Set Goals
2. Focus on the Task
3. Crossing Hurdles (Assured that It is not going to be a cake-walk. And this is what differentiates YOU from the Pack. Go extra mile and be persistent)
4. Achieving Results

Go back to Step 1 and Repeat.

if you are a single person, it is easy to get align with the Goals and also it is easy to forget them. But if you are a team then you will have to pass the DNA to each and every one in the team. Energize them, Charge them, Motivate them, Stretch them, Give them the courage to deal with un-certainties, and Show them how the end results will look like.

Do NOT ever Manage your team. Instead, Lead them. There is lot of difference between Managing and Leading (Manager & Leader).

What you say, what you do and who you are

See here...

Your time is limited…

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Integrating Amazon’s Engine with Public Library Systems

I am sure some one might have thought about this. Integrating the beautiful Amazon.com’s engine with Public Library Systems. By doing this, Libraries can help the users with more relevant search and product recommendations based on their history of transactions.

Here are few of the Amazon.com’s features that help Libraries…

1. Book Recommendations (based on check out history of a user)
2. Customers who bought (read as “checked out” for libraries) Items in your recent history also bought
3. New for you
4. Coming soon for you

Think of personalized service at Libraries (online or onsite). Beautiful world. Disclosure: Library is the second most favorite place for me to sit and think/work. First place is of course Starbucks.

Divide & Conquer

Divide & Conquer is some thing like finding a perfect Niche for your products/services and positioning them in that area. The narrower the niche you are trying to address the broader your audience will be. And you will be spared from big brothers because the niche you are trying to address is too narrow for them to step into. Finding a perfect niche is also related to Market Segmentation.

Segment the market based on various parameters and see if you can address any of their problems with your innovative solutions. No matter how small your idea/solution be. There are finite ways to segment a market. At the outset, start with these ...

1. Consumer (Individual) Products/Services
2. Enterprise Products/Services
3. Government Products/Services
4. Non-Profit Products/Services

You can further divide each of them into multiple sub-segments. For example:
1. Consumer Products/Services
  1.1 Addressing Kids Market
  1.2 Addressing Teen/Young Adult Market
  1.3 Addressing Baby-boomer Generation Market
  1.4 And the like

2. Enterprise Products/Services
  2.1 Addressing Industry Specific Market (Retail, Healthcare, Insurance, Financial, IT, etc)
  2.2 Addressing Operational Specific Market (SCM, ERP, CRM, etc)
  2.3 And the list goes

These are just examples and you can divide them in any way you want to target a specific group.

Go figure out your niche area.

Keywords for change

• Co-Creation
• Crowd Sourcing
• Participation
• Wisdom of Crowds (Collective Intelligence)

Please add relevant keywords in your comments…

Sandbox is ready

Thanks to Economy for rebooting the system. It has even removed virus, spyware and malware. Now you have a clean slate to play with. What do you want to do with it?

Word of caution: before you start playing with the clean slate, please keep in mind all the lessons you have learnt in the last decades and do not repeat the same mistakes again. New mistakes and new errors are most welcome. And the system reboots again when it is full with these new errors.

As per statistics, the system takes approximately a decade to differentiate between Good and Bad. Once it does, it panics causing loss of data (read loss of jobs) and then reboots to clear the mess.

The Cycle Continues...

Creating Value for your Customers

Each and every organization in Business thrives to give some kind of value to their Customers. And they get paid for the value they create. The core at the center is "Value for Customer". Business cease to exist when they stop the value creation cycle. There may be some business that destroy customer value instead of creating and again some one will get paid for restoring the destroyed part. Complex matters, indeed.

What is it that you want to give (Sell) to your Customers, as an Individual or as an Organization?

The more and more Customers want it from you the more you can sell and charge. And vice versa. Laws of Supply & Demand. You can create and sell some things as an Individual. And some you can not as an Individual. So you form/join a group/organization that works on a common purpose of creating a form of Customer Value.

If you are working as an Individual you may not need organizational policies, culture and processes. But when you are in an organization, the organization needs to have Culture, Policies, Tools, Leaders and the like to keep every member on the same page and help them to reach their common goal. These passive elements (Culture, Policies, Processes etc) should help your organization to reach its active goal (Customer Value). The better they (Passive & Active Elements) are integrated & aligned the better the results would be.

