Steve Jobs & Bill Gates together and an update on London’s Carbon footprints

Steve and Bill came together after a long time at the D5 conference – text and video all available here.

100’s of bloggers have probably already analysed this for content: let me analyze it for style and personality.

- Steve Jobs was so much more confident of what he was saying. This is not to say Bill Gates wasn’t confident; just a relative measure.   His concise answers were not at all beating around the bush

-  However, imho Bill Gates took to humor/wit/light-heartedness more easily; though in some bits of the video it might seem otherwise.

- It was quite incredible that they never spoke on top of each other! Good prep or what

- The interviewers, oh my god Walt was so speaking on top of Kara that it was making her seem like a child

Here’s another quick update on the Carbon footprint posting from a few weeks ago. Conrad, now an alumni of the school and a well-known figure in the business for social change scene in UK, had a chat with me about this. Conrad suggested that taking a city as the basis of carbon footprint is misleading and messy for various reasons (1) There are too many interdependencies between areas within a country’s legislation, way more than pointed out in the FT article (2) Cities are not accountable for their carbon footprint, countries are under Kyoto (3)  Understanding data on the basis of city can be manipulated easily and (4) Mr. Mayor of London is putting probably too much emphasis on London’s footprint at the expense of a bigger goal perhaps.

Finally, a lot of close family and friends have seen Chini Kum on my review & endorsement, and loved it as well; so go out there and enjoy it!

 

The best advertisement… probably ever

This 1-minute TV advertisement has got to be up there in the best ads ever (ya the title of this post is a bit gimmicky). Have a look, believe me, you will love it. There are two huge things about this ad: 1. it’s extremely creative; makes you laugh, makes you remember it (so recall of presentation is high) and 2. it actually serves the business branding purpose superbly; you actually think of the message being given by the company and wonder if it’s true by relating back to their own memories; most people realise it is true (so recall of the message/content is also high)

On the sidelines of this topic: I obviously went to YouTube to search for this ad first. It’s almost a reflex. But within a few seconds spent there, I knew it would be difficult to find it there (too many Toyota ads, too dependent on user tags, lost concentration in checking other videos) . On the Visit4Info site above (a dedicated advertisement search service), I entered the brand name, the product category, keywords in the ad, ad medium and the ad was the only search result I got. Once again,  if you are searching for a specific thing, it’s better going to a specialist search engine.

(Note: This ad kick-started our Toyota case discussion today for Adv. Marketing Strategy)

 

Internet: Mario, Rent-a-coder and Skype

1. Gaming: I grew up playing Mario. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find the original Mario ; have been addicted since last week. This is not a demo, no software required, no adapted version: This is the one. The games today are good no doubt but the nostalgia of Mario is unbeatable. Like one of my classmates Vikas said when asking me to pass him the link: “Mario was the first love”.

2. Personal outsourcing: Rent-a-coder is the place to go for everything from a simple Excel/VB macro to sophisticated large systems. It’s amazing because it is in the true sense of the word, a value-added-intermediary. It has over 170,000 developers/development firms registered, with projects being posted every damn minute. I am using it to select an individual for one of my projects, and I have got 12 good bids in the last 16 hours. Their escrow payments is one of the biggest success factors, and it is implemented very strictly. Talk about network effects, can another general-coding outsourcing service on the Internet challenge this! Their user interface is way too simple, and in the Web 2.0 world, I would say almost regressive. But the same issue of 100,000s of users are used to it and so change doesn’t come easy (think Amazon, Rediff)

3. I don’t know how popular Skype’s SMS/text messaging is, but is invaluable to me now. You might say why dont I just call my fiance in India, rather than messaging. But its not possible to call all the time, she is busy, I am busy and with short texts sent regularly it’s great. And Skype helps reduce per text bill to 25% of what sucky t-mobile charges

 

Food for thought from today’s FT

Views on 3 articles that really made me read them completely on FT today:

1. UK considering Tax on Virtual Income: Second Life is having multi-dimensional effects, isn’t it! UK regulators are wondering when should they start charging virtual income, generated and staying completely within Second Life. If you think this is a small amount, think again. Second Life Economy page keeps a running tab: $ 1.59 million was spent in the last 24 hours (that is not a typo, and that is US Dollars ) .Agreeably, almost everyone earning money in SL would be like a business person thus adding the extra complication of establishing Cost Of Sales.   The important issues are:should Linden dollars that remain completely virtual (i.e. are not converted to real currency) be taxable; does a cost-benefit analysis show any point of trying to collect tax on this; and what impact will this have on the users/avatars and their spending. This is just fascinating; FT quotes analysts that Second life may be the 21st century’s avatar of “offshore accounts”

2. MySpace establishing formal US Presidential candidate program:

News Corporation will soon be able to track and monitor online donations made to presidential candidates through its MySpace subsidiary, giving the media group an increasingly prominent role in the 2008 presidential election. This involvement in candidates’ fundraising is new territory for News Corp, which, until now, has limited its interest in presidential elections to media coverage via its print and broadcast outlets.

