Hugh Macleod :

So what’s responsible for the success if the iPod if it’s neither price, nor features? In a word: Marketing. Advertising. Advertising and marketing that is creating an emotional attachement. People choose the products they buy - apart from price - for three reasons, how they see themselves, how they want to see themselves or how they want to be seen.

Successful advertising, in all its incarnations, including blogs, including WOM, is all about creating the emotional attachment. It’s about becoming a part of who the customer is, or wants to be, or wants to be seen as. It’s really that simple.

Hugh Macleod :

So what’s responsible for the success if the iPod if it’s neither price, nor features? In a word: Marketing. Advertising. Advertising and marketing that is creating an emotional attachement. People choose the products they buy - apart from price - for three reasons, how they see themselves, how they want to see themselves or how they want to be seen.

Successful advertising, in all its incarnations, including blogs, including WOM, is all about creating the emotional attachment. It’s about becoming a part of who the customer is, or wants to be, or wants to be seen as. It’s really that simple.

Clay Shirky in one of his essays about “Situated Software ” says :
“We’ve been killing conversations about software with “That won’t scale” for so long we’ve forgotten that scaling problems aren’t inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large. A reading group works better with 5 members than 15; a seminar works better with 15 than 25, much less 50, and so on. "

Now this is interesting. There have been quite an number of instances where blog authors have given away books, writtern blogs exclusively of books which are due to be released(Long tail, Clue train, freakonomics, Google search etc)..But Tom Evslin takes a totally different approach where books and blog experience are combined in to one.

Hackoff.com:

Blooks are online books distributed on blogs. There are only a couple of them in existence so we are making up the rules as we go along. My book hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble is being serialized as a blook starting today (hardcover to follow) and this post describes the way we implemented that blook. Other people may implement blooks differently. We will probably change the way we’ve implemented this blook depending on the feedback we get from readers.

Jake Steinfeld, has written his new book . So what ? Lot of Entrepreneurs write books. But this one is slightly different.He is starting a biz plan contest( the details of which are in the book/his website) where he is going to select one plan out of all the plans submitted and FUND 250USD and , here is the interesting element -.He is not going to take any ownership stake for the funding..Sounds like a real opportunity for a person who has a wonderful idea but is in need of funding

Nanotech patents that have been issued has grown from a measly 45 in 1999 & 180 in 2001 TO 2500 in 2004.One of the reasons for the rise is that a number of folks are attaching nano to a lot of processes and applying for patents. To clarify the patent definition, US PTO announced it had created a new classification for nanotechnology patents.
US PTO announced it had created a new classification for nanotechnology patents.
Classification 977 includes only those patents 1) whose subject matter is in the scale of approximately 1-100 nanometers in at least one dimension; and 2) that involve materials, structures, devices or systems that have novel properties and functions because of their nanoscale size.

Most of us do come across the statement that ideas are dime a dozen and all it takes is the execution of the idea . A good/bad idea can be turned in to a good outcome, if the execution is taken care of. Yes I do buy the argument considering that a lot of people talk more, act less. However, I also feel that ideas as touted by the media are not all that pervasive amongst folks. Most of the people talk about additional functions and features that can be provided for various customers, VERY FEW people think of disruptive ideas. These are typically the ideas which are just about to cross the chasm / ideas which have terrific design, usability and value to the customer.

43 Folders has an excellent 2 part article on managing TO DO lists. I am sure it will be of immense help to those whose todo list keeps growing / becomes stale / plagued by infrequent use.

Part I , Part II

Time Profit model typically is followed by a firm which comes up with a product,skims the market by catering to the early adopters and let the other players in the industry copy its products, specs . Hence the entire focus of the company is to come up with products at a faster rate. Intel is one classic example in the semi conductor industry where its self annihilation strategy coupled with time profit model has kept its flag high in the highly competitive market. When Intel are first to market with a new product, profits happen in the first four or five quarters and then drop down very quickly to almost zero after that. To make a profit, Intel must work hard to maintain a two to three-year lead over its competitors. Diffusing the product as instantly as possible helps extend their period of profitability.

