Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

March 11, 2010

When platforms change, opportunities beckon

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 6:02 pm

Awesome post from Seth godin:

When the platform changes, the leaders change.

Wordperfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at Wordperfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft?

In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant.

When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled.

Think this only applies to software?

The platform for healthcare changed from independent doctor’s offices and small practices to hospitals and hmos.

The platform for TV changed from airwaves to wires (so HBO and ESPN win, NBC loses).

The platform for cars is changing from gas engines to alternatives.

The platform changes. Insiders become outsiders and new opportunities abound.

The dominant internet access device  is changing from PC to mobile. There WILL be new winners (and losers).

Economics of News

Filed under: Internet, Media — Raja @ 11:29 am

Is internet killing the print news business or is it merely exposing the problem with the newspaper business model?

The newspaper subsidizes news with advertising from classifieds and special interest pages such as autos, real estate and enrertainment where it is much easier to sell advertisign. Now that the classifieds are moving to craigslist and vertical niche sites cater to autos, real estate etc., there is no way newspapers can justify the old production and distribution costs. Also blogs and social media are commoditizing news production and distribution. So now that the internet is exposing the problems with the old business model, news media must adapt and find a new workable business model.

Many people including Marc Andereesen suggest the news should go exclusively online. But as Chris Dixon points out, news is lousy for online advertising (even for google). No wonder news media wants to charge for news, which has the small issue of convincing people to pay for news which few are used to right now.

That is the hard conundrum faced by the news media.

Everyone takes quality news for granted and it is not easy create it on the cheap. Someone has to pay for it. Will it be the readers or the advertisers?

March 10, 2010

Evolution of enterprise software

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 3:25 pm

Marc Benioff pioneered SaaS with salesforce.com. He says he started salesforce.com prompted by a simple question: ‘why isn’t all enterpsirse software like Amazon.com?’. He sees another evolution now prompted by the questio: ‘why isn’t all enterpsirse software like Facebook’?. He calls it the facebook imperative which inspired salesforce chatter.

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” Why couldn’t applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn’t we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn’t anything close to a straight-forward solution.

That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn’t ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud and can’t help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it’s no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers.

In this decade, I’ve become obsessed with a new simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service’s status as a “killer app.” Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It’s where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part.

What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn’t meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven’t kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a “newsfeed” was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed.

He has a follow on post in which he says the following:

I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.

I agree that the future (nay the present) is social and mobile. Mark is a good salesman and he is obviously trying to pitch his product, but there is merit in his observations.

March 6, 2010

The new color of money

Filed under: Business, Internet, Mobile, Trends — Raja @ 12:15 pm

Social media is making all transactions, even financial ones, frictionless.

Money

A simple typo gave Michael Ivey the idea for his company. One day in the fall of 2008, Ivey’s wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet — which would have sent the note as a direct message, a private note just for Ivey — she hit p. It could have been an embarrassing snafu, but instead it sparked a brainstorm. That’s how you should pay people, Ivey publicly replied. Ivey’s friends quickly jumped into the conversation, enthusiastically endorsing the idea. Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadn’t hit on something: What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?

Just a decade ago, the idea of moving money that quickly and cheaply would have been ridiculous. Checks took ages to clear. Transferring money from one bank account to another could take days, as banks leisurely handed off funds, levying fees nearly every step of the way. Credit cards made it a little easier to pass money to a friend — provided that friend owned a credit card reader and didn’t mind paying a few percentage points in fees or waiting a couple of days for the payment to process.

Ivey got around that problem by using PayPal. Since 1998, PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. For the most part, its powers were confined to eBay, the online auction company that purchased PayPal in 2002. But last summer, PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Ivey immediately used it to link users’ Twitter accounts to their PayPal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off. Today, the service has almost 15,000 users.

That may not sound like much, but it sends a message: Moving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey. Ivey is just one of hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs who are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built. Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. A startup called Obopay, which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN. Amazon.com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price, cutting out middlemen, and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies’ constant nickel-and-diming. Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites. And last March, Apple gave iTunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications, making iTunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in Motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research. It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years.

March 1, 2010

Internet surpasses Newpapers and Radio for News

Filed under: Internet, Media — Raja @ 11:07 am

From Pew Internet:

The internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV.

