INSPIONS - Murali's Thought Garage

Curated Audience As ‘Everyone’ is clueless

Sunny — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:00:18 +0000

Targeting a specific group of audience for any kind of product is not new mantra. But when Seth Godin talks about it, he hits the nail right on the head so that everybody gets it. Here is an excerpt that exemplifies it:

The problem with “everyone” is that in order to reach everyone or teach everyone or sell to everyone, you need to so water down what you’ve got you end up with almost nothing.

Everyone doesn’t go to the chiropractor, everyone doesn’t give to charity, everyone has never been to Starbucks. Everyone, in fact, lives a decade behind the times and needs hundreds of impressions and lots of direct experience before they realize something is going on.

You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone.

Someone who cares about what you do. Someone who will make a contribution that matters. Someone who will spread the word.

As soon as you start focusing on finding the right someone, things get better, fast. That’s because you can ignore everyone and settle in and focus on the people you actually want.

via Seth’s Blog: Everyone is clueless.

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How To Choose A Database For Your Next Application ?

Sunny — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:38:08 +0000

Well, it depends.

Want to know what options are available and how to choose one for your own application, read this wonderful article by James Hamilton. Though this article does not include all possible options (particularly those on the cloud), but its a nice introduction to classify databases based on what you need.

Relational databases have become so ubiquitous that the term “database” is often treated as synonymous with relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, or DB2. However, the term preceded the invention and implementation of the relational model and non-relational data stores remain important today.

Relational databases are incredibly rich and able to support a very broad class of applications but with incredible breadth comes significant complexity. Many applications don’t need the rich programming model of relational systems and some applications are better serviced by lighter-weight, easier-to-administer, and easier-to-scale solutions. Both relational and non-relational structured storage systems are important and no single solution is appropriate for all applications.

Source: One Size Does Not Fit All by James Hamilton (b:Perspectives)

Good to know. But before you start researching for a perfect Database for your App ..

Keep this great suggestion from 37signals in mind. I am big fan of “Getting Real”. The team behind “Getting Real” @ 37Signals suggest that you don’t worry too much about Scalability aspects early in the design of your application, as you will have lots of time later on to figure out.

In the beginning, make building a solid core product your priority instead of obsessing over scalability and server farms.Create a great app and then worry about what to do once it’s wildly successful. Otherwise you may waste energy, time, and money fixating on something that never even happens.

Believe it or not, the bigger problem isn’t scaling, it’s getting to the point where you have to scale. Without the first problem you won’t have the second.

Source: Getting Real – Scale Later

WordPress 2.8.5 : XML Brackets Stripped Off When Using XMLRPC

Sunny — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:28:50 +0000

One of the best features of Wordpress is the ability to upgrade to a newer version by just clicking on a link from the dashboard. So, whenever I see a new version available, I just go ahead and upgrade to the latest version.

Just a couple of days of back I upgraded to 2.8.5. Everything went smooth, no issues what so ever. Later in the day, when I published a post from Windows Live Writer, I suddenly found that the post actually lost all HTML formatting. Didn’t know what happened. I quickly searched for any 2.8.5 problems with XMLRPC. But did not see anything other than some comments that XMLRPC has been updated to work better.

I did a full reinstall. But didn’t fix the problem. I did a full installation of latest Wordpress in a separate folder, but that also had this problem. I checked an old blog I hadn’t upgraded in a while, but I found that also had this issue.

I was quite baffled. Before I did the upgrade everything was working fine. I published a post on 30th of October 2009 from WLW. No issues. And now I find issues not only in this upgraded blog, but all blogs on my host. Not sure how did that happen.

Anyways, today while searching on the internet, I found a solution. Thanks a ton to Joseph Scott. It appears it has something to do with libxml version on my host. Didn’t understand how my wordpress installation worked all the while until 2.8.5 with the same libxml version but failed after the upgrade.

Link to the wordpress Plugin Libxml2 Fix:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/libxml2-fix/

Anyway, I installed the plugin and still didn’t work. Later I found on the plugin developer’s blog a comment by another user on how to check for libxml version on the host and update the plugin code accordingly to use it.

Original blog post where I found the comment talking about updating the plugin to a different version :

http://josephscott.org/code/wordpress/plugin-libxml2-fix/

I just checked it on my host SiteGroud and found that it got 2.6.3 and I updated the plugin file to include this version as well. Now all works fine.

Thanks a bunch.

“FREE : The Future Of A Radical Price” Audio Book Is Available For FREE!

Sunny — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:48:29 +0000

The Audio version of “FREE : The Future Of A Radical Price” by Chris Anderson is available for download from Audible or through iTunes for, what else, absolutely FREE.

Menu Engineering : How To Fix Price For Your Product

Sunny — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:36:58 +0000

Very interesting. More I think about these strategies outlined in this post, the more I could relate to various shopping experiences. Now I know, how products are priced, it is difficult to resist the temptation to see beyond the price tag (:-))

Just as most of us must rely on relative pitch to discriminate amongst various tones, so too must the vast majority of consumers rely on relative price cues in order to determine what they’re willing to pay. What this means, according to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, is that the price of everything is “up in the air.” That’s where menu engineering comes in.

Source: What We Can Learn About Pricing From Menu Engineers