Sarah’s Blog

All about Failures

2006-03-24T04:25:00.000-08:00

All about Failures

Generally we put our heart and soul to any work that we do. But it is always disheartening to know that it failed. The most frustrating part comes when we were not able to figure out the reasons for the failure. There are four reasons for any new product to fail. They are as follows :
1. Not many audience saw your product
2. The audience never bothered to become an user
3. The users never became a customer
4. The customers never shared it with others

Why not many audience saw your product? It is because of two reasons. The main reason is cluttering. There are too many options out there in the space, which makes users to get confused or carried away. The second reason is that your product is not remarkable, that it made an impact. In fact being remarkable is the solution for the first reason – cluttering.

Why audiences who saw our product never bothered to be an user? This is because there was no story behind the product, which appeals the audience. It is these stories that help people get more done, enjoy life more and even live longer. And Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.

Why users never became a customer? There can be two reasons attributed to this. The first reason could be related to your own product. Be it the ease of usage, the performance, the cost etc., which makes the user to go away from your product. The second reason is that some other product offers better service, better usability or best cost etc., And the users may be pulled towards the other product.

Why customers never shared it with others? This could be because, the customers would not have felt fully comfortable. Also this could happen when the customers feels that the product is not worth talking about.

Reference : Seth Godin’s “All Marketers are Liars”

Six Thinking Hats - by Edward de Bono

2005-11-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

This post is all about the book "Six Thinking Hats" by Edward de Bono.

About the Author : I feel that the author, Edward de Bono, is one of the few, who could make complex things easily understandable. He is also the author of the books called "Lateral Thinking" & "Parallel Thinking". His language is very simple to read.

About the Book / Concept : The books talks about the thinking mechanism and how get the most out of it. In fact, it was quoted in the book that using this principle / concept, in many big companies, discussion time were dramatically reduced to a great extent [say from 3 hours to 20 minutes!!]. Moreover, in many companies, they have this taught as part of their corporate training. Very interesting.

Why This Book ?

Many times, we would have noticed that we feel something really good and after sometime we would have felt otherwise. Why this swing?
Invariably, though we understand the pros and cons, we stick ourselves with one side and discuss. Mostly towards the fag end it turns out to be an argument. How to avoid this?
We feel that going back to and fro from +ves and -ves are bad. Is it good or bad?
It would be frustrating, when we are +ve about something and somebody is exactly opposite about the same. There is nothing good or bad about this, but still there is a frustration. How to make it a win-win?
How to reduce the discussion timings ?

About the concept : The author classifies our thinking into six types and refers them by six distinct colours. He symbolises thinking as Hat.
The following are the details of each Hat :

Blue Hat Blue colour is associated with sky. The upper limit, and hence signifies controlling factor. This is the thinking, which we use to make decisions, prepare agenda for a meeting, making a summary of a meeting etc.,

White Hat White colour refers to peace, neutrality. That means more to do with data. This thinking leads us to collect more information, stats / facts about a particular thing. It is only based on this white hat thinking, the blue hat thinking can make appropriate decisions.

Black Hat Black is associated with dark. Hence Black Hat thinking is to do with cautious thinking. This is like thinking about all the bad things that could happen, any danger. Over usage of this hat may lead to slowness.

Yellow Hat Yellow is associated with light, sun. Yellow hat thinking means positive thinking. More on the good things. Over usage of this hat may lead to over promising and hence overloading ourselves.

Red Hat Red is associated with blood. Red hat thing is more to do with emotions. It purely depends on the individual(s), culture, psychology etc.,

Green Hat Green is associated with vegetation. It symbolises mother nature. Green hat thinking is creative thinking.

How to use these Hats - an use case : Assume you are going to conduct a group discussion about "Team Changes". This is just only an usecase. First as a coordinator, you may come up with the agenda for the meeting and plan the sequence of the hats usage - eg.
1. Red Hat, 2. Black Hat, 3. White Hat, 4. Yellow Hat, 5. Green Hat, 6. Red Hat, 7. Blue Hat again.

This is Blue Hat thinking. Under each Hat thinking, I've given the example statements under each hat thinking in quotes.

1. Red Hat "I don't like this" "Again one more round of learning / training" - This may be the feeling of all including the coordinator.

2. Black Hat "What will happen to the knowledge gained so far?" "Is it really required right now?" - This is anyway everyone feels the same

3. White Hat "About 90% of the members who got team changed were more than 2 to 3 years old in the existing team" "About 8% of the members who got team changed were more than 1 year old in the existing team" "Only about 2% of the people were shifted 2 time a year and that too because of urgent project requirements" - Now this opens up a new dimension to the whole thinking.

4. Yellow Hat "This gives us opportunity to learn new technologies" "This gives opportunity to mingle with new set of people" "Keeping ourselves challenged is a great way to keeping ourselves ahead and active" - This is also true and everyone agrees.

5. Green Hat "May be come mentoring and some stipulated training time provided would make the transition smooth" "Some award scheme for the people who had transformed quickly and got into the new job quickly" - This opens up the doors to possibilities.

6. Red Hat again "Logical and can't help it" "Once in a while it is OK' - See how the thinking has changed.

7. Blue Hat to summarize "To summarise - Finally, the members felt that the team change is a logical and said it is ok to change the team once in a while".

From the above usecase, it is evident that the Six Hat Thinking help use to converge on things which would otherwise take longer duration.

Advantages of Using different Hats :

1. At the end of the discussion you would have felt that everyone felt the same.
2. It was easy to change the thinking using this hat concept
3. Since everyone in the discussion are made to wear the same colour hat, it is easy to converge and no distraction in between the discussion
4. Using different hats make users to give their comments freely without sticking to their original comments. Does not affect the ego of the person when changing the thinking
5. If we use the right mix of the hat, we can easily converge for a quick decision.

