Personal Time-Off

Over the last few weeks, I have been missing in action because of some personal issues needing my undivided attention. I am back now...so expect a post in the next couple of days. I am working on several topics and will post them as I finish my research and writing. Read more!

Bruce Judson’s Go It Alone! – you can go it alone.

Bruce Judson’s Go It Alone (http://www.brucejudson.com/) is a good book for budding entrepreneurs. It is a bibliography of management books and true to his academic stature, Bruce has assembled a synopsis of their wisdom in an easy to read format.

I purchased the book upon a recommendation from GigaOM – “F|R Crib Sheet: 7 More Sites to Cut Your Startup Costs” (http://gigaom.com/2008/08/09/fr-crib-sheet-7-more-sites-to-cut-your-startup-costs/). The article mentions the book under the sub-title “Free Apps for Everything!”, implying that the book talks about free apps and low-cost services for entrepreneurs.

Conceptually, the book is right on. More low-cost and free resources are available to entrepreneurs than anytime in the past. The advent of web-based services has made it easy for moon-lighting and full-time entrepreneurs to “Go It Alone.” Some points in the book are very apt –

• Focus on the important: Speed is important for entrepreneurs so focus on important core activities by outsourcing the rest.
• Free and low-cost outsourced services: Plenty of free and low-cost outsourced services are available in the market that provides most of the required functionality. Not perfect, but sufficient enough.
• The 60% rule: test market your product features when they are 60% ready. As Bruce puts it “Great is the enemy of good”.

While “Go It Alone” lists a number of case studies, it does omit practical processes, worksheets and templates. Therefore, I have decided to write a series of blogs covering the steps for identifying essential outsourced services, processes & procedures to manage them and benchmark them for the benefit of entrepreneurs. If you know of or would like to recommend services, please feel free to email me and/or post your comments.

Ram. Read more!

Invitation to write for eSamvad

I was recently asked by the founder of eSamvad to write for their new blog. I have known the founder, Subhash Palsule, for a long time. He has a sense for how technology and society come together. Subhash is a serial entreprenuer and this is his latest endeavor.

eSamvad is setup to include many writers projecting different perspectives from politics to society to technology. I expect eSamvad to grow exponentially and become a popular blog.

Please visit eSamvad at http://www.esamvad.com and my post at http://www.esamvad.com/2008/09/from-indian-classical-to-superpower-india/

Post your comments eSamvad and here. Let me know if there are topics you like to read.

Ram. Read more!

Best Buy - but for who?

I am amazed at the number of pricing gaffes that companies make. I was researching some voice plans and found this on a website. See the picture below and decide for yourself.



From the looks of it all plans above the Lite 1000 are exactly same. The pricing is number of included minutes times 4.5c plus the basic package price of $9.95. From the looks it seems the "Best Buy" is a best buy for the seller.

While I do not think this is purposeful mis-leading, it sure does not speak about being customer oriented either.

Ram. Read more!

Chocking the Web 3.0 before it is born

Not sure how many of you are aware if a recent an impending 250 GB bandwidth cap by Comcast starting Oct 1 (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-250GB-Cap-Goes-Live-October-1-97294 and http://gigaom.com/2008/08/28/comcast-makes-metered-broadband-official-beware-what-you-download/.) Time Warner is already testing one in Texas with tiered limits as well.

Of course, ISPs are going to want to charge by the GB - it is their scalable revenue model; And why should the ol’granpa pay more or work at a slower speed to check his email once a week.

However, I can see a war erupting between service providers claiming their application is “less bandwidth hungry” or “better HD for the same low-bandwidth”. It is especially going to hit advertisers as now, users will want to only view low-bandwidth ads and will start complaining if a paid service starts to hog their networks with ads and unnecessary information.

In all this, I don’t think there would be any backlash. Possibly, the limits are aimed at very (I mean extremely) heavy users. The kind that would want to constantly download and upload something or the other.

Your comments and thoughts are welcome.

Ram.
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Millions of blogs – one alone matters

Ajita Pattanaik and I worked together in India in the early 90s and then went our ways. He emigrated to the US in 1994 and I in 1996. During this time, Ajita started a software company (www.abvtech.com) and I…well you know me. Neither of us knew where or how to reach the other.

That is until yesterday. Out of the blue, Ajita called me. He had found me thru my blog and my Linked In profile. Because I have been diligently writing blogs for over two years, commenting on other blogs and have been active on LinkedIn, my name pops to the top on Google, Yahoo and Cuil. While this may seem coincidental, it has been a lot of hard work and patience. “Ram Iyer” is a fairly common name in India. There are pages and pages of “Ram Iyer”s on any of the search engine results. So it is quite an honor to be among the top. It took me two years - I asked a lot of people for help, read a number of books on networking, personal development and marketing (among them David Meerman Scotts's The New Rules of Marketing and PR) and discovered techniques from other bloggers.

I intend to publish these tips and tricks on this blog – so keep following. Additionally, I intend to start a mailing list soon. If you are interested, leave me a comment.

Ram. Read more!

And now Web 3.0

I saw this post - Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center - today on TechCrunch, written by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. While I have a lot of respect for Marc for what he has done with Salesforce.com being a pioneer, I am a little averse to people just throwing in new terminology without clear definitions.

I am pointing out because my last post was about Web 2.0. Little did I realize that Web 3.0 was already here. However, I do think technology is moving toward Marc's Web 3.0. Applications are already getting sophisticated and useful in the real-sense. We are moving from Web apps primarily for entertainment to Web apps for user applications. Two types of companies will be successful in the Web 3.0 world - one, companies that have (or are planning to) cloud infrastructure and two, companies that build and offer commercial web apps.

These are truly exciting times...

Ram. Read more!