Highlightings

Why implementing your system using Open standards is more important

2012-07-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

So you are developing your next generation web /mobile application for your business and you see a popular service offering the required cloud infrastructure for you to use. It seems easy now since you can use their APIs to deploy and run your application with ease.

Even though they follow a proprietary standard and is not compatible with others, it is very cheap and it is better than developing those services inhouse.

But hold on. Should you just go with them or find another provider that provides an implementation based on an open standard ?

Even though you are not anticitpating it now, the fact is that you are only starting out and you will be investing much more in your product in the future. So is better to go for an open implementation based on open standards.

There is strong possibility that your provider could be out of business in the near future. They could also be taken over by another company and their services shut down later.

Once your technology is developed on the host ecosystem that is closed (proprietory), you have no option but to stick with the provider for a long time. Later migrating to another provider will prove to be a nightmare as the interfaces will not be compatible and you may have to redesign your entire layers. There is also the scary possibility of service disruption if you decide to migrate later.

Pricing - To hide or not to hide

2012-07-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to approach pricing.

One way is to put the price and any related information publicly available.

The second way is to hide the pricing and provide custom pricing for each customer.

Both of the above approaches related to pricing a product has its own positives and negatives. The advantage of publicly displaying the price is that it requires less effort in negotiation. More people are willing to deal with you when you are transparent in your dealings.

But custom plans and per customer pricing has the advantage that you can offer a higher price to a customer who is capable of paying more. This can improve your margin. And also provide you with an option to provide deeper discounts to your favorite customers.

But the drawback is that it affects your reputation if one customer comes to know that you are charging way less for the same service for another customer.

In short, it is not only what you charge for your product matters but also how you charge for your product .

So before you even consider selling your product, make sure you have decided on how to price your product.

Cold calling during modern times

2012-07-25T09:54:00.001-07:00

Cold calling is a very effective marketing tactic because it is fast, costs very little and so is very efficient.

With respect to a business to business (B2B) calls, cold calling is even better strategy than most other sales / marketing technique. Most countries allow cold calling other businesses and there are very less regulation to prevent this. Also, most business owners would already be familiar with this tactic as they themselves might already be doing cold calling.

You should consider cold calling as more of a sales technique than a marketing technique. You need to keep track of how much resources are spent on cold calling and keep track of the revenue it is bringing.

The best part about cold calling is that you will get early feedback about your product. The reaction from the other end will provide you early indication of your product's success. You can pivot earlier from this feedback thereby reducing losses.

With little planning you can make the calls to be more rewarding and less painful.

First, understand whom you are calling. Make sure that he has the power to make any sales decision.
Create a rough outline of what you will be talking about. If possible, prepare the script well in advance and practice the talk. Don't worry even if you deviate from the script initially.
You should sound confident and friendly. Don't just read from the script from the paper but let it sound natural.
Record and listen to what you are speaking before hand. This way you can adjust your tone and speed when calling the customer. Practise till you think your calling is perfect.

If you have a great product, now is the right time to start calling potential customers and let them know your existence. With the right message, you can not only spread the word, but also make some sales.

Google Targeted Ads - An extreme case of Ad targeting

2012-07-10T09:13:00.001-07:00

There is much controversies going around regarding Google's targeted ads, specially their interest based advertising.

No wonder we saw this on an Income tax calculator website (screenshot below)

Note - You may not see the exact ads we captured in the screenshot above. Google ads are dynamic and changes from time to time and from person to person.

As per this Adsense help site, if you are a sports enthusiast, you might frequently see sports related advertisements on all websites you visit.

No wonder we saw all web server related advertisements on a Tax calculator website.

The three possible Actors for an adsense site are the "Advertisers", "Publishers"and "Viewers"

The question "Is it good for the viewers ?" has an obvious answer - NO.

So the two open questions are -

Is it good for the publishers ?
Is it good for the advertisers ?

Free and Opensource Project Management software for your business

2012-07-10T08:54:00.002-07:00

Once your business grows and crosses a certain stage, you will require a proper tool for managing your projects. The growth may be in terms of company size or number of projects.

A proper tool will help in better tracking a project timeline and at the same time enable you to better use your resources. You can know where you are lagging and what issues are pending.

When looking for project management tools, choose something that is suitable for your company workflow. There are various options available in both commercial and free software worlds. It will surely take quiet a lot of time for you to figure out what is best suited for your business.

Two such project management tools are Teambox and Trello. Both are free to use with some limitation on the number of users for the free account.

Let us start with Teambox. Teambox has both hosted and self hosted option and it is opensource. That means, you get the source code for the software for you to host it inhouse or you can choose to use their online system.

Trello on the other hand currently has only hosted solution. That means, you have to use the service directly from Trello.

Both are free to use and provides a sticky notes kind of interface and that is the best part. You can give them both a try before you proceed with your options.

When you compare trello vs teambox, you may find that both are good in many respects. While Trello is simpler to use and has less learning cure, Teambox has more features but requires more time to learn. At the end Teambox also provides you the option to self host making it better.

How to Motivate Workers working away from office

2012-06-30T07:48:00.001-07:00

Developments in technology now enable many people to work from home or in a dispersed team. In addition, flatter organizational structures mean that even larger organizations have local offices employing just a few people. These arrangements bring benefits, such as flexible working hours, but there are serious implications for motivation.

Working away from the office

For many employees, not working in an office is a dream. For the employer it can mean lower office costs and also better productivity, as staff don't have to spend time commuting to work.

