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Tag Archives: Web-2.0

Check It Out: My First Podcast on Why Startups Need Workaholics and Why Mobile Will Drive Web 2.0 Usage in India

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Quick Summary: Check out my first podcast on Indicast where Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra and I discuss why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India.

My First Podcast on Indicast

I had a great time last Sunday recording my first podcast with Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra (tweet) on why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India (tweet).

All three of them have extremely rich backgrounds, resulting in an extremely vibrant discussion —

- Aditya Mhatre is India’s leading podcaster at Indicast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- VeerChand Bothra is at the center of India’s mobile boom, as MobilePundit, as organizer of Mumbai Mobile Mondays and as VP at NetCore Solutions (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Aditya Mishra is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem in India through his work (he has the fancy title of Entrepreneur-in-Residence at TCS) and his role as the organizer of BarCamp and Kickstart (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Filed in Desi Web 2.0, Internet, Marketing, Mobile, Noteworthy, Social Media, Trendspotting, Twitter Threads, podcasts | Also tagged Aditya Mishra, Aditya-Mhatre, Agencyfaqs, Duncan Riley, Entrepreneurship, Hindustan-Times, Indicast, Jason-Calacanis, Michael Ryan, Michael-Arrington, Mobile, Mobile Blogging, Mobile-Advertising, Rajesh-Jain, Robert-Scoble, Startups, VeerChand-Bothra, Wall Street Journal, WSJ | Permalink | Comments (3)

Updated: Mumbai Twitter Meetup & Seven Reasons You Should Sign Up For Twitter Today If You Already Haven’t

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

Quick Summary: In Mumbai? On Twitter? Register for the first Mumbai Twitter Meetup. Not on Twitter? Find seven reasons why you should sign up for Twitter today.

- X- X- X-

If You Are in Mumbai & on Twitter, Attend the Mumbai Twitter Meetup

Yesterday, when I tweeted about wanting to do a Mumbai Twitter Meetup —

Blog meets are so passe. I want to do a Mumbai Twitter meet. Anyone interested? (Twitter)

– I received half a dozen responses within seconds.

Within the hour, I had set up a @MumbaiTwit Twitter account, a dozen people had started following it, Aalaap Ghag (@aalaap) and Kapil Bhatia (@kapilb) had posted about the event and Aalaap had set up a Mumbai Twitter Meetup event on Facebook. Phew!

So, if you are in Mumbai and on Twitter, let’s meet up for the first Mumbai Twitter Meetup.

When? 5 pm, Saturday, December 29, 2007.

Where? Flat No A/65, Sea Lord, Cuffe Parade, Mumbai.

If you are planning to attend, here are a few things you should do in the run up to the event –

Filed in Events, Noteworthy, Press, Twitter Threads | Also tagged Events, Facebook, Mainstream-Media-Mentions, Mumbai-Twitter-Meetup, Noteworthy, Orkut, Social-Networks, Tweetup, Twitter Threads | Permalink | Comments (16)

Now a Social Network for SMS Forwards! Vakow!

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Vakow! front page

Vakow! user page

Vakow! is a new Indian web 2.0 startup for people who “luv SMS Forwards”. Basically, Vakao! lets you post SMSes from web or mobile; tag, rate, comment on and share SMSes with your friends; and subscribe to users or tags to receive SMSes.

While I’m not a huge fan of SMS forwards, I know a lot of (mostly) young people who are. Therefore, Vakow! looks like it is ‘lowest common denominator’ enough to appeal to young people in a way that, let’s say, user generated content won’t. Vakow!’s user interface is also quite cool and, therefore, likely to appeal to the young audience it is targeting.

Valow! is the brainchild of two twenty-something youngsters Rahul and Amit who were amongst the earliest employees at Webaroo.

The duo will most probably try to monetize Vakow! through advertising and content syndication. If Vakow! scales up well, content syndication will be easy and I can even see youth oriented marketers wanting to advertise on Vakow!. What’s more, I can totally see Vakow! as a popular app for the Indian community on The Facebook or the OpenSocial platform.

Filed in Desi Web 2.0, Internet, Marketing, Trendspotting | Also tagged Mobile-2.0, Mobile-Apps, Social-Networking, Social-Networks, The-Next-Marketing-Guru, Trendspotting, Vakow!, Wannabe-Web-Millionaire, Web-Apps, Webaroo | Permalink | Comments (0)

Web 2.0: Is the Bubble About to Burst?

