Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category
Friday, January 11th, 2013
9.9 out 10 Entrepreneurs expose the first look of their product to their friends, family and people who trust them and they trust. If we throw all of them under the umbrella of “Trusted Users”, these trusted users will help you a lot in the early stage of your product evolution. They will help you find bugs, give you friendly advise, moral support and so forth.
Let me clue you in on one biggest surprise about trusted users -
Trusted Users are NOT your Tribe Users
This blog is inspired by my conversations with Maxim Razmakhin, founder of Mixely – a new way to find friends . Max is really smart and is on to something interesting. Watch his progress.
Where can you find your tribe users?
- Tribe users typically emerge from those who have the problem that your product solves; and will “try” a new solution other than what they have been doing for a long time. Not all people who have this problem will become your tribe users. Only a small segment of them.
- Tribe users are also part of those users who have an immediate need, urgency, desire, resources and time to engage with your “not so great beta” product.
- For each startup, their particular tribe user is defined based on the
- Market (emerging, mature, crowded emerging, etc)
- Business Model (B2c, B2B, B2B2C)
- Revenue Model (Paid, Free, Ad supported)
- Age, demographic, etc, etc.
- In short this is very subjective to every startup – don’t mimic what others are doing. Define your tribe user based on what is ideal for your business
What are other characteristics of Tribe users?
- Tribe users are those who don’t care who you (founder) or your team is BUT love everything about the product
- Tribe users don’t hesitate to tell you that your product sucks and which features work well and what features don’t work well. Tribe users don’t hesitate to voice their dissatisfaction but at the same time change their opinion if you hear and address their concerns.
- Tribe users have an emotional and passionate relationship with the product and company rather than the company management or team. Of course that passion and emotion could emerge from how the management/founders engage with the users, but ultimately their relationship is with the product.
Picking people you trust for the tribe users does not qualify them as your tribe users. Also, picking who trust you rather than their own needs also doesn’t qualify as tribe users.
People who trust you and you trust might not be honest with you. More importantly they may not even fit the profile of your target user. You sister, college roommate, advisor, colleagues, drink buddy – while all of them have a trust relationship with you, they send you incorrect signals for the success of your product.
What to avoid when looking for Tribe users?
- When it comes to tribe users, don’t start with trusted relationship just because you could. They will lead you the wrong way.
- When it comes to tribe users, don’t accept everyone who wants to try your product. Define a “profile of your prospective user” and stick to it. Make it public – don’t worry about alienating others, as most of them are not even looking at your site or your product anyways.
- When you let your users pick their friends to be part of your tribe, I would use some caution; In the interest of “virality” and growth, most entrepreneurs allow their users to invite their friends. While there is less risk in the growth stage, but in the initial stage, this might be risky. So, add proper thought into how you can control this process at the same time empower your users. Priority is to find users who fit your qualifications -rather than just any willing users. Don’t expect your users (even though they are your tribe users) to care as much as you care about these aspects.
-@Vsistla
Posted in Customer Discovery, Customers, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Lean Startup, Product, Startup, Tribe Users, Tribes | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 11th, 2012
Inspired by a tweet by Vivek Wadhwa -
“What’s the shelf life of a techie? Just 15 years http://bit.ly/TRT8A5 — Good advice from India. Applies here also”
and by drawing on Dr. Clayton Christensen‘s work on disruptive innovation for companies/businesses, here are my thoughts.
This is article is spot on – without really qualifying the “5 years” as the period, a techie/developer has to evolve to the next stage of their career or risk being “irrelevant” in tech industry completely.
Note: In this post I am treating Language & Technology as one and the same even they are not. Both languages and technologies go through similar cycles;
If you take a slice of the talent pool at starting of this 5+5+5 cycle, and study how their careers are evolving in the next 15 years, one will find many interesting trends that validate some of my assumptions I published in this post.
At the start of cycle, qualifications for entering and picking a new technology or programming language is much lower and new graduates are willing to jump in for few reasons. There is less competition, less compensation and less expectation of quality.
Forces impact Coder / Developer’s ability to enter, learn & thrive coding languages and technologies
During the middle of the cycle, once the technology/programming language starts to mature, more and more people enter the foray, comp inflation creeps in and higher barriers for new entrants to enter into the space as early adopters become incumbents and experts. This is the hardest phase/cycle for fresh graduates and inexperienced professionals to enter in the cycle. So, either they struggle to get into the current coding cycle or try to look out for a technology cycle that is just about to start or completely abandon the developer world and pursue managerial & other adjacent careers.
Professionals who are in the 3rd phase of their current cycle (10 to 15 years), will inadvertently become irrelevant to enter into the new cycle either in Phase 1 or Phase 2 for various reasons. To enter in Phase 1, its too beneath their compensation expectation or visibility. Also, their age, family and financial constraints create additional barriers for them. To enter Phase 2 of the new cycle, these people have to compete with incumbents who entered in Phase 1 of this new cycle. So the challenge for people who are in Phase 3 of their career is they either have to either be at Executive level who can leverage their financial and social capital to continue to generate value for themselves or fall of the cliff to go into other verticals like real estate investments, venture capital, advisory services, etc.
So, for each individual, the best choice to enter into a particular Tech Cycle is not only based on timing but also their individual constraints – age, financial expectations, burn rate, social/family pressures and fundamental aptitude to be good at programming/technology leadership. So, it is a very subjective decision for each of us to enter, stay, thrive or stay away in any particular tech cycle.
Entry Level Candidates:
While it is tempting to enter into maturing technologies (cycle 2/phase 2) as there are many opportunities and also attractive compensation trends, it is best for them to enter into brand new technology cycles/new entrants. This allows for them to dictate the future of the emerging technologies; also make them incumbents when these new entrant coding languages/technologies become mature/established technologies. There is also huge risk for new grads to bet on unproven technologies and coding languages. If they end up entering into unproven coding languages that don’t take off, they not only are stuck in their career path but also missed out on other proven & successful languages/technologies (Phase 1 technologies) but also current mature languages/opportunities (Phase 2 technologies) where despite competition and compensation pressure opportunities still exists.
Mid Level Candidates:
Ideal situation for coders/developers is to become incumbents in a coding language by the time that language is in its cycle 2/phase 2 of its existence. They are able to command higher compensation despite high competition from entry level candidates. People who have natural aptitude for coding and programmering could try to hedge in the current Cycle 2 programming language as well as keep a close eye on newer languages that are in their cycle 1. In the language that is in cycle 2, assuming they have gained expertise, mid level candidates can thrive and command higher compensation and visibility.
Experienced Level Candidates:
These candidates have the greatest potential or greatest risk based on their expertise, knowledge and visibility in a particular coding language or technology. If these individuals grew with the language from its cycle 1, their potential to thrive is huge. If not, there is a risk of these professionals becoming irrelevant.
Tags: Business Anthropology, Careers, disruption, Irrelevant, Linkedin, Recruiting, Talent, Tech Careers, Technology Anthropology
Posted in Analytics, Anthropology, Coders, Coding Languages, Competition, Developers, Disruption, Disruptive Forces, Information Age, Innovation, Market Research, Research, sociology, Talent, Tech Careers | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
Forces that dictate the success, failure & survival of a coding language
Every newly invented coding language will have various forces that help, hurt and hinder its growth & survival in the long run. I feel these are some of the forces – am sure there are more forces.
Coding Language/Tech Growth Diamond
This is I call “Language Growth Diamond” – which is driven and dictated by various aspects such as its use cases, target platforms, growth of the market needs, # of new developers entering vs # of current developers abandoning the language for newer/more efficient languages, and so forth.
Coding Language/Tech Growth vs Developer Pool
As a new coding language/tech grows, its pool of developers grow and shrink based on some of the forces discussed above along with individual tech developer objectives, goals and propensity to learn a new language or abandon an existing language.
Coding Language/Tech Phases vs Type of Developers Entering/Abandoning a Language
Coding language growth/maturity some how dictates the type of developers that embrace and ignore the language/tech. Type of developers is based on their level in their career and other factors discussed later in this blog.
Developer Age/Career Level vs Ability/Goals/Life Event Mapping
Developer age, their cognitive ability, they career goals, career aspirations, their life events, and propensity to learn something new dictates the duration of a developer to be an active developer.
Tags: Coders, Cognitive Skills, Developers, Life Cycle, Talent
Posted in Careers, Coders, Coding Languages, Cognitive Skills, Developers, Innovation, Personas, Talent, Tech Careers, Universities | No Comments »
Monday, November 19th, 2012
Genotypes of an organism are inherited instructions carried within the Organisms genetic Code. Where as Phenotypes of an organism are what is resulted from Organisms genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and the interactions between the two.
From Wikipedia -
The interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been conceptualized by the following relationship:
- genotype (G) + environment (E) → phenotype (P)
A more nuanced version of the relationship is:
-
genotype (G) + environment (E) + genotype & environment interactions (GE) → phenotype (P)
In the world of Entrepreneurship, Accelerators, & Incubators, no matter how great the mentorship is, how great the ecosystem is, ultimate success of the startup still depends on the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurs ability to respond to the ecosystem. Accelerators only empower the right entrepreneur.
That’s conventional conclusion and thinking;
What’s missing in the above argument is the relevant “qualification” of the ecosystem. For example just because a mentor is great at what he does or has been a successful serial entrepreneur, doesn’t mean that the mentor can create right support for a specific entrepreneur;
Entrepreneur’s ability to learn, grow and get influenced has as much bearing on him as it is on the accelerator and its ecosystem.
Most of the accelerators pick mentors and advisors from their connections and networks well before they even know the entrepreneurs, their startup concepts and their needs & strengths. While the new accelerator model (assuming the 1990s version is original/older version aka IdeaLabs, etc) is less than a decade old, there has not been enough progress with respect to mentors, advisors and ecosystem customization based on individual entrepreneurs and enterpreneur’s startup ideas. Some of these accelerators get away by saying that we are investing in the entrepreneur rather than their idea – while there is some validity in that argument but am sorry, “no cigar”!
Since 2011 and 2012 we are starting to see industry specific accelerators – for industry such as Health Care IT, Fashion Tech, FinTech, Entreprise, etc. While these might address some of the problems common in generalist accelerators (by bringing specific mentors in a particular industry or sector), they also bring their own set of challenges and problems.
Going back to mentors and advisors, best way to improve the accelerator model is to start focusing on mentors & advisors as well – not just on entrepreneurs.
Here are some recommendations -
- Some Mentors and advisors should be changed for each semester based on the entrepreneurs, their backgrounds and their startup ideas.
- Mentors and Advisors should be accountable for their contribution – not just at the equity/compensation level, but some open/independent review of their contribution to the ecosystem.
- Mentors and Advisors cannot be part of the management or shareholders of the Accelerators – this creates a conflict of interest for the management to be critical of mentor’s performance/actual contribution.
- Mentors/Advisors who are also investors also creates weird situations – for the entrepreneur who is getting mentorship and the management. This scenario needs to reviewed appropriately – on a case by case basis.
@Vsistla
Tags: Advisor, BioMimicry, Entrepreneur, Genotypes, Mentors, Startups, TechStars, Y Combinator
Posted in Accelerators, Advisor, BioMimicry, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Incubators, Influencer, Innovation, Professional Connections, Startup, Statistics, TechStars, Y Combinator | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
As many of the active LinkedIn users are aware, LinkedIn’s latest feature – social endorsement of “Skills & Expertise” – is in later stage of its beta release and growing like rapid fire in the past few weeks. What’s interesting is LinkedIn brought social validation by your network to this feature they started testing since Feb of 2012 – a social proof for your skills and expertise.
After studying this feature for a few days, I decided to do few social experiments & surveys and my past few weeks of results have been nothing short of eye openers – with respect to user behaviors. While my data set is only limited to my own network, I am quite certain these results would be very akin to majority of LinkedIn users.
While most people endorse as a social convention – “you scratch my back and I scratch your back” – very much similar to how most of us used LinkedIn Recommendations, unlike LinkedIn “Recommendations”, skill endorsements can be removed any time you want after you endorse.
Similar to tweenage kids, I am already seeing immature behavior – where people endorse skills and delete the endorsements if you don’t endorse them back or if you don’t endorse them as many as they endorsed you.
Also, from a sheer value standpoint, an individual’s recommendation for you will always be more valuable than that individual’s endorsement, even though in the long run, # of credible endorsements speak a lot about you than recommendations.
Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions around this social experiment -
- Reciprocity seems like an unspoken rule – This seems to be an overwhelming expectation – with my own direct experience as well as with people I spoke with regarding endorsements. Times when people solicit you to endorse them in return for their endorsements and other times they straight up harras you. This is very much akin to some of the spammers in the world of Twitter – You follow me and I will follow you.
- When it comes to Endorsements, huge egos are at play – I have purposely ignored to see what would happen if I didn’t “endorse back” someone who deserves some endorsements. To my surprise, their original endorsements have been removed after few days! This is a big shocker for me.
- Mutual friends & partiality in endorsements don’t get along – When you rate two peers inconsistently on skills they both pride themselves (like endorse Product manager to only one even though both of them are equally good and skilled at Product management), you start a pissing contest – most of the time without any straight confrontation.
- That’s not a skill I am proud off – re-endorse me! – Thanks to LinkedIn’s auto recommendation of skills based on your profile, most of the people I spoke to were unhappy about some of the skills that were automatically chosen for them. I heard one person contemplating to contact all the people who endorsed him on a particular skill to re-endorse for some other more relevant skill. Another wished he could change the skill text without losing the endorsements for that skill.
So, how can LinkedIn make these endorsements more credible and experience less controversial/painful? While it is too soon to conclude where the crowd sourced endorsements could go for LinkedIn, here are some recommendations -
- Endorsements are not same as Follow! – People should not be endorsing others and then remove them the next day. If they are not sure about endorsing someone, they should not endorse to begin with.
- If you insist on leaving “undo” feature, then at least insist on getting rational feedback on why someone wants to undo their endorsement just a few days after they endorsed that person.
- For Credibility, lets focus on Quality than Quantity- LinkedIn can make these endorsements more credibility by offering rich data around individual endorsements and individual motives behind endorsements. Such as -
- Displaying # of endorsements given vs # of endorsements got will give you some understanding of the value of endorsements.
- Publish like an Endorsement Gradient that is calculated based on – # of endorsements given by those who did not get an endorsement vs # of endorsements given by those who got an endorsement.
- Maybe an infographic about who (as in relationship – professional or personal) actually endorsed to learn why they endorsed – if all your endorsements are coming from your family members or close friends who never worked with you, then we know how valuable your endorsements are.
- Percentile the endorsements by skill or overall – When you crowd source people to endorse, some kind of percentile for individual skill endorsements or total endorsements – based on industry, education qualification, # of years of experience, etc – would be very useful.
- Educate your users that endorsements are not social convention! – This is very important. When someone on the street says hello to you, you say hello back to them – that is social convention. Endorsements should not be social convention. Period! Educate your users with proper “coach marks” and alerts.
As per LinkedIn users, to create more credibility for your endorsements, stick to following principles -
- Tell your endorsors to only endorse if they feel strongly about it. You do the same.
- Tell your endorsors that you will not be reciprocating them back. Reiterate that endorsements should not fit social convention. If they try to obligate you, be polite and say that you don’t know enough about them on that particular skill to endorse.
As per endorsing me, take a wild guess!
@Vsistla
Tags: Facebook, Linkedin, Online Communities, Skill, Skills & Expertise, Social network, Twitter
Posted in Anthropology, Attention, Crowd Sourcing, Customers, Endorsements, Follow, Gamification, Influencer, Innovation, Linkedin, Motivators, Professional Connections, Psychology, Relationships, Social Capital, social networks, sociology, Twitter, User Behavior Data, Wisdom of crowd | No Comments »
Friday, August 3rd, 2012
This post is not just for Social Entreprises but also for people who value relationships and those who want to put a value for relationships.
In the book Sway, authors talk about two parts of our brain that respond to altruism & material rewards and how both these parts can never work in sync and the part of the brain that gets excited about material rewards (Nucleus Accumbens)will trump the altruistic part (Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus) IF these two forces ever butt each other.
English: Reward system Français : Structures cérébrales constituant le système de récompense. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a very important concept to grapple with for most of the social entrepreneurs and social entreprises. In fact every social entreprise should clearly understand these forces before they instrument their product features, incentives & rewards.
Here is the most interesting thing – these conclusions are also consistent with non social entreprises and other conventional “do gooder” type; I have conducted my own experiments to validate that many of the following -
For example,
- Sometimes, no reward is better than some reward – In general not putting a price or reward for someone’s good actions and intensions is better than putting some price/reward in place. This has impacted my own ability to contribute at the best of my abilities in some of the personal projects I was involved in the past few years. This becomes a big issue when the reward you are given is much lesser than what your time and attention is worth. Of course, we tend to rationalize (that darn Nucleus Accumbens) as soon as someone puts a price on your deeds. It is very important for individuals to clearly understand the inherent motivations behind “do gooders”. Those inherent motivations dictate their reactions to the rewards.
- When you reward, don’t expect – In general, when you reward someone for their good deeds especially when they are doing that without any contingencies or expectations, you should not have any expectations from them especially after you reward them. Most of the time, as soon as someone rewards for your actions, they also start to set expectations on your ability to do future good deeds. This becomes a viscous cycle.
- Rewards and incentives are a tricky beast - Most people focus on “how much” they can reward for someone’s good deeds and to a lesser extent on “what”; I feel “how” the reward is defined, delivered, acknowledged and so forth is as important as how much and what the reward is. Inherently each of us are motivated by many aspects in life when we help others. You cannot define all of us with a few broad strokes. More about this in the next bullet.
- Good deeds/intensions come in all kinds of instruments- Some take “time” and other’s write a check and others donate what they don’t need. Some do physical labor, and some help on strategy and others be there for you in need. Some make the very important introduction, while others “like” or “retweet” your message. While not all of these are same, one cannot ignore the value of each of these actions. So, when your social entreprise is only accounting for a “check” then you are leaving lot of opportunity untapped.
- People who give in all kinds of instruments are as myriad as what motivates them to do – Just the way people contribute for “social good” in various instruments, people’s individual expectations (if they have any) also vary. So, taking into account all those aspects in your models is very critical. For example, someone who is motivated by being the “charitable” leader board responds to “gamification” compared to someone else who want to be anonymous.
- First give before you expect – I spend umpteen hours with many early stage startups to coach, share, learn and collaborate – without anything on paper. I strongly believe we give before we expect or take. That is how we create “value” for people around us. The more value we create for people around us, the more valuable we become. I see many Social Entreprises experimenting with interesting “charity” models – where you give something for charity for getting something back in return. Some times what you get in return for your charitable contribution is its just bragging rights and some times its lot more tangible. Different people respond to these models differently. So, it is critical social entreprises take into account all those nuances into account before they structure their charitable models.
This blog post is motivated by – the book Sway by Brafman brothers, Robyn Scott from OneLeap, Ali Ansari Professor & ex-Chairman of Engineers Without Borders, interactions with various angel investors from The Unreasonable Institute, and my own experimentations with various early stage startups and entrepreneurs.
Tags: Ali Ansari, Altruism, Charity, Engineers Without Borders, Incentive, Incentives, Motivators, Nucleus Accumbens, Rewards, Robyn Scott, Social Entreprise
Posted in Altruism, Charity, Crowd, Crowd Sourcing, Good Society, Incentives, Influencer, Innovation, Motivations, Motivators, Neocortex, Personas, Psychology, Reputation, Rewards, Social Capital, Social Entreprise, Wisdom of crowd | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 13th, 2012
Value attribution is a basic innate human behavioral tenet that superimposes characteristics and qualities of an individual or thing when we are assessing the “objective” value of the individual or thing. In other words we tend to stick with the “perceived value” of a thing or individual over its “objective value”. Our perceptions from our own culture, past experiences, diagnostic biases take over and trump our ability to assess based on the real objective values.
Value attribution phenomenon was demonstrated by Joshua Bell – one of the finest violinists and Washington Post in 2010 in Washington D.C. at a Subway station where over a 1000 people walked by without paying attention when Joshua Bell – one of the best known violinists in the world played for over 45 mins on his $3.5 Million worth violin – at a busy Subway stations in D.C. Metro.
Value attribution is all around us – every time you try to interact with someone who is more accomplished than you or in a different social strata …..some of this is very much reflected in our Zombie relationships we have built around us via social networks.
Our media industry also plays into “value attribution”. We see this in typical headlines and trade journals as well – where if someone famous or accomplished gives a sound bite, that gets more visibility and credibility than someone who is nobody although both of them concluded the same thing. Specifically when I was a research analyst early 2000s anything I said was picked up as a quote and listed here and here but no one cares two hoots even if I had said something more profound via my blogs or otherwise without such a credible “qualification”.
How is “value attribution” related to startups, entrepreneurs and investors?
Well, let me tell you that its spread intravenously through out the entire industry – for worse.
Entrepreneurs:
Whether you are a first time entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur, you do face negative and positive biases respectively that adversely affect you, regardless of the bias.
For first time entrepreneurs, most investors – angels and VCs alike have a negative bias for the inexperienced and lack of credibility. The mentality is if you didn’t do this before why would we invest in you and take a bigger risk.
Where as for a seasoned or more than once entrepreneur – angels & VCs – especially those who have already invested or saw the entrepreneur execute in the past – give a positive bias – and are lot more inclined to invest. Most investors are ignorant of the fact that success is not fungible and every startup would have similar as well as unique challenges. Millions of investor dollars go in the gutter because of positive bias towards serial entrepreneurs.
Investors:
For one of my previous startups, many investors have told me that they would only invest in entrepreneurs with whom they have worked in the past.
While taking the “known devil is better than the unknown god” approach works in most cases, I am willing to bet that statistically investors might lose “more” on startups that they have not invested but should have than the startups they have invested based on the “value attributions”.
Investors – angels as well as VCs alike give higher weight towards existing relationships, past experiences & emotionally charged biases when they deal with known entrepreneurs. On the flip side, they go the other extreme when they deal with first time entrepreneurs with perceived biases.
Investor or entrepreneur or just about anyone – approach all your interactions with people (strangers or friends) around you as if its a privilege for you to interact with them!
Especially first time entrepreneurs should create interesting avenues and opportunities to overshadow “value attribution” that they will inevitably face when they want to build their startup and do fund raising. There is no check list I can provide but will tell you that its your mind set and perspective that will help you overcome this dogma.
Tags: Business, Entrepreneur, Investor, Joshua Bell, Relationships, Startup company, Subway, Value Attribution, Washington D.C, Washington Post
Posted in Angel Investor, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Influencer, Innovation, Investing, Investors, Psychology, Relationships, sociology, Startup, Value Attribution, Venture Capitalist | No Comments »
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
don’t address Go to market/distribution and mobile browser use cases!
Typically, companies spend a lot of time on product, features and problems that they are solving for the end user but don’t think through the Go to market and distribution to get their customers/users to the product. This is a problem – whether you are a startup or a dinosaur like Yahoo!
Yahoo! Axis mobile browser is great …..but don’t know if they thought through the aspect of how mobile users get to the browser!
It feels like Yahoo! started working on Axis pre “Mobile App Proliferation on iPhone/Android” age and by the time they release their product, the opportunity already passed? Akin to Motorola Iridium Satellite venture ?
While the product seems well though through here are few suggestions as they continue to figure out how to get user to use their product -
- Smartphone mobile users rarely start with a mobile browser – at least by the 80/20 rule, most of them start with an application. If users are starting with Apps, why not work with App publishers and strike deals to embed your browser in their Apps; This way, your users are exposed to unique features Axis provides and that creates easy discovery and dependency?
- At least in Android, I think there is a way to set a default mobile browser. Encouraging your users to set Axis browser as default might be one way to get some more traction but no one will make yours a default without compelling reasons!
- Microsoft Bing Search (http://www.bing.com) started incentivizing its users by giving “credits” that could be used for Game App downloads, Mp3, etc. Incentivizing new users to try out your browser might be another way and encourage them to set your browser as default (for additional incentives).
As I always say, its not just the product that will make your product successful! Nail the go to market strategy before you release your product!
@Vsistla
Tags: android, Bing, iphone, Mobile browser, Smartphone, Yahoo, Yahoo Axis
Posted in Bing, Go To Market, Innovation, Productization, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
If you build good enough products and give away for free to gain market share, your customers will defect you when you are ready to charge; Period!
Why?
Few reasons:
By the time you are ready to charge rest of your competition also has a good enough product and now it’s their turn to give away their product.
