eBay released the Togo widgets. There are 3 different types of widgets that you can put up. These are neat and cool looking widgets. Will be good to have these widgets tied to the affiliate program to get more participation.

Ram Charan is a highly paid management consultant, who makes about $20,000 a day! 67 years old, Ram Charan doesn't have a residence of his own. He has lived in hotels all his life and doesn't have any personal belongings.

Strange man:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index.htm

Baazee cofounder and Matrix ventures cofounder Avnish Bajaj says India is not yet ready for Web 2.0. According to him, there are a lot of "low hanging" innovations that can be done in the Indian market before India reaches the stage of requiring to go with Web 2.0 innovations.

Interesting read.

There are most definitely a lot of inefficiencies in the Indian market which not a lot of folks are yet addressing and there are opportunities there, if you get the hang of the Indian market that is.

Just saw this video on Google about Sreesanth mocking fast bowler Nel of South Africa after hitting a six. Funny stuff! The song fits very well as well :-)

Then read this article on rediff about the background of this incident Sreesanth to curb aggression. Apparantly Nel had mouthed these words to Sreesanth :

Nel said, 'I can smell blood, I can smell blood,' " the Kerala bowler, whose match haul of 8 for 99 scripted India's first Test victory in South Africa, was quoted as saying in Outlook magazine.

"Then after beating me, he said 'You don't have the fire, man. You should have a big heart to play. You are like a bunny to me.' He turned back and said it again, 'You are a bunny man and I will get you next ball,'" Sreesanth recalled.

Sreesanth responded in the above fashion! Neat! Btw Congratulations India on the very well deserved first victory on SA soil!

Came across this insider memo, presumably from a Sr. VP - Brad Garlinghouse - at Yahoo!, enumerating the organizational challenges Yahoo! is facing in his view. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/11/18/yahoos_peanut_b.html

Tehcrunch's take on this : http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/18/yahoos-brad-garlinghouse-makes-his-power-move/

Most important point I took out of this is the challenges yahoo! is facing integrating all the acquisitions it has made during the past years into its current organization heirarchy. There are a lot of competing products given the acquisitions resulting into an overall reduced accountability. The VP also points out to the reduced accountability of the Matrix Organization structure, which I found very interesting and true. You lose overall accountaibility as everybody is reporting to their own bosses with the Matrix model.

Will be interesting to see how Yahoo! reacts and responds to this.

On a side note, Valleywag equates this memo to Jerry Maguire's memo in movie Jerry Maguire : http://www.valleywag.com/tech/yahoo/brad-garlinghouse-is-jerry-maguire-215842.php

Following is Jerry's memo extract:

