I stumbled upon an interesting 3D Online game which goes by the name secondlife.com.By the time I gathered a little information , the facts about the site seemed stunning.Firstly, it was started in June 04 and has since risen in popularity not only among the game developers but also among quite a variety of people.

At the first instance, it looks like an open source game development site where the environment is faciliated by secondlife folks. However at a much deeper level, it is an innovative experiment to create a digital world in the true sense of the word. It allows users to create avatars and then live in the second life. The MOST interesting idea behind the game is that it does not have any clear rules before hand, except for a few. All the new rules are debated, decided by the in-world members.

With the huge popularity of Google maps, it is but obvious that google will try to leverage it to other services. Here they come up with the first ancillary service Google Ride Finder . It helps one to find out the nearest cab and the phone number of the cab operator.

Dr Gershenfeld of MIT has invented a technology called “fab labs” which will enable manufacturing to reach large masses who lack formal education and resources to manufacture stuff. Is this a scenario of plumbing services being made available in the Long Tail ? Looks like it.

One of the bottlenecks for the growth of Indian economy is infrastructure and in particular roads.Some facts and estimates that help us see the urgent need for infra development:

• According to the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), highways form a tiny 2% of the entire road network but carry more than 40% of traffic.
• The annual road-transport market is gauged to be worth about US$95 million, but could increase to more than $125 million if road conditions improve, says the transport industry.
• A new Asian Development Bank study says China and East Asian countries will have to invest $1 trillion in the next five years on infrastructure to cope with growing economies and populations.
• India has thus become the fastest-growing car bazaar in the world, overtaking China.Goldman Sachs has predicted that India will have the largest number of cars by 2050.
• Transporters say there has been a major shift in transportation mode from railways toward roads. Indian roads carry 85% of passenger and 70% of freight traffic.

Budget 2005 emphasis on Infra development should see some improvement . However I remain skeptical about govt. talk as a lot of previous govts. have shown that “there’s many a slip between cup and lip”.

With the huge popularity of Google maps, it is but obvious that google will try to leverage it to other services. Here they come up with the first ancillary service Google Ride Finder . It helps one to find out the nearest cab and the phone number of the cab operator.

Mark Cuban has a fascinating post on The Sport of business . Its afterall the “edge” that counts for the success of any individual in the world of business

Dr Gershenfeld of MIT has invented a technology called “fab labs” which will enable manufacturing to reach large masses who lack formal education and resources to manufacture stuff. Is this a scenario of plumbing services being made available in the Long Tail ? Looks like it.

One of the bottlenecks for the growth of Indian economy is infrastructure and in particular roads.Some facts and estimates that help us see the urgent need for infra development:

• According to the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), highways form a tiny 2% of the entire road network but carry more than 40% of traffic.
• The annual road-transport market is gauged to be worth about US$95 million, but could increase to more than $125 million if road conditions improve, says the transport industry.
• A new Asian Development Bank study says China and East Asian countries will have to invest $1 trillion in the next five years on infrastructure to cope with growing economies and populations.
• India has thus become the fastest-growing car bazaar in the world, overtaking China.Goldman Sachs has predicted that India will have the largest number of cars by 2050.
• Transporters say there has been a major shift in transportation mode from railways toward roads. Indian roads carry 85% of passenger and 70% of freight traffic.

Budget 2005 emphasis on Infra development should see some improvement . However I remain skeptical about govt. talk as a lot of previous govts. have shown that “there’s many a slip between cup and lip”.

Adam Bosworth’s talk at ISCOC04 posits a new view of the evolution of internet world.He says “Keep it Simple and Sloppy” are the real technologies that become the trend setters ;Additionally, History also tends to reinforce the importance of the simple technologies like the widespread adoption of HTML,RSS and simple user interfaces.

We make decisions a lot of times, be it deciding what to do on a holiday, to deciding the educational course to taking up a job to complex decisions like choosing a life partner. The most interesting thing I realized after reading the book is the verbalization of our thought process that goes behind decision making. I do take decisions sometimes in order to maximize and sometimes in order to Satisfice. But I had never pondered over the importance of being thought process behind the same and how it influences me.

Blair Singer says that time management is giving perfect attention to the activity being done and applying 85/15 rule to the activities that we need to attend to.

Time is not the issue as much as priorities. Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it!

