BookTour.com - Just Another RoR Site

Chris Anderson the author of The Long Tail, released BookTour.com a web 2.0 startup that helps authors connect to audiences. Booktour.com used Ruby on Rails to build the site, and Anderson was all praise. “The powerful web tools available today, from Ruby on Rails to MySQL, are just astounding--what we built in three months and at the cost of a few thousand dollars would have taken years and millions of dollars in the mid-90s. I'm still not quite sure what Web 2.0 means, but if this is what it enables, I like it!”

Zoho as an Office Appliance

Red Herring wrote an article in August 2006 which mentioned 17 Microsoft Office Killers. The line up is:

• Microsoft Word: Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Writeboard, Writely , Rallypoint , JotSpot Live
• Microsoft Excel: JotSpot Tracker, Numsum , iRows, Zoho Street
• PowerPoint: S5, Zoho Show
• Office ‘Suite’: ThinkFree, gOffice, Zoho Virtual Office
• Microsoft Project: Basecamp, JotSpot Project Manager

Zoho figures in all the categories except MS-Project.
Over the last year Zoho has added some very interesting products. They now have a CRM application and all the office productivity tools - email with calendaring, a word processor, a spreadsheet, powerpoint, chat, a planner, a wiki and a host of other interesting tools including an online questionnaire called 'Zoho Challenge', an online survey tool named 'Zoho Polls' and a site monitoring service. Very Impressive.
It would be even more impressive and useful of Zoho could be offered by a local partner as an Office Appliance that includes a dual ISP connection, proxy and network security. The appliance could be installed on the customer's office premises (local appliance), and connected via the internet to the partner's data center where a mirror appliance (remote appliance) is maintained. To reduce issues to do with bandwidth, Customers could choose to configure Zoho to use applications on the local appliance (via a LAN) or the remote appliance (via the internet). LAN access would be suitable for users who work out of a fixed geographical office location.

Under-served Young Indian TV Viewers

UTV is launching a youth channel named Bindass. It will go on air by August 2007. The brand proposition for Bindass, a Hindi channel targeted at youth in the age group of 15-34 years, is the celebration of being young, fun, fearless, frank and valuing freedom in all its forms. According to UTV, the 15-34 age group constitutes 72 per cent of India’s population and forms 42 per cent of the TV viewership.
The television company got Synnovate to do syndicated research, and the findings indicated that this segment of viewers is highly dissatisfied with the content available on television. They are not interested in watching soaps or gadget shows or music or even VJ shows. Instead, they were found spending time on something unexpected – cartoons and kids’ shows.

42

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought is the second most powerful computer in the universe of space and time. Millions of years ago there lived a race of "hyperintelligent" beings. Their favorite pastime (or 'timepass' to all you Mumbaikars) was a game called Brockian Ultra Cricket. The game involved suddenly hitting people for no apparent reason and then running away. Besides this they spent their time bickering over the meaning of life. They got so fed up with this bickering, that they decided to build themselves a super computer and ask it to figure out the meaning of life. They build a computer called Deep Thought. And it does just that. It thinks. And it thinks. Time goes by and seven and a half million years later Deep Thought pops out the answer to the question and delivers it to the descendants of the people who built Deep Thought. The answer is …42
The problem was that the people didn't know quite what to do with the answer. In fact they did not even know what the question was.
Deep says "So once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means." Of course the problem with this is that it will take a new super computer and 10 million more years to do the reverse calculation to obtain the question from the answer of 42.

Talent Communities

The internet is changing the world in very fundamental ways. Many of the changes lie before us as opportunities. Besides products and services the internet is increasingly demanding that we create fundamentally new organization structures and management techniques that let us outsource greater and greater parts of the production process.
It is creating a world of David Ricardo and Ronald Coase. Ricardo, a political economist, popularized the idea of comparative advantage. It is his theories that form much of the academic underpinning in favor of outsourcing. Ronald Coase, who was awarded the Nobel prize for Economics in 1991, popularized the theory of Transaction Cost Economics. Bringing down transaction costs, makes it easier to outsource. Internet technologies are making it possible to bring down transaction costs to a level where it becomes possible to outsource components of work that were hitherto considered an internal function.
There are organizations (like The Gerson Lehrman Group Councils ) that are being setup that specialize in creating professional networks for consulting and even provide temporary CxOs.
The concept is being extended to what are called talent networks and talent communities.
Jon Hagel (of Netgain fame), in his talk on Web 2.0 at NASSCOM suggested that Indian IT service companies need to innovate and create fundamentally different organizational ways to build and deliver IT products and services that Indian IT companies need to build scalable talent networks encompassing a broad range of smaller, more specialized companies.

Foolishness on Demand

Foolishness follows the universal law of demand. The greater the price you have to pay for being foolish, the less you do. - Ronald Coase
http://www.reason.com/news/show/30115.html

Facebook

Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn't that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the "cool" thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Understanding Ricardo

There is a theory in economics which shows that it can be beneficial for two parties to trade in a goods or services, even if one of the parties has a lower relative cost of producing all goods and services. In other words if India can produce both rice and oil at a lower cost than Bangladesh, it still makes sense for India to buy rice from Bangladesh and sell oil to Bangladesh.
Apparently what matters is not the absolute cost of production but the opportunity cost, which measures how much production of one good is reduced to produce one more unit of the other good.
Counterintuitive. But it is one of the cornerstones of international trade theory.

Legal Process Outsourcing: $640 million by 2010

Niche legal process outsourcing (LPO) services are expected to become a US$ 640 million market by end 2010. Employment in the sector is expected to grow from 7500 in 2007 to 32,000 in 2010. According to ValueNotes, there are about 100 LPO service providers in India, who cater to 8 broad segments:

1. Legal Transcription
2. Document Review
3. Litigation Support
4. Legal Research
5. Intellectual Property
6. Contract Related Services
7. Secretarial Services
8. Legal Publishing Services

Most LPO companies are small. There are only about 12 players who have more than 100 employees. Leaders are eValueserve, Integreon, OfficeTiger, CPA Global, Mindcrest, Pangea3, Quislex. Emerging players include: Lawscribe, New Galaxy, SDD Global Solutions, Tusker Group, Aptara, Lason and Quattro BPO.

Hyman Financing

According to Hyman Minsky, an American economist, in prosperous times corporate cash flow rises beyond what is needed to pay off debt. This results in speculative lending that goes beyond what borrowers can pay off from their incoming revenues. This results in a crisis, which results in a drop in lending, even to companies that can afford the loans, and the economy contracts.
Ponzi Finance (Mint)
Minsky said balance sheets and cash flows go through three stages, which he termed hedged finance, speculative finance and ponzi finance.
In the first stage, hedge finance, the cash flows generated from operations are enough to meet all financial obligations of a company. But as an economy grows, companies tend to take more risks. They move to the second stage—speculative finance. Here, their cash flow is enough to cover only debt payments; the actual debt is rolled over rather than repaid. Then there is the final stage of ponzi finance, when the cash generated from operations is not even enough to cover interest payments. The company either has to borrow more or sell off its assets to service its debt.
Ponzi finance is the last stage before a financial crisis and, after the crisis, companies go back to the first stage of hedge finance. And then the process starts all over again. Minsky has in recent years developed a following in the investment community, especially among the “world is a bubble” crowd.