Valli Bindana is the president of a company called Kreative Vistas. I am fascinated by the kind of work they do. In a nutshell, they help companies explain complex things in a simple fashion via animation.
It is also a lesson for the rest of us on how to communicate powerfully. Here is an example:
This short blurb is about high blood pressure:
What is High Blood Pressure?
Each time your heart beats, it pumps out blood into the arteries. High blood pressure is excessive force of your blood pushing against the walls of your arteries. When left untreated hypertension hardens arteries as cholesterol and calcium builds up. High blood pressure usually has no symptoms, but it can cause problems with such as hemorrhage, heart attack, and kidney damage.
Now, this is the same thing communicated via Animation:
On a lighter note: I don’t have high blood pressure but if I watch the above movie a few times, I might be at the risk of getting high blood pressure just because I will be worrying so much about it
=== PS: Thanks to Kare. She reminds me in the comments section that I do have blood pressure. The post above is corrected to include the word “high”.
I should know this, shouldn’t I. Shows how dumb I am sometimes
This is the advertisement for UC Berkeley’s 5-day product management course.
I have a lot of respect for UC Berkeley and I have had the opportunity to work with fantastic students who have come out of that college. If an institution such as UC Berkeley has to “stretch” it a bit, you can only imagine what others have to promise to attract students
was the title of the article in FT on July 2, 2007. The grounding for the conclusion is that a small company moved 20 engineers from Bangalore to Silicon Valley. Well, that was an exception. Such things happen all the time but the difference here is the brilliance of the PR team of the small company. They used an event like this to generate massive publicity and drew attention to the company in general. Hats off!
I was in India recently and met the CEOs of several companies of various sizes. One thing was clear and common – every company I met there was on a hiring spree. Talent shortage and retention were the biggest problems discussed there.
My $.02: Reverse Offshoring is happening for sure – but not at the scale that these publications want us to believe.
Related articles that talk about drawing conclusions based on flawed data:
I am flying to Washington DC tomorrow to attend (and speak at) the TANA 2007 conference. While I was booking my car rental at CheapTickets.com (Yes, I work for a startup) I saw an ad for HotWire.com. Here is the image
Of course, the price at HotWire was cheaper than CheapTickets.com and I had no choice (again, I work for a startup) but to book my ticket with Hotwire.com.
I really don’t get it. Unless CheapTickets.com and HotWire.com are owned by the same company, it does not make sense for CheapTickets.com to send me to a competitor site. Yes, they made money through advertising but lost money on the deal
A business person, I think, is like a chess player. The opponent is the marketplace. That may explain why most business plans change a number of times once you put them into action.
In a chess game you make a move and wait for the opponent to make another move. If you are a good chess player, you can predict what moves your opponent will make and may be (in some cases) force an opponent to make a certain move. If your opponent is good chess player, it is impossible for you to predict your opponent’s every move. So, you have to re-think your every move based on your opponent’s move.
Business works in a similar fashion. Just remember that you are playing with an opponent who is a superstar in chess. The reason – The marketplace is always right!
Here are few things that is hard for your competition to copy (individually and collectively)
1. Your History Your history is yours alone. Nobody can repeat it.
2. Your Identity Identities are built over a lifetime. Whatever you have built as your identity so far, others can’t copy it.
3. Your Relationships Who you know, how you know who you know, who knows you – these are all impossible to copy.
4. Your Configuration How you have structured your business, who owns how much, the vendors you chose and your relationship to them etc. are hard to copy.
5. Your Values, Beliefs, Determination These are all so personal. If they are powerful, you have a huge competitive advantage.
6. Your Intellectual Property When protected right, it can be a source of competitive advantage.
7. Your Timing If you time the market right and your competition does not, you have a huge lead.
The above list is incomplete and I am sure each one of us can come up with more items to add to the list.
Her are my points:
1. List all the items (with their combinations) that are hard to copy and see if you are taking full advantage of that “strength” to establish a better position in the marketplace.
2. Most often, it is not that we don’t have enough resources that makes us fail. It is how we configure “everything we have” to gain superior strength.
What do the people listed below want from my blog readers?
Answer is simple: Attention. In fact, they want “attention” desperately.
I took a snapshot of the part of the day (May 16, 2007) and observed the trackback entries waiting for approval. While all the names look legitimate, none of them are real blogs. All the trackbacks point to products of companies that are seeking attention desperately.
