Tuesday, September 11, 2007
INDUSTRY INNOVATORS!!
Co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs and his team at Apple have made the iPod as ubiquitous as cell phones and changed the way we listen to music.
CEO David Neeleman is known to take JetBlue flights and chat with customers on how he can make their time in the air more comfortable.
CEO Raphael le Masne de Chermont is gunning to make Shanghai Tang the first luxury brand to come out of China, and changing the face of global competition in the process.
Its Aeron chair become a symbol of the "dotcom job," but after the bust, Michael Volkema, chairman of the board for Herman Miller, CEO Brian Walker and their team downsized and made a radical investment in R&D to once again become the trend makers in the industry.
It started with aromatic, carefully roasted coffee beans and grew into a model for how a large company can do business responsibly and still grow like mad. Chairman of the Board and Chief Global Strategist Howard Schultz has been influential in putting a Starbucks in just about every corner of the world and on your local grocers' shelves.
When Samsung Chairman Kun-Hee Lee found the company's products gathering dust on store shelves, he made it his company's priority to create stylish, premium digital products that sparked customers' emotions with elegant, human-centered design.
Lyndon "Duke" Hanson and his partners at Crocs sold 6 million pairs of their different looking casual shoes last year, putting them on the feet of toddlers, parents, teenagers and grandmothers, and taking the concept of boat shoe as casual shoe mainstream.
Mark Constantine, the CEO of Lush Cosmetics, insists on shedding one-third of Lush's entire bath products line each year to avoid missing the next hot thing. With this strategy, he plans on tripling Lush's size by 2008.
Cold Stone Creamery founders Donald and Susan Sutherland created an ice cream experience where customers can have custom made ice cream concoctions folded and mixed to their hearts content.
Monday, September 10, 2007
startup to watch out for!
1. www.stumbleupon.com Launched in 2002 by three 20-somethings in a Calgary, Alberta, apartment, StumbleUpon now has 2 million registered users drawn by its knack for finding websites that match their interests and those of others with similar tastes as they "stumble" around the Net.Co-founder Garrett Camp (shown right), who totes around a mid-'80s Nikon F3 (yes, with actual film), came up with the idea as he was working on a master's in software engineering.
Frustrated as he tried to indulge his hobby online - "There wasn't a good way to find the best photo sites," Camp says - he tapped his own background in clustering technology. With coding help from Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith, he created an early version of StumbleUpon. Having nailed the photo problem, the team quickly saw how the technology could click with all sorts of media.
In the same way that it matches users with like-minded websites, StumbleUpon's technology also pairs online ads with targeted demographics and interests. Now StumbleUpon is attempting to do the same for online video and video advertising. In December the startup launched StumbleVideo, a service that offers the closest thing to channelsurfing that you'll find on the Web.
Business model: Advertising, subscriptions
2. www.slide.com Slide has developed customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver.
Funding: Not disclosed (Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, others)
Founder & CEO: Max Levchin (shown right)
Business model: Advertising, subscription
Bebo has built a social network, more than 30 million members strong, that keeps users' pages private but still allows them to share things like video and drawings made on an online whiteboard.
Founders: Michael Birch (also CEO), Xochi Birch (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Meebo lets users manage multiple instant-messaging services from one site. Meebo's killer app is a widget that places an IM window on your blog or webpage.
Founders: Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg (also CEO), Elaine Wherry (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Wikia operates a hosting service for ad-supported community sites that use the same software and collaborative content model that made Wikipedia a Web phenomenon.
Launched in 2004, Wikia communities range from fans of 24 to politics junkies. Wikia is also working on an open-source, user-generated search engine.
Founders: Angela Beesley, Jimmy Wales (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
6.www.joost.com
Forget the three-minute video blog. The 30-minute, broadcast-quality Web 2.0 TV show is coming in all its full-screen glory. And if serial disrupters Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have their way, neither television nor the Internet will be the same.
The duo behind peer-to-peer services Kazaa and Skype will officially launch Joost this spring, aiming to merge the best of TV with the best of the Net.
The service provides more of a television-style experience than current online video sites, with channels you can flip through randomly or program yourself. Viewers can also share playlists of their favorite shows with friends or chat with them online while watching the same program.
Joost will be free, supported by highly targeted ads based on people's actual watching habits, their friends' viewing patterns, and information they volunteer. Ad revenue will be split between Joost and the content owners.
Joost can offload much of the heavy bandwidth and storage costs borne by Web video companies like YouTube because the service is a partial peer-to-peer system, with content distributed among viewers' computers. And to reassure Hollywood moguls who watched the music industry get burned by Kazaa's legions of illegal file sharers, all Joost video is streamed and encrypted.
Founders: Janus Friis, Niklas Zennstrom (shown above)
Business model: Advertising
Dabble has designed a tool for organizing videos into playlists of favorites. Users share them across the network, so, say, food lovers can dabble in one another's video collections.
Founder & CEO: Mary Hodder (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
Metacafe's service ranks uploaded videos by popularity and feedback from a community of 17 million monthly visitors - and pays the creators for the success of their work. The auteurs get $100 after 20,000 viewings and $5 for every 1,000 subsequent views. Since September, Metacafe has paid a total of $250,000 to 200 contributors.
CEO: Erick Hachenburg (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
9. www.revision3.comRevision 3 is a production studio for geek-oriented online shows. Started by Digg founder Kevin Rose and its CEO, Jay Adelson, Revision3 sells sponsorships to companies like Go Daddy, Microsoft, and Sony for as much as $10,000 per episode.