Free is only a competitive strategy if you plan to keep your product for free for eternity and never derive any economic value at any point of the value chain;
The problem w business entity offering a free product is they have to extract some economic value at some point in the value chain.
That is the reason some companies like Apple never or rarely offer any service for free; either they try to be the category leaders or figure out a way to convert into paid customers;
Apple deals with the inevitability head-on and focus on creating excellent products;
Free product only makes sense for open source industry!
This post is motivated by TechCrunch news about Google Maps app in the iOS 6 doghouse;
http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/05/11/ios-6-and-the-sundance-kid/?grcc=33333Z98ZtrendingZ0
Tags: apple, free, Google, Google maps, iOS 6.0, price
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
For 2000 years the cost of education and knowledge acquisition only goes up and up.
1980:
Enter Internet!
Early 2000s:
iTunes U give choices to Ivy leagues to lure more students via few freebee podcasts!
Rules of education are still the same!
2008:
Enter collective consumption!
Innovators start to realizes the it’s time we change the rules of the game – instead of managing for scarcity let’s manage for abundance!
KhanAcademy leads the charge!
2012 Current day:
Early adopters follow innovators!
Stanford, MITx, Purdue, Harvard start to make their courses available for free to the masses.
Stanford profs quit their tenure to start Coursera backed by KP in Silicon Valley!
Future:
All major Universities will take part in turning knowledge and education into utility!
Universities get restructured to fit this new model – where student gather knowledge for free but come to attend college for aspects that need face to face interaction, lab work, social skills, etc.
Basic knowledge and educational material repositories will be moved under one independent or govnt mandated organization.
A new age of learning begins where your knowledge gathering is not limited to a text book or a professors style.
In the age of abundance, student with Discipline and hard work will win!
Traditional colleges will continue to exist for student who lack discipline, attention and capabilities.
@Vsistla
Tags: Coursera, disruption, Education, Innovation, KhanAcademy, knowledge, Purdue, stanford, Students, Universities
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2012
You know we hear people talk about how traditional cable/satellite industry is getting disintermediated, more and more over the top TV will impact the business of incumbents, but we never hear such concerns with respect to Book Publishing industry – especially professional and non fiction book market.
I wonder the impact of information democratization via social media on the current and future market potential of professional/business/educational books.
We see more and more authors and people with something insightful to say are sharing their thoughts via blogs, tweets, youtube videos and so forth.
I guess the impact would be based on % of readers who are smart enough to read and learn from freely available sources on the web and be able to create value from that.
Also, as we move far away from Industrial age to Information age – a new mindset - that – we learn more than what a book offers – will ultimately impact this market as well.
I personally don’t anticipate my kids buying text books by the time they are in college – that is if they really go to college (that’s another blog).
@Vsistla
Tags: business books, college, democratization, Education, industrial age, information age, professional books, text books
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2012
I love Linkedin – at least I used to ….
Image via CrunchBase
Linkedin allowed me to “connect” with my professional relationships, keep in touch and engage. At least that was the promise when you connected with someone via Linedin.
In the past 9 years, LinkedIn’s value creation for “relationship” has only gone down.
Case In Point: In the past 1 month (March 29th to April 29th), I have received about 45 LinkedIn connection requests and 20 of them are from complete strangers I have never met. Out of these 20 strangers, I have accepted requests from 15 of them based on mutual backgrounds and potential value the relationship could generate in the long run.
Anytime I accept a LinkedIn request from complete strangers – who requested the connection with the reason we are on the same LinkedIn group or went to same college, etc – I send a follow on email to find out what evoked them to send me a connection request and if we could have a quick discovery call.
Out of the 15 emails (suggesting them for a discovery/”get to know” call) to these complete strangers who have connected with me via Linkedin – only 2 people have actually responded back to me. That’s less than %15 success rate.
Here’s another stat that drives this message home: My success rate (receiving back an acknowledgement) when I “congratulate” my LinkedIn contacts – when they make progress in their careers is less than 23% on average.
Yes, my experience doesn’t stand for a scientific survey but I feel the writing is on the wall!
On the other hand, lets look at social & personal broadcasting platform – Twitter!
Image via CrunchBase
I have been able to engage meaningful conversations – DMs – via Twitter – even with people who are NOT connected with me via LinkedIn. Most of the DMs to my followers get answered. In the past 1 month, I have initiated DM conversations with 8 different people and ONLY 1 person didn’t respond back to me. That’s just less than 90% success rate.
To keep my relationships fresh, Twitter seem to work out better for me than LinkedIn. That maybe the case for other Linkedin users as well. Most of the time, my LinkedIn emails to people I have known for a long time(or for that matter to new people) don’t get answered.
Here is the bottomline: LinedIn can ignore Twitter at its own peril. Twitter is becoming a relationship platform that could ultimately threaten LinkedIn.
When a user signs up for LinkedIn, currently they have options to either create an account with their email ID or by using Facebook connect.
It is time LinkedIn allowed people to not only sign up with Twitter IDs but also accept LinkedIn requests via Twitter handles – not just email address.
LinkedIn Sign Up Using Facebook ....
If I further dissect LinkedIn and Twitter – both these platforms have distinct roles to play in the world of networking, conversations and relationships.
The biggest reason LinkedIn still “rule the roost” when it comes to relationships is because of the features such as resume like profiles, ability to offer a dynamic rolodex and so forth. If Twitter can address those deltas, Twitter could potentially threaten LinkedIn’s business – if not immediately, maybe in the long run.
Also, traditional recruiters and head hunters are still using Linkedin as their primary source of talent search, but with detailed Twitter user profile pages that addresses needs of recruiters and head hunters, the shift for Twitter from being a broadcast/conversational platform to be a broadcast/conversational/recruiting platform.
So, either LinkedIn could wait for the inevitability or maybe strike a deal with Twitter to integrate LinkedIn Profile pages within Twitter User Profile pages – this way, LinkedIn can preempt Twitter from creating their own resume like profile pages.
Here is my bottom line – my relationships via Twitter are looking more richer and active than via LinkedIn and I feel that’s a sign!
@Vsistla
Tags: Linkedin, Online Communities, Professional Networks, Recruiting, Relationships, Social network, Twitter
Posted in Constant Innovation, Innovation, Linkedin, Network, Professional Connections, Recruiting, Relationships, Social Capital, social networks, Talent | No Comments »
Monday, April 30th, 2012
pbsparents: Just sit there and think about what you’ve done, Monday.
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Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
If Sun itself thought that Android was going to strap some rockets [to Java]… then how can Oracle can say its been damaged? There ought to be a counterclaim for unjust enrichment – Judge Alsup in Oracle vs Google Case.
Tags: android, goog, Google, Java, Oracle, Sun
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
We live in an age of abundance …….not scarcity; So, the rules are different. You cannot approach this marketplace with the same rules are the previous one.
What you used to sell in the past …..now you give it away for free …..
What you was free in the past …..now you could monetize it ……
What didn’t existed in the past as goods or services, can be made available as such and also be monetized.
Tags: Age of Abundance, Change the rules, Disrupt, ideation, Scarcity
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Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
If Social Media Platforms went on a Valentine date, what would they say to each other …..
Facebook (imagine Dolly Parton) - Dear Twitter Honey …..could you start DMing instead of letting everyone know about our personal conversations?
Google+ (imagine Vince Vaughn) – Dear Twitter …sweety … I miss you …. we are so made for each other ….I know I screwed up, could you kindly give me one more chance? ……
Twitter (with Tony Soprano’s accent) – Yo! Foursquare ….this is not some motel to spam us with all your “check in” information. Give me something useful ……
Microsoft (Hugh Hefner ofcourse) – With a cigar in his mouth and cognac in his hand with Hugh Hefner robe – Twitter & Facebook – you guys are hot, but ultimately you have to join Yahoo in my harem. Come on it …..
Pinterest - Guys, I am not going to be your pimp any more and drive business….. unless I get something back from y’all!
Zynga - (monologue ) ..with Facebook across the table…. “I cannot trust my husband Mr. Fb …..and I feel I am in a deadend relationship. I got to get out of here!”
On and on …..
@Vsistla
Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Social Media Platforms, Twitter, Valentine, Yahoo, Zynga
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Monday, February 13th, 2012
This post is motivated by my back n forth with Unicorn Labs Maker @netgarden about #Playboys “service” via Instagram.
The biggest problem with playboy offering content on Instagram is lack of privacy for playboy users who have always been in the closet. Let me step back a bit. When you follow someone on instagram or for that matter any other social tool or network, rest of the users and friends know about your acts of following. That’s just how these companies drive virality and growth.
Virality and privacy butt heads in most of the use cases in my view. This issue is not limited to instagram but all social tools. It reminds of this one time when I downloaded a “how to live as a diabetic” deck via slideshare – four friends from my Facebook network messaged me to find out when I became diabetic and how my health was. That was slideshares attempt to drive virality and more users to its site.
What is the healthy balance between driving virality and protecting your user privacy?
Social platforms should provide a “premium” feature to “brands” who care to protect their end user’s privacy at the expense of virality for the platform. For example, I am sure Playboy or for that matter any other brand who might want to protect their user identity might be willing to pay that premium (no expense to the end user).
This would be a very simple way to deal with such catch 22 connundrum.
Happy to hear other ideas …..
@vsistla
Tags: brand, cost, Facebook, Features, Innovation, instagram, playboy, Privacy, Product, slideshare, virality
Posted in Innovation | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 9th, 2011
After seeing Twitter Brand Pages & the work Facebook has been doing with Brands, it feels like #Google and #Yahoo banner & text advertising business is under huge threat.
Twitter brand pages, while in their early days will get expanded to all content owners, destinations and portals – businesses who generate revenue via Ads and sponsorships. This means, content owners, portals and brands can make a bit of revenue through these sponsorships, banner & text ads – and Twitter would take a slice of that revenue.
Similar thing is also happening with Facebook and Facebook pages.
Which means some of the marketing $ that are going to traditional websites/portals/destinations will be diverted to Facebook & Twitter – which impacting Google’s Lunch.
Are these early signs of Google’s demise?
Just a thought ….
@Vsistla
Tags: Advertising, Brand Pages, disruption, Facebook, Fan Pages, Google, Marketing, Sponsorships, Twitter
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Friday, November 11th, 2011
Starbucks is one of the esteem brands and its customers have the highest regard for the company, its brand and its products. Many case studies have been written about Starbucks, about their co-creation philosophy (MyStarbucksIdea.com as an example). Starbucks is regarded in the league of Nike, Apple and the like.
New Policy?
Like many others, I do use Starbucks for – place of work, for meetings, get my timely dose of caffeine, and so on and on. So, as usual I visited Union Square Starbucks and found a table to sit and opened my laptop. As soon as I did, security guard came by and asked if I was going to “buy” something. I told him I would as soon as my meeting partner showed up. In the next couple of hours, I noticed our friendly security guard approached every new patron who is sitting at a table or chair without a latte in their hand.
As a passionate Starbucks user, I found this very unusual. So, I introduced myself to the security guard and befriended him. He told me that they started doing this recently to make sure people are not just sitting but in fact giving some business back to Starbucks. I told him we do give him a lot of business – even those who are just sitting there and don’t have a Latte next to them but he didn’t get what I was saying. He also told me that other Starbucks shop in Union Square is also doing this. Instead of taking his word for it, I went to the other shop to confirm this new “policy”.
This afternoon, I ended up in my usual Starbucks in Jersey – and I didn’t see this new “policy” – obviously as its not as popular as the ones in Union square.
Starbucks was compelled to start this new policy – only in the most visited/popular Starbucks locations: a classic demand and supply problem – and I don’t blame them for that. When there is more demand, you have to figure out ways to “gate” the demand or “benefit” from the demand – some times use both ways. At this point, Starbucks is trying to “benefit” from the demand than “gate” the demand.
Well, they have already “gated” the demand – by – blocking all the power outlets long time back. Due to this, most people with laptops had to leave the shop after their batteries drain. Despite that, the demand was so high that they had to focus towards “benefiting” from the demand.
Now, lets step back and think this through -
- The reason people flock to Starbucks is not because of their coffee but the ambiance.
- Ambiance is not just chairs and decor – but the people who flock there to meet, work and hang out.
- Starbucks doesn’t have to make money on every customer’s every visit. Starbucks should “measure” the tangible and intangible benefits they get from every customer; life time value of a customer is NOT how much they spend per visit, but lot more than that.
