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There are 5 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Know Where That Friend Of Yours Is Located. Now! Presenting Yahoo Fire EagleFire Eagle is a technology from Yahoo that lets you update your info about your location through your mobile or web, and share that information with many other web/mobile apps. For example, you can update the information about your whereabouts on Fire Eagle, and your friends can view it. May be, you can catch up with one of them for a coffee, if they are around. The location information can be updated to a number of applications. Google has kept the platform open for now. Mobiles can also access the site fireeagle.yahoo.com and update our information. What's the use? Well, location based services (LMS) are being worked on many companies right now. Its invaluable to know about the target audience. You can get a lot more customized services if your service is known. In the Facebook example, knowing your location can show you the friends who are around. You can then select a friend whom you wanna catch up. This set; you can search for the café/restaurants around the place. And after the coffee, just in case you have a mood for a movie, you can use that. So, what does Yahoo gain? Ads ? Well yes. But not right. Location based ads can be a good business model. Just that Yahoo has not decided to use the ads right now. The platform is open for the developers right now so expect a lot of applications built upon it. Facebook applications can be a common thing. I would also love to see an extension to Twitter informing about the location of the service. For more serious issues, there can be GPS and navigation on mobile phones.
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult How Google Always Gets it RightGoogle is, undoubtedly, the ‘Giant’ of the World Wide Web. What originally began as a research project back in 1996 by two Ph.D. students has now grown into a full-grown enterprise. Who’d have imagined that a research project in the Stanford University would actually go on to become on of the Internet’s most essential products? Back then, the founders claimed to have indexed around 25 million web pages, an astounding figure during those days. Today, although the company keeps mum about the exact pages in its search database, some analysts believe it to be somewhere over 25 billion. However, the size of your search index is no longer the deciding factor in this age, as we have already seen a while back. Cuil, a product by some of Google’s employees failed miserably, even when it claimed to have an index bigger than Google’s. To me, the most important factor that I need to see in a Search Engine is the relevancy of the search results. And then comes simplicity. And not surprisingly, Google achieves both these factors. In March 2008, when we took a look at the Hitwise statistics for the search engine market in USA, Google lead the pack with a 67.25% market share of the entire US search. Yahoo search controlled 20.29% share while MSN search lay low with 5.25% and ASK.com search received 4.09%. Hitwise have again released statistical data and as it turns out, Google now holds a whopping 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Yahoo’s share fell down to 18.65% while MSN and Ask.com settled with 5.36% and 3.53% respectively. Google’s market hold has shown a remarkable rise over the years gone by and has increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month. The question to be asked here is, why are the others failing miserably? With newer and newer technologies coming up, why are search engines like Cuil, Mahalo and Blekko not gaining popularity? If a new era of Semantic Web almost here, why isn’t Powerset in the news for the right reasons? And most importantly, what is Google doing right? There is no definite answer to that. Although I’d personally credit Google’s success to its simplistic approach. Take a look at Google’s Home page as it is today. As it is clearly visible, nothing much has changed on the homepage compared to the first design, back in 1996. The primary goal of anyone who visits a search engine is to find what is looking for. As Don Reisinger rightly says, a search engine only acts as a middleman, not the destination. A search engine’s only goal is to let a user search what is looking for, and then provide him the relevant results. And Google precisely holds the correct nerve. The search box is located in the dead center of the page. The page is not cluttered with any other junk, such as ads. Commonly used links are strategically placed at the top of the page. There’s also the interesting ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button. When a search is made, the search results are neatly categorizes as Web, Images, News and so on. On the other hand, Yahoo takes a ‘portal’ approach. The homepage is filled with all kinds of information, making is very difficult to separate out what you are looking for. Yahoo! does have its ’search engine only’ located at http://search.yahoo.com , but the average Joe would obviously visit yahoo.com the first time. One of the other major reasons for Google’s dominance is its easy availability. Google ships as the default search engine with most of the popular web-browsers in the market, and even through mobile phones. As the popularity and usage of these products increases, so does Google’s. Lastly, Google has an army of other Web Service which are equally popular among the masses. Google bings all these services into a single user account - ‘Google Account’. It this becomes easy to navigate from one service to the other on the fly, saving you the troubles of entering the login credentials all over again.
Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Top 5 Hiring Mistakes to Avoid at a Start-upBuilding a high performance team is definitely not an easy job. Finding right people and convincing them to join your startup is an art which only a few people are gifted with. However, if you start avoiding some basic mistakes, more often than not, you will end up with a high performance team. After observing many startups in the last 3 years and after experiencing the difficulties myself in the last 18 months, here are the top mistakes that I feel one should avoid while looking to build a high performance team.
