Who? Me??

I was on Google Suggest, and it’s wonderful what little insights you can get on how and what are people searching for – go figure!

Came across Google Webfonts, decided to try it out on this blog.

Instructions are pretty simple, as long as you are using CSS on your site. Otherwise you will be forced to CSSify your site first before implementing Google’s webfonts.

Include the Google Font definition in your head section, and simply update the “font-family” attribute in your body CSS definition to the desired font family.

Pretty simple and elegant. Trust Google to come up with this.

For those of you who do not have the bandwidth (internet or time) nor are hardcore gamers there are not many games (unless if you count the ones Facebook has to offer like Mafia Wars and Farmville).

Worry naught, Kongregate is here!!

The entire site is based like a game, and it is a collection of flash based games. RPG, Strategy, Multi-player, Adventure, you name it, you got it. Even for a hardcore gamer, I got addicted to quite a few games on this site.

A warning for office-goers though, you might get addicted to playing games!

So you are stuck with submitting lots of data over and over again through a long web-based forms … sigh!! Wondering whether this can be automated.

OR

You have entered into this community based competition where people register and vote on different entries (you see a lot of these competition these days … crowdsourcing the judgement to the community … another brilliant way out of making judgements!!), how do you win when your entry is hopelessly late and others are way ahead??

Well you see, all of these are workflows, and especially on a web environment they can be automated. The IT industry already does this, through regression testing. When they have to test and re-test the same thing over and over, they finally realized that an automated testing tool needs to be built which can do this task. Plus, we want to do this for free, right … enter open source.

I was tinkering with the open source regression testing tool, called Sahi and I realized the beauty of this application. Consider these scenarios -

• A friend has participated in a competition. It is a crowdsourced competition where users register and vote for their favorite entries. Hmmm … all you need is a set of valid email-ids and voila!! From 500 votes to 2500 votes in no time!!
• You are part of a web development team and in charge of testing all the minute details. The changes in the scope are coming left, right and center … you have to keep on testing the application repeatedly. Well, now its a one time thing!! Create different scripts for each functionality, and voila!!

Basically, if you are creative enough, and wherever there is a need to do something repeatedly, you can use this tool. Also, be on the lookout for captchas, I dont think it works with them.

Facebook keeps changing its layout, looks, etc ever so slightly and so constantly that most users do not even notice the changes … until it hits them smack on the head. That’s what I like about these FB Apps, revisit the games after 3 months, and the game has also evolved … it has got more items, more plots … somehow it has become more interesting.

That’s why when I started playing Hero World, I couldnt help but notice that instead of having micro transactions through pay-pal or some such payment gateway, the game also had Facebook credits as a currency source. On further digging, I found that Facebook is offering users to buy Facebook Credits. Users can then exchange these credits with different applications.

Instead of carrying out micro transactions within games, now we can carry them through Facebook itself. Good to see a definitive revenue stream other than eyeballs and ads.

It was the summer of 2005, I was in the quest for knowledge in the mostly empty libraries of IIM-Indore. That’s one of the main reasons to be there, if you don’t want to be disturbed, then the library is for you … nobody goes there

I found Soft War by Larry Ellison. It was an interesting read, but throughout the book, there are potshots at Microsoft and the personal PC concept. Oracle says that the era of the personal PC is over and its time everything moved onto the web with machines as dumb terminals. Although I agreed with most of the things he was saying, I could not fathom how could the PC fade into oblivion? One of the main reasons why I thought this not possible was because of games. As a gamer, I thought that PCs are here to stay, games require too much hardware support to have a successful online game.

Five years later, I stand corrected and oh so much humbled! With games like WoW, 9 Dragons, Silkroad, Eve Online, League of Legends, DotA, most of the game titles which we know are planning (if not already) a MMO version of their game. What really makes sense to the game companies is the ease of distribution and control they get over the piracy that soon ensues after a successful release. Add to that a pay-per-use business model that is inherent to the cloud architecture, and organizations really stand a chance to make a thriving profit. I am thanking the stars because creators are looking at replayability as one of the critical success factors in making an MMO.

I still have some nagging doubts about the cloud (I guess because of a higher total cost of ownership), but its there to stay, for games to go online and create a variety of possibilities. I wonder when people will start having company reps within these games ala social media.

Every year Google releases their Zeitgeist (“spirit of the times”). I was going through their 2009 release when I came across this list for India.

The top 10 How-To’s that were searched in India are listed below

How to

1. how to kiss
2. how to hack
3. how to meditate
4. how to study
5. how to swim
6. how to draw
7. how to flirt
8. how to chat
9. how to concentrate
10. how to download

Does that tell you something about the average Indian web-user?

A romantic student who fantasizes about being a cyber superhero but in reality is failing in studies.

I walk into a brick and mortar store (say a book store), browse through some books, finally decide on my selections, head to the counter, make the payment and come out a happy customer. All that the vendor needs to do here is –

   1. ensure that he is well stocked with books I like
   2. have a search mechanism in place to find the right book for me
   3. have someone manning the counter

The beauty here is that if the book were torn or something, I do get a chance to examine the goods before buying them. I decide to buy the goods only after I say its ok, who would I trust more than myself? Thus, I perceive the transaction as fair, and I pay the book store and head home.

Now consider a second scenario, I walk into a bookstore, and I inform the vendor that I am looking for, say a Jack Reacher novel. The vendor shows me his collection, but much to my chagrin the particular title I am looking for is not with him. The attendant assures me that they have run out of stock and will restock in 5 days. However, they would be more than happy to inform me once the book arrives. I hesitantly leave my no. with them and think that it’s good to have book stores who inform their customers about books they want.

Apply the same paradigm to an online shop. Rarely would I come to this shop for idle browsing, if I do have a title in mind, then I would be interested in skipping directly to it. If at this juncture, the store informs me that it is out of stock and will not accept my order, however they will be more than glad to inform me when the book is in stock – I won’t be that pleased. I will grumble and grudgingly close the browser.

If the decision making involvement is the same, if the outcome is the same, then why the difference in behaviors?

In December 2006, we were working on an e-commerce portal aimed for the B2C segment. It was supposed to rival Amazon in terms of features, experience, technology … a very ambitious project. When doing market research for that project, we tried out many Indian e-commerce sites, actually shopped on some of them, and literally choose from the best of them the features we want to build. That was the first time I came across Futurebazaar. I bought a book, (Shantaram) from the site, the book was delivered in a week or so. I soon forgot about the site, little did I know that I was one of the first customers on the portal. Within a month or so, I got a mail from them saying so and also an invitation to their public media launch. Wow! My first media launch invitation!! Wheee!!

I look at the site now, almost 40 months later, and I can see how well they have evolved. No more the tacky-looking nested menus, distinct spaces which map onto their physical presences, interesting sales promotions (Lucky Wheel thingy), only products which they stock in their physical stores, support offered through their physical stores, etc. The way they have evolved their business from being a pure play online shop to a click and brick model is to be applauded.

Kudos to you Futurebazaar!!

Was listening through a podcast by Duct Tape Marketing on Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. It started of as an interview promoting his new book on analytics powered through crowdsourcing. Towards the fag end of the interview, something that Avinash said really got my attention.

Most people treat Twitter as a shout channel. Please do not treat it as one.

Then he rattled off two important parameters for measuring one’s tweeting success. They made more sense because I agree with him on Twitter being an engagement space with your customers. His parameters are -

1. No. of RTs/1000 followers
2. No. of replies per day

The first one measures how many of your followers are listening to you and see value in your ideas. The second one measures how many of those listeners are engaging with you.

Simple.