- There are many reasons people drive miles to find the nearest Starbucks – even though there is a Dunkin Donuts or McD right in front of them – and that’s not just because of Starbucks Coffee!
Here is the bottom line -
- If you have too much demand and make sure all the Starbucks user are getting access to your resources and services, then, come up with some other methods instead of ”gating”.
- Starbucks should realize that the demand is not just for their coffee but the welcome it’s patrons get when they walk in. If the welcome becomes gated, patrons get jaded!
- Today the security guard is asking if I am going to buy something. Tomorrow, he may have to ask me “how” much I am going to spend and compare that to how much time I will spend at the store to calculate the COGS (cost of goods sold – per customer, per visit)
Over all, I love Starbucks as a brand and I truly wish this “new policy” is just a misinformed store manager’s way to deal with the demand and hope he/they fix it – before the next door McDonald’s benefits from Starbucks mistake!
@Vsistla
Tags: Co-Creation, Customer Service, Demand, Entrepreneur, NYC, Starbucks, Startups, Supply
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Saturday, November 5th, 2011
Majority of the informational content i consume is free today. Not only that I know who is producing that content and where they are producing that content. For example I know the bloggers, beat reporters, entrepreneurs, angels and VCs – who have active blog rolls, rss feeds, etc.
Despite all that ……
90% of the news I care about and interested usually comes from twitter tweets. Comes to me directly or indirectly and content is from the same sources I already know. Instead of me going to each of their blog posts or soliciting them for the latest, I get it through tweets, retweets and responses to their tweets. L
This is the case regardless it’s a good tech article, funding for a startup I am familiar with, news about a friend who sold his company for multi million $, innovation in technology or management or marketing and so forth.
Eschewing the importance of learning about the news before all your friends, for most situations, the convenience of information finding you is a frictional less process thanks to Twitter.
This might be the case with others as well …….
The convenience of knowing the source (in this case the producer of the content) n having the access to get the information from the source is trumped by intermediaries, aggregators and other users – ecosystem.
@vsistla
Tags: access, aggregation, blogs, clustering, curation, filtering, Twitter
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Monday, October 31st, 2011
I take photos when I get inspired by what I see – albeit my inspirations are not esthetic; I get inspired by the message in the image and the context. For some time I have been gathering and collecting photos w messages – and I post them in the stream #MessageDisconnect!
Most of the time I take photos and at a later point I post them to my stream. When I do this, I am not using any particular application like Instagram or Filckr! The problem with this is – the photos I took in the past are NOT attached to an exact location. This is a huge problem for me. I can select a location or type a business name, but it would NOT be 100% accurate.
I wish there is a photo application out there – that not only allows me to tag a location to the photo, but also allows me to move that photo+location to any application or post it to any stream!
So, the use case is:
UC-1 – Application allows users to take photos and attach location and personal tag to the metadata.
UC-2 – Application allows users to take photos+metadata out of the application to be post into a stream like upload to a blog post, or tumblr, or even to Instagram.
Thank you
@Vsistla
Tags: Disrupt, disruption, Filckr, ideation, instagram, MessageDisconnect, Photography, Photos
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
When kids fight with each other, at least parents step into to calm them down. When grown men fight with their egos, who can knock some sense into them?
Regardless of who stole what from whom, Steve Jobs wanting to destroy Android is very reminiscent of two boys fighting over a toy.
Regardless of how successful Android becomes, iPhone, Apple and Steve Jobs and their legacy will be etched in the history. $40 Billion in cash and biggest company by market cap – Apple and Steve have made history.
When boys fight, parents on both side ask them to compromise and make peace. Legal and judicial systems cannot play such a paternal role for big boys!
Boys are boys, even after becoming adults!
Alas …..
Tags: aapl, android, apple, egos, goog, Google, iphone, lawsuits, steve jobs
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
If prodigy and aol are the precursors to open internet without boundaries then what’s to replace Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, and the like? #OpenSocial? Or something we are yet to see?
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Thursday, October 20th, 2011
Recently someone told me that they don’t read any emails coming from Linkedin and suggested me to contact them directly via their emails instead through Linkedin messaging.
That got me thinking about the connections and friends we have built in the past half a dozen or so years – via Linkedin & Facebook.
There is a reason why I try to contact my Linkedin contacts via Linkedin messaging – the fear that the person will not even recognize my email if I send a direct email. At least if I send it via Linkedin, they can quickly look at my background and at least realize that I am part of their Linkedin contacts. That’s travesty but that’s true.
Why did we come to where we are today …….
Linkedin was one of the first social networks I embraced despite joining many others that came before that. Like me, most of the first wave of Linkedin users were very eager to connect and link with others – on just the criteria of being on the same network. It was the “in” thing for all of us – professionals and students like.
While people who are already Linkedin users were lot more cautious when accepting friend requests via Facebook, most of the users who are new to social networks were lot more accepting towards Facebook requests. Similar behavior persisted on Linkedin as well from first time social network users.
At a broad level, most of the connections have fallen into one of these categories -
- Connected with people you knew in real world until that point - emotional connections.
- Connected with anyone you met at a networking event or party – in hopes of a job or date or some short term incentive - opportunistic connections.
- Connected with anyone who are contacts by situation – like your college acquaintances, your current girl friend’s/boy friend’s friends, etc – situational connections.
- Connected due to obligations – your friends friends, your office colleagues, your boss etc – obligatory connections.
This overly complacent behavioral patterns led to couple of scenarios -
1. Even thought you are connected to people on Linkedin and Facebook – you are not emotionally connected with them – even as casual acquaintances.
2. Due to emotionless connections – over the years – with growing & changing socio, economic, cultural & geographical parities (fact of life) between the so called “friends/contacts”, these so called friends turned short of fiends.
Due to the above reasons – our situational, obligatory & opportunistic connections have turned into sour puss within our existing connections. Now its too late – so, some of us have deliberately removed such contacts from our networks and others have left them like old pair of sneakers – neither useful nor do we have the heart to part with them. These are Zombie relationships – you cannot get rid of them and you cannot ignore them either.
- One of those Zombies for my contacts!
This blog is inspired by two new startups I recently ran into – Mingle (http://www.mingle.com) and Pearescope (http://www.Pearescope.com). Founders in both the startsup are solving a very important aspect of social networking & relationships. Certainly check them out.
Tags: Facebook, Incentive, Linkedin, Online Communities, Social network, User
Posted in Anthropology, anti-social, Facebook, Innovation, Linkedin, Network, social networks, sociology | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
Most of the startups do a good job in figuring out the business they are in buy fail to align their “go to market” strategy with the business you are in.
Go to market strategy should be thought through with respect to target customers as well as competition/incumbent.
In layman terms –
1. If you are competing with current incumbents, make sure that you don’t vie for their current customers right off the bat. You will fail!
2. If your Customers and you have same go to market strategy for your business/revenue model, you are doomed to fail! For example – if you are making a branded consumer app that gives your end user something from your Customer but your Customer also has a branded consumer app, you will fail! You are better off offering your value as part of your Customer’s branded app. (note user is different from customer in this regard)
3. You cannot compete effectively against your incumbent with the same go to market strategy – ESP with limited resources, lack of brand recognition, pedigree, etc. Just the way you focus on underserved customer to disrupt, you should also focus on underserved market approaches.
@Vsistla
Tags: Disrupt, go to market, Startups
Posted in Innovation | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
When you are hiring senior level candidates, for a consumer Internet startups, how about you approach like this?
Job desc: For (3 mo & FullTime & DoSomething) IF (it’s awesome) THEN (RideOn) IF NOT (KeepYourEquity & WeBothMutuallyMoveOn)
What’s the downside? How practical is this? No …. I really want to know!
@Vsistla
Tags: Entrepreneurs, startup, Talent
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Monday, October 17th, 2011
Not all incentives are created equal! Incentives are a slippery slope – some of them could lead you to paths that you didn’t originally intend to go on to begin with.
This blog is motivated “after” my discussions with Matt Corbett, Founder/CEO of InCXO.com and Amit Gupta, Founder/CEO of TenLegs.com. Both of them are solving the early customer/user development with interesting incentive structures. Very interesting startups …..please check them out!
In the past, I talked about incentives as “features” or “actions” your users perform while using your products -When to enforce “Actions” out of your users & customers? .
In this blog, I will talk about incentives with broad strokes – what they mean to startups, impact of them and impact on the type of users.
Incentives can be tangible or intangible. Incentives could be vanity (leaderboard) or centered around benevolence.
Users and/or consumers respond differently to incentives and type of incentives. Startups needs to be clearly aware of following aspects when they create incentives -
- Objective of the Incentives – Startups need to be very clear about the objectives of the incentive. Are the incentives
- To grow new users,
- Bring current users back to the site/app regularly,
- Increase the time on site/app for the current user base
- For current users to bring new users,
- For current user behavior/actions to brings new users, and so on and so forth.
- Life of Incentives – Some incentives are short lived and some are part of a startup’s existence. Knowing that well ahead of time allows startups to tailor the incentives accordingly.
- Temporary incentives – These are short lived. Typically offered in the initial days of a startup to grow users, user engagement and loyalty. These could also be offered during special events, campaigns and promotions as well.
- Long term incentives
- Incentives as features
- Target User – Who is the target user for the incentive? What kind of users are you trying to convert or engage with this incentive? Early adopter? Influencer? Networker? Passionate advocate? Biggest catch for any startup is what happens when their target users change? What happens – when the company moves from early adopters to mass users/consumers? How will the incentive structures change and influence the next leg of users? What motivates Quora to attract high profile entrepreneurs to take an active role in discussions where as not in other communities with lot more tangible incentives?
- Behavior - What kind of behavior would incentives encourage/evoke from your “current target” users? Is that behavior consistent with your overall business growth and objectives? During early days of Hashable, all interactions were rewarded equally – which led to active interactions but when they changed the incentive structure to “new introductions” versus “interactions”, user behavior has changed – which in turn led to increased user base for Hashable.
- Which type of user – Understanding which segment/type of your users are being incentivized is also very important. For example, typically for most consumer Internet startups, you have some or all of these types of users – “end users/demand”, “customers”, “producers”, “paid users”, “partners/suppliers”, and so forth. Typically they fall under two broad categories – demand and supply. Its a good idea to white board incentive structures for both those categories – demand as well as supply. There are times when companies focus only on one side of the user base that will not generate optimal results for the startup as they grow.
Tags: Amit Gupta, Business, Customer, Human resources, Incentive, Incentive program, Quora, Recreation
Posted in Attention, Customers, Hashable, Innovation, Motivations, Motivators, Product Evolution, Productization, User | No Comments »
Friday, October 7th, 2011
After seeing cash for cars, cash for clunkers, cash for jewelry, I thought I will see “Cash fo
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
That’s right – its not a typo! @business_design @claychristensen @RobertWheeler27 I am not comparing Kindle Fire with iPad. I am comparing Kindle Fire’s entry into tablet market with iPod and iPhone from a disruptive entry standpoint.
This is motivated by article published by Rob Wheeler- @RobertWheeler27 titled - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/amazon_kindle_fire_scare_apple.html .
Very interesting article – especially Rob talks about disruptive innovation – drawing from Clayton Christensen’s (@claychristensen) seminal work in this space.
Rob is “right on” when he says Kindle Fire’s entry is a low end competitor to compete head on with iPad’s market share in future. That is very much akin to when Apple introduced first generation iPhone without 3G or camera or any of the then “advanced” features offered by the then smart phones from Nokia and the like. There were umpteen articles and research published knocking first generation iPhone as a “pinch hit” to the then smart phones. It only took less than 5 years for iPhone to completely disrupt the smart phone market place.
Most disruptions – especially those very well researched and documented by Christensen are low end disruptors which moved the up market and wiped out incumbents.
BUT …then……. iPod is doozie
If you look at the two “criteria” for disruptions, I feel iPod doesn’t fit that definition. iPod actually is a high end product that wiped out low end incumbents. People questioned why would anyone need that many gigabytes of storage on your mp3 player and why would anyone spend upwards of $200 for an MP3 player when all other MP3 players were available for sub $100 and in some case much less than $40.
So, disruptions can also be brought with a high end innovation that will ultimately wipe out the market for low end products? Where will such disruptions fit into “Disruptive Innovation” theory?
Thoughts? …..
