Got a review of indiainteracts.com from Amit Ranjan of webyantra.net. He has been kind to us by cautiously terming us as an interesting experiment :) However, I must admit that we are tinkering a lot with what is the norm both in the traditional media space and in the alternate media space. But, my reasoning for the same, as hinted in the earlier postings is that, I am only trying to do what would eventually end up happening. When traditional 1.0 companies buyout new 2.0 upstarts they start doing the hybrid model. I feel altering the platform of established 1.0 players to fit their newly aquired 2.0 properties or vice versa would be much more diffucult than building a platform from the scratch to suit this model. I guess time will tell.
In his review, there was one main issue raised by Amit on the content side, which is that its currently south focussed. This is deliberate. One, we are limited by our burn rate and content creation is expensive and time consuming. Two, our current focus is on getting the platform in shape before scaling on content and thereby users, which is in direct correlation to the content one has. Our idea is to build our the platform, model it for the south content to prove to potential investors our idea. Then we will have national content, both created by us and through partnerships with other content providers.
Overall, we want to eventually, give our users the ability to customize their user space into a media space where they can easily create and distribute content like we do @ indiainteracts.com. Our users could be an individual, a company, or a local community.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
Social Media Access Points
There are 3 primary modes of access for digital content, namely, PCs, mobile devices, and TV. Using IP all three can be enabled, however some basic advantages and limitation of these form factors have to be considered before mapping the content for these access points.
A successful social media platform should have enable content distribution to these access points. In addition, the access points should be well understood to build the right mapping between access points such that the creation and distribution of conent by both the media and user community should be simple, easy, and intutive for these form factors.
More on these points as we learn from our practical experience in implementing these features in indiainteracts.com. We just opened up our mobile offering 2 days ago and already excited about this as I just heard that IM in mobile is going to be a reality in India soon as MTNL has just today done a soft launch of it and would do a full scale roll out in the coming months. What excites me is that IM would eventually replace SMS and unlike SMS, IM needs a GPRS connetion. GPRS adoption is quite low in India (~10%) and IM is going to trigger its growth which is step closer to people getting used to accessing the web through their mobile devices. Today, I now and then see my Driver doing a SMS to his friends, hopefully, soon, I expect them to check the latest movie trailer from his phone. This is when sites like indiainteracts.com would reap its full potential and thats when traditional media companies would scramble to get a IP based delivery mechanism for their content.
The key dampner on my hopes would be cost. As voice based revenues spiral south, and almost irrelevant and growth rates eventually tappering off, most operators would look towards VAS to improve their ARPUs. GPRS would be treated as a VAS and hence would have a premium attached to it. Either this has to come down, or your offering would motivate the customer to pay this premium, not to you, but to the telecom operator for the GPRS connection. I still have my hopes pinned on IM to drive the GPRS growth rates.
A successful social media platform should have enable content distribution to these access points. In addition, the access points should be well understood to build the right mapping between access points such that the creation and distribution of conent by both the media and user community should be simple, easy, and intutive for these form factors.
More on these points as we learn from our practical experience in implementing these features in indiainteracts.com. We just opened up our mobile offering 2 days ago and already excited about this as I just heard that IM in mobile is going to be a reality in India soon as MTNL has just today done a soft launch of it and would do a full scale roll out in the coming months. What excites me is that IM would eventually replace SMS and unlike SMS, IM needs a GPRS connetion. GPRS adoption is quite low in India (~10%) and IM is going to trigger its growth which is step closer to people getting used to accessing the web through their mobile devices. Today, I now and then see my Driver doing a SMS to his friends, hopefully, soon, I expect them to check the latest movie trailer from his phone. This is when sites like indiainteracts.com would reap its full potential and thats when traditional media companies would scramble to get a IP based delivery mechanism for their content.
The key dampner on my hopes would be cost. As voice based revenues spiral south, and almost irrelevant and growth rates eventually tappering off, most operators would look towards VAS to improve their ARPUs. GPRS would be treated as a VAS and hence would have a premium attached to it. Either this has to come down, or your offering would motivate the customer to pay this premium, not to you, but to the telecom operator for the GPRS connection. I still have my hopes pinned on IM to drive the GPRS growth rates.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Various forms of Social Media
Social Media is freely used to describe many apps that enable user generated content. Most significant of them being web logs, or blogs, which started it all. Others, include, podcasting of both audio and video, social networking apps, wikis, photo sharing sites like flickr etc...
But what should really be considered a social media platform? In addition to orchestration, one should be able to create and publish all basic content types and their possible combinations to enable each user to become a media powerhouse with relative ease. Furthermore, the platform should adhere to fundamentals of social media mentioned in my previous post.
Who does this today? None, but MySpace comes close, and the others like Google, and traditional media companies like nbc.com etc would eventually move aggressively on this. indiainteracts.com is surely working towards this goal.
Who will win this race? I think its hard for a traditional web 1.0 company to acquire a web 2.0 and meaningfully orchestrate the result for many reasons.
Converting their existing architecture to the web 2.0 format, which is technically difficult, but the most difficult is actually killing their 1.0 business model to adopt a new model which is still sketchy in its monetization details.
Surely building ground up for this would be easier and less expensive and surely VCs are in the prowl for such a company which will truly disrupt the current media model.
