Daily Archives: June 19, 2007

Talk at IAMAI

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IndianTelevision.com writes about a talk I gave at an IAMAI symposium on “Enterprise Mobility.” My talk was on Invertising.

Jain implored upon all corporates to create a friendly relationship with the customers through the mobile network. He talked about how “sounds of silence can be converted into sounds of money”.

He said, “Small ads, news and movie theatre updates, shopping discounts and serial timings should be provided by the mobile operators. Mobile-centric advertising has the potential to grow annually to Rs 20 billion. The pull mails should be converted to push mails and spam into subscription.”

He further explained that there can be growth in mobile advertising when customers pay for each detail they receive in their mobiles. Corporates can also double their income via network marketing and advertising.

Facebook and AOL

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Michael Parekh writes:

Facebook today feels like a web-based AOL.

You log in to do anything.

You keep logging in because you get logged out if there are big periods of inactivity.

You log in to keep in touch with your friends, just like today’s net natives did in AOL’s chat rooms and IM sessions.

You exchange emails back and forth with them using Facebook’s walled, proprietary, email system.
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There are a lot of differences of course is a vis AOL, key among them being that one’s identity is crystal clear in Facebook, while on AOL, one could be interacting with anybody and their dog.
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While the net natives may not be yearning to re-create a newspaper, TV or magazine in this new “Web 2.0” realm, they may be sub-consciously trying to re-create an AOL of sorts.

India Internet Numbers

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From an agencyfaqs interview with Manish Agarwal, vice president, marketing, Rediff.com: “21-25 million is the number of active users in the last month; 35-38 million is figure for the last three months and 72 million is the figure for people who have ever used the internet…The growth of the online industry is about 25 per cent. ”

Telecom: Back from the Dead

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Business Week writes: “All those YouTube videos and MySpace pages zipping back and forth on the Net have revived the telecom industryand charged up the economy.”

Investors saw some $2 trillion of market value vanish in a little more than two years–twice the damage caused by the parallel bursting of the Internet bubble. Amid the wreckage, some predicted it could take a decade or more before the industry would climb back and fill all those empty pipes that starry-eyed executives had buried beneath the earth and oceans.

Over the past year, however, the telecom industry has roared back to life. Credit a steady rise in appetite for broadband Internet connections, which enable easy consumption of watch-my-cat video clips, iPod music files, and such Web-inspired services as free Internet phoning. Indeed, this year broadband adoption among U.S. adults is expected to cross the important threshold of 50%. Capital spending is on the rise as companies invest to build high-speed networks.

TECH TALK: Good Books: Everything is Miscellaneous

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I have followed David Weinberger’s blog for a long time. So, it was natural to want to read his new book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. David’s two previous books include The Cluetrain Manifesto (as co-author) and Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

From the book’s inside flap:

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place–the physical world demanded it–but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your childrens teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think–and what you know–about the world.

This is what David wrote in an essay on Amazon:

As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash–adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like “flocking behavior,” joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.

For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If youre using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one stores customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general “buzz.” (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.

Wize…[makes] money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous–letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.

Were seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a companys will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.

Tomorrow: Everything is Miscellaneous (continued)

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