@Vsistla
Tags: apple, Christensen, disruption, Innovation, iPad, iphone, iPod, Kindle Fire
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
“@dweekly: “If you’re not paying for a service, you’re not a customer. You’re the product being sold.””
I just saw this tweet from David Weekly – which got me thinking.
Since all products from a company re not of same value and quality, companies need to figure out “value” for each of their users. Some call this targeted advertising but that also assume that all targeted viewers are of equal value – which is inaccurate. Also it is important to differentiate metrics with which a company measures it’s user’s value (example- loyal viewer, viral user, etc) versus the product “value” to the buyer (in this case a brand advertiser or sponsor or etc)
Typically a viewer/user who is getting something for free puts up with some inconveniences. A brand or sponsor who’s actually paying to get the attention of the user is happy with whatever value they can get. But, if a startup considers their free users as products then the buyer- brand advertiser is going to expect and demand certain value out of the “product”(the free users).
Looking at your nonpaying customers as “product” – It’s just a different lens that can bring up new nuances to the ad supported model.
Wonder how those nuances change if we consider the nonpaying users as product features instead of products?
@vsistla
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Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
We all live different lives in the eyes of the people around us ….putting up different personas and vibes based on the company we keep at any given time. This is not only true in our real world interactions but also in our virtual worlds. For example, we are lot more laid back in our interactions on Facebook versus on Linkedin. We try to keep those personas to their respective companies/groups – to have some kind of semblance to the relationships we keep and maintain. For example my care and affection toward my family is different from friends which is different for colleagues. We verbalize certain emotions and reactions based on the person and group we are interacting with – and this is same regardless of the medium – virtual or real! So, in real world, we are able to do this judo of keeping our relationship based groups superbly (except for George Costanza in Seinfeld – <a href=”http://youtu.be/uPG3YMcSvzo” title=” -World’s Collide ….” target=”_blank”></a>). We are also to expose those relevant personas to the right set of people. We have been doing this for hundreds and thousands of years.
Thanks to hugely popular micro blogging (Twitter and Tumblr to some extent), each of us have voices to share with the world but how can multiple personas survive in such a ecosystem without an ability to limit our messages based on the groups those voices should reach. For example, I blog about technology, innovation but also care about Cricket, rampant Indian Corruption, macroeconomic conditions, Rugby and on and on. Twitter or Tumblr doesn’t give me an option to limit my commentary to the right groups and people.
Here is the challenge – When you say the same thing to all the people, the value of what you say is diluted based on what you say. Not only that, it impacts the perception and ultimately your relationships (professional, personal & casual).
Google Circles is an amazing way to create the groups based on the personas and your personal criteria for your contacts.
Most of the Social Network Applications such as Hootsuit and the like allow us to “post” to multiple social networks but don’t give you the ability to “limit” your message to certain groups within your social networks.
Most of the specialist social networks such as #Hashable and #StockTwits offer us the ability to “post” just to those communities without posting to Twitter or other networks. This is very good but those comments and conversations are limited in those communities and don’t reach others who are in my network who also care about that space.
I am yet to see a product that marries Google Circles with Microblogging with Hootsuite.
Google Circles + Twitter+ Hootsuite
Is there one out there yet?
@Vsistla
Tags: Facebook, George Costanza, Google, Hashable, Linkedin, Microblogging, Seinfeld, Social network, StockTwits, Twitter
Posted in Facebook, Google Circles, Hashable, Innovation, Microblogging, Personas, social networks, StockTwits, Tribes, Tweet, Tweeter, Twitter, virtual world | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 19th, 2011
Clayton Christensen talks about how companies continue to fail when they are required to disrupt and cannibalize their core businesses based on mkt conditions.
Netflix is trying to do the right thing – but many a companies have failed in the past.
In case of IBM they could not make the switch from mainframe to pc mkt place until new players established themselves. DEC, Wang Labs, etc are also part of that wave of failures. Their then sales teams were listening to their current customers that impacted their ability to go after newer customers and hence failed by the time their current customers are ready for the disruption.
In case of Microsoft they r are still struggling with open source movement and saas!
HP is another recent example …..
And the list goes on and on ..
But companies also learn from their mistakes! IBM after first failure they made a very successful shift from hardware to service. Apple is another stellar example ….
What’s unique about Netflix compared other examples is their suppliers and partners. They are trying to deal with disruption in the distribution of their product rather than actual market itself.
Another unique aspect of Netflix is their customer base for legacy n disruptive products has a huge overlap.
In summary, there is still demand for entertainment and on demand content consumption. The mode of distribution is getting disrupted.
I think Netflix is doing the right thing – but no cigar yet!
@vsistla
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
In general all research is getting crowdsourced, commoditized(cost) and better quality due to follow trends –
1. More people have voice and hence helping in the discourse – twitter facebook n the like
2. In the past researchers were managing for scarcity – only few people had info, those few didn’t have tools to share with the world, n researchers collaborated with those few to bring the research to the masses for a premium. Now those few who know also have tools to let the world know with out waiting for a researcher to publish. Now researchers have to manage for abundance – much better than scarcity.
3. Wisdom of crowd is helping create and gather more data and also higher quality albeit one has to wade through the noise. Wisdom of crowd has a higher odds of success hence quality than the ” few” we talked about.
4. Due to above trends time to gather, distill and deliver has dramatically reduced – for researchers.
Across the board it’s good for everyone!
- Coming from an ex researcher but also one by passion!
@vsistla
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
We often talk about gamification, incentives, motivators (lets call them “incentives” collectively) – when it comes to users and when we are defining certain features. Each of these incentives have distinct role to play in the growth of our user base, enable network effect, capture relevant data, launch viral loops and so forth.
Some of these incentives are typically wrapped around features and sometimes are features!
Basically – as a end user/customer – what is in it for me to use your product – is what I am defining as broad strokes incentives.
I have rarely seen these incentives talked with a “Voluntary” and/or “Enforced” lens.
At a high level user’s voluntary actions are motivated due to one of these -
- Tangible Incentive – Examples – Utility, Experience, Rewards, Coupons,
- Intangible Incentive – Examples – Vanity (leaderboards), Social Interaction (Friends, family, being in the know, etc)
Voluntary :Tangible Incentives are broken into “Direct” and “Indirect” incentives;
Voluntary:Tangible:Direct Incentives :
Typically all Utility features fall into this category – Examples – Getting directions from Maps App, checking your bank balance from your Banking App, Checking your email, etc
Voluntary:Tangible:Indirect Incentives :
Indirect incentives are anywhere from gathering Airline miles, Hotel Rewards to raking up Points or Badges in your latest social media app. These incentives can be potentially exchange for some perceived “free” gift or coupon or reward in future.
While playing with http://Turntable.fm, got me thinking about enforced actions. In Turntable.fm, you have to have another DJ in the same room to listen to your own music. This their way to drive viral loop out of their current users.
While one could argue that having another DJ will help the “social” experience to your music listening, enforcing that as a key requirement does create certain inertia for some users.
Yes, “forced actions” is a way for new startups to grow their user base and launch virality, could also generate undue inertia and in some case repulsion to early evangelical customers.
Forced actions are especially risky when there are no intangible benefits to the end user – for example – in case of Turntable, first DJ doesn’t get any benefit in getting another DJ into the room – other than the fact the user get’s use the product. This is really a “service fee” or “compensation” to Turntable to use their product.
Forced actions should come with strong tangible and intangible benefits to the end user!
In summary, companies should play the “Forced Action” card very carefully – it is walking on thin ice!
ps: I do love Turntable.fm as an experience.
Tags: Features, Gamification, Incentive, Incentive program, Leaderboard, Product
Posted in Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Productization, Turntable.fm, User | 2 Comments »
Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
One of the ways to judge how prudent an entrepreneur is based on some of tools n choices
Stay away if the founders
1. Use any paid calling bridge instead of free conference or skype to take phone calls.
2. Want to raise funds to build mobile app BEFORE testing their customer validation/discovery using web apps (mobile optimized) – specifically for mobile focused startups.
3. Top heavy management team without any technical chops to code – but want to hire coders and develop alpha after angel investment.
Helps you filter some of the chafe in the startup scene.
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
One of the caveats of Google Hangout – Since the hangout you’re in is visible by the circles of the other hangout participants, people you don’t know may learn that you’re hanging out.
I can already see Girls in Russia and Lawyers of rich dead Royalty in Nigeria & Viagra Sellers in Latin America salivating over this “feature” or lack off from Google Hangout!
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Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
When using crowd sentiment and tapping into power of Wisdom of Crowd for Stock Market, Trading and Sell said analysis, what is the importance of individual motivations in the group for generating results closely to reality? I argue that individual motivations and impact of external motivations on individuals are important and could skew the results in either direction – http://blog.sistla.com/?p=338
@Vsistla
Tags: Crowd Sourcing, EPS, Estimize, Incentives, Motivations, Sentiment Analysis, StockMarket, Trading, Twitter, Wisdom of crowd
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
When Space Shuttle Challenger burst into flames quarter century back, it took 21 minutes for the stock market to dump shares of all the suppliers to the shuttle and Morton Thiokol stock took the biggest hit by the end of the day. All the investors – amateur and pros have dumped Morton Thiokol stock within that trading day but it took months for the investigators to conclude the same. Crowd knew it before the experts could figure out – way ahead.
Enter Wisdom of Crowds!
Wisdom of Crowd is one of the most counter intuitive concepts out there. I revisited this problem when Leigh Drogen (@LDrogen) pitched me his super awesome startup - Estimize – to disrupt sell side research for publicly traded firms.
Just because Morton Thiokol stock took a hit doesn’t mean that all the individuals who avoided to buy its shares are smart or well informed. Chances are many of the traders might have “followed the leader” or in some cases the trend. After all that is the wisdom of the crowd!
We start to question the wisdom of crowd when we pay close attention to each of the individuals in a crowd. The argument goes like – if majority of participants in a sample are not smart enough to make the right decision, even with few smart well informed individuals the average outcome of the crowd decision can be skewed by the “not so smart” lot. This argument assumes that average members of the group do not get influenced by their surrounding in making their decisions such as why is everyone selling this stock, why is there is a trading halt on the stock, etc. Such arguments are based on the individual merits and do not take into account individual decision making acumen regardless of their domain knowledge or Intellectual Quotient (IQ).
For example, members in a crowd making decisions based on their friends, other experts, trend/sentiment, could actually tilt the average towards the right decision. So, one could generate more accurate results if members of the sample know what the previous members have chosen and their reasoning behind their decision.
What’s more important? The individual member’s IQ/domain knowledge or their individual motivations?
I would argue that their motivations are as important as individual’s domain expertise/IQ in a crowd assessment.
Of course the above argument assumes that individuals in a group always make rational decisions and all the true individual motivations are apparent to the rest of the group members. That is a very big assumption but in a very controlled experiment or system, one could turn such assumptions (at least some) into reality.
For example, if we take a sample of traders in stock market – their individual motivations to estimate future stock price is based on following -
(note am only talking about motivations)
- Do they already have a position in that particular stock?
- Is that long or short position?
- If neither, what is their incentive to make an accurate assessment?
- What information do they have and how they can benefit from that information versus other members in the group, and so forth.
* If motivations are aligned, group’s decisions have lowest variance. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it would lead to most accurate decisions.
Each of the group members have their own individual motivations. Aligning the group’s motivations would get you results that are much closer – and with right motivations, average estimate could be accurate or close to accuracy. For example, traders in Morton Thiokol stock all had the similar motivations – to make money and avoid loss. Traders who own the stock want to reduce their losses and the traders who don’t own the stock want to put their money to work somewhere else. Of course some of the traders got into the stock assuming it is a bargain and hoped to make a quick buck the very next day.
* If individual motivations are apparent to the rest of the group members, rest of the group might make rational decisions.
If individual motivations are apparent to other members of the group, individuals can make the most rational decision – but depending on the individual motivations, someone of the members might not make their true drivers apparent with the rest of the group. Such behavior is the pulse of Stock market – since a trader needs another trader to sell off the losing stock and sellers need to conceal their true motivators to buyers of the stock.
For example if traders who are already in Morton Thiokol stock are trying to reduce their losses by selling, other traders who might be aware of such motivations decide not be on the other side of such trade.
Individual motivations dictate their individual actions which will ultimately impact the crowd sentiment about the assessment.
What are the types of motivations within the members of a group?
At a broad level there are group motivations as well as individual/more dispersed motivations.