If you want to prove the power of social networking to anyone, use this data piece! A giant media conglomerate is taking the biggest (by far) online social network places. Wonder if this is what Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson (founders of mySpace) envisioned! But, hey this is interesting. I will try to follow this more in the coming weeks. Just imagine how many entities are being put in a completely new environment here: the candidates themselves (mySpace giving them tutorials to develop good profile pages), mySpace (started and wanted to remain as a music-lovers social network), NewsCorp (what all can mySpace be leveraged for) and the political system itself (the voters!!)

3. US Buy-out funds bids go to record high of $82 billion in May so far: I am out of depth here, but by god these are big numbers.   May has been the month where US buy-out funds have made bids totaling 82 billion USD.

Next question in your mind – maybe the number of deals has gone up.
Answer:  No, they have reduced

Next question in your mind – maybe buyout-groups are bidding as a team
Answer: No, club bids have reduced, are reducing.

Basically, huger deals are being bid for. I guess these groups (1) have the momentum going in their favor right now, both in terms of invested capital and interest from the target companies (2) are confident that these bigger companies have bigger scope for streamlining (no double-edged sword intended) and extracting value

By the way, a small piece of trivia, an Interrobang is the punctuation symbol for combination of  question mark and exclamation mark

 

Talk by Tim Davie, the Director of Marketing at BBC

Tim (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/executives/timdavie.shtml) is a good speaker; his presentation  slides were very picture-heavy and that makes for a good discussion-style talk. It was during the QnA however, that Tim showed why he is considered one of UK’s top marketeer, answering with  style,  substance,  clarity and insight.

Lets ponder over a few interesting points that he stressed on:

• Doesnt matter what role you are in, you gotta love content if you want to be good in the media business
• the strategic question “what business am I really in”, as per the media value chain, is the question every senior management is asking themselves – and the answers are not easy.
• Quality becomes even more important for this wide choice and easy control  world; 6/10 just wont do, you need 9/10
• BBC  has always delivered great-quality content suitable for the long-tail; so mobile is a synergetic channel
• The test for the under20 generation is “do I want to share this media piece”
• Cross-media measurements are becoming crucial to have
• BBC’s business model is “great quality content” + “trusted guide”; backbone-d by the best unbiased News worldwide

I can see that I am not being able to capture the ethos of a good session in bullets here; more to come in a day or two on this

 

Online ad exchange acquisitions: up, up and up!

16 Apr: Google acquires Doubleclick: $3.1 billion
30 Apr: Yahoo acquires Right Media: $680 million
18 May: Microsoft acquires AQuantive: $6 billion

A few points of interest here:

- With online advertising being their modus operandi for a while, is this not way way too late?

- Dunno whether you noticed that Microsoft is again playing catch up in the online space, and at huge premiums. When exactly will they wake up & be agile or just give up on copying?

 

The new Hotmail, and an away-from-Google approach to information retrieval

Don’t think its been that long since MSN changed Hotmail to an Outlook-style interface; just converted, quite simple to convert (once you know from somewhere else that its happening and if you can find the button easily that is!) ; didn’t take more than a minute. The interface and user experience is slick, customizable, easy to understand and powerful, always a good combination.  However, the inability to have keyboard controls (at least when I tried) disconnects between Outlook and Hotmail, breaking the analogy they are positioning on. Maybe in the next (Safer:)) version. Was thinking this about Microsoft – even if they come up with great products for the networked world; perhaps the internal wheels prevent it from being what they are trying to be – Google’s  numero uno competitor, and then subsequently displace it. What I mean is that perhaps they are leaving a very-strong and imbibed company-culture to move towards the strategy of another company.  I am sure they have considered this, but I still wonder – can’t there be a better strategy for them in the online/digital space than for example the Live portfolio of weirdo wanna-be’s.

I have been going straight to specialist sites these days for a lot of my information retrieval: IMDB, Google Finance, Hoovers, etc. The thing is Google has started making me spend more time browsing look for the right or more information. i know search is classified in 3 categories as per the intention/behavior of the user; I guess I am doing the kind that doesnt need looking around much more these days. In fact, a lot of people use specialist websites + wikipedia for their search needs online these days.  (But when in the Google toolbar I type 1 ton and while I am typing it presents a drop-down with suggestion, and top one being = 907.xyz kilograms, man do I love it then!!!)

And, before I forget, Apollo should be publicly launched soon; I believe it marks a milestone in the development of the networked world. Not least because Adobe has the resources to put behind a great product, and the experience to expand it

 

A new fascination

I hope I will continue posting regularly here. The thing is, in recent times, I have been on a website creation spree.

1. Business of Partnerships: This is where I intend to find partnerships in business, almost in revolt of the M&A spree on at the moment.

2. New cool Technology services I browsed about: This is where I post any new technology product and service that I read about or find, my own engadget

3. Citizens initiative for Noida, the city where I am from in India: Democracy is successful when it’s citizens are active. The community hopes to get the issues at one place, brainstorm for solutions, feedback to the right authority, and demand action.
I also put up the website for Synergy, my dad’s new engineering-consulting business.

All these are truly interesting concepts which I want to read about, then write about, then discuss and therefore learn. But if I was a good time manager, wouldn’t I be doing my MBA 2nd year project right now!