Tagged: API RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:18 pm on January 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Android App Marketplace, API, Application Ecosystems, AuthorStream, Cyn.in, , Digital Inspiration, , Facebook API, , Fachak, Friday 2.0, , , Global Market, , iPhone App Marketplace, Kwippy, , MediaNama, NASSCOM Emerge, Nokia Ovi App Store, One Forty, OpenSocial API, Pluggd.in, , Skype, , SocialTwist, , , , Tell-a-Friend, Toufee, TutorVista, Tweetmeme, Twitter API, , , , ,   

    My NASSCOM Talk: Made in India, Made for the World 

    Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    Yesterday, I gave a talk at the NASSCOM Emerge Friday 2.0 event about how the time is ripe for Indian startups to target the global market: ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘.

    So far, Indian startups have focused on tweaks for the local market, not inventions or tweaks for the global market, partly because Indian VCs have tended to fund me-too startups with a business model focused on enabling transactions for the local market (book a air/ rail/ bus/ movie ticket).

    However, in the last one or two years, several Indian startups have dared to build products for the global market. On my list are enterprise collaboration players Zoho, Deskaway, Uhuroo, Remindo, Cyn.in and YouSuggest, consumer focused web 2.0 startups like LifeBlob, AuthorStream, GizaPage (and the now dead Fachak and Kwippy), widget company Tell-a-Friend/ SocialTwist, flash-maker Toufee and online tutoring company TutorVista. Do let me know if I have missed out startups that should be on this list. With a little luck, several of these startups can become global players, and some already have.

    I think there are five trends that are enabling Indian startups to target the global market –

    1. SaaS/ Cloud Computing: The SaaS based delivery model enables such startups to sign-up users without a significant upfront investment in a sales and distribution channel and the cloud computing infrastructure from players like Amazon allows them to scale seamlessly as more users sign up.

    2. Application Ecosystems: The application ecosystem created by Facebook, OpenSocial, Twitter, iPhone, Android and Nokia Ovi enables startups to build and distribute applications quickly. Over the next two years, as more players set up structured marketplaces like the iPhone marketplace, I expect these applications ecosystems to become the key driver of entrepreneurial innovations around the world, including in India.

    3. Social Connections: The people behind the tech blog ecosystem (TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily, Scobleizer) that drives initial adoption for tech startups are more accessible than ever, on Twitter, Facebook and their own blogs. The Indian tech blog ecosystem is also evolving with Digital Inspiration, Pluggd.in, WATBlog and MediaNama building a large Indian and international readership and some of us are beginning to build a global reputation as thought leaders in the web 2.0 space. There is increasing interest in finding and highlighting startup success stories from the emerging world, especially India and China. The world is eager to listen to us and we have more means than ever to tell our stories. Not only that, these social connections can even help startups find international employees, partners and investors.

    4. Viral Loops: Social media doesn’t only help startups leverage social connections; startups can also tap into the viral loops created by social platforms to build buzz. Aggregators like Techmeme and Tweetmeme and virality machines and platforms like Facebook Connect enable startups to grow virally by tapping into Facebook’s 350m user base.

    5. Support Ecosystem: Social media and web 2.0 tools can also help startups convert and support customers. Startups can use Twitter to find prospects and track customer complaints and then use Skype to convert or close them. GetSatisfaction is emerging as a strong customer-driven support platform that can enable tech startups to offer support at scale without building a big support team.

    At one level, ‘Made in India, Made for the World‘ is a manifesto to encourage more Indian startups to build web 2.0 offerings for the global market. At another level, it’s also a reminder to myself as I try to build 2020 Social into a global social technology firm, based in India. The journey has just started, for all of us, and I hope that we’ll have the will to go all the way.

    Cross-posted at 2020 Social: Because Business is Social.

     

    • ishwinder 6:35 pm on January 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Hey Gaurav , Fachak is not dead , we are a little slow on development but we are on track for a new feature set by this quarter end.

  • Gaurav Mishra 8:40 pm on December 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , API, Buzzstream, , , , CRM Solutions, , , Enterprise Collaboration Solutions, , , , Helpstream, , Jive Lithium, , Neighborhood America, , Radian6, RightNow, , , , , , , , Visible Technologies, WebStorm   

    How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit 

    The Social CRM Toolkit

    The Experience Ecosystem

    Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.