It's 1 AM and this might be the bad pizza I had earlier talking, but I believe I have something to say. Or rather, I have something to say that I believe in. My father once said, "Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff." Well, here goes. There is a cruel wind blowing through our business. We all feel it, and if we don't, perhaps we've forgotten how to feel. But here is the truth. We are less ourselves than we were when we started this organization.
Sports Management International began as a small company. I was hired by Jack Scully in 1981, I was fresh out of college, I didn't even watch much sports. But a young man came to me, and his name was Bill Apodaca. He asked me to look at a contract he'd acquired to play football for the Atlanta Falcons. Before long I was overseeing the business of another member of the Falcons, and two baseball players. The nuances and the small miracles of professional sports would soon hook me - there was something simple and perfect about the way a stadium felt. The way you felt when a player you'd helped and represented made his stand in front of 54,000 people. And I remember the conversation Mr. Scully and I had by an elevator, standing next to one of those sand-filled ashtray posts, right before he hired me as one of the first agents in this company. "You and I are blessed, he said, "we do something that we love."
Tonight, I find those words guiding me back to an important place, and an important truth. I care very much about the fact that I have learned to care less. Now our company is one of the top three in this business, and we represent over a thousand athletes. Over sixty agents work at our huge new office, and I still haven't met all of you. The business of sports has never been bigger, or tougher, or more written about. And we are at the forefront. But I wonder tonight, as we leave our 13th annual conference ... we've talked a lot and partied a lot over the last three days, but I dare say that not one of us, our diet Pepsis and sheaf of papers in hand, have said what we really think.
It is beyond the easy arguments waged against sports, and our business on the editorial pages of the New York Times. It is beyond the huge salaries, the endorsements all our clients now want because "I'm a better actor than Michael Jordan." Beyond the globalization and merchandization of the games. It's more subtle than the baseball strike, more about loyalty than the Colts moving to Indiana, the Rams going to St. Louis, or the Cleveland Browns moving to ... someplace. I'm talking about something they don't write about. I'm talking about something we don't talk about.
We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our business. Every day I can look at a list of phone calls only partially returned. Driving home, I think of what was not accomplished, instead of what was accomplished. The gnawing feeling continues. That families are sitting waiting for a call from us, waiting to hear the word on a contract, or a General Manager's thoughts on an upcoming season. We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds? When we learn not to care enough about the very guy we promised the world to, just to get him to sign. Or to let it bother us that a hockey player's son is worried about his dad getting that fifth concussion.
There is a good bet that I will erase all of this from my laptop, and you will never read it. But if you are reading it, and you're reading it right now, it is only because I was unable to stop. I was unable to forget the quiet questions in the hallways, when some of you, usually the younger agents, or interns, asked me on the side: "How do you keep all these lives, all these clients, separated in your mind?"
Chances are, I didn't say much. I might have told you "it's easy," or, "you're not working hard enough." Chances are, I said something that you expected, maybe even wanted to hear. But it wasn't the truth, and it wasn't what I felt. And if you ever wondered about the drawbacks of being quiet about important things, talk to yourself in the mirror some time, say the truth. Yell the truth to yourself, when no one is listening. See how good it feels?
My father worked for the United Way for 38 years. We lived in San Diego for many years, before I left to move up the coast to Los Angeles. One of the things my father said was: "Every time you allow a problem in your life, you are actually at a point of transformation. Crisis is a powerful point of transformation." (Never mind that he sat at the same chair for 38 years, and when he retired said only that he'd wished he'd asked for a more comfortable place to sit.)
We are now at a point of transformation with this company. But this is not something to fear, it is something to celebrate. Because I come to you tonight, looking out at the dark Miami skyline, not only with a challenge. I come to you with answers too.
But first let us define our position.
Right now we are a breaking point with our client list. We are not so huge that we must hire more agents, and not so small that we have not experienced huge success. We are at a point of neutrality. We are all, right now, neutral. Neutral, as in not black or white. Not bad or good. Even. neutral.
Even in my own life, after 35 years, I feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. Even writing this Mission Statement is odd for me. I am used to flying below the radar, enjoying my life and friends. But I have not been truly tested. I have not gone to India to explore my life, as my brother has. I have not been in a major car accident, or fathered a child. I have not created a life, nor have I killed anyone. I am neutral. I haven't started a war and I haven't stopped a war. I have broken even with my life. I have a nice home, a nice car, a fiancee who makes my heart race. But I have not taken that step, or risk, that makes the air I have breathed for 35 years worthwhile. I once had a yellow couch. I got rid of it because it was neutral. My life is now like that yellow couch.
And yet, as I sit here in the wonderful Miami Hilton, I have never been so happy to be alive. I have said "later" to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say "later" because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.

 

All this ties very well in the Organization Theory class I am taking this quarter. Interesting stuff.

An Indian search engine Guruji was launched today. It kinda falls under the "vertical search" category for the Indian market. This is a better and a rebranded version of the cofounders' earlier venture Terrawiz.

Till recently search engines in India were pretty much yellow pages. khoj.com, 123india.com come to mind as the web 1.0 version of Indian search engines.. directory based. Khoj actually had a good chance to enter this search engine market given its branding as well. It probably got lost in all the advertising focus it had!

Recently though some action has been happening in the Indian search engine market. Junglee co founders have started an Indian search engine - Hot Samosa. Guruji has been launched now. Seems like this market seems will grow in India given the fantastic success of Baidu in China.

Although there are some unique challenges in India though given the differences in India China. So not easy to become as successful as Baidu:

1. Guruji will have to have a very strong support for local languages search. This will be a much bigger initiative than Baidu in China as there are just so many more languages in India!

2. Although even with the language support, given that most net savvy Indians are very much comfortable with English, they wouldnt have as much affinity to local language search engines comparable to Baidu.

3. Good rating, ranking and relevancy algorithms needs to be implemented which will automatically crawl new Indian websites, rather than users submitting their sites. A problem which gets much more complex given again the local languages support.

4. Guruji will need a lot of marketing, PR and advertising as it has to displace Google and Yahoo from the Indian users browsers/desktop. This I believe is not as easy as Baidu had it in China as even today Indian users tend to prefer the 'western' products more. Will be interesting to see how Guruji overcomes the biggest challenge it faces in the face of Yahoo and Google in India. Both have offices and strong teams in India already.

