And it seems clear to me that there is no better robotic brain on the market than an iphone or iPod touch!

The most popular robotic kit is the Lego Mindstorm NXT and iPhone should replace the brick used in the Mindstorm kit.

The iPhone/iPod 3.0 has everything a robotic brain should have and then some! It has WiFi, blue tooth, peer to peer connection, a robust gps, and the ability to control other peripherals. In fact, one can even use the audio to transmit data and decode it on the receiving end using applications like iData.

I can totally see an application that recreates and improves the capability of the Mindstorm NXT on iPhone and makes possible a community that develops very functional and notable robots.

I’ll be the first one to buy it!

The iPhone developer kit has been downloaded 800,000 times; I am sure one of them is listning!

]]> http://www.bizorigin.com/2009/iphone-30-as-a-replacement-for-mindstorm-nxt-robot-brain/feed http://www.bizorigin.com/2009/when-life-gives-you-lemons-the-business-version http://www.bizorigin.com/2009/when-life-gives-you-lemons-the-business-version#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:01:10 +0000 Sunny Kalara http://www.bizorigin.com/2009/when-life-gives-you-lemons-the-business-version When life gives me lemons, I make lemonade, lemon meringue pie, lemon rosemary chicken while I am sipping tequila with lemon.

But what if life gave me lemons as the main resource for my business? I need to come up with a business plan using the lemons!

Here are a few ideas:

• Start a lemonade stand! Call it Citrus-elixir and see if PinkBerry or Starbucks would acquire you.
• make lemon confectionary (lemon drops, lemon pie, lemon bars…)
• get the juice out, paint the skins gold and sell it on eBay
  (Bonus if you can make the peels look like virgin Mary)
• Shave the lemon zest and sell it as potpourri
• Plant the seeds and wait - in 30 years you will have a lemon orchard
• Sell the lemons as a spare battery for a digital clock; work with big three auto makers to see if lemon batteries can be used to power electric cars.

• Sell lemons as a miracle product to clean metalllic surfaces
• Sell it as a all purpose cleaning product for kitchen - clean your cutting board, counter tops, microwave, garbage disposal.. it really works.
• Sell it as a natural highlighter for hair
• Sell it as miracle anti-aging product
• package the juice and sell it as “invisible ink”
• Make invisible ink printer and sell overpriced ink cartridge

• Sell it to all the banks as a replacement for little moist-pads that they have to help the teller count money
• Create a recipe for lemonade and sell the recipe as a digital download
• write a book on 200 uses of lemons and sell it on Amazon
• figure out a way to use lemons as bio fuel; ask congress for reaserch money or bailout money
• Use it as a collateral and get a loan to start another business (OK, this would have worked in 2007, but not so much in 2009)
• Buy forward contracts for lemon delivery in 2010 and manipulate price of the lemons to strike it rich

But my favorite business idea for using lemons is: put ads on the lemon skins to monetize it. If you can’t find sponsors, just put google adsense on it.

]]> http://www.bizorigin.com/2009/when-life-gives-you-lemons-the-business-version/feed http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/have-a-wonderful-holiday-season-and-a-very-strategic-new-year http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/have-a-wonderful-holiday-season-and-a-very-strategic-new-year#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:21:03 +0000 Sunny Kalara http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/have-a-wonderful-holiday-season-and-a-very-strategic-new-year

We wish you a wonderful holiday season and a very strategic new year!

]]> http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/have-a-wonderful-holiday-season-and-a-very-strategic-new-year/feed http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/the-google-adwords-the-reality http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/the-google-adwords-the-reality#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:48:35 +0000 Sunny Kalara http://www.bizorigin.com/2008/the-google-adwords-the-reality

Yes, this is the reality of the online marketing; been there, done that!

Even now, it is so common to find big holes in the calculations people do in their business models - grossly underestimating the cost of marketing, especially online adwords marketing.

Just a few weeks ago, I saw a presentation where the company was selling a widget for $99 and they had allocated $12/unit as adwords cost. In the first month, their actual cost was $44/unit and in the second month it was $34/unit (and I am not convinced that the reduction in the second month was because of better targeting or better conversion primarily attributable to adwords program).

Another misconception that I have seen way too often, is the belief that somehow the cost of adwords marketing is related to the cost of what you are selling.

The argument goes like this “I see people are selling widgets for $10 on adwords; I know it costs $5 to make it, so they couldn’t possibly be spending more than $5.00 to acquire a customer!”