ABC News:
Where can Moore’s law hold good ?
Andy Grove once said that the ultimate goal of the electronics revolution was to convert every part of human life, where possible, from analog to digital. By that he meant that whenever you could find something that could be managed by digital systems — not an automobile but an engine computer, not a doctor but patient diagnostic and monitoring equipment, not a chromosome but gene mapping — it was like strapping that industry to a comet. Almost overnight the rate of change literally became exponential, improvements asymptotic, and miracles began to occur.

Here’s a nice web based calendar - AJAX based interface : Kiko - Paul graham camp

Here’s a new web service which integrates all the IM client services in a webpage..
What if a company has download restrictions, just go ahead and use this..: meebo

A lot of kids these days attach extreme hard work to success. However one must bear in mind, that hardwork can lead only to a few notches up in the success ladder. After all, a successful and joyous person is easily distinguished by his ability to work well and not hard.

Here’s a zen story which emphasizes the same :

A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, “I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it.“The teacher’s reply was casual, “Ten years.“Impatiently, the student answered, “But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice everyday, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?” The teacher thought fora moment, “20 years.”

My sudden urge to know about Zen made me wander through a few blogs. Here is what I have understood:

Zen means waking up to the present moment. That is, perceiving this moment exactly as it is, rather than through the filter of our ideas, opinions, etc. One way to practice this is to ask yourself a Big Question, such as “What am I?” If you ask such a question strongly and sincerely, what appears is “Don’t Know.” This don’t-know is before thinking. If you keep it moment to moment, then everything is clear. Then, each moment, whatever you’re doing, just do it. When you’re sitting, just sit; when you’re eating, just eat; and so on. According to Zen, existence is found in the silence of the mind (no-mind), beyond the chatter of our internal dialog. Existence, from the Zen perspective is something that is only happening spontaneously, and it is not just our thoughts. All of life that we perceive is constantly in a state of change. Every atom in the universe is somewhere different every millionth of a second.

Sometime back, one of my friends wrote in his blog that Firefox has no additional features other than tabbed browsing .However, from the nascent plain vanilla firefox,  as of date, there are umpteen number of plugins available. My browsing experience has definitely become richer , courtesy these plugins.

It appears to be an exciting browser :Flock

It appears to be an exciting browser :Flock

Four Indians bag the MIT Innovator’s award: ANITA GOEL for work on nano, SHILADITYA SENGUPTA for  Delivering drugs to cancer cells , NARASIMHA CHARI for Setting the mesh networking standard and RAJIT MANOHAR for Taking the clocks out of computer chips.

It really inspires me when I read about such people.

NYT:
 " What’s so clever about the iPod Nano ($249) is that it merges these two approaches. It contains memory chips, so it’s dazzlingly tiny - 3.5 by 1.6 by 0.27 inches, to be exact, about the size of a folded playing card and thin enough to slip under a door. Yet because Apple stuffed it with four gigabytes of memory, it holds as much music as some hard-drive players - more than 1,000 songs. (Apple also offers a $199 model with half the capacity.) Because it contains no moving parts, the Nano is less delicate than full-size iPods and virtually skip-proof.

Po Bronson :What Should I Do With My Life? :

MONEY Doesn’t Fund Dreams
It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world – and psychologically adapted to it – that you don’t really want to ditch it.

One of the weekdays , there was a surprise visit from my undergrad friend, Sendil . Was very anxious to meet him as it was more than 6 years since I had any talk with him. He later called me up and said he would be late by half hour. The next best thing to do was for me to do was browse through Gangarams book store , where I chanced upon " Getting Things Done" , a book which remained in the national best seller’s list for a long time. I for one totally believe that disciplined and systematic life would go a long way in becoming a happy man.Though I became JIT(Just in time ) person for the last 2 years or so, I am slowly going back to MRP+JIT system which makes life easier and simpler.

One of the weekdays , there was a surprise visit from my undergrad friend, Sendil . Was very anxious to meet him as it was more than 6 years since I had any talk with him. He later called me up and said he would be late by half hour. The next best thing to do was for me to do was browse through Gangarams book store , where I chanced upon " Getting Things Done" , a book which remained in the national best seller’s list for a long time. I for one totally believe that disciplined and systematic life would go a long way in becoming a happy man.Though I became JIT(Just in time ) person for the last 2 years or so, I am slowly going back to MRP+JIT system which makes life easier and simpler.

