There is a mad rush towards online social networking space. Every second person wants to get on the bandwagon with his own social networking website with a silly-sounding name. In my opinion, most of these sites are just a fad and are not built on strong fundamentals in terms of a) revenue sources and b) the problem they solve.

What is online networking, btw?

The purpose of a social networking website is to help you keep in touch with your existing contacts and to generate more contacts! In case of social networking, the contacts are friends or prospective friends, whereas In case of business networking, the contacts are business associates or prospective business associates.

Now, answer this question – How much time and money are you willing you spend to keep in touch with your: a) friends and b) business associates. It is important to know this fact. Online market may be different, but it is closely related to offline consumer behaviour. Online business model can help in extending the product composition with new innovation and format of delivery. It is important to know if people are willing to pay for a given convinience. And if they are not willing to pay for the convinience, what alternate source of revenue do we have?

So how do you keep in touch with your friends?

In real life, you spend nothing to keep in touch with your friends. You call them up when you want to hang out with them, you give them a shout on their mobile phones or drop in to kill some time! If you are tech-savvy and love to announce a great news, you send them emails. Why will you like to send a scrap to someone (when you can simply send a short email or catch up on various instant messengers)? And why will you like to create such huge volume of personal content and share with millions of people on the Internet who are not even known to me.

Though you may have build friendship /relationship on social networking websites, they are generally not for long. And the long ones actually use the social networking as only the contact point and then evolves and flourishes offline.

What about business associates?

However, business networking sites will keep evolving, since it adds value to businesses. It help people refer / recommend a vendor or buyer to other people in a networked environment as a recommendation network. It has been very successful, when it comes to executive search and generating new business.

Again, the formal nature of relationship and privicy factor makes business networking websites a great place to get connected and exchange notes.

So, the conclusion is:

So, as on today, given the trend, I can say that social networking is a fad, which is getting saturated and is not supported by a proper revenue model. Online advertising cannot be considered a decent revenue model for a site where people come to kill time! However business networking is here to stay. Corporate intranets having social communities may stay. 

I have already written the orbituary of Facebook, My Space, Bebo and social networking platforms. These are evolving as a fad and will vapourize in the same way in years to come. I wish these trillion dollar valuations to be true, but my mind says otherwise. And I am not the only person saying this. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuation feels the same way to a great extent (may be for different reasons).

What do you think? 

Just a random thought:

Programmers are supposed to use their programming skills to automate business process for their clients. Therefore, a good programmer should be one, who takes an initiative of automating his own work and never repeats the line of code he has written once Charity begins at home!

Unfortunately I have hardly seen many such souls.

What do you think?

Yahoo announced that they are opening up their search results for third party data integration. This will allow third party to contribute to Yahoo search experience and make it more useful for their users. It will be interesting to see how other webmasters use this open search platform to gain popularity by sharing data with Yahoo, while still retaining their competitive edge, by virtue of their database, in their respective area. We can expect to experience a long-tail of innovation in days to come. This will help webmasters, visitors and Yahoo! A perfect win-win-win situation.

On the other hand, Google already have a open platform called Google Co-op, where anyone can create custom search engine. As per Google Co-op,

"Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website."

Google also offer Google Subscribed Links which in their own language they define as:

"Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more"

The challenge

However, both the services that Google offers, has a great deal of focus on promoting Google, Google Search & Google Subscribed Links. Again, they are not directly making any change in the Google Search (at least it has not be publicly explained how it will effect user experience of a normal search).

Therefore, Google Search or Yahoo Search cannot be termed as true "user contributed" or "Web2.0" as described by Tom O'Reilly. People won't contribute unless they see that their contribution is making a positive impact in the search pattern and it is visible. In the current state both Subscribed Link and Yahoo Open Search will only help if a user wants to use the enhanced engine. Most Internet users will never switch these engines. Even if they are told the benefit of the plug-ins, how are they supposed to select the ones which will help them from a collection of thousands of user contributed plug-in channels? And what happens when new plug-ins come out?

Suggested solution

If search engines want to go the Web2.0 way with user contribution enhancing the overall experience and defining the way search engines display results, they need to bring user contributions to the mainstream. I feel that themed searches are the way to go. Google / Yahoo shall classify a particular user contributed plug-in into a theme. When a visitor wants to search for a business, he may choose a "Finding a business" theme. On a contrary when a visitor wants to learn about the subject he may chose the "Tutorial" theme.