Given the strong $7M venture backing Guruji has from Sequoia India and Baazee cofounder, they will be in a strong position to tackle these challenges.

(Disclosure: The CEO and cofounder Anurag is a friend and an ex-colleague. Good luck Anurag!)

You have been hearing news that Indian stock market is red hot. But heres a comparison with the Dow, S&P500 and even the high volatility Nasdaq to understand really how much it has performed better over the last 2 years.

Dow went up from 10000 to 11800 : 18% increase
Nasdaq went up from 1900 to 2300 : 21% increase
S&P500 went up from 1120 to 1350 : 20.5% increase

And the BSE Sensex from 5700 to 12300 : 115% increase

A picture is worth a thousand words .. so here goes :

Ross Mayfield has a nice graphic on how the information dissemination cycle works in today's world.

(Click the image to see the larger original)

 

It shows how the playing field of information access has been levelling with the recent Web 2.0/blog/online communities advent.

What other time in the past would I have heard of so many startups before they even get any funding, from any corner of the world.

If you are able to catch a startup in the mobilization phase, you are in a very good shape. Of course this is based on the BIG assumption that diffusion and commoditization happen for the product! Most of the companies would fail while trying to move from the mobilization to the diffusion phase.

Good Luck in catching yours! :)

Recently I read the transcript of the following podcast by Om Malik and Niall Kennedy on Snakes on Business Plan. A very interesting read (or listen ). Liked some of the observations made by Om and Niall in the article. It starts off with a discussion of some of the recent burnouts of some web2.0 companies such as Kiko (online calendar), Feedlounge (feed reader) and PubSub (subscription service to latest happenings). The discussion then headed off into whether these were more internal company related or more global web2.0 burnouts.

Given the very low barrier to entry in today's market especially in Web2.0, it is natural that a lot of new blood has come into the market. With relatively less experience, it is certainly possible that these are genuine company and focus failures rather than a global burnout of web2.0. So far no conclusions can be made of whether this is a bubble or not in my opinion given these samples.

What I liked about the article though was about some examples of how focus and flexibility helps in this very dynamic environment. Pyra started blogger apparantly as a project management software. Flickr started more to share online gaming experiences. Once these businesses realized what the users wanted and were willing to pay for, they quickly readjusted their strategy slightly and focused on the user needs.

Focus has also helped smaller startups such as 30boxes.com or 37signals.com competing against giants of the world such as Google, Yahoo! You dont start out with the entire world as your potential market. You need to start with a narrow focus, analyze the business needs of the customers in the space and readjust your products/features ever so slightly to fit that need. Om gives more examples where altering focus slightly helps : Myspace.com which is totally a failure in the geek community but a huge success otherwise, orkut popular in Brazil only, MSN/Live Spaces popular in China, etc.

The smaller start also lets you stay out of the path of the VCs initially till you build your business the way you want. That way you also last longer. I agree my friend Vaibhav of Webvapors when he says that web2.0 failure is a relative term. Smaller startups without a lot of capital needs are at an advantage here in that they can last longer with smaller seed funding and the founders have a more open environment to experiment. Unlike the funded startups where VCs would be looking for quick ROIs.

Interesting business world out there today given the tech changes, and one needs to adapt.

Following video shows Jon Stewart's hilarious take on Sen Ted Stevens comment : Internet is a series of tubes!
It is hilarious stuff except these are the guys actually coming up with laws against net neutrality, not knowing or understanding the slightest bit of the technical details!

                      

Do something about spam first for heaven's sake. That is what is clogging your tubes. These guys are going to kill the small businesses with the net non-neutrality laws. This is what happens when you load up the senate and congress with lawyers! :-)

In trying to analyze the various news pieces that I saw, I started realizing that this indeed might be an exaggerated response by the government. Not done on purpose to anger any community or corporation, but out of sheer ignorance!! I doubt if the decision makers in the Indian government understand the meaning of community website or Web2.0 where the end users are responsible for the content!

If there is one bad blog, you dont ban the entire website, you should ban that particular blog. But I think the Indian government sees blogspot as a single domain and thinks that blogspot is responsible for the content. So lets ban blogspot!

News flash : Doesnt work that way in community websites 'Information minister'!

This is the same knee jerk reaction that probably caused the arrest of Baazi/eBay India CEO Avnish Bajaj! If I find the content on eBay, it must be eBay that is selling it!