Intercasting : Vision - LMNO

We want to show people how to go way beyond voice communication. Our ultimate goal is to be the world’s largest Location-aware Media Network Operator (LMNO), connecting people through user-generated mobile relevant content. It is a different vision for a different kind of media company. Instead of dialing 411, you’ll ask your device “Is there a good independent band playing around here tonight?” Your profile will filter content you’ve created with other people’s channels and connect you to a flash community of people who can help you find an answer that is contextually relevant. This is the ultimate in localized and personalized search and directory.

Olivier Travers :The Microsof t Office I Really Want :

What I want is an internet application with a desktop frontend, with a choice of providers you can plug into, just like you can source other hosting services. The whole “internet Excel stack” should automagically normalize and synchronize the pseudo database work that most people do with it. And if it looks and tastes like a bunch of names and addresses, I should likewise be able to read/write/synch them through Outlook contacts. Wikify/blogify Outlook Today to have a mini-portal to point people to stuff and keep them on the same page (putthat stuff on the private web too), and we’re all set.

Mark Fletcher:

Stealth is utter crap in this world and speed is life. Why ?

• First mover advantage is important.

• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone
  else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably
  way ahead of you. Get over yourself.

• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.

Another application in the social networking context - Writely :

It is a skeleton version of instacoll,but however its usp is web app and targeting to the customer base who are already familiar with numsum, flickr , etc kind of services.

Another Model described in “The art of Profitability " is the Switch board model. It is characterized by 3 aspects

1. Packaging - Bringing together a disaggregated tasks/individuals/etc.
2.Concentration of power : Cater to all the disaggregated needs by one core product/service
3.Critical mass / scale

One of the examples mentioned by the author is the business of bringing of set of actors, musicians, etc to a recording studio and providing a platform to come up with a TV Opera / Movie by bringing in Good content to the entire set up.
In the example mentioned, the actors, actresses, directors are always in need of ppl. Hence switchboard model works by first bringing together and satisfy their need of great writers and stories.Thus once the packaging and concentration aspects are taken care of, the set up is scaled so that it reached a sustainable mass where by it can bargain with both ends of the parties

Teleo is a voip service , skype types which failed post beta phase got acquired. This is the probably first time I am coming across a case where a failed beta product gets acquired by none other than the behemoth in the IT industry, MSFT.

Is such a thing possible in India ? How did Teleo in the first place do a sale ? Was it a distress sale ? Did MSFT buy it for peanuts ? we will know more about the deal in the days to come.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”  -Yogi Berra

I have never thought of this idea till this day when I came across a post in headrush . It was quite a nice idea to build something in flat 24 hours even if it is crap. I am planning to try out this weekend with rails. Only problem is that I do not have a domain name as such and an IP..I need to work out on the details.

Can you imagine yubnub.org  was built in exactly 24 hours ? I guess long gone are the days when one needs to think of projects where the unit of measurement is months, weeks..The new available infra has crashed down the development time to 1 day.

Why do a rapid development ?

• Speed - Improve your ability to perform tasks quickly, even under pressure.
• Adaptation / Agility - Learn to hit a moving target and adapt to radical shifts in design and requirements.
• Hindsight - Benefit from a high frequency of postmortems and a quick turnaround on action-verses-consequence lessons.
• Fun - Have a good time. Laugh at yourself. After all, you’re really quite pathetic.
• Balance - Learn to govern the balance between speed and quality, between risk and reward. Learn to avoid oversolving or undersolving problems.
• Exposure - Be exposed to a wide variety of game development domains. Move through many different diverse problem spaces. Go from 3D modeling to 2D pixel-pushing, real-time to turn-based design, from A.I. to network code.
• Experimentation - Dare to try stupid or silly ideas. They just might surprise you and turn out to be works of genius.
• Proof of Concept - Prototype gameplay concepts for immediate fun-factor feedback. Stumble onto an idea that becomes the seed for a AAA title. A fun-to-play demo speaks louder than a boring-to-read design doc.
• Cooperation - Improve your ability to work closely with other developers under the gun.
• Communication - Learn how to communicate efficiently and succinctly. Learn when to talk and when to shut up. Learn when documentation is critical and when it isn’t.
• Time Management - Hone your ability to estimate task completion time. Learn to work smart, even under extreme time pressure.
• Community - Work with area game development peers. Build cross-company relationships.
• Challenge - Set the bar high. Jump higher.
• Restraint / Self-Discipline - Learn how not to bite off more than you can chew. Learn the fine art of culling the good ideas from the great ones, and cutting the great ones when they become infeasible.
• Inspiration - Become inspired by an idea prototype, then go off later and explore that avenue further and in greater depth.
• Creation - Force yourself to create. Get those “bad” ideas out. Give yourself the opportunity to create something great by allowing yourself permission to make something awful.