Individual Motivators -
Within individual motivations, there are at least five types -
-
Vanity (intangible benefits) -
An individual could be motivated by vanity of being accurate and correct in crowd experiments. Such intangible motivations could be provided by the system in which such experiments are conducted such as leaderboards, badges, points and so forth. Even if the system doesn’t provide intangible benefits, building a consistent and successful pedigree would also result in future intangible perks and that could become a motivator for some of the individuals.
-
Tangible Benefits -
Group experiments and crowd sourcing when tied with tangible benefits could become major motivators for individuals. For example, in case of Jellybean Jar, if the instructor promises to give the entire Jellybean jar to the individual or individuals with most accurate estimate, the quality of estimates will be much higher. Of course, it would help to know the demographic of the individuals to assess the impact of such motivators – for example – the older you are, the less you are interested in winning a Jellybean jar; you might not care for it if you are diabetic or don’t have children; etc – in short – knowing what such tangible motivators mean to the individuals within the group might help rest of the group members in making informed decisions.
-
Could careless -
As I was saying in the previous point, motivators should mean sometime to the members of the group to have act on them. For example if the motivators are not attractive enough, the members in the group might not respond to them. So it is as important to know what motivates individuals but also the impact of motivators on individuals to understand the crowd and its decisions.
-
Pain versus Profit -
Not all motivators are equal. For example, if a system offers rewards for most accurate estimates the impact of such motivators is far different than when a system punishes the individuals for inaccurate estimates. Also, individuals respond differently in systems that reward accuracy and punishes inaccuracy versus systems that only reward accuracy and doesn’t punish inaccuracies.
-
Good denizen -
While hard to find, there are always members in a group who are just passionate to make rational decisions without any external motivators.
In case of stock market and traders, knowing about individual motivators and the impact of those motivators on individuals will help the system assess the crowd estimates and hence present the data in a most informed manner to rest of the users of the system.
Group Motivators -
Now if we move on to group motivations, if groups of individuals are pitted against other groups, and the group’s actions are tied to tangible benefits, “co-operative” and “collaborative” thinking will produce accurate assessments from the group.
Ideally any system or platform that taps into wisdom of crowd should make sure that individual motivators should not counter group motivators lest all motivators will cancel out the group actions.
PS: I limited this blog post to motivators within wisdom of crowd. I will try to address other aspects of wisdom of crowd in future blogs.
Opinions expressed are my own ….
@Vsistla
Ps 2: I have not read book Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki – so, this blog is not a reflection of that book.
Ps 3: I have not done any scientific analysis or research in any of the thoughts – open to debate and suggestions on these thoughts.
Tags: Business, Crowd Sourcing, Decision making, Incentives, Investing, Morton Thiokol, Motivations, Motivators, Stock market, Stocks and Bonds, Thiokol, Wisdom of Crowds
Posted in Analytics, Attention, Business Intelligence, Competition, Crowd, Crowd Sourcing, Information Age, Innovation, Motivations, Stockmarket, Trading, Twitter, Wisdom of crowd | No Comments »
Friday, May 20th, 2011
Sizzling dunk by Durant! @Vsistla paulkatcher: The folks at Fathead are already selling a 6-foot by
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Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
I can see the lure towards using Tumblr over Twitter. @Fredwilson - you are right on, once again! st
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Game theory revisted – I think typical “competitive price vs quality of service” equilibrium doesn’t hold true when competing firms generate their profits on the different “segments of service”. For example, Apple intends to generate profit on providing access to the AppStore, where as Google intends to profit on data and ads. I wonder if there can ever be a nash equilibrium in such a game. I could be wrong.
Competitive equilibrium is defined as a situation in which no firm can offer a price service rate combination that offers higher utility than others but still earns positive expected profits (quote from published research).
So, I say this competitive equilibrium will not hold in case of Google vs Apple – unless Google is under estimating the “marginal cost” of offering this service. If that is the case, Apple would not have anything to fear with Google’s zero fee subscription service as in the long run, Google would have to generate enough revenue to cover the margin cost and then profit on top which will succumb them to re-evaluate their price strategy.
What if Apple offers another tier in their Service offering that is ad supported – which competes head on with Google?
I could be completely off base here …..
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Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
My suggestions for @startupamerica to be impactful.
1. Make it easy and inexpensive for #startups to get started with less paperwork and process.
2. Make it easy for startups to easily collaborate with established/strategic partnerships.
3. Providing access with basic infrastructure support to build your startups – would be awesome. For example, in case of Web and mobile startups, Startup America can provide hassle free resources for hosting, marketing, billing and so forth. This can be provided by established firms at cost or lower or subsidized to encourage more startups to start.
@Vsistla
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Saturday, January 29th, 2011
With 3% inflation for 3 decades will cost your milk 13$ …..mr. Bernanke! Inflation doesn
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
Where did you see this? Would you like to know? (Taken with instagram)
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
Is this true? Does a car you drive say a lot about you? God I am contemplating buying a Honda - what
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Friday, January 14th, 2011
#msft s best salvo at salesforce #CRM domination? Don’t get forced? (Taken with instagram)
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Thursday, December 9th, 2010
When I saw @Amazon_Studios ‘s annoucement to start their own studio, I realized that age old tradition of Instinct and Instuition of building Hollywood blockers is getting challenged by Wisdom of crowds.
While I have not done enough analysis on the process or economics of how Amazon Studios works, I think this is a bullhorn sign of disruption in this particular industry.
Just the way Disney, Fox and others banded together to start Hulu – to hedge their bets in the disruption of television business, @Warner is hedging to achieve two objectives – 1. Squash any new entrants to the market and 2. Get a front seat if the disruption is for real in their industry.
In late 1980s Coco-Cola tried to bring Research and Marketing philosophies to reinnovative Hollywood business (with their acquisition of Columbia and hiring bunch of MBAs to run the studio) but miserability failed.
Its yet to be seen what Technology and Product Centric thinking can bring to Hollywood with this latest efforts from Amzn.
http://studios.amazon.com/
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Saturday, December 4th, 2010
If you follow someone on Twitter and they do an auto respond to you welcoming or selling something, immediately unfollow them ……its a sign that their tweets will not be objective, personal & unique.
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
Sunday, November 21st, 2010
Economic imperative – unemployment tracks 3 times inversely w Christmas tree sale prices- selling at 30% discount this year.
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Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
Thinking of Nokia’s decision to go with MeeGo and not embrace Android speaks oodles about how corporations make their decisions based on their sunk cost rather than where the future is.
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Sunday, November 14th, 2010
I can imagine in a few years there will be a communication device/platform that allows people to call or talk using their Twitter IDs.
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Sunday, October 10th, 2010
Aza Raskin, Creative Lead at Mozilla Firefox – was quoted as saying you can never let your data dictate design. He adds – “If you do, you end up following what people currently do and never innovating”.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/10/01/future-of-the-web-how-firefox-panorama-and-aza-raskin-will-shape-the-web/
Basically, one way of interpreting what Aza saying is “don’t listen to your customers and the data from your customers if you want to innovate”.
This is a profound statement that could raise many eye brows amongst conventional product planners. This goes against the grain of most line manager’s day to day activity of generating reports and keeping the status quo or make modifications to generate more and better data.
Honestly this statement is not aimed at line managers who have obligations towards their core and current customer base. This is aimed at corporate strategies and new product managers whose primary responsibility is to find out what’s next rather than what’s been.
Opinions expressed are my own and not my employer.
@Vsistla
Tags: AzaRaskin, Firefox, Mozilla Firefox
Posted in Business Intelligence, Constant Innovation, Contiguous Producitization, Customers, ideation, Innovation, Product Evolution, Productization | No Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Every time we stumble upon a new concept, we extrapolate its use cases across everything we can imagine only to realize that it doesn’t work in every instance! While some other times, we bring those use cases to market much sooner than the market is ready for them. Whether it is the most advanced hard disk drive – Kitty Hawk- from HP in early 1990s, or video streaming in the mid 1990s or online adv supported dot.com ventures in late 1990s, we have left a trail of such untimely ventures in the past.
Welcome to Social TV!Social TV is in its infancy and its good to understand the rules of Social TV based on current market conditions, limitations and end user’s expectations. These rules might not be relevant once the market matures with a different ecosystem than the early days of Social TV.
I define Social TV is an interactive television viewing experience with one or more individuals who are not co-located.
These groups of viewers can not only interact with each other via Television but also with any other devices. In case of certain genre shows such as reality TV or live competition, active social TV viewers can easily influence others in their voting/sentiment.
TV watching has been a fairly lonely experience until now. With connected TVs hitting over 40 million sales by the end of 2011, it doesn’t have to be a only experience. That was also one of the reasons why more youth are spending majority of their time Online rather than watching TV – despite good quality and compelling content.
- When you are in the theater
Social TV is akin to going to movies with a bunch of your friends without Shhing …..and turning off your cell phones while watching.
At least a “pinch hit” substitute for going to movies.
That said, these are the basic rules of Social TV.
- Social TV is not for everyone – Social TV is a very interactive and passive experience unlike traditional TV viewing. Most of us are accustomed to this passive experience and might not take to Social TV experience as some of the younger generations might. So, there will be some significant parity between how each generation approaches Social TV. Industry should be mindful of such generational parities in building their Social TV platforms.
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- Social TV is not for every type of content/show/movie – Just the way not all types of content evokes similar/same reaction and engagement, Social TV is not for every time of content. Social TV is ideal for content that is inherently debatable, passionate with high emotions and opinionated.
- Social TV is most compelling when it gives a strong enough reason for the audience to change their viewing patterns and behavior! – Social TV is not just about chatting and interacting with other viewers. Social TV should be able to change the user behavior – at its fundamental level. For example- People who are fans of a show who watch the show in “time shift mode” should find compelling reasons to watch the show “live” along with thousands and millions of other fans. That would dictate the success of Social TV.
- Social TV with well-thought through privacy options is very critical. Privacy will be one of the cornerstones of Social TV. Your entertainment viewing options would have profound impact on who wants to be your friend and how close they want to maintain their friends with you. Social TV adds another source of information – about you – to your friends. Your reputation, persona, personality, priorities, values and principles get re-evaluated in the eyes of the world. So, privacy becomes that much more important.
- Social TV should be non intrusive – should not spoil the experience of watching the show or movie. Done right, Social TV should not negatively impact the viewing experience. If anything, it should enhance it.
- Social TV gets interesting when there are two or more sides/teams/parties – aka – Sports is the most apt genre for Social TV. Yes – Social TV thrives when there are sides, teams, emotions and passions. Sports content is most suitable for Social TV interactions.
- Social TV is not just socializing while watching TV ….its also bringing TV to social networks and online communities. Social TV brings conversations from online/web to your living room. Your Online communities enter your living room.
- Conversation is the engine between social TV – content is just a topic at hand! That’s correct – Social TV enables the conversations, heated and passionate debates in real time instead of waiting until the Water Cooler moment the next day morning.
- Image by dennis -Nothing to talk at Water Coolers – via Flickr
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- Social TV thrives on the principle that we often look to others when we make media consumption decisions. We are less hardwired about these decisions than life changing/serious decisions
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- We are heavily influenced by the people in our physical space than remote. So, your social interactions vary based on who and how many are around you while watching TV. You might interact lot more with your remote buddies when you are watching TV alone versus with someone in the room. As George Custanza from Seinfeld would say, the “World’s Could Collide” that might lead to interesting scenarios - based on type of conversations and your company in the living room.
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- People care deeply about how they look to others! Social TV is no different – if users don’t have appropriate tools to control how they are perceived by others, Social TV will die. Humans self-censor and we cannot live without it ….
- Social TV is most suited for Sporting Events, Live Events and Reality Television – Based on above rules and scenarios, I feel Social TV is most suited for Sporting, Live and Reality TV Content - in that order.
Tags: Arts, Conversations, Interactive, Interactive television, Privacy, Reality Television, Seinfeld, Social network, Social TV, Sports Content, Streaming media, Television
Posted in Apple TV, Apps, Attention, Broadcasters, Customers, Facebook, Home, Influencer, Information Age, Innovation, Internet, iTV, Over the top, Privacy, Real Time, Reputation, Social Capital, Social Grooming, social networks, Social TV, sociology, Twitter, virtual world | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Inspired by Steve Masur’s (@masur) Tweet -
This is true for individuals as well as companies and businesses. This will be the fact in any environment where there is freedom of thought, democracy and capitalism are recognized and rewarded.