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Steve Rubel started talking about it yesterday and, within a day, everyone is talking about the web 2.0 bubble -

The bubble really began in earnest when Google bought YouTube. That’s when every person with an entrepreneurial itch woke up and smelled the hype and money. Prior to then, startups were more focused on the entrance, not the exit.

John Heilemann at the New York Magazine argues both sides of the case but fails to make up his mind -

There’s the glut in venture capital: $3.4 billion invested in fledgling Internet firms in 2007, the most torrid pace since the height of the Web 1.0 mêlée. There are those lunatic valuations… There’s the frothy run-up in the NASDAQ… And then there’s the flood of derivative, dum-dum start-ups inducing a severe case of dot-com déjà vu.

Despite some tremors, online advertising is now a juggernaut that promises to only become more powerful as companies like Facebook start creating sophisticated networks where fine-grained behavioral targeting is possible. More than 1.3 billion consumers around the world now use the Internet, and the global growth curve is steep. Meanwhile, the main source of unbridled mania in the nineties, IPOs, are a non-factor this time around. Instead, the boom is being driven by giants with riverine profit flows and vast reservoirs of cash.

Filed in Internet, Trendspotting | Also tagged Marc-Andereessen, Startups, Steve-Rubel, Trendspotting, VCs, Venture-Capitalists, Wannabe-Web-Millionaire, Web-2.0-Bubble, Web-Bubble-2.0 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Conversation Age E-Book: Create Conversations, Not Clutter

Friday, May 4th, 2007

The ‘Conversation Age’ e-book is a collaborative e-book project conceived by Drew Mclellan and Gavin Heaton -

- 100 authors. We’re a few but need more.
- The overriding topic is “The Conversation Age” — where you take it is up to you.
- The items are short - one 8.5″ x 11″ page — it can be words, diagrams, photos (again up to you) If it is words - about 400, give or take a couple.
- We write it quickly and get it out there. We publish electronically.
- We make it available online for a small fee and we donate 100% of the proceeds to Variety the Children’s Charity — which serves children across the entire globe.

My contribution to the e-book is a chapter titled ‘Create Conversations, Not Clutter’. Here’s a teaser excerpt from the chapter -

While all of us agree that we need to create conversations with our customers/ readers and build a community around them, most of us end up creating clutter instead of conversations. In this article, I will share with you my thoughts on creating conversations, not clutter.

For the rest of the chapter, you’ll have to wait for the e-book.

Filed in Marketing | Also tagged Age-of-Conversation, Collaboratibe-E-Book, Collaborative-Project, Conversation, Conversation-Age, E-Book, Marketing, Marketing-Bloggers, Marketing-Blogs, Marketing-Guru, Miscellaneous, Social-Marketing, Social-Networking, The-Next-Marketing-Guru | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Tom Sawyer Model for Web 2.0 Content Creation is Not Sustainable

Monday, April 30th, 2007

New York Times wonders if the Tom Sawyer model for Web 2.0 content creation -

Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff.

- is sustainable. It isn’t.

Online video site Magnify already shares ad revenues with users, YouTube is planning to, and everybody else is likely to follow. Web 2.0 businesses looking for free user-generated content will soon see users migrating to their competitors who have implemented a revenue sharing model.

Filed in Internet, Marketing | Also tagged Magnify, Revenue-Sharing, The-Next-Marketing-Guru, Tom-Sawyer, User-Generated-Content, Wannabe-Web-Millionaire, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (0)

Six Levels of Web 2.0 Participation

Monday, April 30th, 2007

According to the the Forrester Research Social Technographics report, social technology, or web 2.0, behaviors can be categorized into a ladder with six levels of participation (via ZDNet) -

- Creators (13%): Publish web pages or blogs, upload videos to video sharing sites.
- Critics (19%): Comment on blogs, post ratings and reviews.
- Collectors (15%): Use RSS, tag Web pages.
- Joiners (19%): Use social networking sites.
- Spectators (23%): Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts.
- Inactives (52%): None of these activities.

The percentages don’t add up to 100% because, apart from the inactives, the other five levels of participation overlap with each other.

Forrester recommends that instead of looking at Web 2.0 as a list of technologies to be deployed on an ad hoc basis, marketers should first analyze where their customers are on the Social Technographics ladder and then create a Web 2.0 strategy to transition them to the next step.

Here are my top of the mind thoughts on the Social Technographics report -

Filed in Internet, Marketing, Novice Blogger | Also tagged Apple, Blogging, Blogs, Dell, Forrester-Research, Novice Blogger, Podcasting, Social-Networking, Social-Technographics, Technorati, The-Next-Marketing-Guru, Wannabe-Web-Millionaire, ZDNet | Permalink | Comments (0)

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