    The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.

    At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.

    The Experience Ecosystem provides the framework for creating talk-worthy experiences. It consists of all the touchpoints between the organization and the customer, including products, services and partners, sales and support channels and interactions, and the values for which the organization and its individual brands stand for.

    At 2020 Social, it is our belief that the best way to create an experience worth talking about is to design it collaboratively, with your customers, employees and partners.

    Deconstructing the Experience Ecosystem

    So, the obvious question arises: How do you collaboratively design an Experience Ecosystem that drives conversations and results in close-knit communities?

    You start by listening. Your customers, partners, and employees are talking to each other about you, often in public, and their conversations include a treasure trove of feedback about your Experience Ecosystem, along with ideas to improve it. In short, they offer clear signals as to how they will take ownership for the experiences and conversations that will drive your brand.

    However, listening is only the first step. You also need to respond to these people and participate in these conversations, not with the intent to direct them in one direction or another, but with the intent to engage them and learn more. Over time, as you track these conversation threads, you should seek ways to build profiles for the people who are participating in these conversations, and identify which conversations, and which people specifically, are the most valuable to you.

    Some of these conversation threads will involve responding to and converting prospects who are considering your products or services. Other conversation threads will relate to supporting existing customers seeking an explanation or a solution. Still other conversation threads will be about customers, prospects, partners or employees giving you feedback on your Experience Ecosystem.

    In each of these cases, you should try to tie together related conversation threads to unleash the power of collaboration. A prospect considering your offering may benefit from the reviews and experiences of other customers. An existing customer might find that other customers have already shared useful tips on how to solve common problems. Finally, your customers, partners and employees can collaborate to find the best ideas to improve your products, services, and sales and support processes, or design entirely new ones.

    Once you have collaboratively designed a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem, you should build community platforms to catalyze the formation of communities, and transform customers, partners and employees into evangelists.

    The Social CRM Toolkit is Still Evolving

    The toolkit to create an integrated talkworthy Experience Ecosystem is still evolving, but it’s already possible to connect the various activities described above, as my colleague Dave Evans recently pointed out in his October 2009 ClickZ column.

    Social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies already incorporate workstream elements. Not only that, Radian6 connects with Salesforce CRM, apart from Twitter. New tools like Buzzstream are designed for profiling and responding to influencers, and not just listening.

    With Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial and now LinkedIn offering robust APIs, it’s now possible to find or build powerful social applications that connect with other solutions in the toolkit and make sharing easier than ever before.

    Collaboration solution vendors are an integral part of the mix because they enable your customers, partners and employees to collaborate and co-create innovative products and processes. I expect enterprise collaboration solutions like SocialText and Cynapse and ideation platforms like Accept Ideas and WebStorm to start offering integration with other applications.

    Social commerce solutions like Bazaarvoice play an important role in the ecosystem by converting and cross-selling to customers and we should see such solutions offering more integration too.

    CRM tool vendors are also expanding in both directions and introducing social media analytics and community features. Salesforce and RightNow now offer a full suite of community features including ideation, support and knowledge sharing and even connect with Twitter and Facebook. Apart from the integration with Radian6, Salesforce also supports integration with the Lithium community platform and customer support applications like Helpstream.

    At the other end, community platform vendors like Jive, Lithium and Neighborhood America are also aggressively introducing social media analytics and social CRM features.

    In Summary

    It’s more important than ever to create a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem and the tools to enable it are quickly coming together. Organizations that develop the end-to-end view described above will use these tools in an integrated manner and win on the Social Web, while those who implement disconnected solutions on an ad-hoc basis will struggle. Integration, then, is the key to winning on the Social Web.

    (This is an edited version of a guest post I wrote for the Marketing Practice Blog in October 2009.)

    Update: Social CRM Resources

    Since I wrote this post in October 2009, I have come across several interesting conversation threads about Social CRM. Here is a selection of some of the most useful resources I have found so far:

    - Paul Greenberg puts a stake in the ground on Social CRM.

    - Jeremiah Owyang starts a list of Social CRM vendors.

    - Fabio Kipriani explains the benefits of social CRM.

    - Lithium’s Chief Community Officer Joe Cothrel gives a great overview of the evolution of Social CRM.

    I’ll be grateful if you will help me understand the Social CRM space better by sharing your favorite Social CRM resources in the comments.