Am having a sad realization that Indian online market has a ways to go still before it becomes mainstream!

You can follow the latest on this on various forums and wikis.

I didnt think it would come to this in India! Indian government has blocked blogger and typepad in India!!

Here's Rediff's coverage of the issue.

Under the Information Technology Act, 2000, a body called the Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-IN, was created along the lines of similar authorities the world over. Although its main task is in the domain of Internet security, it also oversees Internet censorship under a clause that seeks to ensure 'balanced flow of information.' Any government department seeking a block on any web site has to approach CERT-IN, which then instructs the DoT to block the site after confirming the authenticity of the complaint.

Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism.

This is a ridiculous attempt to stop terrorism, if this is what it is! Blocking sites wont get Indian government any closer to solving the terrorism issue!

More disconcerting is fact that the Indian government doesnt see the blocking as a problem.

However, CERT-IN's Director, Dr Gulshan Rai, said he was unaware of the problem and would not be able to respond "off-hand". In a telephone interview, he told this reporter, "Somebody must have blocked some sites. What is your problem?"

huh!! 'What is your problem' is the response!!

Freedom of speech is our problem!!

Here's a list of ISPs that have complied with the government order apparantly.

At least my desihub blog isnt blocked in India!

Its French Open finals time, and its going to be an exciting match again! Federed vs. Nadal. top 2 seeds. Must be pretty rare to have top 2 seeds in the final, and for that matter top 4 seeds in the semis as well.

Nadal has won last 5 encounters and Federed must be looking for revenge. This would be a match I wouldnt want to miss.

Check out the highlights for day 13 on Rolland Garros website. About quarter way into the highlights - 2nd point in there, check out how Federer chases a tough lob from Nalbandian and hits a winner! Fantastic shot, reminder of Agassi in prime. This will be a memorable final.

Am back after a blog sabbatical! :) Refreshed

The latest hot topic I have been hearing and reading about is the 'Net Nutrality' debate. A lot has been said about 'Net neutrality' in the past few months. According to Wikipedia, Network neutrality is defined as "the principle that network operators should not discriminate among network applications. "

Basically the current hot issue is that the US Congress is planning to pass a legislature to remove Net Neutrality. If the law is passed, it will give much greater control of the network to the carriers such as AT&T, and probably bring them back in business. What the law would allow is for companies to pay for higher QOS and higher bandwidth. This can be viewed as a simple form price discrimination, and a way of monetizing the net traffic.

Opponents of the net neutrality principle argue that discrimination is required as QOS requirements of different type of traffic that flows on the net is different. VOIP traffic should get lower priority as it is a bandwidth hog.

Proponents say that a free net will foster innovation. I agree. A paid net will give a much higher control to the big players. Traffic to their sites will be faster, and the digital dive will keep on increasing. This will naturally work against smaller innovative startups. Also carriers will get a much higher control. Carriers could decide to kill Skype or such VOIP services by reducing the QOS and bandwidth for such traffic unless the services pay for the premium bandwidth. This way the carriers, who have a vested interest in killing VOIP, win! Another example from a recent wired article :

a carrier like AT&T might launch its own internet video service and then conspire to hurt the performance of competitors, such as Google, Amazon.com and YouTube, at least where its own customers are concerned

Unfortunately today, the big carriers have a much bigger lobby in Washington. The proponents of net neutrality are comparatively smaller players. Some bigger players include eBay, Google, etc. What these companies are afraid of is the higher control they will have to give to the carriers in terms of the traffic their users request for. Community sites will suffer more if net neutrality goes away.

Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig has been involved in this fight for net neutrality. He gave a good presentation recently at my company about this. He gave a good example about how free and open networks have fostered innovation. Examples given were road networks, electricity network. These are pretty much democratic networks and have fostered major innovations and flourished because of the model. The phone networks were pretty much stuck in a rut for decades till government forced deregulation.

Will be following up on this topic to see where it goes. Given the US is the thought and technology leader in this space, this issue is crucial as this model will most likely be replicated worldwide.

 

A good article in Business Week on the best innovators in the world today. This list includes all types of innovations from 'product' innovators such as Apple and Google, to 'process' innovators like Dell and Infosys and Walmart, to 'experience' innovators Vrigin Atlantic and like Starbucks - $3.00 experience of drinking a $0.50 coffee! Its a good glimpse of innovators around the world to see where and how the big ideas come from. The entire innovation special is worth a read and a look.