You don’t have to do everything, you don’t have to run every errand and you don’t have to control every activity in your life. You can have priorities, you can learn to ask for support and find others who are better at things than you are. You have to ask yourself: Is it revenue generating or not? Is it relationship-building… or not? Is it a worthwhile relationship or not? Is it busy work or not? Are you giving yourself lots to do and being busy rather than being effective? Are you on your own or do you have a team? Is it time with the special people in your life or not? Choose and then be present with your choice.

All it needs is an idea to start a business , along with a solid team and a network. In these days, when we come across statements that " ideas are everywhere and it is only execution that matters", it is heartening to come across examples like Paul Hartunian , Alan Francis who with the sheer power of their idea created million dollar businesses. One came up with a idea of mass selling Brooklyn bridge and othe sold a book with blank pages !. Both are examples of the importance of IDEA per se.

Learning comes from Experience and Good Learning comes from Bad Experience

All it needs is an idea to start a business , along with a solid team and a network. In these days, when we come across statements that " ideas are everywhere and it is only execution that matters", it is heartening to come across examples like Paul Hartunian , Alan Francis who with the sheer power of their idea created million dollar businesses. One came up with a idea of mass selling Brooklyn bridge and othe sold a book with blank pages !. Both are examples of the importance of IDEA per se.

Learning comes from Experience and Good Learning comes from Bad Experience

In the world of VCs , Joanna Rees Gallanter , a woman has made a name for herself . The path to the success has not been easy at all . Read her story here

Watch, the Japanese are still coming ! :

Nanotechnology, the science of tiny things, is hot, and one entrepreneur in Sunnyvale, Sonny Oh, has brought over a nanotechnology ceramic material from Japan to launch here. The technology acts as a catalytic anti-oxidant device, which restaurants add to their oil in deep-frying machines for fish or fries. Steve Fujii, owner of San Francisco restaurant Ebisu, has used it to cut down to seven five-gallon cans of oil a week, down from 15.

In the world of VCs , Joanna Rees Gallanter , a woman has made a name for herself . The path to the success has not been easy at all .
Read her story here

We are seeing a commoditization of goods and services in our society. My basic premise is that increasingly, the truth behind most of the images we see is the same; hence the appeal to the customers has started to play a deciding role.

With the proliferation of goods and services, companies face a major challenge in communicating the benefits of their products to their customers. Large turnover of the products and shorter lifecycles of the products make the first few instances of the customer contact very important. In those few moments, it is the packaging / the appeal that plays a predominant role in the success of the product. “This is the age of Blip economy “ says the marketing wizard, Seth Godin. Blip economy essentially means customers are exposed to bits and pieces of information relating to a lot of news around them. Hence with so much information competing the mind share, it is but natural that the appeal or packaging of any thing, be it a product, be it a news item, be it an announcement, becomes crucial to the performance of the product.

Malcom Gladwell’s article says : “Panic is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”

Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies. Bo Peabody says : “Much of what makes a company fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive is contained not in the company’s business model, but in how the entrepreneur communicates the mission of the company. A company’s mission, communicated by the entrepreneur with charisma and passion, is what creates the environment that attracts smart people and gets them inspired in the first place. Which is exactly what gets the luck rolling”

Malcom Gladwell’s article says : “Panic is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”

Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies.

Bo Peabody says :

“Much of what makes a company fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive is contained not in the company’s business model, but in how the entrepreneur communicates the mission of the company. A company’s mission, communicated by the entrepreneur with charisma and passion, is what creates the environment that attracts smart people and gets them inspired in the first place. Which is exactly what gets the luck rolling”

In one of the articles by Malcolm Gladwell, there is a description of a simple experiment, where a group of people were told to imagine that they had three hundred dollars. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another hundred dollars or (b) tossing a coin, where if they won they got two hundred dollars and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had five hundred dollars, and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up a hundred dollars or (d) toss a coin and pay two hundred dollars if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). What is interesting about those four choices is that, from a probabilistic standpoint, they are identical. They all yield an expected outcome of four hundred dollars. Nonetheless, we have strong preferences among them. Why? Because we’re more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains. That’s why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash.

