Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Please don't say YES when you really mean NO

I read this book when I was very young, not sure how young - but it was definitely before I appreciated its importance. As humans we often end up taking more work than we could or ought to - just because of the fear or absurdity of saying No. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it.

Of the first 9 business meetings I had after moving back to India, none of them said "No" to me - and yet nothing good came out of them. And then finally, My first "NO" arrived in the 10th meeting. And in an weirdly ironic and somewhat sadistic way, it felt wonderful.

Please do yourselves and others a favor. Just say NO, if you are not going to do it.

SMS - the ultimate goldmine

6.30 AM - Ahmedabad Airport
7.35 AM - Mumbai Airport
7.35AM - SMS from Hutch Customer Care - “Welcome to Mumbai”
7.36 AM - SMS from Hutch Customer Care - “Our Hutch Customer care number in Mumbai is 98201.98201. Please call us for any questions’
9.51 AM - Great deals from Big Bazaar. Save 60% on all footwear, clothes, etc.
10.14 AM - Download ringtones from ChakDe for only Rs 5/tune
11.01 AM - Call me asap. Dinner at our place at 7PM today
And so it goes…

I know a lot of the above SMSes are crap, but do you notice the gold here? The fact that mobile is a giganormous market in India and that Indians are SMS happy folks is well-known. But - the amount of data that is generated through SMS and the advertising opportunities it provides us is simply mind-boggling.
Consider this - a SMS enables an active communication between the sender and receipient. It knows precisely where the sender is located, where the recipient is located, where they both live, and it knows what we are talking about. I mean, WTF - if this together does not provide the ultimate advertising opportunity, I am not sure what does.

Imagine how much better the above set of messages could have been -
6.30 AM - Ahmedabad Airport
7.35 AM - Mumbai Airport

7.35AM - SMS from Hutch Customer Care - “Welcome to Mumbai”.
-----------
Sponsored message:
We invite you to try our breakfast at Hotel XYZ. Breakfasts from Rs 75
Or
Message from Makemytrip: Booked your hotel yet? Hotels in Mumbai from 1900. Return flights to Ahmedabad from 1700


7.36 AM - SMS from Hutch Customer Care - “Our Hutch Customer care number in Mumbai is 98201.98201. Please call us for any questions’
---------
9.51 AM - Great deals from Big Bazaar. Save 60% on all footwear, clothes, etc.
10.14 AM - Down ringtones from ChakDe for only Rs 5/tune

11.01 AM - Call me asap. Dinner at our place at 7PM today
Sponsored message:
Florists in Bopal, Ahmedabad, Buy bouquets from Rs. 25 OR


Dinner gifts from Rs. 125 at Big Bazaar
-------------

The last message here is probably one of the most common messages I receive - and is perhaps one of the most information rich messages - it tells you where I am going, when I am going and why I am going.

Granted, its not easy to mine the myriad of short hand words that people have started using for SMS, and interpreting context from less than 10 words of SMS is hard. But there is gazillions of data already, so its certainly doable. And when it does happen - SMS will be free, phones will be subsidized, no one will care about voice plans (who cares about voice anyway, its intrusive and its completely un-minable). And that - I think would be the googliest thing ever…

Anyone got a million dollars to bankroll this idea?

Friday, September 07, 2007

How cool is Web 1.5

Definitions aside, what if we take the best of 1.0 and 2.0 and throw the crap away.

Think about it - all the massively profitable companies from the Web 1.0 world are largely transactional companies - Ebay, Amazon, Expedia, Google, (insert any billion plus dollar company here)... These are real companies with real products and a real business model - and they make money the good old way - just sell stuff people want. Sure - Google is not transactional per se - but, arguably, it does offer a product customer wants, i.e. "information"

Now - moving on to Web 2.0 - we have YouTube, all social networking sites, most of Y! properties, millions of blogs and a whole bunch of other sites profiled on Tech Crunch. These are the sites where most of the engagement, page-views, energy, VC money and start-up activity is. But, I can think of hardly one site that actually has demonstrated the ability to make profits. Yeah - You Tube did sell for a billion six-fifty and Facebook valuations seem to many many times more - but, profits - we don't know and the jury is still out whether those are sane valuations anyway.

The point is that while Web 2.0 does really well to give users a voice, engage them through RIAs and actively pushes the envelope on web innovation - it has seldom translated to making profits. Which makes me wonder - "Should we rather take a Web 1.0 product and combine it with Web 2.0 marketing? - i.e. give them a pretty face, give our users a voice, engage them and enable them to be active advocates of your product and keep iterating?"

Case in point - Kayak (same ol' travel product, but smarter and funner), 37 signals (kickass product + fanatic users), Google Maps (a simple, but real product + viral distribution), amazon (your stuff, our store)., facebook (same old social networking + crowd-source apps).

I am not giving up on social networking sites. The jury is still out on whether all the gazillion or so user-engagement hours are monetizable? The argument of course is that these eye-balls have been monetized on TVand they are are only shifting online. The problem is that this money should have never been spent on TV in the first place. TV got the dollars because marketers had full-time jobs to do and could hardly ever measure the ROI of their investments. And there in lies the bane of the web, ROI is measurable and its hardly ever positive in the short-term. Which brings us back to Web 1.0 - sell a real product, but please please - sell it well - Web 2.0 style