Only local and national TV news, the latter if you combine cable and network, are more popular platforms than the internet for news. And most Americans use a combination of both online and offline sources. On a typical day:

  • 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
  • 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or FoxNews
  • 61% say they get some kind of news online
  • 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
  • 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
  • 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today.

February 17, 2010

Eric Schmidt reveals Google’s mobile first strategy

Filed under: Internet, Technology, Trends — Raja @ 12:24 pm

Eric Schmidt’s speech at MWC reveals google’s mobile first strategy:

He  read off a flurry of statistics highlighting the growth of the mobile industry, pointing out within three years sales of smartphones will surpass sales of PCs. He noted that in developing countries such as India, Google searches were more likely to be made on a mobile phone than on a desktop computer; he highlighted the rescue stories from the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake and called the mobile technology that enabled some of them fundamental to the human existence. “This is all part of the same view that information is fundamental, and the joint view that mobile communication is ‘it,’” he said.

In Schmidt’s view, he explained, the current mobile ecosystem and its future incarnation are the result of three intertwining factors: computing power, connectivity and cloud computing. “The Internet is humongous. The notion of publishing and microblogging is an explosion that will drive networks further into everything we do,” he said. “Today’s generation doesn’t call it a mobile phone; they call it a phone. That’s a win for everybody sitting here.”

The mobile phone is the meeting point of these three trends, he said, and furthermore, any device that is not connecting in this way is considered not interesting, but lonely. As the mobile phone is the high-volume end point of these trends, it becomes the defining product in that space, he said. “It’s like magic,” he said. “All of a sudden there are things you can do you never even believed were possible.”

This led to his belief in the “mobile first” doctrine, as Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications and technology first, because “mobile apps are better apps” and that’s what top programmers want to develop. “It’s more specific, more human, more location-aware, more satisfying to them,” Schmidt said.

Eric Schmidt’s vision of the power of combination of internet and mobile is something we also share at our company.

February 14, 2010

Chartroulette founder is a rock star

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Media — Raja @ 10:13 am

I love the story of Chartroulette. It is the classic story of a teenager doing something for fun to see it become a web sensation. It reminds of napster (without the copyright issues) and facebook. It has other issues such as profanity and vulgarity everywhere (so if can be ofensive to most people). But the concept is intriguing (and a subset of its current community, not all of it).

Fre Wilson, one of the noted tech VCs, wants to invite him to NYC.

Here are some interesting facts from the NY Times piece: 

  • The founder, Andrey Ternovskiy, is a 17 year old high school student who lives in Moscow
  • He created the site for “fun” and had no “business goals” for it
  • It was inspired by his extensive use of Skype web chat with his friends
  • It spread entirely by word of mouth
  • He’s had to rewrite the code several times in order to allow it to scale
  • His relatives invested some “funds” so he could buy more servers
  • Right now, he’s doing it all himself
  • Chatroulette runs on seven servers in Frankfurt, Germany
  • He is planning to add more servers in new geographic locations
  • Andrey has never been to the USA but would love to visit
  • He has ideas for more “weird in a good sense” features
  • He’s not sure what Chatroulette is any more
  • He thinks it would be best to “found Chatroulette” as a US-based company

I think we’ll reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. I’m still not sure if this is something we should invest it, but I’d sure like to meet this guy. He reminds me of many great young entrepreneurs we’ve worked with and his story sounds so familiar.

I think it would be a great experience for Andrey to get exposed to the US tech scene. But I hope he doesn’t get too comericalized and  lose the curoisty and innocence. People love stories like this and it is only natural to hang out with sensations. I just hope that Andrey keeps his eyes on the ball. He seems like a mature teenager and reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg. I wish him the same success as Mark.

One of the commenters on Fred’s blog, Aviah Lor, says it well.

but he shouldn’t be institutionalized (yet). keep the artist side.

Amen.

February 13, 2010

Chatroulette

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Media — Raja @ 7:00 pm

Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17 year old school kid from moscow, started a fast growing video site called Chartroulette. It is a real-time p2p video site that connects people over their webcam. It has been a mystery as to who is behind the site until today. This is a perfect example of the power and beauty of viral distribution pioneered by Hotmail. This is how facebook and twitter became popular. If you have products that has viral loops as integral part of the service (not tacked on as an after thought), then you have a good chance to grow exponentially wothout any marketing.

