It is getting inevitable that people share lots of information on sites like Facebook, and other similar sites. However, when it comes to who controls the data on these sites, people should really read the “fine-print”.

As quite a few might have experienced, Facebook periodically blocks accounts of any users exhibiting “suspicious behaviour”. A blog post actually summarizes this in a post entitled “13 Reasons your Facebook Account will be Disabled”!
Apparently this could range from just adding “too many” friends at one, sending “too many” messages or poking “too many” friends. The underlying theme is the “too many” because Facebook considers this as spam and takes evasive action immediately.

Besides controlling how you behave on these sites, the owners also have rights over what you have posted and how they use it (for their gains!). Here is a snip from Google’s Terms of Service -

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services”

The core point is that Google can parse this content in any which pay and let advertisers know, so that you can be targetted. though we don’t exactly “lose” any rights over the content, Google still has the authority to use, reuse information and/or transfer that right to anyone it wants.

The fun part actually ends right there! People have to really keep in mind that anything posted online is subject to several different laws, Terms of Service, and is NOT PERSONAL anymore from the time it exits your keypads!

Currently, a few specialized portal-as-a-service providers or ASPs can do this, but being able to take your own WebSphere Portal servers and move them to a farm is a different level altogether!

With this cloud architecture, developers and administrators would be relieved from worrying about issues such as hardware, backups, networks, licenses etc. It is also easy to spawn new instances if the need for more processing power arises.  As far as security is concerned, Amazon ensures that all the essential aspects are taken care of, including SOX compliance.

While this may be practical in a few scenarios, this approach sometimes constrains the company from keeping up with competition during tough times. Going usually gets tough when competition intensifies and the market is getting more fragmented, or when the market by itself is shrinking – like during recessionary periods.

When it comes to developing growth or turn-around strategies or surviving tough times, “outside-in” strategies tend to be more relevant and yield better results. There’s been a lot of research in this space and most recently, Wharton marketing Professor George Day and Christine Moorman from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University describe this approach in their new book called “Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value”.

One example that I personally liked and would like to discuss about is the example of McDonalds turnaround.

In 2003 McD’s had its worst period in the entire 52 year history. McDonald’s reported its first-ever quarterly loss in Q-4 ’02 and its stock price hit a low of $12 by mid-March of 2003. Operations were seriously affected and franchisees were losing money. Worse still, CEO Jack Greenberg, had just been fired by the board.

Usually, there is a solid co-relation between market orientation and profitability. So by carefully evaluating the results of research and survey, McDonald’s was able to pin-point that its strategies were not focussed on where the problems were.

The main focus at that time had been on adding more and more outlets – almost like one every 4.5 hrs round the world! More time and effort was being spent on real estate rather than the customers’s issues. While at the same time, menu was getting uninteresting, service was not up to expectations, customer satisfaction levels going down.

“We had lost our focus. We had taken our eyes off the fries.”

McDonald’s CEO James Skinner, in Business Week, Feb 07

Soon McDonald’s started applying all this research info into carefully formulated strategies which yielded tremendous results. They ensured that they’d slow the rate of new stores opening, and rather focus on growing sales within each outlet. Very soon almost 40% of the outlets were open 24hrs up from just 0.5%.

The product devlopment process had also been improved to ensure attractiveness to customers and not just for the profitability or ease of preparation. This was a key step, because as part of the survey one feedback was that many mothers would bring their kids along and buy them lunch, but they themselves wouldnt be eating anything the outlet because they didnt find anything quite interesting on the menu!

The “outside-in” – focus helped turn the company around, and by 2006 the net income had quadrpled to $3.5billion and stock price zoomed to $45. The market share also grew to almost 3 times more than the nearest competitors (Burger King or Wendy’s).

With the rise of digital media and social marketing, there has been a tremendous proliferation in the number of channels by which customers are being reached out. And markets are also splintering, which makes it more important to look at things from ‘outside in’.

Essentially, market forecasting is a highly time bound activity, but as market places are too dynamic in today’s world, it is important to see patterns outside and react swiftly.

Quite often we tend to overlook some obvious lessons we can learn from nature. Even if we do focus, we tend to look at big things and miss out on the tiny ones.

Actually turning our attention to ants, its quite easy to notice how organized they are in accomplishing seemingly complex tasks. For example, when they encounter some food – just from nowhere, a team of ants immediately gather and help one another and move the food to their “colony”.

Without any form of supervision they quite easily get together in moving an object sometimes several times their size (20-30 times!). Comparing this to routine projects, we think that projects get more challenging when there are hurdles and issues. Just going by that, if we were seemily disturb this gathering of ants, they  scatter away but just for a while, and quickly regroup, and execute the task.

