Leveraging multimedia to reach out

[Update: This post does seem ironic in retrospect!]

I wanted to scribble a few lines on Social CRM. My research begins at alter of the almighty Wikipedia. Here’s my search for Social CRM. What? No page exists?! Let’s try CRM 2.0, shall we? Nada. But Wikipedia suggests ever so thoughtfully ‘Did you mean: CMR 2.0’. Unfortunately this time around I didn’t.

Strategy #2: YouTube. Much better! I got 63 results. Interesting and relevant too.

Now this post is not about how I seized the opportunity and created and a wiki page and neither is it a conspiracy to bash Wikipedia. Rather it’s about the growing trend to ‘multimediaize’, if I may use the term. Inevitable I’d say: Encyclopaedia Britannica vs. Animal Planet? For that matter books vs. TV? Let’s extend that one more time TV vs. Internet? Bandwidth prices are tumbling and the ‘other’ screen is catching up too - most newer handsets are capable of streaming YouTube or iPlayer. Podcasts anyone?

And in the enterprise space, companies should start taking notice: in the 3-4 minute time a visitor (a potential customer maybe?) is searching for information it’s a no brainer that you need (not) throw 10 pages! There are however obvious reasons to keep text, but I believe companies are still not leveraging multimedia. YouTube, Dailymotion or even your own website, but please start using multimedia to reach out (Product Offerings, Case Studies etc etc). Reaching out increases mind share increases knowledge increases consumption.

Case in point: Paul Greenberg & Brent Leary’s CRM Playaz discussion actually became Paul’s top rated post. It’s an audio with supporting text. Though I have to admit content still drives a fair amount of (listeners) readers.

Honestly if the Vatican has started taking notice of YouTube, then so should enterprises.

Reduced mobile sales in 2009

Reuters has recently put out a note that sale of mobile devices would be reduced in 2009. I see it that the market would still grow, but with reduced momentum. In fact Nokia had a press release warning investors to expect reduced growth for the company. And it has nothing to do with all the job cuts, nothing whatsoever.

Motorola is one of the worst hit (for quite a while too!) and the India head honchos have already started looking for greener pastures (especially in the booming construction market :) .

The Reuters poll (yea the note from the poll) states that the customer spending is reducing. On average, the poll of 36 analysts shows global market volumes shrinking 6.6 percent next year and 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter -- traditionally the strongest period for the industry due to holiday sales. Read more about it here.

Quick update: Gartner has also said the same thing apparently. Their reasons? Stockpiling of unwanted phones, people not getting what they want! Totally agree.

Nokia goes the Linux way with Maemo - Cool specs, but another OS?!

It's now official folks - Symbian and the S60 platform are soon to be defunct. (I may be reading too much into this; but if not today, tomorrow for sure.)

Nokia has just announced the Maemo 5 SDK. Slated for the Nokia Internet Tablets the OS is 100% opensource (well so was Android till they circulated newer SDKs to the elite. Disclosed later, but that's another story) and will feature a revamped UI called 'Midas'.

Some of the new features include (although I don't quite get the data connectivity part, WiFi?):

• OMAP3 support.
• Cellular data connectivity.
• High definition camera support.
• hardware-based graphics acceleration.

Nokia warns that the release is pre-alpha (that's a new one. pre-beta = alpha? So pre-alpha = zeta :) and is not at all suitable for development. More of a heads-up fashionable entrance. Impressive specs, yes you've got our attention. I forgot the best part... it's Linux!

I was curious to find if Android had moved into Nokia territory and came across this. Check out the video of Andriod on an N810 Internet Tablet. Also came across this interesting quote by Ukko Lappalainen, Vice President of Nokia's markets units “In the longer perspective, Linux will become a serious alternative for our high-end phones,” I can't agree more, but wait “I don’t see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo.” What I see here is bruised ego than anything!

Geek talk: Since Maemo 5 SDK is not backward compatible, implementation on the N810 would not have been possible anyway.

Quite certain there would be very stong drivers for Linux in the future, however I'm seeing it restricted to the consumer electronics, small devices space - where there is a lesser chance for the user to muck up. In many ways Nokia is the Microsoft and Dell duo, if they pull their weights in the Maemo direction, there would be alliances being formed.

With the Linux synergy and being 100% opensource I certainly hope the Meamo and Android application are compatible. As long my system is stable all I want is functionality and not operating systems.

We certianly are living in interesting times...