Unfortunately, this is not correct. In many cases, the vendor who is selling $10 widget might be spending $12 to $15 for adwords and hoping that a person buying $10 widget will buy something else from them or will become a returning customer and the over all cost of the adword expense will be low.

So unless you have a matching offering and have ways to convince a customer to buy additional things or have the customer return for something else, you can’t win the adwords game.

The only way to correctly gauge the adwords cost is to gather conversion data and look at real time bids for the keywords and base your calculation on 2nd and 3rd highest bids placed. Why 2nd or 3rd bids and not the top one? Because invariably I have found people over spending just so that they can stay on top. Typically this happens when there is a disconnect between the part of the organization selling the product and the part of the organization marking the product.

Adwords and other online marketing can be excellent and very cost effective tools, you just need to understand what is the true “cost” and how you measure “effectiveness”.

Source of the picture.

Jason Calacanis has heard and reviewed hundreds of startup and has excellent advice for all of us on how to demo your startup.

1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds.
2. The best products take less than five minutes to demo
3. Leave people wanting more.
4. Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do.
5. Understand your competitive landscape–current and historical.
6. Short answers are best.
7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death.
8. How to use this new device called the phone.
9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15
minutes early.

This is a great list for “how to demo” your startup. May not be a perfect list for how to present your company for fund raising. “Show me what you got” is not the same as “why should we help you?”

Especially item number 4, “talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do”. If you are a startup, there are more of “things to be done”, compared to what you have done. A showing of a clear path as to where do you plan to take the the things you have done is equally important.

The item one, “Show your product within the first 60 seconds” works only when your audience is well versed in your space. I try to take the first 30-45 seconds to connect with the audience, you don’t have to connect to them by showing the size of the market, or by showing your market share, but you need to take them to a level where they can follow your plans.

You typically have one to fifteen minutes to tell your story. No matter how hard you try you will NOT be able to bring out all the important things; so you need to focus on thing that are going to be important to your targeted audience. In this case, Jason wants to see a demo, sort of like an end user. Show him the demo, talk about what you have done and what your product can do. If you are giving a presentation to a potential investor, they want to know “how would you sell this” and you got to focus on that.

Previously, we have written about Kiva, the P2P micro finance system that is all the rage now.

The prosper.com system works like a reverse auction. A borrower posts a listing for the amount that they’re interested in borrowing, the time that they need the money for, and the maximum interest rate that they are willing to pay.

Lenders bid the amount that they’re willing to lend along with the interest rate. At the end of the auction the lowest bids are accepted and combined into a single loan.

The point to note is that the lender is not really lending the money. The borrower is actually getting the loan from prosper.com. In turn Prosper is selling the loanto the lender.

The prosper.com site charges only when funding is closed. Fees for the borrower range from 1% to 3% of the loan (or $25, whichever is greater) depending upon the riskiness of the loan. On the lender’s side, there is a 0% to 1% loan origination fee depending upon the credit worthiness of the borrower.

While the trend of micro-financing is pretty small for now, in time the banks will wake up and start to notice. Banks have long enjoyed having captive clients to whom they have extended personal loans, lines of credit and a host of other financial services. They’re not going to be happy to see novice lenders cut into their main business.

Lenders on the prosper.com site are even allowed to set up their own loan portfolios depending upon the amount of risk they are willing to take, with loans ranging from Conservative (estimated return of 7%) to the highly aggressive loan (which nets 10%). All of a sudden individual investors are beginning to look like institutions where they’re able to decide whether they want to be Wellsfargo or Washington Mutual.

Next time a person tells me that I don’t need a digital camera with more than 6-10 mega pixel resolution, I am going to hit him/her on the head with the sharp corner of my camera (my potential targets here, here and all over).

People who say that you don’t need more than 6 Mega pixel resolution in your camera are the same people who proclaimed “64K computer memory should be enough for anybody”.

These myopic folks miss the basic point of why one takes pictures. One does not take pictures to print out 3×4 prints from the local drug store; one takes pictures to preserve the memory, capture the moment for ever.

When people are running away from their burning house, what do they grab first? their old pictures! It is one of the most precious possession in people’s lives. Why would you want the most precious thing in your life to be of a mediocre quality?