Peaking a bit into our own history,
There were 1000 Printers within 15 years of Gutenberg Printing Press discovery -
According an archived article by New York Times, there were 448 Car Manufacturers in the US and about 40 companies have folded from 1912 through 1916.
Within 2 years of iPhone AppStore, almost a dozen companies have announced their own versions of AppStores from the likes of Qualcomm, Verizon, Intel, Blackberry, and Nokia.
This is very similar to classic idea filtering we all go through as part of ideation. The only difference is, in this case, true entrepreneurship, determination and execution gets tested during the filtering process. No one should get discouraged by their competition or first movers in any space. Had it been the case Facebook wouldn’t have existed in the light of Friendster, Google in the shawdows of Yahoo! and Linux in the trails of Microsoft.
As Geoffrey Moore says in Dealing With Darwin, “Free-market economics operate by the same rules as organic systems in nature”.
—-
Opinions expressed are mine own.
Tags: Darwin, Entrepreneurship, Evolution, Geoffrey Moore, ideation
Posted in Anthropology, Entrepreneurship, Google, ideation, Innovation, Twitter, Yahoo | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
SpellingBee – A tradition that started somewhere around 1875 as fun and friendly exercise is becoming irrelevant in the information age by the minute. I got that realization when my 9 year old nephew didn’t have to know the exact spelling to a word while typing his school home work in Microsoft Word.
So, is the SpellingBee
heading into a Web …..biting the dust?
Over the decades until 1980s, with heavy use of Typewriters and less intelligent early computers, spelling accurately carried its cache. In the age we live in with teens spending 80% to 90% of their writing either on a computer or on a cell phone/text, how relevant is Spelling for the next generations? I proved my case if you know these acronyms – LOL, JK, TC, TXT or these emoticons – 
, 
and so forth …..
Unlike the title suggests, the issue at hand is much larger than Irrelevant SpellingBee …..
Over the years, in the civilized world, we have dropped few habits and picked up some newer ones -
For example …..
During the early days of Automobile, drivers mentally calculated the distance they were traveling and made sure there is a gas station (near by) or have enough gas for their trip. Today, we get an alert in our dash board when we have 1/4th tank.
We used to manage our circadian rhythms to wake ourselves in the morning and now depend on Alarm clocks.
I used to remember all the phone numbers of my friends and family. Today, I need to look up my address book even for my own number, sometimes.
While driving I don’t have to remember which way I go to my destination. My GPS takes me where ever I want and brings me back home.
This generation has lesser physical activities than the previous generation – as part of their day to day routine.
We live an age of abundance and automation. We can get away giving less work for our brain to get through our day than ever before. While some of us are making use of that unused brain power for more complex thinking where as most of us relish the opportunity not to use the brain power at all.
The issue is not how much of memory or brain power we use but how we use it and what are the long term physiological and biological implications of that change. For example, what part of our brain or memory do we use when we remember and retrieve phone numbers and directions? Would that activity be replaced with something else to keep those parts of the brain active and sharp? In the book Think Smart author Richard Restak suggests that all parts our brain need regular exercise to avoid neurological and other ailments at later stages of our life.
Just the way current generation Gyms and Workout franchises have made their way to get us into shape, should we have clinics and gyms for training and keeping our brain and its parts active?
to
to
Just the way Physical labor (where you get paid for physical activities) replaced by Gyms (where you pay to get physical activities) in the desktop age, are we to see businesses where we pay to use our brain and keep our memory sharp in the near future?
I think governments, universities and educational institutions should collaborate with citizens to refine and redefine school curriculum based changing market needs – on a 3 to 5 year basis.
I will leave with you a fascinating talk by Ken Robinson who talks about a complete overhaul of our current education system at TED Conference.
—–
@Vsistla
Opinions expressed are mine own
Tags: Automation, Brain, Education, Information, Innovation, Internet, Memory, Neocortex, School, Students, TED, Universities
Posted in Analytics, Anthropology, Attention, Automation, Brain, Focus, Information Age, Innovation, Internet, Memory, Neocortex, physiology, Research, School, sociology, TED, Universities | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Thanks to my friend Colin Crawford’s (@ccoc) RT of @ramblingman, I caught up on this article about disruptions Telegraph has brought to Newspaper industry in 1845 and how the newspaper industry built their relevance in the changing communication landscape of Telegraph in mid 19th century.
If I were to build analogous comparisons between both innovations – Telegraph and Internet – and their impact on Newspaper industry, this is how it would look.
Unlike the Economist editor, I think the News paper industry will also survive along with news business – just in a brand new form with new rules. I talked about the threat of substitutes in my previous blog. I think that threat can be turned into opportunity for news publishers.
I think the biggest threat to the news paper industry can be turned into their partners and promoters – in the world of Twitter, Search and Internet in general.
PS: Opinions expressed are my own.
Tags: Google, Innovation, Internet, News, Publishing, Real Time Analytics, Telegraph, Twitter
Posted in Competition, Digital, Google, Innovation, Internet, News, Publisher, Real Time, social networks, Substitute, Telegraph, Twitter | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Did you ever notice that the “App Store” icon is listed with other Apps on the home page instead of at the bottom along with Phone, Mail, Safari and iPod? Did Apple decide to leave the “App Store” Icon along with other Apps because of lack of space at the bottom – too hard to put the 5th icon in there? Then again, they also short changed Settings, iTunes, Messages and Camera – by leaving them along with other Apps.
Regardless of where the App Store Icon is, I wonder if there is a future, where brands and publishers can create “Publisher Stores” – similar to “App Store” – where they Catalog all their own branded Apps – conveniently located in one location – for users to select all and download all and pay for all them at the same time.
For example Sony Music Entertainment has deployed 6 iPhone Apps on the App store. Instead of downloading each of those 6 Apps separately, wouldn’t it be cool to download all Sony’s Apps with one click?
Enter Publisher App Store !!!!
With Apps on App Store reaching 100,000 in next few months, it becomes critical for Apple to consolidate as well as make it easier for iPhone users to download Apps. Users don’t have to search for different sub brands multiple times. If you are looking for all super hero comic apps, all you need to download is Marvel App Store.
Then again, does the Publisher App Store need to be a downloadable App OR could it be an aggregated list of apps via a microsite available through Apple’s App Store?
Download or webapp – doesn’t matter – there is a huge need for such a feature. Its long due …..
Why limit this concept to just grouping within a publisher? Aggregator can group Genre specific Apps in one location and give option for their user to search, download through one interface. There could be App stores for all free casual games, all card games, all music apps and all news apps ….
Ideation
There is a start up idea right there …..what are the challenges? Well, for one, Apple might not approve such an App!!!!
No harm in giving it a try. Create a shell App and let all these brands customize the Shell App the way they want to and list out their on deck Apps, Icons, descriptions, and hook it up to iTunes store.
Even if Apple doesn’t approve such an App, at least publishers can start creating such Microsites and let user’s download ….Disney has around 12 iPhones Apps on the App Store. Couldn’t Disney or Sony or some of these big brand names build microsites by partnering with Apple – giving options for fans to download all the Apps in one go?
Tags: App Store, apple, iphone, Publisher
Posted in App Store, Apple, Apple TV, Apps, Constant Innovation, Handset, Innovation, iPhone, mobile, Product Evolution, Productization, Publisher | No Comments »
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Just in the last 2 decades we have moved from information scarcity to overload. While there was so much focus on data generation, aggregation and distribution of information, we have barely touched on analytics let alone leverage analytics – creating actionable intelligence around the data that is being generated. Our current generation analytics are static and not contiguous: not real time: does not drive real time productization – in other words Contiguous Productization.
Data mining which was looked at as a fringe benefit of technology was relegated to research labs has become front and center of current generation business operations and success. Business Intelligence is very critical for retail and industrial sectors – small, medium and large enterprises – across the board. In fact leveraging Analytics is a key competitive advantage for leading CIOs in this day and age.
Market research, customer surveys and benchmarking used to be part of external vendor solutions. Today businesses can generate similar data, analysis and intelligence with off the shelf tools and open source technologies.
For example, we were happy to just gather the data two decades and over the years have learned to track the progress of our business using the data generated to manually respond to the analytics generated by the data. From late 1990s we have seen a slue of business intelligence software companies that helped traditional industries to leverage the richness in the data that is generated during their normal process of production & operations. Faster computers, more powerful networks, society’s propensity to live, share and propose in the virtual worlds is helping generate more data, crunch the data in real time and respond to changes in customer interaction. Consumers and end users are not consuming in silence – technology has paved way for them to share their knowledge and experience – which in turn helping businesses increase their own productivity, customer satisfaction and affinity.
Points of “data generation” has also increased – initially started with understanding and learning internal processes, operations (that made way for Six Sigma and others) to capturing data through interactions with customers and end users.
Today Social Media is much more than just an outlet for Teens to dish out their personal factoids: it has become a “PR and Sales engine” for businesses in all verticals; data mining has entered a new era – opening opportunities for innovation and productivity.
Where do we go from here?
Businesses can ingest, analysis massive amounts of data in real time and issue predictive intelligence for product teams to respond to changes in end user interaction and market direction.
IBM InfoStream is targeting “Stream Computing” for crucial business verticals. All that will enable only certain businesses to respond to information and data generated by other computers and devices on the network. While this is step in the right direction, we are still long way for achieving Contiguous Productization.
Abundance of data and near real time response is not good enough in the future. While innovation in real time response to analytics will be limited to critical and crucial verticals (such as medicine, security, natural calamities and so forth) in the near future, rest of the verticals will catch up in a hurry.
Product innovation through internal research is archaic. Businesses need to align their resources and processes to tap into collective intelligence, end user feedback and customer touch points. Contiguous Productization is possible with real time capture of data, analysis and response to the intelligence generated by the data.
Internet & Software based industries will have tremendous opportunity for Contiguous Productization in the future. This concept of productization also brings its only challenges and new nuances; For example, software and platform releases and versioning we have been used in the past few decades might become an out dated practice – at least the concept of small change and patch releases will cease to exist. Businesses could benefit from collective intelligence without really becoming open source.
Analytics is only means to an end. Its not end all. Analytics should lead to product innovation – in real time – not to serve some distant future but NOW! Contiguous Productization through actionable analytics turns Customization from a Privilege to a Standard Feature. Niche replaces mainstream. Niche is mainstream!
Tags: Analytics, Business Intelligence, Constant Productization, Contiguous Productization, Innovation, Real Time Analytics
Posted in Analytics, Business Intelligence, Constant Innovation, Contiguous Producitization, Customers, Innovation, Market Research, Metadata, Productization, Real Time, social networks | No Comments »
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Just got back from CES show in Las Vegas and I found some interesting trends at the show …..there was an all around endorsement from CE behemonths for the following -
Viera Cast YouTube
1. Web is here to stay and consumer electronic industry cannot ignore that any more – While last 10 years of CES was all about Plasma, LCD, HD TV, Thin TVs, Large Screen TVs and some home networking, this year I saw clear endorsement for Web from the CE 800 pound gorillas. For years, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and HP have tried to make this marriage happen but this year it felt like the CE manufacturers are ready to welcome the web into the living rooms. Across the board, Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, Panasonic, LG and the likes have demoed technologies and products welcoming Web, Web Video, and other rich media into their TV sets. Some of them showed widgets (although closed) while others showed custom home growth interfaces to access Netflix, Amazon, Flickr and so forth.
While most of them showed proprietary implementations of hooks into the Web, this could be the start of the Web on mainstream CE devices. It felt like CE manufacters will start to do an arms race to get premium relationships in place for their next generation TVs and DVD players.
This could turn into a wind fall for Internet giants – Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Yahoo, etc – for many years to come.
Ideation and Disruption –
What are the opportunities for Ideation and Disruption in this case? While CE industry will try to do this their way initially, there might be opportunities for open platforms and aggregation down the line. Startups could focus on intergrating various web services and package them to sell to each of the leading CE device manufacturers. This way CE manufacturers can focus on what they do the best and leave the Web integration to the Web experts. While Microsoft, Yahoo and Google might take the lead on such efforts, startups still might have interesting role to play in such a future.
2. Man to machine interfaces – At the show it felt like CE industry is very keen on upgrading the user interaction to the 21st century. Panasonic, Toshiba and others have showed some really cool “man to machine” interfaces. Toshiba’s Spacial Motion Interface is certainly interesting. Microsoft’s Surface is note worthy. Panasonic’s next generation remote control could bring the innovation “remote controls” needed for so long. Over all this is a great trend for content industry in general as this will lead to better user experience and engagement …..