But what should really be considered a social media platform? In addition to orchestration, one should be able to create and publish all basic content types and their possible combinations to enable each user to become a media powerhouse with relative ease. Furthermore, the platform should adhere to fundamentals of social media mentioned in my previous post.
Who does this today? None, but MySpace comes close, and the others like Google, and traditional media companies like nbc.com etc would eventually move aggressively on this. indiainteracts.com is surely working towards this goal.
Who will win this race? I think its hard for a traditional web 1.0 company to acquire a web 2.0 and meaningfully orchestrate the result for many reasons.
Converting their existing architecture to the web 2.0 format, which is technically difficult, but the most difficult is actually killing their 1.0 business model to adopt a new model which is still sketchy in its monetization details.
Surely building ground up for this would be easier and less expensive and surely VCs are in the prowl for such a company which will truly disrupt the current media model.
Social Media fundamentals
An online avatar of media, which has all the following characteristics,
1) Participatory content creation. ie, both the media and user community engage in building content.
2) Openess with minor exceptions. ie, rate, comment, blog on all content with moderation only to weed out un-civil acts.
3) Conversation style content delivery. ie, with participation, views are built on a conversation and not just the root content built, by the media or the user community.
4)Common interest communities. ie, slowly like minded people for communities within communities and based on their strenght make content of their preference dominant in the community.
5) Integrating various content types. Content is not only text, but also, image, audio, video and all possible combinations of the basic content types.
1) Participatory content creation. ie, both the media and user community engage in building content.
2) Openess with minor exceptions. ie, rate, comment, blog on all content with moderation only to weed out un-civil acts.
3) Conversation style content delivery. ie, with participation, views are built on a conversation and not just the root content built, by the media or the user community.
4)Common interest communities. ie, slowly like minded people for communities within communities and based on their strenght make content of their preference dominant in the community.
5) Integrating various content types. Content is not only text, but also, image, audio, video and all possible combinations of the basic content types.
Friday, January 12, 2007
India and Social Media
Social media, as I see it, is the proper orchestration of user generated content with content generated by media companies. (Content in its basic form is either text, image, audio or video)
Conventional wisdom on social media is that its all user generated content. But, have you recently looked at the top 20 video's in You Tube. Its content is all user generated, and with the exception of 3 or 4 mostly they are objectionable content and would repluse many serious advertisers. Or, take the example of digg, and so many of its clones available both outside of india and inside of india. They are just a bunch of URL referals allowing their user community to rate them. In essense we are just keeping a score on traditional media. You might then say, what about blogs?. Well with the exception of few bloggers, the vast majority are drifting without a sail or rudder in the wide open ocean.
The answer, I feel, is in orchestration. What I mean by that needs a little bit of what web 1.0 and web 2.0 is. To be honest, I dont really get this web 2.0 and web 3.0 in the works - better known as the semantic web. But, my understanding of this without a web x.x tag is that in the beginning (read as web 1.0) content in the web was given to the users by traditional media compaines. Later (read as web 2.0), due to lack of openess and interactiveness, clever entrepreneurs leveraged advancement in technology created web properties that allowed users to generate their own content and publish with ease. However, the problem was monetization and meaningful content.
In came the traditional companies who said, I have something meaningful and you have the user base so I will buy you out. Most significant of this was Fox and MySpace (which prompted me to start indiainteracts.com) and recent acquisition of You Tube by Google. Now, I feel, the success lies in the clever orchestration of these web 1.0 and web 2.0 companies should yield a more meaningful experience and hence huge revenues are to follow. Only time will tell. However, I am biased and feel its going to be a runaway success, provided they overcome the obstacles in front of them.
Conventional wisdom on social media is that its all user generated content. But, have you recently looked at the top 20 video's in You Tube. Its content is all user generated, and with the exception of 3 or 4 mostly they are objectionable content and would repluse many serious advertisers. Or, take the example of digg, and so many of its clones available both outside of india and inside of india. They are just a bunch of URL referals allowing their user community to rate them. In essense we are just keeping a score on traditional media. You might then say, what about blogs?. Well with the exception of few bloggers, the vast majority are drifting without a sail or rudder in the wide open ocean.
The answer, I feel, is in orchestration. What I mean by that needs a little bit of what web 1.0 and web 2.0 is. To be honest, I dont really get this web 2.0 and web 3.0 in the works - better known as the semantic web. But, my understanding of this without a web x.x tag is that in the beginning (read as web 1.0) content in the web was given to the users by traditional media compaines. Later (read as web 2.0), due to lack of openess and interactiveness, clever entrepreneurs leveraged advancement in technology created web properties that allowed users to generate their own content and publish with ease. However, the problem was monetization and meaningful content.
In came the traditional companies who said, I have something meaningful and you have the user base so I will buy you out. Most significant of this was Fox and MySpace (which prompted me to start indiainteracts.com) and recent acquisition of You Tube by Google. Now, I feel, the success lies in the clever orchestration of these web 1.0 and web 2.0 companies should yield a more meaningful experience and hence huge revenues are to follow. Only time will tell. However, I am biased and feel its going to be a runaway success, provided they overcome the obstacles in front of them.
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