Personal and professional development for technology professionals.
» Bringing Ideas To Life. With Love!
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 07 Jun 2007, 1:32 AM - Leave Comment
Here is one way to look at innovation – to see things before the world sees it. This short quote captures the essence of innovation brilliantly.
Posted under Great Quotes, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 05 Jun 2007, 7:27 AM - 1 Comment
I get fascinated whenever I see the power of leverage in play. Recently I saw this with SimplyHired job boards. With almost no coding, you could create a job board on your blog or website and start making money.
Bala Musrif at EventBee has a new offer from his company called Network Ticket Selling and Network Event Listing. I am also interested in the people who are behind companies with interesting business models. So I had an opportunity to ask Bala Musrif a few questions about himself and his business. Here is the quick interview that will provide the “Behind The Scenes” view of the whole thing
1. RS: Bala, tell us a bit about yourself. You had a successful career at Sun. What prompted you to start EventBee in the first place?
Bala: I started my full time job as a Hardware Engineer when I was 19, since then I worked in National Remote Sensing Agency, Wipro, Imake Software and Sun Microsystems. I am always fascinated with new technologies and ideas. My quest for technologies made me work in many areas at Sun, from clustering to Portal servers. While I was managing portal server partnerships at Sun, I saw the opportunities Internet is brining to every industry you name it. I evaluated many opportunities and found focusing on events market is not only rewarding, but also risk is limited with huge market size.
2. RS: EventBee was competing with many other registration systems out there. Apart from being commoditized, what were the challenges with EventBee?
Bala: Yes, there are many companies who provide registration software. The fact is events market is very big, and there is no clear established leader. That gave us opportunity to enter the market with new innovative ideas, and quickly establish our self as a most advanced web based registration system. The initial challenge for us was to establish our self as a trusted partner as we deal with tens of thousands of registration payments. The next challenge for us was to educate Event Managers to tap state of the art technologies to promote and sell more event tickets.
3. RS: Network Ticket Selling and Event Listing seem to be the place where you are expecting home run. For the benefit of readers, tell us what exactly is “network ticket selling and event listing”
Bala: Network Ticket Selling allows Event Managers to sell tickets from third party Websites (or Blogs) that are part of Eventbee Partner Network. By simply listing and enabling Network Ticket Selling at Eventbee, Event Managers tap “Network” effect to drive more ticket sales, and reward commission to third party Websites for each ticket sale they generate.
Using Network Event Listing, now Webmaster (or Bloggers) can monetize traffic by enabling premium event listing on their site with zero investment. By simply enabling Network Event Listing on their site, webmasters tap new revenue stream that was not there earlier, and allow Event Managers to reach website visitor community in a seamless fashion.
Network Ticket Selling combined with Network Event Listing allows Event Managers to create Viral Marketing effect, Distributed Ticket Selling phenomenon, resulting in maximum ticket sales with minimal efforts.
4. RS: Why should webmasters or bloggers be excited about Network Ticket Selling and Listing?
Bala: By joining Eventbee Partner Network, and displaying Evnetbee streamer (widget) on their site, webmasters (or Bloggers) earn money two ways -
This is completely new revenue stream for Webmasters (or Bloggers) with zero investment, does not conflict with other revenue streams they already have in place, such as Google Adsense or Job Boards.
5. RS: How did this idea come about?
Bala: Last three years blogosphear is growing explosively, but the audience have limited time they can spend online, that made them to stick to their favorite websites or blogs. This created a new challenge for Event Managers on how to reach this audience which is scattered across multiple websites or blogs, it is very time consuming and almost impossible for Event Manager to contact each webmaster and request them to display his event on their site. That is when Eventbee saw new opportunity and came up with the idea of building Partner Network that consists of Websites and Blogs, and allow Event Managers to make use of Network Ticket Selling and Event Listing features to push event across multiple websites (or blogs) automatically, and reach wider audience with minimal efforts.
6.RS: How do you think your competition will respond?
Bala:
I am sure competition will come up with similar solution, the fact is
Eventbee has been in the business since 2003, we already established
our self as a trusted partner with over 6000 event managers. Apart from
being first to the market, we have the advantage of loyal customer base.
7. RS: What were the lessons learnt during your four-year journey with EventBee (from inception until the launch of “Network Ticket Selling and Event Listing”)?
Bala: Well there are so many things I learned as a first time entrepreneur for last four years. Most importantly one need to build great team that is flexible enough to adapt to new market conditions and deliver the results in half the time than competition can do. Most of the times markets may not react the way you expect, so be bold to recognize market dynamics and change the direction of the company if needed.
8. RS: If you were do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Bala: Having done one startup, now I can take more risks in my next ventures. Focus on completely new idea that has viral marketing built into it.