Posted in Consumer Electronics, Convergence, Digital, Home, Innovation, Web | No Comments »
Monday, December 8th, 2008
A month ago I was visiting Korea and Taiwan on business with some of my colleagues. I was sitting in a cab with my colleague Adam Powers heading to our hotel. It was a 45 min ride back to the hotel. As soon as we got back into the cab, we pulled out our Blackberries to check our emails followed by our voice mails. Then we both joked about the fact that we are so hooked onto our “email” clients and went back to our Blackberries. I checked by Facebook account to update my status to make sure all my virtual friends and contacts know where I am, responded to few of my MySpace buddies and posted few comments to Twitter. Congratulated a contact in Italy on his first born, posted a comment to one other friend regarding his obsession with Heather Lockear and scanned recently uploaded photos on my Flickr account. Before we knew we were at the hotel. 45 mins went by without me knowing anything more about Adam or his interests or his latest projects or his weekend plans. We conversed for less than a minute in those 45 minutes. In the “pre-Blackberry” era we would have talked up a storm.
Have we become “anti-social” in our physical life where as “super social” over electronic communication?
What are the sociological implications of a society that is tethered to be electronically social but not so plugged in with the surroundings?
What are the physiological implications – especially our eyes, ears and other sense organs with gadgets plugged into our ears and glued to our eyes?
We are so oblivious to our surroundings – in public places – trains, buses, etc – we have become completely irrelevant to the person sitting next to us. Days are gone when you can eves drop on the conversations to either quench your gossip curiosity or use that to build a new friendship or join in the conversation or help them with something – because you are so busy listening into your iPod and playing solitaire on your iPhone.
Seeds for Ideation …..
The way I see, there are few questions that are yet to be answered – in turn lead us to some innovation.
1. Physiological implications of getting plugged in electronically – on our sense organs.What can be done to mitigate them in the long run?
2. Sociological implications of being anti-social in the physical world.
If we put aside physiological implications, I feel the sociological angle could be tackle much easily with the help of same technology that brought us to this juncture.
Innovate on head phones that let you capture noise from the surroundings, filter/distill the relevant information into your ear drums. This could be a feature that you could set on or off. For example, you could customize the headphones to capture words such as your name, bomb, or your mother tongue and so forth.
Come up with applications that run on your mobile phone that tell you if any0ne in your address book is also on the same train in the same compartment using LBS/GPS/Bluetooth technologies.
The goal should be to use the same technology to fulfill use cases in public spaces that were prevalent in the pre-cell phone/blackberry era.
Posted in anti-social, blackberry, Innovation, physiology, Product Evolution, social networks, sociology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Garmin is highly successful in what they have done so far – built an excellent brand and convenient solution to their target users. They just announced to offer Mobile TV and bunch of other features in their up coming product nuvi 900T and I think is a big mistake – and here is why.
Companies typically fail (typically being the operative word here) when they try to bring new features and functionality into their products without proper contextual and circumstantial usage analysis.
The biggest problem with technologist and innovative companies is they tend to offer features based on product attributes and demographic rather than “jobs-to-be-done”. Few Harvard researchers have concluded that circumstance based product evolution has a higher rate of success than attribute and demography based product evolution.
For example ….
When a user is using a particular product or device, that particular user is trying to get a job done for which he has “hired” that product to deliver that job. When I am waiting at airport, and quickly checking my email on my blackberry, I am trying to be productive in the limited amount of time I have, while I am waiting at the airport. I have “hired” my blackberry to help me get the job of “being productive while I am waiting in boredom” done. Similarly, I “hire” my blackberry or cell phone to make quick phone calls to be productive in my professional and personal life.
Marketers need to recognize the circumstance in which I am going to hire a particular product for a particular job. Continuing with the same blackberry example, when I don’t have any limitation of time or resources, I would hire my laptop or my work PC to check and send emails. For the same job of making call, I would hire my landline when at work, where as I would hire my cell phone or blackberry when I am away from my landline. Landline vs. mobile phone might be bad example outside the business environment, as most people are replacing their landline completely in their private life, but you get the point.
Harvard research concluded that …
Users “hire” products for jobs based on the context and circumstance in which they need to get those jobs done.
I would like to extend that theory further and say ….
Users are willing to pay incremental costs for features that help the “jobs” a particular product is hired to do.
Users would also be willing to have additional features without incremental cost and unwanted inconvenience to their present context or circumstance.
Just because I read my daily news on the Internet, I would not try to read news while I am driving. I get it from my audio/radio devices. At the same time, I could use my Bluetooth headset to talk on my blackberry while I am driving or not driving because hands free talking on the phone is not as dangerous as reading news on my blackberry while driving.
Who uses Garmin?
Ø People who are traveling to new places/locations where they need help with directions.
Ø Some people use it for places/locations that they are familiar with but challenged directionally.
Ø Some people use them to go from places they don’t know to places they know (for example returning home, etc)
What are the limitations of the context in which user’s use Garmin?
Ø Typically when you are driving and little concerned about your ability to navigate to your destination, your stress levels are higher than normal levels.
Ø “Typically” it is on the dashboard in the view of the driver. Driver is constantly switching between his view of the road/traffic and Garmin step by step directions. This gets little easy when you have voice activation.
Ø When you have voice activated navigation and it is not integrated with your car speakers/audio, you are limited to consume radio/music through your car speaker system.
Ø No matter how good Garmin’s navigational system is, drivers would like to reconfirm or revalidate their paths by speaking with someone in that neighborhood – gas stations, etc – as long as it is possible. Most of the time they call the destination host to revalidate their path.
Why use Garmin?
Ø People “hire” Garmin device for getting from point A to point B and for getting step-by-step voice activated directions.
Garmin is a highly differentiated product and the success of this product is directly dependent on how accurately it navigates its “hirers” to get to their destination in the least amount of time, avoid traffic jams and stress free journey.
What else can you offer Garmin “hirer” that help them in the context in which they use Garmin?
Ø Ability to customize frequent locations – such as home, office, day care, etc.
Ø Ability to do local business searches – restaurants, post office, police station, nearest gas stations, etc.
I believe Garmin and their competitors do offer above two benefits.
What else could Garmin offer to their “hirers”?
Ø Users could “hire” Garmin for navigating them in case of traffic jams and construction – dynamically instead of getting stuck in the gridlocks. Currently most of them offer detour option only if the users select voluntarily. Dynamic navigation based on the current traffic conditions could be a great feature to have. (am not sure if they offer this currently and I stand corrected if they already do)
Ø Users could “hire” Garmin for radio/news/music – mainly to those users who do not have integrated navigation systems. This way, users could hire Garmin for audio entertainment instead of having to “hire” their car audio systems. Garmin offers satellite radio. Some of the navigation systems offer MP3 capabilities but that doesn’t fit user’s usage context as most of the time people leave their nav devices in their cars and forget to load or reload music from their mp3 collection. I feel a radio to be a better feature than mp3 or Photo viewer.
Ø Garmin could let me make some phone calls while I am driving. We see lot of people “hiring” their mobile phones to talk while driving. When you use a cell phone along with Garmin’s voice activation, the user experience is not the best as both voices could overlap with each other. If you integrate calling service within Garmin, then voice feature could be integrated much more efficiently with the ongoing phone call (more though required here to define this user experience). Nuvi 900T offers this.
Ø Garmin competes with street maps, gas stations/seven eleven’s where user’s would pull into to get directions. If users are not completely happy with the navigation they are getting from their Garmin, Garmin could build a “direction helper” network with gas stations and businesses where store cashiers could take dynamically routed calls from Garmin users who are in their neighborhood to provide “human” navigation that would help the drivers have a stress free journey. Garmin could pay these “helper networks” per phone call they have received or on a monthly basis, while charge their own customers extra for this “premium” one of a kind navigation feature. “Helper network” could also offer additional suggestions from locals – offer suggestions based on their own experience of the neighborhood – best restaurants or safe neighborhoods or local entertainments.
Ø Garmin could compete with the likes of OnStar in providing roadside assistance to those users who do not have similar benefits from their car brands (esp. in the low-end car market).
Ø Garmin could offer location based services based on the time of day – such as Lunch/Dinner deals, rest room breaks, service station alerts, and so forth.
Garmin’s nuvi 900T comes with TV Player, audible player, picture viewer, FM radio, Music/MP3 player …. this is a Swiss army knife …..I question the quality of what it can deliver to me ….. all-in-one type of devices are not best suited in an emerging market place – it just dilutes their value prop. Potentially other handset vendors could replace Garmin as a navigation device. Everyone starts to copy everyone else’s features and functionality …..arms race to out do others …..
There are three questions here -
1. Is market really looking for a Swiss army knife type of device for these particular jobs? I don’t think people are clamoring to have mobile TV in their navigational device. There is definitely value in having hands free calling capabilities within a nav device. Not many people have really used the mp3 functionality in the existing nav devices. There is value in Radio/FM. I highly question the need of a photo viewer in this device.
2. Is this the right move for Garmin in particular? I personally think this will dilute their core value prop. Traditional handset vendors will flood Garmin’s vertical, a.k.a Nokia/Navtec followed by everyone else. Garmin and Nokia are trying to enter each other’s markets as a defensive strategy, end up doing feature arms race commoditizing their core products.
3. What else could they do to keep their value prop? Focus on additional other value add services within the nav vertical and provide a superior nav experience. Make it so hard for other traditional handset vendors to compete in the nav market – sort off become the iPod of mp3 market. No matter what Microsoft, Samsung and Sony offered, they couldn’t touch iPod market share. Garmin could do the same even if Nokia and the likes try to enter the nav market.
Here is another example of why companies should focus on the context in which their users use their products rather their technological capabilities ….
Apple did not include camera in their iPod even though technologically they could. Its been 5 years and many version of iPods, including iTouch doesn’t support a camera. Where as first version of iPhone comes with a camera. While people “hire” iPod for music and audio needs, they could potential take photos with the same device when there is a context for it, but “typically” one takes pictures/photos when you are in groups of two or more and most of the time people are using their digital cameras or camera phones. You also take photos when you are traveling but when you travel you also carry a digital camera with you. People carry their digital camera photos on their iPod by side loading. Providing iPod users with photo loading capabilities didn’t increase the cost of delivery for Apple and some users do make use of this functionality although that is the not the primary reason for them to carry their iPod. When the integration of camera feature into iPod does not significantly increase the cost of iPod, user would be ok with that feature. Since mobile cell phone users are already using camera functionality, it was critical for iPhone to enter the market with that feature.
iPod commands the highest premium in the mp3 player market even after 5 years of entering this market and the only reason they are able to do is by providing a superior product that is highly focused in delivering what it is hired to do.
In the evolution of a product or technology, one-size-fits-all type of products make sense only when the technology is completely mature. When the technology and markets are still emerging, one-size-fits-all doesn’t really provide a superior user experience. From a usability standpoint, creating undifferentiated products and doing arms race to add every possible technological feature to your product will lead companies towards a dangerous collision course and ultimately usher commoditization.
If one looks at user’s subjective value, a user would not want to pay for features they are not hiring that product to delivery. This triggers brand disloyalty. Worse, will make way for new entrants who could potential steal your unsatisfied customer base. Microsoft and its products are an example of this where they have so many features that majority of their users do not even use but end up paying for it since there is no other option. It is only a matter of time when new entrants will go after these unsatisfied and non-consumers.
So, when companies want to add features or functionality that do not fit the exact context or circumstance of usage, it is critical that companies do not penalize/charge the user for getting those unwanted features – from a cost and user experience standpoint.
For example, buying a Swiss army knife saves me space and number of devices to buy or carry. The drawback is only one person in my family can use it at a time. I am not in need of ALL the features Swiss Army Knife provides me. The screwdriver, knife and bottle opener do not work as efficiently as the respective standalone devices. Now, I have Swiss Army Knife as well as all the other standalone tools. So much for reducing space and carrying just one device …..
Note: Some of the inspiration came from Harvard Research, James Gibson’s seminal work on Visual Perception and Anthony Ulwick’s papers and articles.
Tags: 900T, disruption, Garmin, Handset, Innovation, Mobile TV, Nokia, Product Evolution
Posted in Handset, Innovation, Mobile TV, Product Evolution, Up market | No Comments »
