blog.dinogane.com

Kill Hollywood

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:12:00 +0000

YCombinator's Paul Graham has a great reaction to SOPA/PIPA. Here are some highlights:

The main reason we want to fund such startups [that will compete with movies and TV] is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.

Blackout

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:43:00 +0000

The Internet is killing the entertainment industry. It is becoming increasing difficult to protect copyrighted materials from being posted online. In the past these materials would have earned the entertainment industry money, but now they are becoming free. The business model that the entertainment industry has come to rely on is increasingly becoming unworkable in an Internet era.

Their reaction? To lobby the government to introduce bills (SOPA/PIPA) that provide unprecedented powers of censorship to the entertainment industry.

While Google...

... and Wikipedia...

... have taken some action against these bills, Seth Godin probably says it best:

It's painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

...

Breaking systems that benefit your customers is dumb. Taking money from lobbyists to break those systems is dumber still.

Forget failure. Just do it.

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:42:00 +0000

Building a next generation, cost-efficient enterprise

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:58:00 +0000

One of the benefits of building a company from scratch, and doing it in a bootstrapped way, is that you are really forced to do even the simplest of things in new, innovative and cheaper ways than a Fortune 500 company might. In this way, even if you were to do nothing but create a company that replicates an existing business, for example, a realtor (real estate) chain such as Foxtons, you could create the business in such a way that it has significant cost advantages. With these cost advantages, your business might even be able out-compete the more traditional type of firm.

Perhaps the most stark example of emerging cost advantages that new firms have is through the gradual elimination of IT infrastructure costs. In many companies, IT infrastructure is a significant investment that covers desktop application software, computer hardware and IT support staff that manage these. If you are building a company from scratch, you can build an enterprise that has little of few of these types of costs. How? With Google Apps.

Current and upcoming features in Google Apps include

Web based docs, spreadsheets and other office software - all of which is free, comparative to Microsoft Office.
Management of your web site and domain.
GDrive, Dropbox-like software that will integrate your offline storage with Google docs online, and thus also provide back-ups.
Chromebook laptops that are integrated with Google Apps. They can be leased at approximately $300/year - and so can be cheaper than dedicated, purchased hardware.
Google Apps, and their partners', support staff, who provide assistance in using these services.

Clearly a Google Apps centric solution is not as feature rich as tradition solutions... but how many organizations need those rich features? And is it worth the additional cost?

Beyond the cost of IT infrastructure, there are other areas where cost advantages are possible.

The use of offshore, remote workers that can be employed for simple tasks using oDesk and other contractor platforms. Do you really need to hire administrative staff at full US staff costs, or can a remote worker (at a fraction of the cost) suffice?
In some cases Western workers are required, because of the nature of the work involved. In those cases, can you employing segments of the population that are normally not considered by other firms, and hence can be cheaper? These include, for example, the retired and stay-at-home mums.
Maintaining all documents and literature in electronic form, and hence eliminating filing cabinets of paper, and reducing the amount of office space required. Just think about how much paper that your legal department has, for example.
Allowing staff to work from home, so the office is just a place used for meetings and work that requires collaborative effort. This again reduces the amount of office space, and overhead costs, required to run a business.
Use of Skype and Google Voice to reduce or eliminate telephone costs. Use of Join.me, instant messenger and email to enhance collaboration.

New companies that are starting right now, particularly if they are bootstrapping, are already incorporating many of these practices. Over the long-term, if they maintain these practices, these firms will have significant cost advantage over existing traditional firms. Older, more bloated, firms may not be able to compete with these next generation firms.

37Signals' Jason Fried: The Drug-Dealing Model of Online Business

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:18:00 +0000

What customers are coming to expect

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:21:00 +0000

An interesting excerpt from IDEO's Patterns:

Despite its reputation as a suffocating bureaucracy, China is a place where virtually anything is possible and everything is available. Want a custom-made suit for less than US$50? Knock-off Italian furniture? Unlocked iPhones? China has it all — if you know the right person on the right street corner. This no-holds-barred approach, or abundance service, has become legendary at places like Shanghai hot-pot restaurant Hai Di Lao (海底捞火锅店).

“THIS IS THE BEST FRICKING HOT POT RESTAURANT ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET!!!” wrote one reviewer. “It rivals the Ritz Carlton. Free drinks if you want them. They will bring new eyeglass-wiping cloths to wipe the steam from your glasses and offer to do it for you. …there is a children’s playroom, and there are small tables with Chinese Checkers and Chinese Chess, and they have a team of women who will give you a professional manicure. THIS PLACE IS AWESOME.”