Circuit City to be a lost city

Chapter 11 in the dreaded book for Circuit City. The no. 2 electronics retailer in US filed for bankruptcy on Monday. That's Fortune 499 for the moment then.

Of the 566 stores operating 155 are planned to be closed. Quoting from the CNN website, CC has said that they would "We remain committed to doing a better job of taking care of our guests, and making it easier to shop at Circuit City." So they would still be in the business temporarily. Translation: bigger better bargains in the coming few months. But i guess that is moot: will the people have enough money to buy that 53" HDTV?

Bob Dylan for the soul:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

ps: Somehow I feel the worst is yet to come :|

Blu-spec - Sony's new CD format (Floptastic!)

Aren't CDs dead? To be honest in the last 2 years the only time I used a CD was a month back to install drivers for my FSG (oh yea the Ubuntu installation last week too). I hear you say DVDs, well that's another story.

Still remember during engineering Biju had come over with a spindle of 25 blank CDs for burning MP3s :)

*Note to self: Must stop digressing*

Sony has plans to launch a new CD format - Blu-spec CD. People are still mourning over Blu-ray. Why won't Sony give it a break? Apparanetly they have perfected the art of the 'Blue laser' and wants to bring out audio CDs. Not much information is available at the moment, but the company says it will have over 50 titles ready by Christmas eve, in Japan that is.
The new way of creating CDs apparently would be extremely close to the master plate. Sure we'll have audiophiles queuing. Remember MiniDisc anyone?

My two questions to Sony:
1. What DRM plans? Now, now, you can't have anyone and everyone making copies, can you? ;)
2. Why go to such extreme length to create the "perfect" CD when my ears (pardon me, but yours too) won't distinguish any of this!

Another monumental flop for Sony I'm predicting. Bring back Blu-ray, change the pricing model, but please refrain from confusing the all too confused folks.

Financial crisis moving to Asian shores??

Today's FT has a writeup called "Japanese insurer Yamato Life collapses"

Yamato is a medium sized insurance company has filed for bankruptcy with debts of over $2bn! FT writes

"Yamato Life failed largely because of its problematic investments in securitisation products"

Well now we know US been very gracious not just in helping Asian countries with its dollars but also with its subprime risks. Not just the Japan, there were rumours and even speculation that the ICICI bank of would also buckle under. All dismissed as rumours of course by the Bank.

For a while, with the bullish run, the peanuts that I earn was invested 'strong' stocks; I even diversified and kept a little in mutual funds. Both tumbled, fell, went, vanished. Can I leave leave them in the bank? Or do I need to stash them under my pillow? Sooner than later I believe the government in India would also guarantee the investments. Fingers crossed.

Last thought: if there is no where to 'invest' why don't we just spend? Or are we concerned with saving up all for a rainy day?

Save the cheerleader, save the world :)

Mashups - An overview

This post came about after a little chat I had with my boss on a 'thought leadership' paper submission. His thought was on a way in which enterprises (say power companies) can talk to each other over the Internet. As he was explaining, here's how my mind went: "Hmm standards, eh? Services on the Internet. SOA. Hmm why not have a website where the customer can pick and choose the company and why just electricity? Water too. Let's put together a map to find out the nearest office, and comments and maybe even YouTube videos. Yes YouTube. Spiderpig was hilarious. Should download the Simpsons. Sorry what were you saying?"

So here I was wondering about mashups and I still don't have a clue what to write for the paper. Anyway thought I'd post an overview of mashups before the Kronenberg kicks in.

Lets start with examples, shall we?

Example 1
Consider the PC. We have many applications that we use everyday like Word, Firefox and Winamp. Now spare a moment on the picture below. So at the bottom we have Windows as the OS and all these apps run 'on-top'. But we can obviously use other alternatives like Abiword, IE & foobar. Double click and voila! The seamless operation is because Windows provides something called APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. Interfaces are exactly what they - application use these are well defined requests to query information such as Date/Time, access to the graphics display, or even authenticating the user. Windows recognises the request, does the necessary work and provides the information.

The steps would be something like this
* App: Hey Windows what time is it? (of course it's all in some computer language;)
* Windows: I undesrtand your request. Let me check the system clock.
* Windows: The time is 12:00 pm

Now thanks to APIs, all applications have a consistent way of working with Windows ie. even when new versions of Windows is released or even if it's an Intel or an AMD processor or even if you have an NVIDIA or an ATI.