2. Followers versus Leaders: Just look at their past experiences, you will find enough examples to judge. Even while looking for a fresh and young leader, you can look at his academic approach or at his social approach to judge. 3. Profile for the candidate versus Candidate for the profile: Don't be nervous. There are enough stars in our society, who can bring great value to your company and you can start searching for them when time arises. Never create a profile just to accommodate somebody. It just destroys the value chain of your company. 4. Equity versus Higher pay: What to do in this situation? Given the current stage and low (or no) valuation of the company, it is always tempting to give away some equity as you can decrease lot of strain on your payroll immediately. But, remember that you are not getting a new employee on board rather you are getting a new partner (or share holder) on to the board. If he doesn't have the right qualities that a partner requires then you are done and out. It creates a negative impact in the market, in front of investors, and on your organization as a whole. Hence, try and outsource the profile, if possible. This is the best possible option. There are specialized companies which deal in outsourcing of Finance, HR, and even sales & marketing. If it's not possible, get some money from somewhere and pay him the hefty salary that he needs. I am sure; you will find the required money. 5. Overheads versus Value add: Only go for profiles that can directly impact your top line or your valuation. Every profile should either generate new business or should execute business. Never go for profiles that act as over heads or that may seem to be important in future. Mostly, well funded companies commit this mistake and burn lot of cash even before they realize their mistake. At a startup more than 90% of the success depends on hiring and building a high performance team. It's just about finding people with right attitude, skill and personality at the right time. Any VC will tell you that the 5 most important things they look at are team, team, team, team and team.
Post written by Guest Author Srinivas Nudurupati of TechZing.com Want to be a guest author on WATBlog? Post as a guest here Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Can Twitter Be the Flag Bearer of Conversational Marketing?The buzz on Twitter’s business model has been building since quite a while now. Except Biz Stone, everyone else seems impatient and worried about how Twitter will make its money. I knew things are going to take an interesting turn when a friend of mine who doesn’t use Facebook, doesn’t have a blog and who has no idea about what social media means asked me “How does Twitter make money?” (This isn’t fiction, he really leads a web1.0 life) Anyway, the question made me dig up the past articles on Twitter and also keep tabs on newer ones. For one my pal keeps pestering me with have you come up with an answer phone call every week. So a few days back when we found Wired talking about Twitter and its revenue model with valuable insights from Stone, it definitely intrigued me. One of the suggestions as a possible revenue model, something that I hadn’t thought of till a while back was corporations paying to use the service to stay in touch with their customers. Bringing Business to Conversations
Twitter being a message service primarily (though their blog claims its architecture wasn’t developed as one), it is best suited to mobiles than any other web 2.0 product. And that lends it an enormous reach in the long run, maybe wider than any other social media service. It is already growing at over 2 million users a month. And like the cases mentioned above, it provides a surprisingly direct contact for organizations with their customers. And then the scope suddenly seems huge. Twitter can easily become the marketing marketplace. Firms can buy, yes buy, trademark Handles to interact with their target audience. Twitter on the other hand can provide them more exposure, use summize perhaps to do that and more importantly guide them on how to use Twitter to market effectively without compromising its audience needs in anyway. Guide Them to Use Twitter Effectively?I don’t know how sound this suggestion may seem to social media mavens out there, however, this is where the theme of my post begins. This is how Twitter can become the Flag bearer of conversational marketing. I see a lot of company profiles on twitter just shouting out offers on tweets and following zero users back. Where is the conversation here? How is this different from traditional one way marketing? Yes social media consultants can do this to a certain level, however, they don’t hold millions of users within their fold and being a nascent industry maybe we are yet to create a powerful impact with our words of advice. Compare this to an entity like Twitter, and what we have is a powerful system, which has access to potential customers of almost any organization. And they telling you on how to use their system effectively, and follow it up with numbers and graph and other reports that everyone comes to expect out of marketing campaigns these days. I don’t see anyone other than Twitter to be in a position to execute this plan, what they bring to the table is a huge credibility as creators of the system. Also, this can widely open up the vertical of micro blogging marketing services as an industry, it sort of brings a new pie to be cut. The experience that the firms will get out of using Twitter can very well be duplicated on other social media platforms because essentially everything is based on conversations. Earlier WAT also reported about the newly placed limit on followers and speculated on a possible Freemium model for Twitter. This sort of fits very well with the strategy above. Users who don’t want limits on their Twitter, or any further possible features that Twitter may decide to add to its services and those who don’t want advertisers contacting them can go for a premium account. While the free users becomes the target audience for the paying corporates. With the huge number of people already on twitter, and the potentially huge numbers expected on it, the premium users though possible large might end up being a small percentage of the total users. Giving enough reasons for corporate to not mind a certain chunk of audience being out of their reach. The conversational systemGetting businesses to view social media in the proper perspective is what the industry has been striving since a long time. And though it is fast gaining popularity, it can certainly do with a little million dollar push. Twitter being Twitter has the widest scope in terms of reach in social media platforms, it has a wide base of addicted users and it has money in the kitty already. Can there be a better flag bearer among the social media Olympians?