Tech’s Top 10 Trends
1. Web services will evolve and create new businesses
2. Patients will demand online medical records
3. Corporate computing won’t see big changes for at least five years
4. The next big tech innovation will come out of China
5. Blogging and other online content will force traditional media to change
6. California will lead the world in embryonic stem-cell research
7. Text messaging will become more pervasive
8. New consumer technologies will appeal to more than just young hipsters
9. Every consumer-electronic product you own is about to become obsolete
10. Utility computing will keep tech spending strong

Any situation where the customer is forced to buy a product in anticipation of future benefits is definitely ruled by the laws of economics. Assets like loans, bonds etc are all affected by economic indicators like interest rate, inflation , supply, demand etc. Hence we see index based bonds, floating rate loans etc in the market. Frequent flier program is one such case of availing the air service today in exchange of an anticipated return of goodies in the future has also been effected by the demand glut. In the current scenario of lot of people having been accumulated flier miles , they are faced with a situation of not finding its use as the airlines with its limited capacity are unable to satisy the goodies promised .Unless the airways take proper care of the situation, these type of programs can result in a lot of customer dissatisfaction, ultimately leading to a massive atrophy of the customer base. Link: Fliers Find That Mileage Points Go Only So Far

Any situation where the customer is forced to buy a product in anticipation of future benefits is definitely ruled by the laws of economics. Assets like loans, bonds etc are all affected by economic indicators like interest rate, inflation , supply, demand etc. Hence we see index based bonds, floating rate loans etc in the market.

Frequent flier program is one such case of availing the air service today in exchange of an anticipated return of goodies in the future has also been effected by the demand glut. In the current scenario of lot of people having been accumulated flier miles , they are faced with a situation of not finding its use as the airlines with its limited capacity are unable to satisy the goodies promised .Unless the airways take proper care of the situation, these type of programs can result in a lot of customer dissatisfaction, ultimately leading to a massive atrophy of the customer base.

R&D Magazine conducted a survey asking 5 hot technologies where the investments are going to happen in 2005 .The results of the survey are :

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix .

Main arguments in his article are :

Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.The main problem, if that’s the word, is that we live in the physical world and, until recently, most of our entertainment media did, too. But that world puts two dramatic limitations on our entertainment. First is finding local customers to justify the retail investment of the product in the distribution channel. Second is the radio spectrum constraint where it can carry only a fixed number of channels.

As of October 2004 , iPod has dominated digital music player sales in the United States , with over 92% of the market for hard-drive players and over 65% of the market for all types of players. iPod has sold at a tremendous rate, moving over ten million units in a total of three years. The device has had a significant cultural impact in terms of its takeup.

MorganStanley created a NNZ index to track the nanotech sector on the NASDAQ.
Here’s a look at the performance:

R&D magazine attributes the heating up of index in 2004 to :

Continuing reduction in the cost to produce, measure, and control these thin layers of materials. Working at the nanoscale level is now pretty much pervasive in most semiconductor processes and the instrumentation to observe and analyze these processes and materials, while still expensive, has become within the reach of more researchers and manufacturers. The other part of the answer lies in nanotech’s convergence with biotech and other life science areas. Biotech interest has gone through some wild swings in the investment community over the past decade and even today is either flat or even temporarily somewhat in decline. But, the ability to more efficiently manage and analyze living materials at the nanoscale level, provides biotech researchers with abilities they didn’t have or couldn’t afford just a few years ago. Fully a third of the 25 companies on the NNZ Index are biotech companies.

I think the efforts to combine Net and TV will go on irrespective of failures that took place in the past. However Tivo does look like a success , though its sustenance is a question mark .Tivo helps one view the content in the TV shows offline, thus obviating the need for the user to be present when the show is aired.

The new trend in this space is that there have been a set of services where the TV shows have been offered to the users through web. Firstly the costs of developing 24-hour programming are fairly modest - at least compared with the budgets of broadcast TV networks and Secondly the increase in the bandwidth are making it feasible to stream shows for the users

Evolution
Auto-ID center pioneered a system called EPC Global Network comprising RFID technology, Electronic Product Code, Software based on EPC Global Standards Support. To commercialize the system, EAN International and Uniform Code Council were chosen to form not-for-profit org called EPCglobal Network.

EPCglobal Network Components
ELECTRONIC PRODUCT CODE (EPC) : Unique number that identifies a specific object in motion in the supply chain.

ID SYSTEM : The ID System consists of EPC tags and EPC readers. EPC tags are RFID devices that consist of a microchip and an antenna attached to a substrate. The EPC is stored on this tag, which is applied to cases, pallets and/or items. EPC tags communicate their EPCs to EPC readers using RFID. EPC readers communicate with EPC tags via radio waves and deliver information to local business information systems using EPC Middleware.

Paul Graham in his gyan on startups says
“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.”

Main Ideas from his article:

1.What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people.