When I click the shutter on my camera, I want to capture at least what my eyes can see. Apparently, if you converted the resolution of what an eye can perceive in to mega pixel, it turns out that an eye can see at 576 Mega pixel. So, I want my camera to be at least 576MP camera; is that too much to ask?

When I look out, I see in stereo; with full depth - is it too much to expect that my camera does the same?

I want to take pictures for the unknown technology that will be available to me in 20 years, not for the 3×4 print that can be printed now! Even today, there are methods that can take a regular print and create a 3D scene out of it. God know where this technology will be in 20 years. And when that technology is available, do I want a digital picture taken at resolution of 5MP or 500MP?

Even the displays are getting bolder and sharper. In 20 years, there may be life like displays, and on that display, would you like to use a picture taken with 5MP or 500MP resolution? When you recreate that precious moment in holographic 3D, which image do you think will show the details?

The main mistake these so called “experts” make, is that they believe that the only thing that can and will be done with a digital image, is to print it! A digital image is nothing but a piece of digital data; you can do a lot with it and when you are manipulating data, it is better to have as much original data as possible! It is not about being able to crop the image, it is about preserving most available data for future technology and processing advances.

If I can’t afford to buy 576MP camera or I can’t handle a multi lens camera, that is a different story; just don’t patronize me and tell me that I don’t need anything beyond 6MP camera.

Here is an example of a gigpixel image; see how much you can capture.

You can also visit the gogapxl image gallery.

<Rant complete> We now return you to our regularly scheduled program.

Qloud’s application embedded in social networks such as Friendster and Facebook, allows users to download unlimited amounts of free music.  Furthermore, members can discover and share music with each other. Qloud has been funded by Steve Case and several well-known music industry veterans.

Buzznet is a multimedia social network where users generate content around their favorite singers and bands.  In the social network, members, photos and videos get "buzzed" (rated) and rise up the popularity charts. The site gets about 4 million visitors a month and carries content submitted by a million users.

Qloud’s MyMusic application on Facebook has 1.8 million users. The offerings of the two sites are clearly complementary ,and cater to the teen and twenty-something demographic.

Buzznet is rumored to be raising a further $25 million in funding, according to PaidContent, on top of the $6 million in Series B raised last year.

Constant contact is a provider of direct marketing e-mail software. We were a bit surprised when the company filed for its IPO in July of last year. The very first day the company’s stock rose to over $30 a share, well above the initial pricing of $16 per share, putting its market cap at $200 million with 67 million shares sold. This was one of the hot tech IPOs to watch in 2007. Since then the stock has fallen to $14 per share.

Recently Constant Contact registered to sell 4.2 million shares from current stockholders.  Ironically, the stock is being sold to pay the expenses for the offering! 658,620 additional shares are expected to be floated this time around. It appears that insiders are selling after the expiration of the lock-up period.

So what happened to Constant Contact? Back in February of this year Kris Tuttle of Seeking Alpha had predicted that  after the end of the lockup period, prices would come down to a more realistic $10 to $12 per share. Some of the reasons he had were:

1.The  earning expectations for the company are much higher than would be expected of a SAAS company.

2. Customer acquisition costs are pretty high.

3. The e-mail marketing game is very crowded an expectation of 40 month customer lifetime is not realistic

4. The expectation of return on invested capital is low.

Looks like that prediction was on the money!

Bill Gates is down at number three, giving up the number one spot to his good buddy Warren Buffett , at $62 billion - with a 6x surge in net worth since last year, thanks to flying shares of Berkshire Hathaway. The number two spot now belongs to Carlos Slim Helu of the Mexican wireless telephone company, America Movil.

Interestingly, the Ambani family of the Indian company the Reliance group might have come in first on the richest list with a combined worth of $85 billion, except that the warring Ambani brothers Mukesh and Anil split up their fortune and showed up in fifth and sixth positions respectively, with individual net worths of $43B and $42B.

And how about the youngest self made billionaire? Yes, you guessed it - it is 23 year old Facebook genius Mark Zukerberg who is worth $1.5 billion. Of course this number is based upon Microsoft paying $240 million last October for  a 1.6% stake in the company, which pegged Facebook’s value at a whopping 15 billion. Not many believe this huge valuation, and the story going around is that Microsoft paid up not necessarily because it believes that the company is worth as much, but more to keep out those who might be thinking about taking over all of Facebook!

While on unnamed suitors for Facebook, Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin made the top of the Forbes thirtysomething list with $19 billion apiece.

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