Let us see an example.

We search for a very competitive keyword – "web design". This is the result we get.

If you see, there are three different intents that the search result satisfies. A person might be searching "web design" because he:

• Want to find a web design company (blue marker)
• Want to learn web design (red marker)
• Get web design resources (green marker)

All three intents are very different. Most people do not type-in their intent in the search box to make it a specific search, because they are not specialists in using search engines. Therefore, a search engine should suggest a possible intent and display results only related to the given theme. The theme model can best work when they are formed based on a collection of user generated plug-ins. Thus user generated content can find its way to the end user in an organized way.

It goes without saying that pulling in the user generated content directly into the main search result has its challenge of weeding out spam. But this seems to be the most logical way as of now. 

Recently I came across this excellent CSS reference website:

http://reference.sitepoint.com/css

I highly recommend this website since it has been written by two of the world's most renowned CSS experts — Tommy Olssen and Paul O'Brien. In this online reference, the entire CSS language is clearly and concisely explained, including browser compatibility, working examples, and easy-to-read descriptions.

For the purists, you can refer to the W3C CSS reference here – http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/

Few other decent references are:

• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531209(VS.85).aspx
• http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/
• http://xhtml.com/en/css/reference/

W3C HTML Working Group has recently released HTML 5 working draft. This is a very important step forward; the same is available for review and comment at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/

The new standard addresses the need of web application developers in more pro-active way:

• Basic template facility has been implemented with facility to repeat elements
• There are also new elements for navigation, headers, footers, figures, and dialog
• Client-side persistent storage functionality (JavaScript APIs for key/value pairs & embedded SQL databases)
• Support for server-sent events, which will facilitate persistent connections to remote data sources

Some old features like frames have been removed.

Let us see how soon new browsers start supporting these new features of HTML 5. Currently the Opera browser has the best support (though it does not support all features) for HTML 5.

Footnote:

There is an overall trend to make HTML more developer friendly so that complex web applications are developed as per W3C standards and are compatible on different browsers on different mediums. With Bill Gate's prediction coming in about different shapes and sizes of computers in this decade which will make computers more intuitive (like the table PC), this seems to be moving in the right direction.

So let's think, how your website will look and take shape (as per device specific browser compatibility) when displayed on a coffee table as the people sitting around it mumble the name of your company!

Abhishek

Proper project management is key to a successful project. To manage multiple projects and teams which are geographically spread across the globe, you need a quality project management tool.

As a medium sized web development company, we looked around for some quality software which suits our requirement and does not burn a hole in the pocket. Here is our pick!

Basecamp HQ:- A nice, minimalist simple to use software true to the philosophy of 37signals, the company which built it. This software is only available in a SaS (software as service) model. IMO this software best suits small projects which are communication centric. It lacks version control, task management, project tracking along with cost-benefit analysis.

Overall, very easy to easy and adapt, but reporting is not up to the mark. If you are a small business and you do most of your project management yourself, this can be a good choice for you.

Intervals:- It seems to have picked up the baton where Basecamp HQ has left. It also works on a SaS (software as service) model. It has more features (specially in terms of reporting and role management) than Basecamp HQ, thus making it suitable to manage complex projects across a large organization.

Overall, it is a good attempt to overcome the shortcomings of Basecamp HQ. However it needs to improve on its usability. It also needs to provide staged progression in terms of features and complexity so that small businesses can adapt the system. I am sure that this software will become popular as they keep improving and become old. For a SaS model company, time-tested reliability is more important than anything else.

Ace Project:- A comprehensive project management software with user friendly interface and short learning curve. It has different licensing policies and therefore you can rent or buy off (with our without source code) the software to suit your organizational needs. This software is around for quite some time and therefore seems to be reliable.

It has decent reporting capabilities, but not as good as what Intervals claim to have!

Dot Project:- The best free open source project management software that I have come across. This software looks flexible and extendable. You can plug in various modules, including Mantis (for bug tracking). The usability and reporting leaves much to be desired. So if you are looking at free project management software with access to source code, Dot Project is a good choice.

Conclusion:

There is nothing called a perfect project management software. The usage, the users and the desired result determines the one which suits best for a given organization. So take your pick from the above mentioned toolset.