Mark Pincus has put forth an hypothesis   that in the future , information will revolve around people rather than pages. A quick summary of the main points: 1.Web will be categorized based on people, their profile, interests, affiliations, needs. 2. Customer will feel the lock in they face with the current email service providers (they can’t move their emails across SPs). Ultimately open exchange of profiles and people info will happen across net. 3.Network acts as one database caters to a whole set of needs, thus becoming a market place. 4.Big players realize that they are better off aggregating and syndicating than trying to stand alone defending their franchises and competing with the overall network. For the above hypothesis to come true,one needs to consider the following aspects : 1. Need of Open Standards that will facilitate the movement towards peopleweb. RSS standard is a classic example for the nascent blogging business 2. Businesses realizing the importance of adding value to the customer by adopting the open standards.(Having API’s released to all, etc) 3. Since the information about the people is culled from the network, the authenticity of the info becomes prominent . Who vouches for the authenticity of the info? 4. Considering that commerce is an essential building block of peopleweb, Identity theft needs to be abated for peopleweb to move forward. All 4 aspects will play a crucial role in deciding whether peopleweb see the light of the day.

In the current stage of RFID evolution, most of the companies and countries are trying out the technology for operational efficiencies in the supply chain. We can say that the technology is still in the chasm stage. The two aspects which will decide about the paceof integration of rfid in to the mainstream are China and Walmart .

• Walmart by it very mandate that by 2005 all its suppliers should be rfid enabled is good enough sign for the technology to mature. RFID technology firms,suppliers,etc are hurrying to put the rfid infra in place.
• China Factor :The imports by mega-retailers such as Walmart(12% of all the products),Metro AG, Carrefour, Tesco and others, the China-sourced products by retailers adds up to a substantial number. China is already gung ho about rfid and wants to showcase the technology in 2008 olympics. Hence the manner of rfid adoption will be crucial

There is no doubt that the above two factors will largely decide the adoption of the technology.However there are some other issues which should be taken in to consideration

Flytxt is a classic case of a firm using Permission marketing in the mobile content business. Instead of bombarding users with unnecessary ads, it seeked permission from the users to join text-based clubs in a cost effective way.Each mobile message cost approximately five U.S. cents to send, versus 10 times that amount for a first-class, regular mail solicitation. Response rates tended to run about 10 percent, compared with 0.5 percent for a well-executed direct mail campaign. Creative costs were miniscule, and production costs negligible. Mobile marketing was better, faster, and much, much cheaper.

Jennifer Rice says that it is “How” one does business that is more important than “What”. It is more true in today’s world where the products become commoditized at a faster rate, the level of competition keeps growing and the customer expectations keep rising like there is no tomorrow. The “how” which can be termed as strategy for a company needs to be reflected in all the aspects of a firm. Revenue generation, Operational Performance, HR, Marketing and PR should all revolve around one single mantra and then automatically a brand is built. One example which comes to my mind is SW Airlines where all the aspects of the business encompassed “No Frills Airline” . Or take the popular example of Google. In the search space, Google brought in the page rank algo, displayed a new “How” and thus became one of most successful companies.

Mark Pincus has put forth an hypothesis   that in the future , information will revolve around people rather than pages. A quick summary of the main points:

1.Web will be categorized based on people, their profile, interests, affiliations, needs.
2. Customer will feel the lock in they face with the current email service providers (they can’t move their emails across SPs). Ultimately open exchange of profiles and people info will happen across net.
3.Network acts as one database caters to a whole set of needs, thus becoming a market place.
4.Big players realize that they are better off aggregating and syndicating than trying to stand alone defending their franchises and competing with the overall network.

Jennifer Rice says that it is “How” one does business that is more important than “What”. It is more true in today’s world where the products become commoditized at a faster rate, the level of competition keeps growing and the customer expectations keep rising like there is no tomorrow. The “how” which can be termed as strategy for a company needs to be reflected in all the aspects of a firm. Revenue generation, Operational Performance, HR, Marketing and PR should all revolve around one single mantra and then automatically a brand is built.

Phising Scams have risen , hence causing a major crisis in the online transaction volume. Everyday we do keep hearing new type of ad wares/spy wares/virus which seem to be stealing the identity information of the user and thus creating a havoc with his account.  In such cases , Digital Identity comes to the rescue if properly implemented. Digital identities, which provide two measures of authentication, could help improve Internet security, as well as having various other uses, such as digital passports, the experts said. Dual authentication often involves something a user knows or possesses, such as a smart card, and something that he or she is, which can be represented by biometric information

Boo.com is a mention in a  reminder  on the fifith anniversary NASDAQ crash. The lessons that can be learnt from the failure of boo.com are enormous. Burning 135 Million USD in 18 months by the website offers rich lessons to any person. Boo.com will serve as a warning for all the entrepreneurs who are profligate in their approach to their product / service.