Another key point is Ants always tow a line – mostly along the walls or a surface. There’s hardly any pushing, or overtaking or commotion.

There are some amazing takeaways from such events we see in nature. Great example of teamwork, trust, helping each other in accomplishing tasks. But more importantly very focussed and possessing the ability to regroup.

Apparently King Solomon had also once criticized a lazy man, urging him to learn from the ants and become wiser.

And one of the popular Hindu epics, Srimad Bhagavatam, narrates a conversation between a King (Yadu dynasty) and a wandering saint (Dattatreya) who imparts wisdom to the king citing examples from nature. There are as many as 24 such Gurus (teachers) that the saint refers to, and thereby enlightens the king.

Essentially knowledge is all around us, it is down to how we look and how much we tune into the happenings around us.

Just to clear the air, there was indeed a meeting at Adobe’s offices which lasted about an hour – Microsoft’s Chief Steve Ballmer met his counterpart at Adobe Shantanu Narayen and NY Times also reported it. However, the meeting by itself was a hushed up one and there has been no formal press announcement YET from any of these companies.

Though much of the news floating around is all about speculation – ifs and how’s.

Anyhow, just getting into background of these 2 companies, both of them have been around for quite a while and throughout the internet era. Both are almost household names and they come together on the PC (Adobe Apps on Windows) and yet compete against some common rivals (Google & Apple)

One of the main attractions for Microsoft is Adobe Flash, which powers majority of online videos and games on the web. And Microsoft also kind of competes with Flash with its Silverlight platform.

Adobe just got dumped by Apple when it launched its latest iPAD sans Flash. Besides, Microsoft and Apple have been rivals for decades now. So when you share a common enemy then you kind of become partners!!

Microsoft’s been struggling to really get its bearings in the Mobile space. It’s just tried to make a comeback by announcing its Windows Phone 7. While Apple’s gesture could jeopardize the future of Flash on PDAs and Phones, Microsoft could just help right there.
Besides there is the huge Apps market. Microsoft could benefit from the Photoshop market share of Adobe. And there potential similarities in Microsoft’s silverlight and Adobe’s Flash and Flex development platform. And there’s the huge PDF market.

Well for one, both these companies were dominant not long back when Apple or Google were not so influential. But things have changed with Google dominating the platform (Android) space and Apple emerging rapidly in the devices space (iPhone, iPAD etc.)
So in order to fend off common rivals, Microsoft sure could be quite interested. All the chatter however has done quite a lot of good to Adobe’s valuation, and sent its stock price higher by over 11% and raising its overall market cap to $14+ billion.

For Microsoft there are so many other priorities to address – IE browser share, search market share, role in the social networking space etc. So it will be quite interesting to see the events unfold from here.

But more than the prospect of depletion, one of the key issues with use of fossil fuels is that it is quite inneficient in the generation of usable energy. When gasoline is used to run automobiles, most of the energy gets disssipated as heat.

While its quite the contrary with vehicles that un on electrcity, where almost 80% of the energy is used for motion and just the remaining as a thermal loss.

A study conducted recently by a couple of Californian researchers suggests that the world energy demand by itself can be cut down by 30% if we switched over from fossil fuels, by merely doing away with inefficiencies in the production and usage.

And renewable sources like Wind and Solar have enough capacity (individually) to support 5 to 10 times the world’s needs not only now but well into the future.

From a technical challenge point of view, the key would be getting the grids and transmission lines in place to keep supplying power to the destinations and balancing the production and consumption.

But researchers opine that it would take more than just technology and simple logic, as energy is a segment that has deep political connections dominated by lobbyists. But as a civilization if we want to move towards a cleaner, greener, healthier world with a reduced carbon foot-print, clean energy is the way to go.

It has truly carved a name for itself in the history of Indian cinema by breaking several records and being a trend setter. A lot of hard work and careful planning has gone into the making and marketing of the movie. Am trying to list down a few of those points here in this post. 

Many would know that the movie has consumed a massive budget – close to 160+ crores to make it. To begin with this movie was being produced by Ayngaran which subsequently sold out the rights to Sun Pictures. This was a defining moment for the movie’s fate, because not only did this bring in the money power, but it also brought in the tremendous muscle that Sun and its network wield in the southern state (TamilNadu).

Its quite well known that a movie’s success is predominantly determined by the hype and buzz. Sun left no stone unturned to ensure this. There was a massive mega-event music launch show in Malaysia which was telecast on the Sun Network. That by itself raised the expectation levels of Rajini’s fans worldwide.