Note that this breathless review raves about the utterly satisfying dining experience, not the meal. The restaurant’s reputation is for service—and, increasingly, that’s what customers are coming to expect.

Pretend you're 100% sure

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:59:00 +0000

"You have to pretend you're 100% sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure. "

-- Andrew Grove, Intel co-founder

Immigrant Creates U.S. Jobs, Gets Boot Over Visa

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:41:00 +0000

video platform video management video solutions video player

From this ABC news article.

London's Silicon Valley

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:28:00 +0000

In the two years I've been away from London, the city has developed a flourishing digital hub - "Tech City". A map has been created to highlight the growth of startups in the hub.

Seth Godin on analyzing web businesses

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Seth Godin has a great post on analyzing web businesses. Here are the six things he suggests you assess in any such business:

What's the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?
What's the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what's the yield?
Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it's less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter's co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.
What's the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?
Are there members/users? There's a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?
What's the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.

Just three questions

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:16:00 +0000

I once interned at a VC firm. At this firm, potential startup investments flowed through rapidly, and it could sometimes be difficult evaluate every single opportunity. Faced with such a task, the associate tasked with looking at these opportunities assessed them using just one, simple rule of thumb: if you had to ask just three questions of the opportunity, what would they be?

It's a simple rule of thumb, but one that applies to opportunities beyond just looking at companies: if you could ask a customer just three things, what would they be? If you had to build just three product features, what would they be?

Which three questions will help you prioritize and get clarity on what you're working on?

The Groupon Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:14:00 +0000

From Conde Nast.

What success looks like

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:34:00 +0000

Kenyan farmer lauds internet as saviour of potato crop

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:00:00 +0000

We sometimes forget that the Internet has yet to penetrate many parts of the world. This amazing story of a farmer in rural Kenya shows us the impact the Internet can have on those parts of the world.

Kenyan farmer Zack Matere pulls his mobile out of his pocket holds it up and takes a couple of photos.

"It seems they have come back and are digging here again."

He is referring to a group of people who have encroached on a water catchment area and are endangering the whole community's water supply.

"When they came before, I took photos of what they were doing, posted them on my Facebook page and was able to get assistance."

"I got in touch with Forest Action Network and they came back to me quickly saying they would help me protect the catchment area."

This is just one of the ways in which he uses the internet.

More at the BBC.

Google+ Present vs. Facebook Past

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

They were supposed to be the same thing - Google Plus and Facebook were both supposed to be social networks. Yet recently, the unique ways in which these platforms have emerged them headed in wildly different directions.

Facebook has always been the way in which young, social people shared their social life: what they did on holiday, where they went to last night, what they had for breakfast etc. All of these moments were inevitably captured in photos and uploaded to Facebook. According to Mashable:

Facebook has a larger photo collection than any other site on the web. According to an extrapolation of photo upload data reported by Facebook, the site now houses about 60 billion photos compared to Photobucket’s 8 billion, Picasa’s 7 billion and Flickr’s 5 billion.

Over time, Facebook's most valuable asset has become the treasure trove of historical information it has collected on all its users. Facebook Timelines now puts this center stage, allowing users to easily pursue the social life histories of other people. With Timelines, your Facebook profile is almost the resume of your social.

Meanwhile, Google+ is front and center focused on the present - the here and now. Google has been, for some time now, obsessed with making real time search a reality. While this is something that Facebook could have implemented years ago, Google has made real time search one of the first additions to their social network platform. In this same vein, Google+'s core feature is Hangouts - allowing people to have real-time video chats in groups. For Google, social networking is about the interactions you can have right now, in real time.

These wildly different directions mean we are headed to a choice: If you want interact with a person right now, head to Google+. If you want to dig through that person's history, head to Facebook.

Highlights from the Black Eyed Peas' Google+ Hangout

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

How do you get 50,000 followers on Tumblr?

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Clarisa relayed me this interesting tib-bit from a classmate at Medill who has a Tumblr blog with over 50,000 followers. How did that happen?

As for my blog, the only "press" I got that I know of is from Tumblr itself. It all started around the time I hit the Chicago newsroom, because I started posting my science writing. I was highlighted on one of their Tumblr Tuesday posts last March. I can't remember exactly how they found me, but one of their tag curators (for Science) started following me, and then one of the biggest Tumblr bloggers (SoupSoup) started following me and reblogged a few things of mine -- in fact, maybe they found me through him? Not sure.... Anyway, the big jump really happened this June.