9. RS: What is next for Bala and EventBee?
Bala: My goal is to make Eventbee most successful company in events space, reach every event manager and become their trusted partner in promoting and selling their event tickets. Eventbee will focus more on leveraging existing customer and community base, and release more innovative features that tap “Network” effect to sell more tickets.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 05 May 2007, 7:53 PM - 4 Comments
Bangalore has been dubbed as the Silicon Valley of India. One of the factors (that makes them say this) is the comparable number of technology professionals in both the regions. In fact, there was a report that stated that the inevitable has happened – Bangalore has taken over Silicon Valley 
almost meaning to say that Bangalore is the Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is the Bangalore of United States.
Bangalore has a special connection for me. My family members are still there and my very first and only job in India was at Bangalore (long ago). I visit Bangalore often enough that I am not a stranger there. And, Silicon Valley – I have lived here for the last ten years and I have enjoyed every bit of it.
At the outset, let me make my points -
2. You can try – but it would be VERY hard to replicate Silicon Valley in the near future.
So, when someone asked me a question – “If Bangalore really wants to be Silicon Valley, what should change?” it made me think again. Here are is a partial list of “change requests” for Bangalore if it really aims to be Silicon Valley of India:
(For people in other cities, replace Bangalore with your city name)
Ideas can come from anywhere. When someone shares an idea that is worth listening, people do listen attentively without worrying about who is telling the idea. If you are young, you have a better chance of getting your idea heard in the valley.
2. Foster innovation
No, It is just not the number of people that work in technology. What is more important is “what projects are they working on?” For now, focus on the valley is building products and focus in Bangalore is services. Long-term maintenance projects, call center work and support services don’t have a lot of room for innovation (as compared to building products)
3. Look at failure differently
Valley is a place where failure is really fine, especially when a person goes out on a limb to try something radically different. People also share their failures openly. In fact, if someone says they have never failed, it means that they have not taken a big enough risk yet.
4. Make it easy to do business
I have invested in a few companies in the Valley and one company in India. If I hear about all the regulatory requirements to operate a business in Bangalore, I get shocked. The complexity must be ten times that of what is required to operate a business here in the Valley.
5. Shrink
Yes, Silicon Valley is a small place. Meaning – it is probably the rule of “five degrees of separation” that is in play here. If you have a good idea (promise) and a structure to fulfill that promise in the most optimum fashion and you are committed, you can almost reach anyone here.
6. It’s the eco-system that’s hard to copy.
It is not one thing that will set Silicon Valley apart. There is a complete eco-system that will help an entrepreneur to make his or her idea a reality. Copying an eco-system is hard work. There are so many moving parts (including the government regulations) that I don’t see that it is possible to copy even parts of the eco-system in the near future.
7. Infrastructure needs to improve
While in the valley we talk about miles per hour, in Bangalore it is hours per mile. I am not saying people don’t commute in Silicon Valley but what I saw in Bangalore was a real stretch.
8. It’s not the number of years…
With the software boom over at Bangalore, it is easy to get carried away and promote people when they are not ready for it. When the rubber meets the road (when those people face reality) it won’t help anyone. Silicon Valley has a talent retention problem but not of the size of Bangalore.
9. Manage the bench.
Bench helps the organizations and mostly kills talent.
There are few tens of thousands of programmers who are “on bench” in Bangalore. It helps organizations to keep that bench as it gives them the power to be responsive. Part of them are working on “interesting in-house” projects and part of them have no clue that they are becoming vegetables. They just can’t see it because it is a “slow death.” When they do see it, they may be in a stage where the chances of recovery are very slim.
Fortunately, we don’t have that problem in Silicon Valley. Most people are working extra hours just to stay in the race
Thanks for reading this. All of you have a wonderful weekend.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 29 Apr 2007, 6:57 PM - 1 Comment
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?
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.
Posted under Business Models, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 29 Apr 2007, 5:29 PM - Leave Comment
I saw a gadget on a webpage from Google Gadgets and it was cool. Exploring further, it seems like Google has tons of them in their gadget directory. Clearly at this point in time, Google seems to be interested in the gadget space. There are other players in the marketplace whose primary business model surrounds gadgets ( Examples: WidgetBox Majikwidget ) and I am sure they are looking at this move seriously.
Generally speaking, While startups are great at innovating, they may not have the defense strategy outlined when established players launch an attack at their core strategy. When I searched for gadgets on Google, the first sponsored ad that came up was for Google Gadgets. This ad comes at a VERY low cost for Google but it costs a fortune for a startup to match that.