Apart from doing software / web development on Open-source platform, Indus Net Technologies also customize and implement open-source products for clients on demand. Some popular (and free) open-source products are SugarCRM, Drupal, osCommerce for CRM, content management and e-commerce respectively.

IMHO, these are some limitations that I have observed. It is important to know them before initiating a project. These are not very serious in nature and using free open-source products remains a good option for many small and medium sized enterprises around the world.

1. Like any product, it is very important to align the product with your workflow and/or requirements. You must fit the product into the organization by making necessary changes. Therefore a gap analysis should be done and the effort must be estimated for aligning the product as per the current work-flow and/or requirements.

2. Most free open-source products lacks in usability. Therefore if you are doing a major implementation which will be used by thousands of people and you are going to pay for their time, you must consider a major overhaul of interface by involving a usability consultant from your vendor. Otherwise you will end up spending a lot of money.

3. Most free open-source products have very poor reporting system. These reports are not good enough to run a business and shall be re-done as per your company requirement aligned with your key measurement matrix for the given business function.

4. The programmers who can change the software as per your needs are the code-hackers types, who love to dive into existing system architecture and make small changes to achieve the desired results. Therefore you must identify and hook up with the right programmer / programming company (like Indus Net Technologies – a bit of shameless self promotion) to get it right.

5. It is a myth, that implementing open-source software is free. Software code is free, not the hard work of programmers and analysts which goes behind implementing it. And you need the later to successfully implement it in your scenario and reap the benefits of the solution. Yes, it considerably reduces the cost, improves reliability and gives you a head start from where you can take informed decision about your IT needs.

Do not get me wrong. I am only listing the limitations. The benefits are well-known and they out-live the limitations any day. However it is very important that these limitations are known before proceeding.

Feel free to discuss / debate!

• The SEZ Act is under constant change. So whatever is stated there cannot be taken as a confirmed policy from the Government.
• The Act has been poorly and loosely drafted leaving a lot of ambiguity, areas of misinterpretation and scope of misuse by people who have the best lawyers at their disposal.

1. Manufacturing or service companies – They will get duty-free import capability and relief from various direct and indirect taxes including VAT, Service Tax, Excise Tax, FBT, Dividend Distribution Tax and above all Income Tax. These sops are given so that these businesses invest for setting up new infrastructure and in their business within the SEZ marked area.
2. Real estate companies - They will develop the SEZ infrastructure and multiply the value of land literally overnight and reap rich dividends.

• SEZ scheme is mainly helping large, established businesses and is working against small and medium sized businesses. Large companies like Reliance, Infosys, Mahindra, etc. who can buy and build infrastructure measuring 25 acres or more will reap the benefit of tax exemption for another 15 years, while small companies will struggle with a collective tax burden of more than 50% of the total turnover. Big will become bigger, small will have a tougher time and perish.
• SEZ scheme is brining back (in a new package) the age old zamindari system. The SEZs which are being developed by real estate developers to accommodate medium sized companies are leasing out infrastructure at abnormally high costs (almost five times of normal rent) which makes it out of bounds for most entrepreneurs. There is no regulation on the ownership / lease / rent process between these real estate developers and the SEZ units. In one of the agreement that I have managed to get my hands on, the SEZ developer made a mix of Deed of Assignment and A Sub-lease Agreement keeping best of both worlds in his own favor and charging a price which a Freehold Land. Few companies, who will manage to afford it, will end up spending a major of their cash flow on rent/lease cost alone. This will make them highly vulnerable to cyclic depressions in the market which are very common on a new industry.

• We do not mind paying taxes. If IT industry should do away with subsidies, Let everyone pay taxes! There should not be double standards by retaining tax benefits for large established players and punishing small & medium sized enterprises for being what they are – i.e. small.
• Please come out of the dream that infrastructure creation is fundamental to IT growth. IT is not like heavy engineering, steel or shipping business which depends heavily on top-quality infrastructure. In fact IT infrastructure has the highest depreciation and technologies / equipments get obsolete overnight. The largest companies in Silicon Valley have come out of garages and dorms. IT industry needs entrepreneurs and people for its growth. Focus on growing talent in colleges and universities. 
• IT industry has low entry barriers. Try to keep it low. This will help innovativeness and constant evolution of the industry. Let entrepreneurs take control and scale new heights. Facilitate them, don't frustrate them.