    Cross-posted at 2020 Social: Because Business is Social.

     

    • wileyccoyote 2:56 pm on December 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks much for the mention of Neighborhood America, Gaurav. I'd like to point out that we have a #scrm white paper available for free downlaod titled, “CRM: Integrating enterprise social networks to create conversation through customer engagement.” It's the last one on this page: http://www.neighborhoodamerica.com/white-papers

    • Gaurav Mishra 3:00 pm on December 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      @wileyccoyote Checking out http://neighborhoodamerica.com/white-papers Looking forward to know more about your platform. cc: @evansdave

    • Blake Cahill 12:48 pm on December 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Gaurav,

      Appreciate the mention of @visible_tech in your post. I enjoyed your very well constructed explanation about the space and how the ecosystem of listening, engagement, and community platform vendors all play a part in aiding brands and organizations with understanding and hopefully further transforming how they interact with their customers. Well done.

      @bcahill

    • monika bijani 8:57 am on December 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      great stuff!

    • monika bijani 1:57 pm on December 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      great stuff!

  • Gaurav Mishra 10:02 pm on October 31, 2007 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: API, , , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Google’s Social Networking Plans: OpenSocial is Not About Facebook 

    social-networking

    What is OpenSocial?

    TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

    You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.

    - X – X – X –

    What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?

    In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap –

    While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.

    – and for creating a path-breaking open-source platform that will genuinely benefit everyone in the web 2.0 value chain – social networks, application developers and end users – and allay fears about the web 2.0 boom being a mere bubble.

    - X – X – X –

    What does OpenSocial mean for each stakeholder in the web 2.0 value chain?

    So, what does OpenSocial mean for each stakeholder – Facebook, other social networks, application developers, end users and Google itself?

    What does OpenSocial mean for Facebook?

    OpenSocial is bad for Facebook because –

    - Facebook will lose its proprietary lock-in on application developers.
    - Over time, Facebook may also lose its lock-in on end users.
    - In future, Facebook may face competition from a social advertising application from Google embedded in OpenSocial.

    OpenSocial is good for Facebook because –

    - It will encourage more developers to start writing social networking applications.
    - It will encourage more users to start using social networks.

    What does OpenSocial mean for other social networks?

    OpenSocial is especially good for new social networks because –

    - It will enable social networks to offer the same user experience as Facebook via common applications.
    - It will help social networks to scale up user registrations quickly by lowering the entry barrier for users via shared profile, friend and activity data.
    - It will allow social networks to position themselves in increasingly focussed niches.

    What does OpenSocial mean for application developers?

    OpenSocial is brilliant news for application developers because –

    - It is based on HTML and JavaScript, languages most application developers already know.
    - It allows developers to “learn once, write anywhere”, or write front-ends for different social networks using the same API and the same back-end.
    - It is both easy to implement for simple applications and easy to customize for complex applications.
    - Application developers don’t have to choose between the Facebook platform and the OpenSocial platform.

    What does OpenSocial mean for the end users?

    Most importantly, OpenSocial will benefit end users because –

    - It will allow end users to use the same applications across social networks.
    - Over time, it will allow end users to share and synchronize profile, friend and activity data across social networks.
    - Over time, by allowing more niche social networks to evolve, it will increase the social networking options available to end users.

    What does OpenSocial mean for Google?

    OpenSocial is a strategic breakthrough for Google because -

    - It will help Google to break Facebook’s stronghold on social networking.
    - It will allow Google to launch its own social advertising service to rival the one about to be launched by Facebook.
    - It may allow Google to enter into the social search engine space on the lines of Facebook.
    - It may also allow Google to develop a marketplace for bringing together application developers and social networks.
    - It will allow Google to build public consensus on sharing of personal data before it builds interconnectedness between it’s own applications.
    - It will help Google to increase its ad revenues because of overall increase in Internet usage.

    - X – X – X –

    What are other bloggers saying about OpenSocial?

    While the whole blogosphere is buzzing with OpenSocial related posts (see Techmeme and Technorati), most of them are just focusing on the very superficial Facebook aspect. A small minority of bloggers, on the other hand, do seem to get the bigger story.