My friend TP always use to remark that Keyboards and mouse need a major revamp, for according to him, they have been in our midst for too long a time.May be he should have a look at the following snaps  :

Standardize and you simplify lives;everyone learns the system only once. But don’t standardize too soon; you may be locked in to a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing

    – DONALD A. NORMAN

I have tried out a lot of typepad compatible desktop blogging clients. However, none came anywhere close to my satisfaction.
Finally, I stumbled upon Zoundry. I am pretty impressed by the software. Kudos to the developers!

Ha, I am relieved that I don’t have to use post entry link on typepad to blog.

The third model that Zhao discusses in “Art of profitability” is Multi component profit model where a business tries to leverage the base product and builds different related business components and markets it to customers. Unlike the pyramid model where the product is placed at various price points and customers themselves are placed at various segments and finds himself at each price point.
In this model, the customer can be at each of the price point. I buy coke at grocery store, in my office coke vending machine, at a hotel.Its the same product but sold at various locations and hence the various price points. Coke as business is trying to leverage its base product and has built businesses around it like vending machine ,restaurant component, grocery component and the profitability from each of the component varies.Some examples relating to this profitability model are :
Books : Corporate book services, phone to delivery book, retail chain component, online component- Note , the base product is the book
Hotels: one-day meeting for 20 ppl, single room for one night , 3 day convention for 1000 ppl etc.Here the product is the same, the room. But the profitability from various components is different. Ok, enough of examples cited by Zhao.Let me try to make a list of businesses which fall in this category

Standardize and you simplify lives;everyone learns the system only once. But don’t standardize too soon; you may be locked in to a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing

    – DONALD A. NORMAN

Design may be our top competitive edge - says Tom peters on the cover of the book. I have a list of design books that I need to devour. One of the them being Emotional Design - By Donald A. Norman.

While wandering through the Gangaram’s , one of the largest book stores in the city, I stumbled upon this book and was immediately stimulated by the fact that it was written by Norman. I decided to plunge to this book as my fascination of design was pretty evident after the usage of i-pod, a product which to my knowledge has an immaculate design.

I am blogging this post on a weekend,but in noways does that it mean that I suffer from “Weekend Neurosis”, a syndrome which affects quite a few on the weekends. In this syndrome, an individual cannot handle the idleness that he is engulfed with during the weekends. The weekdays are more or less controlled by the external world, like the work place,etc..But weekends are the times when he has the time to actually do something he wants to do. Many a folk dont know what to do, becoz probably they still do not know what they like doing, or want to escape the brilliant independence and pursue activities which are more external driven

I am in to designing a modeling software in my current work. In relation to that, I had to review some concepts relating to Design of Experiments. This can be a potent concept while carrying out real life experiments in the lab.

I just dont remember any of the experiments  I did in my Under grad. May be they were just single run experiments and hence did not require a DOE as such. Sometimes when I look back, I really feel that the experiments and the education related to it that I received was was far removed from the real world scenario. May be surveying that I learnt in my engineering came any where close to making one understand the real difficulties of experimentation and drawing conclusions.

Pyramid Profit model ? Is it possible in services industry ? A very basic service which is used as a fire wall and a profitable service at the higher levels of the pyramid. Ok, let me think out of software industry.