Now lets extend the concept to the Internet.
Example 2
For this example I'm taking my all time favourite company: Goggle :) We've all come across websites (apart from Google, of course!) that have a little search box that actually uses Google to search the website. And the recent one is where there is a bigger box with a map showing locations. Check out this cool website. http://todaysstory.googlepages.com/tokyo.htm

All this is possible because Google 'publishes' APIs that websites can use. Now the important thing to note here is that these websites do not hold Google code to do the search, rather they query Google. A more geeky way to describe this would be 'the website consumes services that have been published by Google'.

Finally Mashups
All this is fine, so what are mashups? Ah well lets extend example 2 further. Consider the picture below.

Now Google is not the only company that provides services, Yahoo! for example provides a lot of financial information. Now how about if there was a website that provides financial information for say, Nike and at the same time gave you an option to buy at eBay and also shows you the nearest store. Hows that for interesting! Well folks this is what a mashup is.

Quite simple if you think about it, bring in data and services from many places put them at one accessible place. Of course you can't just bring in anything and everything: the data & services need to be capable of understand user requests or in geek speak should be 'mashable'. The concept is nothing new, but i guess the tipping point was when Google launched it's Google Maps API (2006 I'm guessing, so you see mashups are not ver new!).

Mashups thus bring with them two very important things: standardisation and more importantly innovation.

Business/Enterprise Mashups
For businesses, mashups can be essential tools to reach out to the customer. An ecosystem ahs already developed companies offering mashable content, companies offering tools to mash content and even companies that offer ideas of how to mash them together!

Now lets take a peek inside the enterprise. IT has been focused on providing infrastructure, and usually has not been able to deliver what users want! Imagine a scenario where end users can actually create applications that take consume data from various application sources and create a soluions without asking too many people. This is business intelligence, this is self service IT, this is what enterprise mashups provide.

Enterprises no longer need to spend huge efforts in building applications that span the organisation. No more suite of products. Consider Acme Inc that has it's field force automation happening on SFDC, the HR running Peoplesoft and trouble ticketing on AmdocsCRM (my favourite!). A mashup can easily drive up productivity (and also drive down costs) by linking all three together.

Standards for data and interfaces are thus very very important. Enter SOA. I'll talk about that in another post.

Well my friends I hope that provided a quick overview of mashups. Time for me to hit the sack.

Tweet-a-boo (aka The Twitter Phenomenon)

The Wired Magazine calls it "Incredibly useful" and Time calls it "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app." Damn I have to part of cutting edge useful things and it's been around for a year or two! Click here to visit Twitter. Well I've been watching Twitter for a while now, sightseeing. And this fine Sunday, thought I'll share my penny's worth.


The concept is quite simple and the site so eloquently puts it

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Long story short you build timelogs of your activities. Postings are called "Tweets" and you have a plethora of applications that help tell the world what you're upto. Check out the video explaining why you need to Tweet! Take for instance SMSs from your mobile, direct posting from the site, IM apps and dedicated desktop clients. (Digressing a little: found a really cool (free!) multi IM called Digspy. Had been using Pidgin, meebo & Trillian for a while. Will do a quick comparison later)

My first impression: doesn't Facebook already have this?

Second impression: redundant information. Too many sources of information. And in someway you following someones Tweets, doesn't it vaguely resemble subscribing to an RSS feed of a blog? Possibly ambiguous too "I got an out of office mail and his Tweet says he's working today!"

Biggest impression: do we need to be this open?? (Pause for thought) I'll give that a morbid yes. How many times have we checked out friend's videos and photos? Youtube, Flickr. I rest my case.

The experiment (if I may call it) is quite interesting. Check out how many guinea pigs we have: (Source)
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

And interestingly 40% of the traffic is from the US. Now now, I'm not drawing any conclusions here :)

So what ideas do I see (apart form the one where there'll be electrodes stuck in your brain that can directly feed Twitter)? Thought I'd list the fisrt few that popped up.

1. We're all going to be even more dependent on Internet. And that means ubiquitous... convergence of devices. "Why call him to see if he's at home? I'll just check his Tweets!". "Did he remember to pay the electricity bill? I'll just check his Tweets!"
2. A Tweet channel where you can collaborate and Tweet together. "Okay man, I'm with you. We'll wake up everyday at 5 and got jogging."
3. A service where you can plan your day and Tweet through them. "Hmm. Practice guitar at 4 for 15 mins. "
4. Distribution points for information. "Follow me to find the best deals on the Net."
5. Curiosity among PR guys & enterprises. New medium to reach out to users. Facebook is something I joined recently and it struck me as a huge marketing ground.
   