Business organizations can never be in equilibrium or achieve stable position. Either they are moving up or they are moving down, depending upon their innovation quotient. 

If you are trying to keep things stable, they won't remain so. You will slowly slide down simply because:

• there is no exclusivity,
• competition will catch up on the technology front and -
  • either cut price – if they too are not innovating (resulting in your margins to shrink)
  • or innovate and better the product – if they want to add value to the product and move up the value chain (resulting in your market share to shrink)

And if you continuously innovate and apply new ideas (refer to my post on manufacturing ideas), you will continue to move up.

It is unfortunate that in some cases, the entire industry decides to stabilize their position and take customer wants for granted. For example, consider:

• radio manufacturers,
• alarm clock manufacturers,
• camera manufacturers (there are some really big names out there)

They decided to stay at their position and were swept away by mobile companies like Nokia (who is the largest digital camera manufacturer in the world today). They decided to experiment and give more to their customers by integrating digital camera in mobile phones (possibly the thought process was that mobile, camera, clock, alarm are all things that need to be handy). It took some time to gather market acceptance which was created by the initial hype, but later on sustained due to the instant-in-the-hand value of the additional gadgets.

Seth Godin has highlighted how alarm clock manufacturers can still make a small change in their product and make it stand out. These are simple improvements which can make a product stand out and desirable!

Are you moving up or moving down?

I was reading about Ed Kohler's post about social networking update redundancy.

I think there can be a simple solution. To do this we may need a simple new standard format of data syndication, which can be a simple derivative of RSS. Basically every individual can have a personal RSS feed.

A person shall provide an input socket (it can be a XML-RPC based system, which already is used by WordPress and several other blogs) when he signs up with any social networking sites or any website where he might update his personal data or make comments or blog posts. These sites can have a system to push the information to this personal RSS feed, which can be the only RSS feed that your friend need to subscribe to know all the latest news about you or your company. I understand that when all data is pushed to the same personal RSS feed, redundancy can be controlled by smart pattern matching algorithm (may be simply matching the heading to start with).

I think this technical solution might work

I recently read Ed Kohler's comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:

1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet

However, I beg to differ.

In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.

An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:

1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database

2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.

3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.

May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?

Abhishek

Reliance's BigAdda, Rediff's iShare and Naurki's Brijj.com are the latest dotcoms to hit the Indian social networking marketplace. It may trigger the next dotcom explosion with many more mindless dotcoms in line with these me-too networking sites by public listed biggies of India. Soon, we will forget why the first dotcom boom wave came down crashing after showing colorful dreams to thousands of tech-entrepreneurs worldwide.

I will personally advise new startups to keep away from such me-too type projects unless they have a solid niche, a risk-managed business model and a proper revenue model.

In fact, I am not at all optimistic about success of any of these new ventures unless they offer a great reason to be a part of it. The market place is already saturated and people are finding it difficult to manage their multiple social networking accounts and commitments. Besides, most of these sites do not offer any value addition apart from entertainment. Gautam Ghosh, an avid blogger shares a simmilar view on the subject.

If I have to select a possible winner among these biggies, I will go for brijj.com, which can take a turn towards the business model adopted by yellowjobs.com of NDTV. Another reason for possible success of brijj.com is that it is designed to be a business networking portal. It offers you a reason to spend time and have a clearly marked revenue model. In comparison other sites, just like their global originals heavily depend upon a speculative value creation and are looking for a buy-out similar to youtube.com which will make them rich overnight.

Do check out how many times people are referring to "Internet advertising" as their business model for their social networking website. It is not that Internet advertising is not BIG business. But it will just not work for social media websites in long term. And it is a foolishness to bet on Internet advertising as a revenue channel. We know it from the Y2K dotcom meltdown. In fact I can see the same madness as Y2K. We are not yet there, but we know it can peak very quickly  

Do you think these sites will bloom?

There is a big debate over India becoming an IT super-power. Every few days I will meet an over-excited guy who is impressed with the growth of Indian IT companies an think that they will take over the world soon!

Let us do an acid test to determine if this is true!

Let us consider a hypothetical scenario that India & the USA are no more allies in economic growth. Let us further consider that both countries have imposed trade restrictions and sanctions on the each other!