    In an absolutely brilliant post, Marc Andreessen writes why OpenSocial is the next big leap forward for web 2.0 –

    Open Social basically standardizes the concept of a plug-in API in such a way that neither host social networking environments nor external applications will ever have to invent another plug-in API, or have to choose between multiple competing proprietary plug-in APIs. Many standards die an early death because they are too complicated and hard to implement. Open Social is what you want in a standard — it’s expansive enough to do useful things, but limited enough to be very easy to implement.

    The New York Times story on Open Social focuses on the Facebook aspect but also says that Google’s bigger game-plan might be to develop a model where it gives away free open-source software to developers, not only to improve Google’s own applications, but also to improve other applications, so that overall Internet usage increases and it could benefit indirectly by selling more advertising.

    I bumped onto LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick’s manifesto called Thoughts on the Social Graph through Google Blogoscoped. Brad said in August that the goal of his project at Google (presumably OpenSocial) is to ultimately make the social graph a community asset, dependent on data from various social networks, but independent of any company or organization as “the” central graph owner –

    (The goal is to) establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users). While the non-profit’s servers and databases will initially be centralized, (the goal is to) ensure that the design is such that others can run their own instances, sharing data with each other.

    Do note that Brad doesn’t seem to be overly focused on undermining Facebook.

    ClaimID creator Fred Stutzman says that Google is using OpenSocial to build public confidence before it breaks the walls between its own properties and interconnects our personal data residing across properties –

    So what is Google really trying to do? By placing “opensocial” in the open, Google is demystifying how it will interconnect its properties. This is as important strategic move; Google contains so much personal information about all of us that openness will benefit the company when Google decides to interconnect.

    ZDNet blogger Dan Farber thinks that Google will use OpenSource to enter the social advertising space –

    OpenSocial is part of Google’s quest to increase usage of the Web. More applications can mean more searches and ad searches. You could also expect some new advertising services based on tapping into the OpenSocial APIs that work across all compliant social networks. In addition, Google will weave OpenSocial across its services beyond Orkut, such as iGoogle, and eventually embed the social graph in the Internet fabric for its users.

    I totally love how Richard McManus describes OpenSocial as the ‘third place’ of social networks –

    Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace. It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks – and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks.

    Finally, according to ZDNet blogger Caroline McCarthy, in spite of all its brilliance, Google may run into various roadblocks with OpenSocial –

    As the OpenSocial overseer, working through partnerships rather than its usual strategy of acquisitions, Google might not have quite as much power as it’s used to… The individual social-networking sites are responsible for getting their own arms of the project up and running, and exactly when that will happen is by no means clear… Additionally, some of the OpenSocial participants have not abandoned their existing in-house platform strategies… Then there’s the Curse of the Zombie (or Vampire, or Pirate). By opting into OpenSocial, a social-networking site may find itself at odds with users who find embeddable applications to be distracting at best and spam-worthy at worst.

     

    • Liz 12:30 am on November 1, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      Yeah read about this on TechCrunch earlier today. Nov 5th :) Sounds good!

  • Gaurav Mishra 7:27 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Alexaholic, API, , , , , Statsaholic, , ,   

    Alexa vs Alexaholic in Perspective 

    Alexa’s lawsuit on Alexaholic/ Statsaholic is generating a lot of negative buzz about both companies.

    Tim O’Reilly – who was at the center of the blogger code of conduct controversy recently – puts the issue in perspective –

    In short, I ended up with a lot more sympathy for Amazon’s position than I expected to. If someone decided that they could make a nice business by re-using the content from O’Reilly books in a new, more accessible form, I’d probably be miffed too.

    Also See: TechCrunch. O’Reilly Radar.

     

    • santaram 8:03 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      Hi gaurav thanks making my blog in ur technorati favourites and please tell me that alexa ranks are reliable. because my blog

      http://tbtitbits.blogspot.com it was new blog and i was writing jokes and humor in it and according to alexa it showing my blog rank as 15. And can u give me ur email id so i have some doubts to clarify with u. my email id is as above. Please help me

    • Gauravonomics 10:24 pm on April 21, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      @Santaram: I checked and Alexa is indeed showing your and some other Blogger blogs’ rank as 15. I’m sure there’s a mistake. Check back in a while and it will probably be corrected.

    • ladybird1005 5:11 am on November 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hi! I have seen many such websites that provide competitive analysis for free. My personal favourite is http://www.estimix.com . It seems to generate very accurate traffic information, too.

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