Image courtesy Nomi and Malcom Related PostsAlso check out Our Jobsite: WATJob Our Video Show: WATShow Our Gaming Blog: WATGame Our Consulting: WATConsult Twitter Limits The Number of Users You Can Follow - Raises Storm in BlogosphereSpam, Spam and more Spam! It first started with the neighborhood bank ‘representatives’ calling up on your mobile ‘informing’ you about the latest ‘interesting’ offers on their credit cards. Then it extended to email inboxes, your Orkut Scraps and now, onto the next big thing in social media, Twitter. How many times have you received an email from Twitter, telling you that you are being followed by the likes of “hotbod365″ and “freewebcam”? Of course, every single follower notification is always music to the ears. However, when you visit the user’s profile, with intentions to check out his updates and follow him back, and figure out that his updates aren’t really that politically correct, how does that make you feel?
Well, welcome to the world of Spam 2.0 and in the attempt to curb this menace, Twitter has come up with a pretty stringent solution. First, Twitter started to weed out the bots’ accounts on its own, sparking up rage and frustrations in the blogosphere with people complaining about losing their followers! Then, Twitter has this brilliant idea of limiting the maximum number of feeds an user can follow. No, Ev Williams has made it clear on the GigaOm blog that Twitter will not limit the number of users who can follow you and but, rather, the other way round. Of course, limiting the number of followers is a stupid idea ‘coz that will always piss off the more popular updaters, forcing them to migrate to other services, also taking their followers along with them. However, they are also not limiting the number of users you can follow, to a perfect number of 2,000, as originally reported by most of the blogs. According to their official blog,
Although it might sound a bit shady, in a way, the fact that spammers will always find a workaround once they realize your algorithm, is true too. Say, for example, the limit had been set to 2,000. All a spammer / attention seeker needs to do is follow 500 people a day and give them 3 days to follow him back. After those 3 days, he simply unfollows the ones who didn’t follow back and moves on to prey on other suspects. Twitter Blog also says,
So, it seems, Twitter users shall not only have to face the wrath of the fail-whale but shall also have to be always in the panic, in the fear of upsetting Twitter’s spam detecting algorithm. We understand that such measures were necessary in their effort to make the fail-whale vanish away. What amuses us is the fact that rather than increasing the habitat space to accommodate the complete ecosystem, Twitter has decided to limit the ecosystem itself. Frankly, I, personally, shall never care if I find a spammer or a bot following me. I always follow people very discreetly. It’s not the users who get adversely affected by the spammers. We feel, such a step has been taken solely to reduce the load on twitter servers. If Calacanis is to be believed, if Ev does has access to unlimited funds, then what’s stopping him from improving the infrastructure behind Twitter’s servers, rather than taking drastic steps like this? What’s more appalling is the fact that, instead of actually announcing a limiting number, you just leave it to be decided by an algo. I understand that announcing such values shall allow spammers to find a work around, but truthfully, I’d always prefer the spammers getting their way than iring the regular and more faithful users of the system. It is something like the word of the law. “Every man is innocent unless and until proven guilty.” While trying to follow this principle, many a guilty walks freely today, but at least, there ain’t many innocent facing the noose! The very reason Twitter has come all this way is the way it has facilitated one-to-many communication to the netizens. The only feature that i can compare it to, is the “Ask Question” feature on Orkut, where one can ask one single question and float it into thin air, answerable by anyone in his freinds list. Twitter has truely managed to enable people to share the knowledge and also gain from it. Every user knows his/her own audience and thus helps in creating cohesion and a sense of utility among the users. It’s a wait and watch situation, now! While many blogs are already suggesting Twitter to go the premium way and start charging for services, I shall rather ask the micro-blogging platform to wait up for some more time till is hits the ‘critical mass’. I like what Calacanis says,
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Social Media circles have always been abuzz with articles mentioning how big corporations are making the most of services like Twitter to their benefit. 
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