I am not offering a solution here but here are a few reminders:
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 09 Jan 2007, 10:44 PM - 2 Comments
I watched the video of Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld. Steve announced the new remarkable innovation from Apple – iPhone. It was fantastic. For the first time in my life, I felt like switching from Verizon to Cingular (iPhone will be available only with Cingular service)
I urge that everyone of you take the time (about 90 minutes) to watch the video whether you are interested in iPhone or not.
The video is available at the Apple website.
Here is what was fascinating:
* 200 patents have been applied for technologies used
* Apple partnered with Yahoo! for delivering IMAP “push” emails
* Apple partnered with Google for Google Maps and a host of other services
* Apple partnered with Cingular for developing Visual Voicemail – you can search and listen to the voicemail you want to listen to.
* There is no pointing device. Your fingers are the pointing device. They are introducing a technology called Multi-touch.
* iPod, Phone and Internet communication device – fully integrated
* Foundation software – OS X – the power of Unix on a mobile phone.
* Conference calls on cell phone in a snap
* In a sign of where the company is moving, last but not the last, Steve mentioned that Apple Computer Inc will be renamed to Apple Inc.
I can go on but you have to watch the full keynote after fastening your seat belts.
Not only will you be amazed by the technological revolution, the keynote itself has several lessons for young entrepreneurs.
Here are some:
* Breakthrough innovations take time, energy, effort and innovation
* There is hard work involved – 2 years
* Alone you can’t do much. Together, you can create miracles. Partnerships with Google, Yahoo and Cingular were developed over years and are being leveraged now.
* Steve thanked the whole team in the end and what was touching was that he thanked the families of all the team members for their support. That was nice.
Watch the video whether you like Apple or not. It will be worth your time.
Posted under Business Models, Compelling Offers, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 26 Nov 2006, 9:54 AM - Leave Comment
I wanted to search for a good image to accompany my Squidoo lens for collection of my mini sagas. The simple approach would have been to search for images with the tag “mini.” However, you know that it might be a bit confusing as “mini” now has two meanings – one is a popular car brand and the other denotes small. I wanted the latter but how do I tell the site that I really meant small?
I didn’t have to struggle much. The stock photo site that I use most often iStockPhoto had an answer. Actually, they didn’t, but they asked me what I really meant. When I typed in “mini” in the search bar and enter, by default the site brought up results from both but there was a place for my to make a selection on what I really meant with two options
Did you mean mini as in…
Option 1: Mini (Car Manufacturers’ Brand Names)
Option 2: Small (Physical Description)
Once I picked option 2, I didn’t have a problem getting what I wanted.
Seems like a simple time-saver. Highlights the obvious – “When you are in doubt, just ask!”
Posted under Compelling Offers, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 18 Jun 2006, 8:16 PM - Leave Comment
One thing that comes with size and scale is that it definitely opens up new possibilities. Buying Innovation is one of them. Here are some ways companies approach innovation:
This is the most common form of innovation within a company. A separate division within the company is dedicated to create new products, take existing products to the next level, watch competition and decide when to retire non-performing products.
2. Outright acquisitions
You find a ocmpany with cool technology and cool people. Look at the opportunity cost and work the numbers. If everything looks good (or you are paranoid or both) make a compelling offer and acquire the company and integrate. Cisco is famous for acquiring companies for technology innovations. They have been acquiring companies since 1993. The acquisition price ranges from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few billion dollars.
3. Fast followers
Sometimes acquisition may not be an option. What if the product that is threatening you is introduced by one of your fierce competitors and thee is nothing similar to acquire. You setup a SWAT team and pour energy and resources to follow very fast. We all know what Microsoft did to get back into the Internet game when Netscape seemed like it would dominate the browser market. Agreed. Now they are being challenged again by Firefox. It will be interesting to watch Microsoft’s response to the new kind of attack.
4. Intrapreneurship
In simple terms, Intrapreneurship is basically creating an environment conducive to entrepreneurship within the corporation. The biggest struggle for entrepreneurs when starting up is the resources (money being #1) and support. If the corporation provides both of these and also lets the group be (almost) autonomous, wonderful things can happen. Whirlpool is famous for this. When I met the folks at Whirlpool leading Innovation over there a few years ago, they had more than a thousand projects being tracked in their “Innovation Pipeline.”
5. Licensing
There are times when it makes sense to acquire the “right-to-use” an Intellectual property and pay a royalty rather than acquiring it. In the recent past, several universities have put a process together to commercialize some of the innovations out of their research facilities.
Link: Stanford University -Inventions, Patents and Licensing
6. Asset sales
There are several reasons fro an asset sales. Here are a couple:
6.1 Company has cool technology but the business model is broken. The company folds. Investors want to make whatever they can to salvage their investments. They sell the assets for a song.
6.2 Company has lots of products lines. company decides to focus on a few of them and retire the rest. The retired products may be of interest to some other companies and a win-win asset transaction is negotiated.