I feel sad for these companies who are trying to get the attention of people in any which way they can. Rather than “interrupt” rudely in people’s lives, why not build products that people “love”? When people “love” your products, they will talk about it – and they will do it for free
Competition can come from anywhere. Let’s take the case for Tivo. I think the promise that Tivo made was (and is) compelling. You can watch your favorite shows when you want it (and without the advertisements)
In simple terms, this meant: * flexibility – you can choose the time. * save time – you don’t want to watch the advertisements
If you think about it, while this works great for viewers like you and me, it does not work well both for the producers of TV shows (they need advertisers for their shows) and advertisers (they need viewers to see the ads)
So, what was the solution that marketplace came up with?
The networks have started sharing the episodes over the web.
If the reason you wanted to buy Tivo was to catch your favorite shows, that reason may not be sufficient anymore.
The second thing that is making this complex for Tivo is that most TV serials are now available for purchase or rentals at stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood.
The point here is simple. Tivo innovated the TV industry a few years ago. The competition, however did not come from another set top box maker but from two different places – web and the DVDs.
I am sure Tivo is working on refining their own strategy in the wake of these developments and it would be interesting to see their response.
You got to innovate but you can’t rest after that.
One of the conclusions Hugh was reaching was that Open Source may not have made a big time impact yet. If it did, you would have seen a lot more famous billionaires in the open source world.
Having been one of the founders of an open source solutions company in late 2000 – CIGNEX, I am passionate about open source and hope to provide my viewpoints on most points raised by Hugh in the article sometime soon. In this post though, I want to offer my $.02 about open source business people not getting insanely rich.
The basic premise: For someone to strike it ultra-rich in open source, the open source company they are involved with should make boatloads of money. Here are some reasons why it’s not easy:
1. Price points are low; volumes need to be high
First, we all know that the enterprise software and the open source business are very different. Open Source is typically developed by the community members almost forming virtual organizations (there are many exceptions, of course) Most contributors don’t get paid for their contributions. They are in it for the passion. You can make a business out of these contributions but since there is no licensing fee per se, you need to come up with some other reason to charge the customers (there are a number of business models that are becoming mature now)
However, the price points have to be lower than enterprise software so that volumes have to be very high to make serious money.
2. Competition from other open source software
Generally people think that open source software competes with enterprise software. While it is true, the bigger competition for open source software comes from other open source software. Barrier to entry to create new open source software is low unlike creating a new enterprise software company. In fact, one way for the enterprise software company to kill an open source company would be to fund a competing open source company and confuse the marketplace completely
3. Getting the right people to manage an open source company is hard.
Open Source companies have a constant battle to get the top talent to fill the top spots in the company. Think about it – who is the RIGHT person to run an open source company? You can’t hire someone from a VERY successful (of the order of a large enterprise software company) open source company as there is none. If you bring someone from an enterprise software company, the person will have to unlearn a number of things as things are done very differently in the open source world. I am not saying that there are no great leaders in the open source world. For the opportunities available today, there is definitely a lack of talent at the top.
4. It beats logic.
If open source is license free, the costs have to be low to work with open source. If cost is one of the reasons for a customer to embrace open source, he or she will pay less than what they would have paid to a comparable enterprise software to do the same job. An open source company would have to therefore work twice as hard to a comparable enterprise software company to make the same or less amount of money. This means that they have to have a lot more resources than the competing enterprise software company. How can you have a smaller pie but feed a lot more people and still keep everyone happy?
I can go on but the point is – there is still a lot more to happen before people in the open source business can become ultra-rich. More about the same and related topics in the future.
Offering a freebie will catch the attention of many, especially if what you offer is
a) valuable and b) there is no other catch associated with it.
I saw that in action during lunch today. Here is what happened:
Mike Martin (president of ValEdge Solutions) and I have been friends for years. We meet every few weeks to catch up on things. Today was one such day. We had lunch at The Prolific Oven right next to Mike’s office.
The Prolific Oven serves varieties of pastries and other bakery items along with a range of sandwiches. The sandwich was great. There was also an interesting twist. Every sandwich plate had a small piece of the one of the pastries from the bakery. During the 90 minutes I was there, I observed that at least three people ordered pastries to go after they had their lunch. The sampling really worked.
This is not the only place where the concept works.
Taking inspiration from Seth, I made my eBook “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals” available for free. 97,000 copies were downloaded. Izumoto Takashi from Japan even got a Japanese version created. It may seem like there was no ROI from these eBooks as they were distributed for free. Not true. Just the sheer reach and the number of friendships that developed because of this will make it all worth it.
Having founded an open source solutions company CIGNEX in late 2000, I saw this model work for many open source companies.
You can see that technique in use in many companies that offer free trials.
Question therefore is: What can your business do to take advantage of this?
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