Andrey Ternovskiy

The site, which gets about 20,000 users on a typical night, generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user. The results are occasionally serendipitous, putting you face to face with an interesting person from another corner of the planet. More often though, the site is reminiscent of those old anything-goes AOL chat rooms, only with video. Let’s put it this way: Parents, keep your children far, far away. The site was well described in a New York magazine article recently and, oddly enough, was featured on “Good Morning America” on Saturday.

The lingering mystery, though, was who was behind the site. The question was answered on Saturday when Andrey Ternovskiy responded to the questions we sent to an e-mail address on Chatroulette. Mr. Ternovskiy said he was a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

“I was not sure whether I should tell the world who I am mainly because of the fact that I am under age. Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself,” Mr. Ternovskiy wrote.

Here are his e-mailed responses, slightly edited and condensed:

I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a microphone and webcam. But we got tired of talking to each other eventually. So I decided to create a little site for me and my friends where we could connect randomly with other people.

It wasn’t so easy to create it for me, but I have been coding since 11 (thanks to my father who introduced me to the Internet early – most of my knowledge comes from it).

I didn’t advertise my site or post it anywhere, but somehow, people started to talk to each other about the site. And the word started to spread. That’s how the simultaneous user count grew from 10 to 50, then from 50 to 100 and so on. Each time the user count grew, I had to rewrite my code completely, because my software and hardware couldn’t handle it all. I never thought that handling the heavy user load would be the most difficult part of my project.

As the user base grew, bandwidth and hosting bills started to show bigger sums. I am glad that my relatives helped me with it by ‘investing’ some money in my idea.

It wasn’t very much money, so I couldn’t just buy new servers just like that, I had to optimize my code as much as possible instead. I must say that lots of people have helped and still are helping me when I have questions about coding. I am very thankful to them. I still code everything myself, though. I’d love to share work with someone else, but I am not in the USA, and most of the interested people are located far away from me, because I live in Moscow. So I still have to do all the things myself. But I am not worried.

I enjoy what I do. It is like a game for me. I discover new things and solve interesting problems.

I am aware that Chatroulette is popular in USA.  It is interesting, but I have never been to the USA myself. Yet most of my site users come from it. I would love to visit the United States.

I actually think that it would be best to found Chatroulette as a U.S.-based company. But this is just an idea.

I have always wanted Chatroulette to be an international thing. That’s why I chose Germany for hosting, because it is in the middle between Russia and U.S.A. It is also at the center of various backbone European networks. I think this is a good place for hosting a project which connects people around the world with each other.

However, I am planning to get other servers in other countries soon. With it I will add more interesting and “weird” (in a good sense) features which will make my site even more entertaining.

What is currently stopping me from adding other features which have been suggested by many and have been in my mind is that I am not even sure what Chatroulette is now.

Everyone finds his own way of using the site. Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service.

February 12, 2010

Veoh: Napster of Video?

Filed under: Entertainment, Internet, Media — Tags: — Raja @ 10:56 am

Online video maket is very challenging, unless you are Youtube or Hulu.

Veoh, one of the earliest online video sites is shutting down. It had the backing of some of the top vcs and media execs. But that couldn’t help save the company. 

Online video is a funny space. Its usage is exploding but it is diffcult to make money unless you have scale and content.

But the thing that seems to have killed Veoh is the lawsuit from Universal Music Group (UMG). So in essense Veoh got napsterized. Here is an exceprt from the blog post from Veoh’s founder Dimitry Shapiro.

Two years ago, Universal Music Group (UMG), the largest music company in the world sued Veoh alleging copyright infringement.  While we made every effort to convince them that we were not their enemy and had not infringed on their content, they pursued a relentless war of attrition against us in federal court.  We eventually prevailed in a decisive summary judgment that has set an important precedent for the entire industry.

Unfortunately, great vision, a passionate team, tens of millions of users, millions in revenues and victory in court were not enough.  The distraction of the legal battles, and the challenges of the broader macro-economic climate have led to our Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

February 10, 2010

Thoughts on Google Buzz

Filed under: Internet, Technology, Trends — Raja @ 9:23 am

I checked out Google Buzz this morning. It is basically twitter type functionality integrated in Gmail.

It makes sense to add twitter type functionality with other communications such as email/IM etc. It this gains critical mass I can see it challenging twitter and even Linked in. I am not sure if it can challenge Facebook because FB is too big and has great reach.

The challenge for google buzz will be to gain critical mass as it is late into the game.

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