Cofounder & CEO: Jay Adelson (shown right)
Business model: Advertising
10. www.blip.tv Blip.tv has built a platform for syndicating serialized online shows such as Starring Amanda Congdon and TreeHugger TV. Blip provides producers with software, ads, and distribution to websites and blogs. A deal is already signed with Web TV service Akimbo, which lets producers send their videos to TV sets.
Cofounders: Dina Kaplan, Mike Hudack (also CEO; shown right with Kaplan)
Business model: Licensing, advertising
the knowlegde worker 2.0
I Am Knowledge Worker 2.0
From: trib, 2 days ago
My presentation from the Office 2.0 Conference. It's a discussion on the changing nature of knowledge workers and how their organisations can help them be better at their jobs and more productive.
The slides alone don't make quite as much sense as they do with the audio.
See it first..the new Apple nano i-pod!!!
Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday brought a new look and new features to the company's most popular iPod.The new nano comes in four colors, and offers a few design changes.
Where the Web 2.0 stars were born
1. Google
Founded: 1998
First Address: 232 Santa Margarita Ave., Menlo Park, CA
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the latest billionaires to get their start in a garage. But while Bill Hewlett and David Packard and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on wood benches and dealt with cold drafts, Brin and Page enjoyed relaxing breaks in the backyard hot tub. The pair, who rented the garage from a woman who's now Brin's sister-in-law, bought the house last October to preserve this piece of the Google legacy.
2. Facebook
Founded: 2004
First Address: 95 Dunster St., Cambridge, MA
Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg started the company at Harvard's Kirkland House dorm, in the suite he shared with roommates Dustin Moskovitz (now VP for product engineering) and Chris Hughes (once a company spokesman). Facebook's success is already legendary, although Zuckerberg now faces a federal lawsuit alleging that he stole the idea from a rival social-networking site.
3. Craigslist
Founded: 1995
First Address: 1010 Cole St., San Francisco, CA
Newmark's classified-ad site grew from humble origins: a list of notable upcoming events that he e-mailed sporadically to Bay Area friends. He worked out of this two-bedroom apartment on Cole Street for six years; he moved the company to nearby offices in 2000 but lived here until he sold the apartment in December 2005. Now 17 million people visit Craigslist each month.
4. Mozilla Foundation
Founded: 2002
First Address: 466 Ellis St., Mountain View, CA
In an ordinary office cubicle, intern Blake Ross and programmer David Hyatt were working on a new browser for Netscape's Mozilla project after Netscape Navigator was crushed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The browser was called Firefox, and it became the first to give Explorer real competition since Navigator's market share collapsed. Both men left Netscape before it was disbanded in 2003, but the Mozilla project lives on.
5. Linden Lab
Founded: 1999
First Address: 333 Linden St., San Francisco, CA
Second Life was born on narrow Linden Alley in San Francisco's quaint Hayes Valley neighborhood. Founder Philip Rosedale worked in the warehouse with a single engineer. Three years later he moved to a larger office on, naturally, Second Street. Company headquarters are now in San Francisco's financial district, while the original space on Linden is occupied by a Moroccan furniture store.
6. Digg
Founded: 2004
First Address: 3255 Sawtelle Blvd., Apt. 107, Los Angeles, CA
Kevin Rose was hosting The Screen Savers on now-defunct cable channel TechTV when he interviewed Apple co-founder Wozniak, whose tales of Apple's early days inspired Rose. Later that day he went back to his apartment and hatched an idea for a news site that would let users decide what went on the front page. More than 17 million people get their news through Digg every month.
The rise of the white collar nomad
From para gliding to of the tops of mountains to deep sea diving in the pacific, they do it all and not when they are on a vacation
Introducing the new breed of the White collar nomad.Page 35,has been traveling for almost a year.He hit the road in 2005 equipped with laptop in hand.He would work on long distance clients over the internet,the nearest internet hookups would be his office.
For all those for whom seeing the world and traveling is a passion in todays day and age there is nothing to stop you from packing a knapsack and hitting the road with visa and laptop in hand.With sites like PayPal.com and other advances in electronic money transfer overseas financial transactions are almost friction-free.In fact Page has created a site for like minded individuals called workingnomads.com for all those who aspire to live this life.
Clients [may not be in India as yet] are beginning to understand that professionals working outside the office are just as reliable and trustworthy and many a time a lot more productive and efficient.
So what are the pre-requisites to choosing the life if a whit collar nomad?
- Make sure you have a reeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaallly huge appetite for traveling and the outdoors
- Be prepared to life the life of a new age saint,devoid of almost all worldly possessions
- Be open to disruption of your daily life routine daily!
- Make sure you have a reliable laptop handy at all times[most travelers prefer a Mac to a PC that is often more prone to virus attacks]
- Carry a PDA or unlocked world phone that is able to switch networks worldwide and a VOIP software is a definite must.
- A Wi-fi hotspot locator makes life a lot easier when it comes connecting online
- The unavoidable visa problems that any global jet setter must face
- Just plain coordinating life at times can take its toll
- Getting accustomed to a lone wolf lifestyle after working in a normal office setup with colleagues and friends a cubicle away
- Self management skills are critical,because at the end of the day all sight seeing and no work makes for no money tomorrow.
Friday, September 07, 2007
send in the clones
Read this interesting article on how International entrepreneurs,inspired by the success of some of the biggest Web 2.0 services,have created their own local knockoffs.Have a look
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