Now, the USA does not have access to a big English-speaking pool of talent to develop their superior software at a lower cost.  That's a big blow. Will the USA survive this? I think they can. There are other developing economies like Brazil, China, Taiwan, etc. which can fill in the gap (initially they may be not as good). So overall they will have a tough time.

Now, consider that India does not have access to products and technologies developed and patented by US based companies. What will happen? Life without Microsoft products, Oracle databases, Google, etc.

Think. Think harder.

Possibly we cannot think of such a scenario! It is beyond our imagination.

This means that India, as an economy is dependent on the technologies and products developed by US companies and not the other way around as many software outsourcing companies think (and as their CEOs will debate with me at length).

So, India works as an "employee" and/or "self employed entity" for US – the "businessman" and/or "investor" (if I have to go by the definition of Robert T. Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame). This means that Indian IT economy at this point is not "financially free" and is totally dependent on the "investor" who controls the game. It will be very difficult to change the scenario, unless, Indians stop day dreaming of the "IT super power status" and get out of the "luxury bed of benefits and perks" and start working for themselves.

Now we know – who needs whom!

Hi,

I recently stumbled upon Voki (www.voki.com) which seems like a nice widget. It comes from Sitepal (www.sitepal.com). Actually I have used Sitepal in past. Unfortunately it didnt work great for me (nothing wrong with their product, but it was just a bit irritating for our customers). However I can see good potential for a concept like Voki which is more of a "fun" concept and can be extended to social networking.

I created a voki character of mine to try it out. I could made this stuff within five minutes flat. So, it is simple to use as well

There has been a lot of talk over the BIG IT talent pool in India. Every bureaucrat and market research agency in the country shows towering numbers of colleges and students that they produce.

But the burning question is – Is this talent employable?

The biggest challenge Indian IT industry faces today is the ever-growing gap between graduating engineers and employable graduates. If not checked in time, it might result in a lost opportunity for India Inc. as opportunities will not wait and move towards economies who provide more employable talent at the best ROI.

The main reasons for this gap are:

• Low motivation for top experts to take up teaching as a profession.
• Outdated syllabus, course curriculum, infrastructure, teaching methodologies and content!
• Little or no emphasis in making people "life long learners", primarily because education is spoon fed in most institutions.
• Priviledge to "best education" has been made available to selected class.
• Poor use of technology to spread education to rural areas

There is a lot to rant about the negatives, which we all do. I never liked the way education is imparted in our country and always wanted to grab the first opportunity to change the same.

I am taking a humble step towards my dream project by launching Indus Net Academy in the third week of June 2007. I have coined the slogan as "New Age Education", which is timeless and conveys the feeling behind the project. The initial academic setup will be in a small area of 1000 sq feet, which will be extended as we mature and generate more demand.

Indus Net Academy has been housed in SDF Building, Sector V, Salt Lake, Kolkata for the following reasons:

• Close to the industry!
• Easy availability of successful professionals who might like to share their experience and knowledge.
• Ease of management, since Indus Net Technologies is also located on 4th and 5th floor of the same building.

The purpose of Indus Net Acaemy can be summerised as follows:

• Create employable talent
• Continued education for working professionals
• Accumulation & distribution of knowledge
• Rural education

(From now onwards the team behind Indus Net Acaemy is being termed as "We" instead of "I" since many key members of Indus Net Technologies thinks about the academy the same way that I do and are working tirelessly to make it a success.

Initially, Indus Net Academy will start with career oriented professionally taught courses on:- Web Design, Web Development & Internet Marketing. The course will be taught by experts who are practising these subjects at Indus Net Technologies and serving clients from all over the world. Teaching methodology will be a mix of classroom based core concept delivery, self paced study, research and discussion on important ideas, lab sessions and practical tips from practitioners of "how things are done in real life".

We are further backing up the courses taught in Indus Net Academy with guaranteed jobs by joining hands with companies who need the "industry-ready talent".

Since we have in-house professional talent available in Indus Net Technologies, we chose to start with subjects related to Internet industry. As we move ahead, we expect professionals from different walks of life to be a part of this movement and make a difference – to make the "new age education" dream a reality!

Will keep you posted. Looking forward to a bright future…

Keep an eye on http://www.indusnetacademy.com/