• So what do you sell to create Customer Value? A Product, or a Service or a Complete Package?
• How do you make sure that the Product/Service serves it's intended purpose (does not destroy Customer Value)?
• What do you do to keep your Product/Service transforming over the time and sustainable?

Values as Foundation Stones

President Obama said: “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.”

Develop a Game of Your Product

If you are going to launch (or already have launched) a Product in to the market, help yourself and your customers by developing a game that is fun to play and will have your product logic embedded into it.  Host this game on your website and let the prospective customers play with it to get to know about your product.

The purpose of the game should be to help your customers in learning about your product/service and in return increases conversion rates for you. 

Make the game as simple as possible and fun to play. Embed your product’s core logic into it for a fun way of exposing it to customer. Having a game of your product will give you an edge over your competitors. If you think developing game is expensive, stick to the old game of dull product demos, screen-casts, screenshots or whatever it is.

VC money is scarce? So what?

There are reports on every nook and corner saying getting money from VCs is much more difficult than earlier. For the record: Getting money from VCs is always difficult and it is no different now and the guys who pitched their ideas to VCs knows that better than anybody else.

There are instances where startup teams spent most of their time raising money than working on their product. Follow these rules if your idea is closely related to Web 2.0, or Mobile Applications, or any Software Application. These are less capital intensive.

#1: Never bother about VC money if you are in seed stage. Bootstrap from family and friends for bare necessities and develop your product.

#2: Give VCs a shot if you are in early stage and need some capital for scaling your application to the next level.  No matter what, your primary task still is going to be your product.

#3: You already have customer traction and you are in growth stage. Now is the time to run after VCs. Go and get them.

Other good alternative is raising money from community. Crowd source the money from people who believe in your product. Wikipedia has successfully raised more than $6M from crowd. It takes time though. But its worth it.

Predicting for next year? Never.

Probably you might have gone through all those predictions for year 2009, be it Technology predictions, Geo-Political, Climate, Regulations, Stock/Job/Housing Markets, and the like.

Do they make any sense to you?

I could make a top 10 list and call it “Great Technology Predictions for 2009” and dust the list at the end of 2009 and see if any of the things mentioned are actually true. One or two hits, I can self-proclaim myself as a world’s great predictioner and publish a new list for the next year.

We may be expecting some radical changes at the turn of every year. It is like expecting some one to wipe-off all your debt. New Year sure does bring improved optimism and outlook. And one can expect good things in store for them. But things does not change at the flip of a coin.

Probably the best way to deal with things is stop predicting and start executing them. If you want to reduce your debt, plan  and execute. If you want to lose weight, start work outs.  You will reach the goal in phased manner. These things are simple and have fewer parameters to tackle them.

If you are predicting Microsoft to acquire Yahoo!, then it is much more complicated. There are lot of parameters/factors that control the deal to happen such as: Microsoft, Yahoo, Stock Holders, Competitors, Regulators, etc. It is a complicated collective action which I think is out of bounds for prediction.

There is nothing like Technology failure prediction. It may be just that it does not suit the current conditions. It sure can raise when the conditions are optimal and can piggy back on some other innovation to create a collective solution.

Predicting is a lot more guess work than tracking patterns and figuring out next curves.

What do you think?

Importance of Bells & Whistles

Bells & Whistles are as important as your core product. Once you have your core product developed, deployed and has some customer traction, it is time for you to go into stealth mode again and this time you will need to add all those Interfaces [think of Export/Import/APIs] to your product which will enable your customers to connect with other applications.

This sure does enhance the scope of your product and there by more customer adoption. This will be better executed incrementally, interfaces to one external application at a time. It is good idea to use open standards when developing interfaces to your product.

As the saying goes “Do not sell your Products. Sell Solutions”. Solutions require better connectivity and integration among Parts. Better connectivity and integration among parts is made possible when you have a set of Interfaces to your product.

The same is true for providing Analytics data related to your product. Think of Amazon.com and see what kind of Analytical information [Product Recommendations, What other Customers have bought and the like] they are providing to their users.

Open up your application as much as possible to the external world. You are not Apple [AAPL] or Steve Jobs to work in closed garden environment.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year !!!

Time to re-charge your batteries for the new year and new beginnings.

Real Value of Social Media Communications ?

Does any one out there in Social Media (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the bunch) can be able to extract some value from their on going conversations/networking ?

Of course, there are some stories like Comcast got some show business by creating a Twitter account, Guy Kawasaki able to get MacBook MagSafe power adapter (he forgot to carry his) on the fly, and Jeremiah Owyang able to held successful Tweetup recently etc. These stories are one in a million.