Following which the music of the movie was launched on iTunes and it recorded the maximum downloads for an Indian movie while fetching revenues legally.
The next part of the marketing economics was the distribution and launch planning. About 2250 prints were prepared for world-wide distribution.
In entire Tamilnadu, there were just 2 other movies that were running since the launch of Endhiran and just a couple of shows. That meant that, whichever theatre or whichever show you walked into, there was Endhiran playing. This was also marketed heavily in the adjoining southern states of Karnataka and Andhra. The hindi versions were also simultaneously released for other parts of India.

From a pure math perspective at the rate of 4 shows for 2150 prints, with an average audience base of 150, and average ticket price of 200, this alone works out to 25crores per day! Now if we take out 100 of those 2250 prints as worldwide releases and calculate the returns on them using currency conversions, they work out to much more.
The movie has been running full for more than 10 days in a row and the theatres are still buzzing. So easily some 350-400 crores would be made in just about 10-15 days of running.

Comedian Vivek said during the music launch that this movie would be like 10 Diwalis put together – he even called this RoboWali and why not? Its been a true fire cracker.
One of the other key aspects that the makers got right was the protection of digital rights. Usually this tends to be an achilles heel as the piracy eats into the plans and movies get distributed very easily on filesharing sites.

Endhiran’s overseas rights were owned by a professional entity – FICUS entertainment (www.ficusmovies.com). And for the overall digital rights, they are protected by the Anti Piracy Group. APG has said clearly that it would pursue legal action as per DMCA rules against individuals/websites who distributes pirated links/sharing files/torrent files of Endhiran / Robot / Robo.

Interestingly though links appeared for some parts of the movie or songs, those were detected and broken very quickly. What was even heartening was the Rajini’s fans themselves were posting messages on social networks referring to such links and asking the site owners to remove them. Social responsbility!!!

Truly this has been a landmark movie in every way – made, managed and marketed very professionally to perfection. As some one said, the earlier movie of Rajini, Sivaji was BOSS – but this one Endhiran is MASS !!! Go Endhiran, Go Rajini!!!

From an impregnable 67% (2/3rd) market share, IE seems to be on a gradual slide and currently down to just about north of 50%. There are some variations in the numbers put up by these two companies, but not more than a few percentage points.

One of the key contributing factors has been the landmark ruling by European Commission earlier this March, 2010 – which forces Microsoft to provide users with the option of choosing the browser of choice on their PCs instead of defaulting to IE. This was hailed by many rivals as a welcome decision that puts the control of lives back into the hands of the users. Currently IE holds just about 40%+ marketshare in the EU region.

The key gainer has been Google Chrome which has soared now into the double digits (> 11%), and overtaken Safari and second only to Mozilla. Interestingly, Chrome had just over 2% share a couple of years back. As the fight intensifies, Microsoft has been trying to buck the trend by releasing the latest version of the browser IE-9.

However IE-9 is still only in Beta, and besides it has to grapple with the fact that it only runs on Windows-7 which in turn commands a much lower market share. So tough times for Microsoft on the browser wars.

Personally, I’ve been very comfortable with Chrome for its simplicity, light weightedness and ease of use. I’ve found IE sluggish right from starting up, to opening pages and even in shutting down. Besides the list of questions that pop up are just endless. And it just seems to be so connected to other key services in the O.S making the system as a whole slugggish at times.

That said, it feels good be part of the worldwide trend – Go Chrome!

Well in India Nokia did have a stong hold for quite a while and it was quite “cool” to own a Nokia phone – both affordable and reliable. Besides a good service network and resale value.

One of the key reasons is the change in the competitive landscape. The number of local players just went up from handful to 28 in these 2 years. Its no surprise that the relatively smaller players (Karbon, Spice and Micromax) have been making a splash by sponsoring big ticket events like the IPL. Their marketshare has gone up to 30% +.

But inspite of all the nibbling into marketshare etc., India is still quite a big market ~ 108 million handsets sold in the current year.

However, what’s really going on with Nokia’s strategy? On one side its really experimenting by releasing too many handsets in the hope that one or some could emerge to be an iPhone killer.

Some say Nokia might have got it wrong with its digital marketing strategy and some others opine that their smartphones aren’t really that great. One of the key factors for success of smartphones is also the open platform on which many 3^rd party applications can thrive upon.

Nokia however strongly contends some of the numbers published by IDC. For Nokia it is just a minor loss of marketshare and not the position as such as the leader in the handsets space. Anyhow, its wait and watch now for how things will head