The tag line for the firm reads as “Style never dies”.
“Lessons never forgotten” would be apt for an entrepreneur.

Peter Cohan, author and management Consultant says that there are three exciting tech developments that will be widely adopted and eventually save executives a lot of time. They are:

1.The Semantic Web. Cohan describes it as an extension of the current Web, where machines will be able to communicate without human intervention for example, scheduling a meeting for several participants at once by hooking into their scheduling software to see when everyone is available.

Here’s a look at facts which will justify the title of this post

1. VC Investment has risen to 33 Million USD from 8 Million USD from the previous year

2. Microsoft steps up the heat with MSN Spaces .IMHO that it is a late entrant in the market. However it is tough to hazard a guess as to how would MSFT leverage its existing communication infra with Spaces

3. Blogs have become another PR engine for the companies where the aspects of product release are discussed. In contrast to the earlier PR Channels, the firm has little control over the matter than can come up in the blogs. Hence the so called arm twising in the relationship management with communication channels has undergone a drastic change.

In an interview with Joshua Schachter,the founder of Del.icio.us,one of the responses regarding the revenue model for the company was as follows:
“I have a day job. I only work on del.icio.us one evenings and weekends. It’s not that expensive, just rack space and ALL MY SPARE TIME.”

Most people associate starting a company as something which requires tremendous amount of money, people etc. But I feel that the ability to prototype and test it out in the market is perhaps the most important ability to create a succesful enterprise. Another case is that of blogbride , a company which employs just one developer and the marketing is done by Pito, a veteran in the valley. Infact an interesting aspect of the development is that it is done in Ireland and the communication is mainly through emails and IM.

Domain name spam essentially means registering names that look like that of legitimate companies but lead users to fake sites designed to steal passwords and credit card details .Domain names are the ‘real language’ addresses of websites, rather than their internet protocol address, which is a series of numbers.

Domain names are used so people can more easily navigate the web.So-called ASCII codes are used to represent European languages but for other languages a hybrid of a system called Unicode is used.So, for example, website PayPal could now be coded using a mixture of the Latin alphabet and the Russian alphabet.The resulting domain as displayed to the users would look identical to the real site as a Russian ‘a’ look just like an English ‘a’.But the computer code would be different, and the site it would lead users to could be a fake."

My view of the pathetic powerpoints presentations we see day in and day out is also reflected in this article Feld Thoughts: Ban Bullets . A e-book written by Seth Godin has some interesting points on the way to avoid presentations.

Four Components to a Great Presentation:
First, make yourself cue cards. This feature should be built in to PowerPoint,but it’s not. You should be able to see your cue cards on your laptop’s screen while your audience sees your slides on the wall. Alas. In the meantime, you’ll just have to resort to writing them down the old-fashioned way.
Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

The story of Ron Popeil (great inventor and marketer) is a classic rags to riches story. One of the reasons he attributes to his success is innumberable interactions with the customers. Demonstrating his products in front of real live people who asked silly questions and broached objections, he was able to learn what the silly questions and objections were and build the answers and counter-arguments into his pitch. The same he carried over to television for selling Veg-O-matic which was a great commercial success. It seems so true but still a lot of companies wait for the perfect product to be released in the market rather than released a well made product which enables a quick feedback. Roberto Kiyosaki says the same in his book Art of Start : " Develop Quick proptotypes and test it out in the market. "

A fantastic article " Journey to the Center of Google takes one through the journey of Google’s success. " Ignoring Conventional wisdom is one aspect which google has done consistently . It has also executed all the unconventional steps with great diligence.
What the google founders have done differently:
1.Inventing a search engine when everyone knew search was dead
2.Building a business on Internet advertising when everyone knew it was impossible;
3.Antagonizing two revered VCs whose rings they should have been kissing
4.Going for a dutch auction in the IPO

Powerpoint is a tool whose power comes in to being depending on the presentor. If the presentor has cogent thoughts and presents in a concise manner , then ppt is a wonderful tool that complements his task .

Alas! thats not the case usually. Pretty bad speakers/ presentors hide under the garb of technical gimmicks in the tool that the entire audience is awestruck by the techy stuff in the presentation OR bored by the whole stuff. Both result in the audience not getting the point.The most disgusting aspect of a poor presentation is when the speaker reads out the points from the slide and doesnt bother to explain the relevance of the point.