What is really in Social Media for me, an average Joe ?  Does it help to hone my Skills? Does it help me to land in a Job ? Does it help me not to lost in the world wide web ? Is it worth my time? And my question list goes on.

I think, most of the people, who are jumping into the band wagon, are trying to ride the wave. Not sure how many of them are actually benefiting from these services.  Their initial inspiration to join these networks are friends, co-workers, and some industry influencers. The number of users who comes back to these services and use them will be a small fraction of total registered users.  Most active users are either field experts in their respective fields or time passers.

This may be the case with any platform that is freely open to public consumption. It may evolve over the time with segmentation.  Till then, It is plug and play.

The Opposite is TRUE

How many times did you encounter that...
It is the other (not yours) fact/opinion that matters most, you may realize this after you blew some thing while executing it with your narrow lens?

Chances are MANY TIMES.

The problem of thinking that your idea/opinion is superior to others is most common. That is the way our brain is trained to interpret the things. The state of Denial. Of course, you need skill and practice to overcome this state and accept criticism with whole heart. I am not saying to shun your idea/opinion and go after others. I am just saying that you should take every thing in to account and make well informed decisions.

Here are some recent examples of contradictory opinions:
1. Start your company in this turbulence times
2. Buy stock instead of selling
3. Mark Cuban's suggestion to Yahoo for more acquisitions
4. Launching new products/services at this time
5. And the like...

Next time, listen carefully. There is more value at the other end.

Startups and the Economies of Cooking

Not all good Cooks/Chefs will be able to startup their own businesses. But they have an advantage if they do. Because cooking is some thing similar to starting a business and flourishing it.

A step-by-step comparison...

• Plan what to Cook -> Get your Business Idea
• Family opinion on the Planned Menu -> Discuss with your Potential Customers about the Business Idea
• Adjust Menu based on Inputs -> Adjust Business Idea
• Gather Ingredients -> Line up your Ducks (Resources: People, Money, Tools, and the like)
• Cook -> Engineering/Development
• Taste (by Cook) -> Private Alpha Testing
• Ask one of your family member to taste -> Invitation Only Public Beta
• Adjust the dressing if required -> Fix the Bugs
• Setup the table -> Marketing the Product
• Serve the Dishes -> Launch the Product

You also serve dessert as part of your dinner. So give your Customers some dessert (product upgrades, Platform offerings etc).

Happy Meal = Satisfied Customers !!!

That says:
If you are planning to start some thing new, go ahead and start cooking. It may give you heads up in the process.

One small precaution though: Do not allow A-list bloggers to smell your food. They can tell the world that your food sucks even without tasting it. :-)

Kids want their space in Social Media

Kids & Teens are not left behind when it comes to social media. They want their space, which is altogether a different market, and they want it NOW.

It was late evening yesterday and as usual I was with my Idiot box (aka Computer. Seems like less and less people are watching TV now a days and more and more people are on to Computers/Mobiles. Any case the biggest time waster is called Idiot Box). I was checking my foot print on web, my blog. There came my eight year old daughter, who is in 3rd Grade, and she started her Q&A session.

First question: What are you doing? My Answer to her: I am just updating my blog. She scanned the page and read about my profile. And her Q2: Why did not you write about me in your profile? A: I was searching for words and before I could answer her question she ordered me to write one section about her and one section about her mother. She wants to be part of the blog. She has a point. Their generation does not know about dial-up connections and dead internet zones. But may know about metered broadband. :-)

It is up to us to create innovative applications/data for their consumption. Most of the web content now is targeted for grown-ups, who are already saturated with the Internet. Can you think of some thing cool that disrupts the segmented (kids) market?

I need to let my daughter to guest post on my blog. Its good to learn from Kids. After all they know no boundaries.

Zoo Signage

Poor Yang

Yahoo!'s CEO, Jerry Yang, finally succumbed to the pressure and stepped down from the post. Here is his take on why he had to do this. It is time to pick a new CEO and see how they can recover the billions of investor value that has since been lost from the time Microsoft withdrew the buyout offer.

Good Luck to you guys at Yahoo! You guys have great web properties.

Radical Service Innovation

See here...

Startups & Economy

Don't miss to read these two articles...
- "Buy American. I Am." by Warren Buffet
- "Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy" by Paul Graham