I know a few of the Tumblr staff through my blog, and I met one of them when she came out to Chicago for a meetup. I got an email some time last Spring from her asking me to fill out a tiny little bio for something they were planning. I never heard a thing more until they launched the Spotlight, where I'm featured in the Writers category. This is where the bulk of the followers came from, because not only is it an easy place to find people to follow, it's also the first thing that comes up when you get the new Tumblr app (which launched for the iPhone in June). So that's the long story of it. Sorry if you didn't want all the details.

Tumblr: blogging for the masses

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:09:00 +0000

When I started this blog, the only real platforms I could consider building my blog on where Blogger and Wordpress. These were the most functional and popular blogging platforms of the time. Yet, in the last two years a third platform - Tumblr - has started to see usage that is changing the landscape of blogging.

At first glance, Tumblr may seem just like Blogger or Wordpress: you write text in a box and it appears on the blog page. Yet, it has been crafted to enable a different kind of blogging - to enable curation of content. You can easily post pictures, movies, quotes and other forms with fewer steps than elsewhere.

Now, you no longer have to be a writer to be a blogger. You can just be a taste-maker, highlighting the content that interests you most. Whereas not everyone feels they are able to be a writer, everyone does have tastes.

As Google Trends shows, the results speak for themselves.

Top: Google searches for Tumblr vs Blogger vs WordPress. Bottom: The same for news references.

Could computing for the masses

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:01:00 +0000

Many companies are now building could computing services, from Salesforce's CRM system to Google Apps and Amazon's EC2 infrastructure for virtual hosting of machines. Yet many of these companies, in divorcing desktop based applications, have created cloud-service equivalents that are inferior in performance and usability. Apple's elegant solution is - once again - in making this technology accessible for the masses. You don't have to treat the cloud as another harddisk, website or application. It just simplifies your existing desktop applications to make moving between them more seamless.

Remembering Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 22:30:00 +0000

For many of us techno-piles growing up in late 80s and 90s, there were two icons that inspired our generation - Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Jobs - particularly through the late 90s and 2000s - carved out Apple as the brand of choice for consumer devices - such as smartphone and tablet computers. His mix of showmanship and products with simple, compelling features pulled in consumers that may otherwise have found computing products to be tiresome and uninteresting. Jobs made a dent in the universe by making design the basis of competition for computing products, whereas previously it was functionality. Starting with the iMac, then later the iPhone and iPad, he created broader appeal for devices in these industries.

Jobs truly made a dent in the universe.

The Apple website, following Jobs' death on October 5th 2011.

The fashion of Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Amazon's Silk disrupts the microprocessor race

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:10:00 +0000

Amazon claims its Kindle, running the new Silk browser, will be able to provide performance and user experience comparable to that which you are accustomed to from an iPad or laptop, but on hardware that is far cheaper and inferior. If they are able to deliver on this promise, Amazon will be ushering the end of the microprocessor race between Intel, AMD and others. However, I suspect they are not quite there yet.

For years, we - the consumer - have had to upgrade our processors on a periodic basis, as software vendors have increased the processing capabilities of the hardware they've required. For example, each new version of Windows has gotten bulkier and graphically more intensive. Yet, this is not what most consumers want. By moving much of the processing to the cloud, consumers no longer need to play this game. Amazon will take care of the computation for us by pre-processing the necessary computation so it is done on their EC2 clouds, rather than on your device.

Yet to fully realize the dream of moving all the computation to the cloud - Amazon needs to do something radical. Amazon needs to create its own communication protocol between the Silk browser on the Kindle and Amazon EC2 servers where the processing is done. This is the best way to pre-process the web content so it is easier to render on inferior devices. Since the standard HTML protocol is verbose, using a proprietary protocol will also reduce the bandwidth required to transmit the data. I suspect Amazon has not yet quite realized this.

Bezos Answers The Kindle's Critics

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:55:00 +0000

An interesting insight from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how well the Kindle is really doing.

Time sensitivity

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:12:00 +0000

What are the lasting ways in which business school changes you, beyond the knowledge that you glean? For me, business school made me far more aware of time than I had been previously in my life.

At business school, there were always far many more activities than was time to do them. Having to pick and choose, and seeing the outcomes from these choices, really made me conscious of the value of time and how the investment of time we make shifts the directions of our lives.

In my particular case, I choose to spend time on starting a company while I was at school, rather than recruiting for a job. Both are significant undertakings. Just starting a company is itself hard to do. It is even harder to do while recruiting.

Don't think Big. Think Big and Fast.

noreply@blogger.com (Dinesh Ganesarajah) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:41:00 +0000

Google is 13 years old today. It is today valued at $175Bn. Groupon's third anniversary will be in November. It is expected to IPO at a $24Bn valuation. There was once a time when it was inconceivable that you could build such big companies so quickly. How those times have changed...