In the entertainment industry, lets take Walt Disney. Each of the theme parks has so many levels of services that it caters to all strata of the society. It is difficult for any normal company to come up with the services like that of disney theme park to begin with. May be Disney took time to make money on each theme park to begin.I need to get in to Disney archives to understand the profitability model of the company. However I feel that in all probability pyramid model was the one working for the company

A sleek search engine :  Previewseek

Results are much better in terms of visualization.

Ha! this was expected from a very long time & finally it arrives though not in style !.
Google has come up with a IM which can be used for chatting and voice services.
Reviews say its got a long way to go compared to skype..I’ll check out the voice service with my friend sometime this week

Link : Google Talk

Here’s a nice blog with more than interesting articles. Definitely belongs to the category of thinkers and not linkers - Headrush

There’s an open souce software called MindMaps which can be useful for a lot of activities like :

• Keeping track of projects, including subtasks, state of subtasks and time recording
• Project workplace, including links to necessary files, executables, source of information and of course information
• Workplace for internet research using Google and other sources
• Keeping a collection of small or middle sized notes with links on some area which expands as needed. Such a collection of notes is sometimes called knowledge base.
• Essay writing and brainstorming, using colors to show which essays are open, completed, not yet started etc, using size of nodes to indicate size of essays. I don’t have one map for one essay, I have one map for all essays. I move parts of some essays to other when it seems appropriate.
• Keeping a small database of something with structure that is either very dynamic or not known in advance. The main disadvantage of such approach when compared to traditional database applications are poor query possibilities, but I use it that way anyway - contacts, recipes, medical records etc. You learn about the structure from the additional data items you enter. For example, different medical records use different structure and you do not have to analyze all the possible structures before you enter the first medical record.
• Commented internet favorites or bookmarks, with colors and fonts having the meaning you want.

Besides You can include the maps in your blog too…Here’s one map which is a help file for the software that I have included in the blog.

Time is life’s greatest leveler. We all have the same allotted 24 hours and what separates the great people from the also-rans is what they do with the allotted time.

Most of us live as if we have an infinite amount of time to do all the things we know we must do to live a full and rewarding life. And so we procrastinate and put the achievement of our dreams on hold while we attend to those daily emergencies that fill up our days. This is a certain recipe for a life of regret.
Paul Bowles, a novelist once said

I began reading Art of Profitability last night and the most exciting thing about the book is the way of delivering the point using simple schematic diagrams. The book urges the reader to read one chapter a week , try to get the gist of each of the chapter , chew, ruminate, reflect on various businesses that one has come across which fits the models described in the book.

Google has come up with a updated desktop version: a side bar which includes news, web clips(automatic rss aggregator), scratch pad, recent documents, and whatzz hot on web, weather and stocks..Nothing great about the application as such..But as such it
Google-esque–which is to say it’s logical, efficient, and practical.

Check it out, its worth having on your desktop

One of the major hassles of subscribing to podcasts and listening to them is the anonymity level as far as the content goes. Even though it might give an element of surprise incase the podcast turns out to be good, in most cases, the listener would want to know what’s its all about, whether he can listen to selective pieces of podcast.
Here’s Eric Gwinn airing the same opinion as mine in NYT

The Second Model which Zhao describes is the Pyramid Profit Model

The firm typically has a slew of products. The products at the bottom of the pyramid serve as a firewall . These act as a barrier for potential entrants and usually these are manufactured and sold very very efficiently. Most often , the company might also end up losing money. However , it more than makes up in the top rungs of pyramid. The profit generators are at the top.
Very very few companies manage can get to maintain and run this profitability model. One of the most important reasons for the success of the model is that customers themselves need to foram a hierarchy with different expectations and attitudes towards the product. The best example one can think of is Barbie doll.
At 10 dollars, a barbie doll is with in the reach of umpteen customers, but however, the real money is made at the top end of the product line where niche barbie dolls cost 200 dollars. Now if one looks at the customers, they themselves are at various socio economic strata and hence end up buying barbie dolls placed at various points of the pyramid. This is one way of explaining the success of barbie dolls

" Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity."   - Christopher Morley

Very recently I have been practicing “The Platinum 30” principle, which states that the first 30 minutes of your day are possibly the most valuable moments which will have a considerable influence of the other minutes of the day.