The concept is so wild that I actually think it might work! Heard recently about Dell planning to answer customers through Twitter. And then there was a bank, can't seem to recall the name. The idea was again to use Twitter to reach out. Hey if your customers are hanging out in Secondlife and you can set up shop there, why not Twitter?

I'm very sure that enterprises are confused about the phenomenon. But the concept of Twitter is so wild that I think it might just work. And I certainly do see it evolving to videos, voice, streaming stations and merging with a popular social site;)

As an after thought frankly I think the name is hilarious! What are the people called Twits? :p

PS: To hell with privacy. You can catch my activities here.... when I eat, sleep, run to catch the bus. How interesting! Hmm lets see if this is gonna work out.

Just Imagine... Life in 2020: CNN Article

Came across this very interesting read on CNN about the living in the future. To put an year across 2020. Read here.

Various topics discussed include The future of Gaming, Virtual Reality (quite cool), the future of Cities, social networking. I have to admit it's too much to read at one sitting though.

Also found an interesting one one teleportation. I'd written an article about this during my engineering. Lemme see if I can dig it up...

On Chrome, Google & the fight for the enterprise customer

Note: Had this urge to write something so I've scribbled horribly in this post (promise to clean up soon!)

And what a hype it has created! And I certainly wasn't expecting Google to come up with a new browser (with it funding Mozilla).

Chrome has been developed with the idea of being able to run pages totally independent of each other. Hmm seems familiar to the way an OS would want to run applications.

The Google ecosystem certainly isn't getting any smaller with Android scheduled. I expect a bloodbath.

Here's what I think the top 3 fights would be
1. Microsoft. Yes it involves IE, but the plot thickens... with Live Mesh, Online Office and family. Microsoft's attempt at device agnostic data.

2. Nokia. Symbian going opensource should have lit a few bulbs. And with the recent announcement expecting reduced market shares. If they embrace Chrome on Symbian it's a sure suicide. In all probability this would be Google's trojan horse into the enterprise mobility space.

3. RIM. Blackberry. If (Google, that is) they have email solutions, calendar solution, a mobile OS that integrates so well, a way to deliver content, tie up with CRM vendors (SFDC). Oh and let's not forget data centres. Sums it up for me.

Of course a lot of little fish would get eaten up. I'm not quite sure how Opera (who incidently is the inspiration to Chrome's look) fits into this whole picture. Shout and let me know your thoughts.

Another interesting thought is the impact on retail users. If everything goes online, I sure do see a lot more revenue coming in through legitimate licensing.

Indian IT Industry Trends & Challenges

A friend of mine had a few months ago asked my opinion on the trends & challenges facing the Indian IT industry. Here's my take. Guess the slides are self explanatory (too lazy i know!). Lemme know your thoughts. This is more for a formal reading;)

The Knol Edge (Or Is It?)

Yup it’s official, Google is going to take over the world. With a plethora of applications, services and rumours (the latest being the Sprint takeover!), Google has come quite way. Wikipedia introduces them as an ‘American public corporation, specializing in Internet search and online advertising.’ And we all know that the Sun revolves around the Earth! Let me put it this way where do your clicks mostly point you to? Wikipedia, Google, orkut? (Okay leave out the last one.) To put things in perspective Wikipedia received close to a couple of hundred millions visits in the last month where as Google received more than twice that! But the last time I searched for info, Google took me directly to Wikipedia.

That’s soon going to change if ‘knol’ has its way. On December 13^th, Udi Manber, a Vice President of Engineering at Google created quite a stir (check out the official Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html) when he declared that providing search results would simply not do and that Google would provide answers too. Poised as a competitor to Wikipedia by many, Google positions knol as follows “…meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read”. And their goal “… for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions”. Sounds kind of scary if you ask me!

Based on a similar collaborative wiki platform, knol would provide authors with tools to create and link articles and contents. But it differs from Wikipedia in that it emphasises the author i.e. there could be competing authors and ipso facto knols.

And Google has made its stand clear ‘Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.’ And that ‘At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads.’ This is all too well for a company that goes by the slogan ‘Don’t be Evil’. Gives me the tingles, if you catch my drift. Still in beta (invite only) stage, the best source of information still remains Wikipedia for most.

From being a number 2 (or a 3) search engine to acquisitions left and right, Google has slowly (but steadily) built an ecosystem around itself. ‘Google’ around for more info (sounds kind of ironic, if you ask me!). Now if only I can Google where my left sock is…

(just realised I blog on Google :P)