7. Open Innovation
Get consumers (or anyone) to participate in the innovation efforts of a company. It can be as simple as inviting people to participate in a contest to design the next version of a company’s product. Offer bounties for winning entries. Think about it – for a reasonably small administration fee and the prize money, you get to see a few thousand ideas. Seems like a huge ROI. Here are a few articles on Open Innovation that I wrote a few months ago.
7.1 The world is your R&D Unit (April 27,2005)
7.2 Open Innovation – Nike Joins In (May 24, 2005)
7.3 Collaborating with your users to create powerful offers (June 14, 2005)
8. Innovation Marketplace
Look at Innocentive, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly. The company was founded with a simple idea of getting help (for a fee) from inventors all over the world to solve some of their R&D problems. Today Innocentive has grown to be an Idea Marketplace connectin the problems with solvers all over the world. Just so that you know – this is not eBay for ideas. The fee offered to solve some of the R&D problems can be over $100,000. Again, the ROI is huge because you pay one solver $100,000 but you get to see the problem solving approaches of ten or hundred more solvers for free.
9. Direct Connection
I had an opportunity to listen to Mohanbir Sawhney at TiEcon East recently and he talked about P&G’s new Initiative – Connect and Develop. Their current mission statement according to the website is:
Connecting with the world’s most inspired minds. Developing products that improve consumer’s lives.
Sawhney mentioned that Crest Spinbrush was one example of P&G’s Connect+Develop initiative. After searching on the Internet, I found the inspiring story of the invention and growth of Crest Spinbrush. You should also read about the other achievements of the inventor John Osher. Inspiring again!
10. Innovation Capitalists
Again, thanks to Mohan Sawhney for raising awareness on this new kind of businesses called Innovation Capitalists. These Innovation Capitalists (also known as Product Capitalists) will work with entrepreneurs to make their innovations or inventions to make them commercial success stories. Ultimately, when the timing is right, these Innovation Capitalists can find a home (large corporations) for some of these innovations. Sawheny quoted two companies in this space.
I am not saying that the above list is complete. I am also not making a claim that one approach is better than the other. Every company follows a combination of approaches for their innovation strategy based on a number of internal and external factors. The point though is to have an innovation strategy within your own company.
May be it’s time to look at your company’s innovation strategy and refine it to ensure that you have a unfair competitive advantage?
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 17 May 2006, 10:36 AM - 6 Comments
More than 10,000 people have seen the “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals” eBook in the last three weeks. Thank you for your interest and support.
Now, the same eBook is available in the NXTBook format as part of the launch of their NXT Big Thing online publication. Now, who is NXTbook Media and what is NXT Big Thing?
NXTbook Media™ optimizes print for use on the Internet using a standard Web browser to expand the reach and effectiveness of the world’s leading publishers.
The NXT Big Thing is produced as a free publication by NXTbook Media, and includes thoughts, trends and essays from some of the brightest minds in business today.
I am happy with what NXTbook format and hope you will like it too. Here is the link:
NXTbook: Personal Branding for Technology Professionals
Update 05/18
Thanks to Erik Hansen at Tom Peters Company: More on Brand You
Posted under Compelling Offers, Innovation, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 18 Dec 2005, 7:08 PM - 3 Comments
I hope somebody will create this plug-in for Firefox or any tabbed browser. Here is the background and the idea.
RSS changed the way we browse for information. Earlier you to go to an individual website and read stuff. Now, with a good blog reader (or RSS aggregator or whatever) we don’t have that problem. Manhy of my friends track hundreds of blogs and read them. This would not be possible without RSS. So, that is one part of the story. RSS won’t solve everything. You still need to visit several individual websites almost on a daily basis to do some of your work. The other day I counted and for me it’s about 14 different websites everyday. How can we solve this problem?
Here is a simple plug-in I thought would help. Store all the links to these “everyday” websites with a special del.icio.us tag and when you activate this plug-in, it opens all these websites in multiple tabs. When the first website opens up, you can continue to do your work and the other websites start getting loaded in the background (in other tabs)
You can save a ton of time. Thanks.
For Firefox
1. Go to bookmarks2. Go to manage bookmarks3. Create a folder4.Group all the sites you want to open in one folder.5. Drag that folder in the bookmarks toolbar. (make sure this is enabled inthe View > toolbars section)6. Select the folder in the toolbar and select "open in tabs".
Thanks to both Derek and Boris again!
PS: Also thanks to Jason Siffring who posted another comment extending the logic. Thanks Jason.
Posted under Innovation, Main Page.
If you are from the Press or if you are from a Speakers Bureau, you can schedule a meeting with me using Jiffle.
Like Jiffle? Get it here.
Recent Comments