Thursday, March 17, 2005

Learning System

Behavior predicting can be surprisingly easy. Its eerie, are we leading a pre-defined life!? Ok, I can reason out the science of probability and all, but still , to be able to predict correctly 90% of the time what you will eat by what car you drive in to the restaurant, is completely surprising!!

Read about this amazing predicting system at : Hyperactive Bob

Amazon with its wealth of customer buying information can go to greater length in predicting your complete online behavior without touching any privacy concerns. Read the Amazon story at New Scientist

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Web as the distribution for movies.

"The official Web site will document the production process and encourage audience interaction, which will be used to shape the series as it progresses"

BitPass provides micropayment model that is essential for making this niche movie making a viable model.

Profile of Media Business in Chennai

Chennai is the unsung hub for online business success story. Following leading online properties functions out of Chennai.

Sulkeha: Online classifieds that work
Sify: Own's the indiaworld properties, Samachar.com, Khel.com, Khoj etc.
Bharatmatrimony: Leading matrimony business online
numtv: A division of pentamedia, this is TV over internet and my friends in US actually subscribe to this and they are happy. Blazeway is the technology solution provider for numtv.
Penta-media: Movies, distribution.

Why chennai is the hub? I believe skilled talent pool is one of the main reason.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

On line Business: A Thought paper

Being part of the Google (Yahoo- Scale players) Ecosystem

With time, even Google's simple self serving service like Adsense will grow in complexity. With many additional Google service offerings in brewing; Google will rely on partners for servicing last mile- there in lies the good opportunity to grow along with Google (Yahoo other large web scale players)

Adsense:

–Nurturing Google certified Adsense professional talent and skill. Building and managing this pool of recourse is an innovation in itself that can be leveraged for Gobal Market

–Build resource pool that could harness all the power of Google API. The API working knowledge harnessed will be a valuable IP worth pursuing

– GMail will be soon provided to Very Small, Small and Medium enterprise. It will make lot of sense for these companies to lap up the Enterprise Gmail service as it will free them from poor in-house maintenance and support. I needn't say more about the power and beauty of Gmail – use it to believe what I'm saying


Blogs will become more professional and organized – atleast will “look” like it

Why I'm saying “look” because blogs will not loose its flexibility, freedom or the characteristic of grass root phenomenon but the sheer explosion of blogs across all categories will call for some organization. Organizing (Collection, Editor's Pick...which is an innovation in itself) blogs and one who can do it will be the next media mogul.

Organizational Structure

Every online business is structured around three teams:

1- Content
2- Marketing
3- Technology


In the nascent stage of the industry the technology will rule (thus the differentiator) the content and then as the technology is mastered the content will be the differentiator. If the market is competitive with similar standards of technology and content, the marketing team will be the key for growth. The marketing team should be well versed with technology in the nascent stage and as the technology matures marketers should be content savvy in order to market the products better. Even the content team should be well versed with the technology in the nascent stage and as the technology matures content team should be market savvy.

The culture and management of each team is different. Companies takes pride in building and nurturing these teams e.g , Certain companies are know for the editorial value, take for the instance Newspaper, how many of us buy the news paper for the quality of the ink or the paper? Exactly as Newspaper is more than 100 years old and the technology is mastered by most, it is the content and marketing that will make the difference.

Internet is still in the nascent stage and technology is the king (not the content as people believed in dot com boom). Developing and Managing (Program management, Project management) the technology team and its culture will be the key to organization growth and innovation in the market.

Content creation is yet be mastered – Structure is the Key

Very few companies have got the following right mixture of skills and required project management capability to create online content. This task is increasingly difficult because the grammar of online content is evolving and most of the current rules are set by technology.

Online content creation consists of following team/process. Nurturing, Structuring and program management of following team will be the key to success.

-UI – Usability
-Visualizer / Conceptualizer
-Designer
-Web programmer HTML/CSS/XML/JavaScript
-WebDeveloper:ASP/.NET/JAVA/PHP/Python/Perl/Database/Content Management System
-Content Writer

Click Fraud - Competing on the Internet

"In this place it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" as said by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" well in cyber place the running has to be really quick.

Article: Click fraud
Resources
Click Defense: Tracking optimization and click fraud detection company
ClickLab: Web Analytics service

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Future of TV: The battle is fought now

Read the article: Built your TV.

The battle of "future of TV" is fought now. Government, media giants and electronics manufactures are bringing in policy/law- Broadcast flag to shape the future of TV. Myth TV initiative is however making open and free platform that will hamper the broadcast flag ruling.

Also to be watch for is Brightcove: A start-up that promised new way to distribute content (Video) over the Internet.

Insight: Media consuming and distribution is changing completely.

Secret of Google - Dealing with crashes

Urs Hoelzle shares Google's data center operations

Glimpses of nightmare in operating a large scale online service. Any large scale online media needs to master these nuances.

There is still lot of engineering innovation that needs to be mastered in computing system. Well that is the topic for my next thought paper.