However, the reality can be less appealing. If you work from home, you can feel isolated, making it hard to stay motivated. Individuals miss the buzz of the office, the companionship of colleagues, and the sparking of ideas when they meet other people. In an office, for example, when something goes wrong, you can turn to a colleague who will help you put the problem in perspective.

Recruiting the right candidate

If a job role will be dispersed or home-based, you should look for certain characteristics at the recruitment stage. If someone lacks self-discipline, cannot manage their time well, or appears to need close supervision, they are unlikely to be suitable. You will need to instill loyalty to ensure they are motivated and focused on the goals to be achieved. At the interview, ensure the candidate is prepared for the working environment. At home this means having room for equipment and a quiet environment. For a dispersed team member, it is the lack of direct supervision and support.

Keeping home workers motivated

A crucial aspect of motivating home workers is to take proactive steps to ensure they have everything they need to work effectively. Agree on targets and time scales and monitor them regularly to check that they are on track. Organize regular visits to the main office, such as monthly team meetings, and arrange one-to-one meetings to catch up on progress and to spot any problems before they become too serious. Make sure home- and locally based workers are kept up to date with any new developments, and remain in regular contact - not just by e-mail.

Exercise trust

Trust your home workers or dispersed teams. While you need to know the work is being done, you won't motivate people by checking up on them all the time.

Providing support

To keep your dispersed workers motivated, make sure they feel connected to and supported by the organization as a whole. Arrange a thorough induction at your main office and ensure your home workers meet the people they will be e-mailing and speaking to on the phone. You may also need to arrange briefing sessions on working from home. It is particularly important to ensure dispersed teams have all the equipment they need to work effectively. It may be tempting to provide more senior people in head office with the most reliable and expensive IT equipment, but for remote team members, any breakdown is likely to be highly frustrating and time consuming. A comfortable working environment is just as important when working from home or in a small local office.

Depending on the structure, encourage people working near each other to meet up to discuss work. Include home workers and locally based teams in social activities if possible. Look and listen for any signs of stress. Set out precise procedures on who to contact if things go wrong. Make sure "out of sight" is not "out of mind".

A CDN is not just about Latency - Why it is always better use a CDN.

2012-06-28T09:43:00.001-07:00

CDN or content delivery networks are now everywhere. Every second site that you visit are fully or partially served by a CDN.

But why do you need a CDN ?
The major use of CDN is to reduce latency. A regionally diverse CDN can serve pages from a location nearer to the user thereby reducing the latency.

So you think you don't need a CDN because you are not serving VOIP and do not require such a low latency ?

The answer is No.

Latency is just one of the factors for using a CDN over a single datacenter.

CDN also reduces your overall running cost. Specially for sites that are very large in size with a large number of visitors (in the millions), CDNs reduces the overall cost of maintainance.

Because, with the current day technology, it is extremely costly to serve high data rates from a single location. The locations may not have sufficient technology and know how for serving such a huge bandwidth. Setting up such an infrastructure requires expertise that is difficult to find and costly.

With a distributed CDN, the traffic is divided accross different nodes, each location now needs to serve only a reduced number of users. This reduces the complexity of infrastructure that is required at each location.

Also a CDN allows you to easily add extra nodes to the network. Specially when the traffic spikes, you could add another CDN at a different location and this enables you to cater to the new increased traffic easily. But if you were using a single datacenter, then it usually would mean getting expensive cables and huge setup fees that would mean long term contracts.

Business blog and an overlooked factor

2012-06-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Its so easy nowadays to setup a blog that more and more businesses are now jumping on the business blog bandwagon.

Here is a most commonly overlooked issue related to business blogs.

You are on a company website at http://somecompany.com and they have a blog at http://blog.somecompany.com. The blog is yet another blog created using the wordpress software.

You are reading their blog and you are you are impressed and want to buy their product. So you click the home button on the blog expecting to be taken to the main somecompany website. But then, it takes you to the blog's home page instead of the company homepage.

So now you have to manually type the address in the bar. Its really silly why a business can't take care of such simple things.

It not only is an irritant to your visitors, it is also a potential loss to you since you could very well end up losing a customer who otherwise would have visited your main page to make a purchase.

It is easy to change it in the wordpress theme. Just do it before you start losing more customers.

News paper and its monopolies - News and Ad monopoly

2012-06-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

If you are wondering, News papers were a monopoly in not just news delivery, but also in advertisement delivery for a long time. Yes, the televisions eroded this to some extend, but still the news papers retained their monopoly status in both.

There is a great article from GigaOm regarding News papers losing their monopoly in both advertisements and News. The culprit - Online advertisements and New generation media.

We will be writing more about the new generation media later and its unknown impact. So stay tuned.

Coming up with a fresh and creative business / product idea

2012-06-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

A good product is a must for any business's success. Coming up with new product idea is tough and any one who was involved in a business startup will tell you that its not a child's play. But there is an easy way that can reduce your burden and help you come up with that great product idea. And we are going to explain that in this article.

If you spend a large amount of time reading various online forums or blogs, you would have observed that the same set of questions get asked numerous times.

How can I solve the xyz issue ? or
How can I make this huge hurdle less painful ?

Obviously, there might be many solutions / answers to these problems / questions. But if you look carefully (just apply a bit of creativity) and you will find the pattern.

There is a problem to be solved or a question that needs an answer. More importantly, there is someone waiting for an answer or solution.

And there is your business idea.

Highlighting your business online, one step a time

2012-06-16T08:34:00.001-07:00

This blog is mostly about Highlighting your business in the online world. We will outline various methods that can get your people talking about you and help create the buzz required to spread your business.

Let us start the process, one step a time.