BlogSat

If you're in the Internet space, or care about it, you've likely heard about Digital Sky Technologies , and almost certainly know about Tencent . If you're based in the USA, my guess is its less likely that you've heard of Naspers . That's why this great article in the Economist was an eye-opener. These companies aren't just growing and building an incredible investment portfolio, but are very closely aligned. Here's the article's summary on these firms: "The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet. Naspers is Africa’s biggest media group, both offline and online. And Tencent is China’s largest internet company by market capitalisation—and the third-largest in the world." This is great, but here's where things get interesting: "...they are financially intertwined. Naspers owns part of mail.ru and was an early investor in Tencent, of which it now holds 35%. I...

The other benefit of train travel is that I get to people-watch again. :) I was unsurprised that on the ride home 5 people around me had the familiar while earbuds in their ears. Yes, yes; everyone has an iPod/iPhone and they listen to it on their daily commute. The music takes the pain away. What did surprise me was when one of these people (a rather dour-looking young girl with blue streaks in her hair) pulled out what her earbuds were connected to, I didn't see the shiny device that is apparently the everlasting testament to Steve Job's genius, but the device that I had in my pocket at the time. Clearly she was using her Android phone as her primary music device. I looked at the other 5 people, wishing some of them would pull out the device they were listening to. One did; it was an iPod, and perhaps the others were as well. But I'd like to believe that as Android devices have more adoption, this is an experience that will be much more common! :)

The ever-modest Rupert Murdoch celebrated his official take-over of the Dow Jones company with a $2 million congratulatory ad campaign . The most interesting part of this (to me anyway) is his intention to drop the WSJ's subscription wall. I grew addicted to Marketplace and Tech sections of the Journal a couple of summers ago (when I had free access:)) and then over the next year when I ponied up for the student subscription.:) Arrington does some sloppy math to come up with why this makes economic sense, and he's directionally definitely right! The WSJ will make more money. The Internet economy is lucky enough to be powered by a strong externality : advertising. This isn't new: the same has always applied to newspapers. However, dropping the price of anything to zero (even something thats really cheap) will really push up the demand for the product through the roof, especially for a product like high-quality news for which the demand is extremely elastic . Of course, Googl...

A couple of days ago, I shared (via Reader) this article by Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch . His basic premise was that Big TV (networks in the US) just weren't getting it. His basic arguments were that the increasing use of Bittorrent (and other alternatives) meant that the networks couldn't really justify products which didn't offer broad choice (i.e. all the programs that they could make available) restricted based on geography (i.e. certain shows are only available in the US) had an expiry date (i.e. only TV shows broadcast in the last x weeks are available) had bad content (because more options now exist on long-tail stuff) I ended up thinking about the third of these practices the other day, and decided it wasn't really as bad Duncan made it out to be and may not be just about future DVD sales as he suggests. In fact, if you wanted to be charitable, its a creative attempt to figure out a business model in a changing environment. Price-discriminating with respec...

So, Seth Godin is a smart guy and he says smart stuff about marketing really often. But then he says stuff like this , it makes me want to find a desk to bang my fist on (my head is hurting now, so I've stopped banging that.:)) "If you have an organization that is slow and deliberative, don't enter a market that rewards the fleet of foot. If you have colleagues that love to discuss everything out loud, don't choose a campaign that will fail if the market senses internal discussion and disagreement..." In other words, "if you kinda suck at something, don't try to fix it. Just smile, accept it and keep doing what you were planning to." Argh! The last time, I remember reading something by him and having such a strong reaction was this gem : Bobcasting . Stuff like this is exactly the kind of stuff, that though its not a terrible idea (not a new, or even well-defined idea either), that makes engineers make fun of marketers

.. is hard. I've had trouble explaining (and even understanding!) how Internet traffic is monetizied (a word, which if you believe answers.com , seems to be incorrectly used by almost everyone:)). This explanation of the categorization and monetization of Internet search traffic at the Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog , is the most coherent and clear explanation I've read in a while. Excerpt below. Numbers based on Netscape.com data. "In fact, around 20% of searches are “navigational” in nature - users looking for a particular website. Another 50% of searches are “informational” in nature (e.g. “capital of Taiwan”, “top social networks”) and the remaining 30% are “transactional” in nature (e.g. “cheap flights to Orlando”, “flat screen TV”... .... It is relatively difficult to monetize navigational and informational searches. "

I should feel sorry for not blogging for a while, but if I did I'd end up feeling sorry for too often. So I just won't.:) Amidst all the last-minute packing (throwing stuff into a box counts as packing as long as the box is going to be shipped) and rush to get rid of accumulated furniture, I ended up experiencing (and hence thinking a bit about) customer service and the effect that it can have on you. I ended up realizing again how fragile a customer's experience is: a little thing can swing it from "great" to terrible and the worst part is you'd never even know about it. Here's a list of a few companies that I've ended up interacting with over the last week. Southwest I'm being a little harsh with the down arrow, cos they pulled it back a bit, but on this trip of mine Southwest came pretty close to losing me as a customer for good. A dangerous thing for any airline to do, given the economics of the business and the state of the industry. Here...

There's something endearing and noble about a company (especially a corporation) trying to serve the poor and bridge the Digital Divide. Something that can make you forget that, as John Mclane said , "Its always about the money." Of course, it is unwise to do so. That really explains the bad blood between Intel and Nicholas Negoroponte's OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project . VS I've been hearing about Negroponte's proposed project for years, though now it finally seems close to completion (shipping November-ish?). He's made a lot of noise about it, and has found a lot of interesting moral support. On the other hand, I hadn't heard about Intel's Eduwise computer until very recently and its already in production. Why is Intel so interested in fighting on what is perceived (at least) to be a socially-responsible project? A few years ago, Prof. C.K. Prahlad 's book " Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid ", explained and gave examples...

I haven't found too many other success-ish stories like this one, but I'm really glad it seems to be working. I found this via the WSJ. In short, these guys made a film . They went well over a $100k in debt and couldn't find a distributor. So they put their film up on YouTube and ended up striking a deal with film-review/social networking site, Spout (they sell themselves as MySpace meets NetFlix ). Spout gives them $1 for every person that signs up with the site after being referred by them. Hopefully, the $1 price has been carefully set, so that even though there'll be a lot of people who sign up just because they want to help out these guys and may never go to the Spout site again, the percentage of users who do come back are worth it eventual revenue. The conversion ratio may be higher than usual though given that the users who find this movie will be really into movies anyway (Spout's target customer.) The Spout design on first look doesn't seem bad, so m...

At lunch today, I attended a talk by David Salyers, a VP of Marketing at Chick-Fil-A. I'd heard of the company for the very first time just last week, when someone brought it up in my Channel Marketing class as an example of a company that managed to stay true to it's corporate values. The talk was organized by the Christian Business Students Association at school and was, in terms of both content and presentation amongst the better talks I've attended at the GSB. David was extremely charismatic (they train em well at that HBS place) and had really good stuff to say. The talk, titled "What is the ultimate business question?" centered around both business strategy and personal strategy, two topics I love just sitting back and thinking about. I ended up leaving pretty happy with the way I'd spent my time. However, what intrigued me most was something that came up towards the end of the Q&A session: their corporate mission. Here's what it is: " ...