Hope this would be helpful for most of us.

What is Web 2.0? - A Quick Summary

2005-11-04T07:36:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to clarify what is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly has written this article - What is Web 2.0. Tim starts explaining how the term 'Web 2.0' came into existence. Later he lists down some of the Web 1.0 applications along with its equivalent Web 2.0 applications. He then explains the various ingredients / characteristics of Web 2.0 applications. I've tried here to provide the gist of the full article.

Tim visualizes Web as a Platform. Here he explains how this transformation happened from the Netscape's style of positioning Vs Google's style of positioning.

Netscape promoted a "webtop" to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.

Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.

He also claims that the value of the software is propotional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage. The lesson from the Web 2.0 is to leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web. The key principle of the Web 2.0 is that the service automatically gets better the more people use it, which is based on 'architecture of participation' concept.

The Web 2.0 embraces the power of the web to harness collective intelligence, where hyperlinking facilitates this. The success of Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon are based on this principle - Harnessing collective intelligence through user engagement. Open Source Software, Collaborative Softwares, Aggregation of the individual's decisions, Viral Marketing are the keywords of the Web 2.0 generation.

Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.

Blogging would play a major role in Web 2.0. Because of Blogging more and more dynamic websites are generated every day. The collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowd make web as 'live web' and also 'incremental web'. The effects of Blogs are :

search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results

blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power

Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies and hence the Web 2.0 applications are referred as 'infoware'. Here SQL is the new HTML. Here the market control and the financial returns are based on the control over the database.

While the jury's still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it's clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the "internet operating system", will enable the next generation of applications.

Web 2.0 would put an end to the Software Release Cycles.

Operations must become a core competency

It's no accident that Google's system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google's success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

Users must be treated as co-developers

release early and release often

A web developer at a major online service remarked: "We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don't adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site."

The Web 2.0 has paved way to the lightweight programming models using RSS, SOAP, REST etc., The significant lessons to be noted are:

Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems
Think syndication, not coordination - end-to-end principle
Design for "hackability" and remixability

Softwares written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a longer period. Rich user experience is another key ingredient of the Web 2.0 applications. Tim summarize, the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies as :

Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
Trusting users as co-developers
Harnessing collective intelligence
Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
Software above the level of a single device
Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Overall Tim has done an excellent job of explaining all about Web 2.0 in a comprehensive way. One of the best articles regarding Web 2.0. Worth a full read.

Sarah.

Reference :
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT by Seth Godin

2005-10-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT is the latest free ebook released by Seth Godin. It is about 32 pages document which talks about the search for Meaning. Through this book, Seth explains about the current web surfing trend and what is ahead of us. Then he talks about the ways and means by which we can increase traffic of our site.

The current generation of the search engines, provide clues than the actual meaning. One has to invest her time to find the meaning. The user on a quest to make sense, looks at various links and pages to understand enough before taking an action. So the current generation of the search engines can be called as Clue machines. Before making a decision, the user pokes in Google, Yahoo even some ads. And what the user does can be called as poking online. So the current generation of the web, web 1.0, delivers matches, but it does not deliver the meaning.

So we need to move on to the second version of the web, web 2.0, where the web enables its users to share meaning. There are two things which are to be taken care. First, people like to listen and the next one is people like to talk. Blogs addresses both the needs. As part of the web 2.0 initiative, we need to have a place where an user (stranger) can go to get some insight and meaning and then leave that site and go somewhere else. Seth calls this place as nowblog. The nowblogs are the best place to start and he even calls them 'Lens'.

A Lens filters light and shows only what is needed. Likewise, lens is a web page, which highlights one person's view of the web. Lens is like a signpost, which quickly answers - What do I need to know? and delivers meaning to the context. It does not hold content, instead it is an organized pointer living in a site filled with other, similarly formatted pointer. However it does not pretend to deliver the complete truth, but provides meaning and links necessary for the user to take action. Unlike a blog, a lens updates itself with RSS feeds and webservices, ie., would do fine without a lot of tweaking and maintenance.

Benefits of Lenses

Quote:

1. Lenses are free
2. A royalty payment. Royalties are earned from all the keyword clicks, affiliate income, and referral fees the lenses generate.
3. More traffic to your blog and your web sites.
4. A way to build credibility for yourself and your organization by serving as a trusted guide.
5. Increased search engine rank for you and the pages you point to.

The person who makes lens is called a Lensmaster, the Expert whom Seth mentions through the title of the book -- Everyone's an Expert.

Quote:

The lensmasters are individuals with strong personal agendas, expertise, causes, products and even opinions.

Who needs to build a lens?

Quote:

1. If you have a website and you're not happy with your PageRank, a lens will increase it. That's because a lens provides exactly what search engines are looking for: authoritative insight so people can find what they're looking for. (That's why wikipedia ranks so highly on search engines - they provide a good experience and satisfied searchers are what search engines are seeking.)
2. If you're an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate three or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sould like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full - or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses. Don't quit your job yet, but if you build the right lenses and promote them, you ought to earn some royalties.

In a nutshell, following are the top two points which Seth wants to sell through this book,

Quote:

The structured nature of Web 2.0, combined with the folksonomy of tags, makes a lens the perfect middleman between the content and expertise you've already got, and the surfers you've never met.

Squidoo lets lensmasters build lenses quickly. Then it connects those lenses to other relevant lenses and provides a search engine to make it easy for any web surfer to find the right lens at the right time.

-- Sarah