SROYS

Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth is an Assistant Professor of Psychology...

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:23:00 -0400

Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Angela studies non-IQ competencies that predict success both academically
and professionally. Her research populations have included West Point cadets, National
Spelling Bee finalists, novice teachers, salespeople, and students.

2 Excellent Web Designer Inspiration Resources

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:47:30 -0400

http://patterntap.com/ | http://dribbble.com/

Both good resources to get exposed to nice web design ideas.

Very important if you are looking to build a brand or product

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:49:00 -0400

Very important if you are looking to build a brand or product:

Came across this while reading the brilliant blog at http://www.nirandfar.com/ - which discusses behavioral engineering.

The Google Partner Connect

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 02:23:00 -0500

We recently became a Google Premium Publisher Partner and I had a meeting with the Global and Asia heads of their online partnerships group. They wanted feedback on what’s happening and ideas for future products…

Here’s some of the stuff we spoke about…

The market we operate in

Business sector - Q&A and networking. Demographics - Business professionals, consultants and students. Real world business insights. Our most popular site deals with HR issues.

The challenges you face in terms of increasing traffic

* We find it difficult to get foreign traffic even on pages not specific to India for example motivational or leadership discussions and documents.

For this we are building a tagging interface which will specify locations of the thread starter and let any user subscribe (via email) to location specific or keyword specific queries.

What are the challenges you face in terms of additional monetiziation

1. Monetizing anything on a website means the visitor is sold for a price and the user goes to another site. It seems Adsense is partially contributing to the lack of attention that the users display towards online content.

When the user is on my site searching for “performance management systems” and sees an ad and clicks out - although he knows that a back button exists - the whole user experience is already down the drain and he starts looking at the web page where he landed (on my site) as a trampoline to jump to other places.
I am averse to showing ads to my logged in members because of this.

2. The regular ads change the number of ads in a unit and many times the alignment of the text of the ad unit. There should be an option to let us stop this constant changing - many times it causes design issues.  

3. Behavioral ads seem to work better on general sites rather than niche sites. There needs to be some sanctity to how behavioral ads work - it needs to be somewhat relevant to the site they are viewed on. For example, on our HR site when we had behavioral ads on - I would see car ad just because I searched for a car price. This is causing a lot of distraction, as usually when the user is on our site they are looking for something related to their work or studies.

What product enhancements/ ad types would you recommend that we don’t already have

PREVIEW ADS - at least for premium publishers where a window slides open to display the site in a light box. It can work like the Google search result preview works and should be cheaper for the advertiser.

VIEW ADS - Many times users (including me) would load up the url from the ad we just saw without clicking it. These should be charged - there needs to be a minimum view bid for ads. I am sure Google can figure out the technology to figure out if the website who’s ad was just loaded is loaded on the same window or another tab. 

INFO DOWNLOAD ADS - where the user can download and read detailed information about a product and possibly print it. Pay per download.

EMAIL ADS - I know you had this product and it should be restarted - it gives us an opportunity to monetize the forwards.

DOCUMENT ADS - this should be created for authors of ebooks who can then monetize the free distribution of ebooks. Would be awesome if something could be worked out for pdfs at least.

IMAGE ROLLOVER ADS - to display text information about the product. Will reduce the attention deficit problem a bit too. Pay a fraction for rollover and a few seconds spent - on click charge full.

RESEARCH PRODUCT ADS - allow users to create snips and notes from ads and PREVIEW UNITS which is displayed via a click on a button inside the ad unit and accessible on all ad enabled sites. Will make the ad units more interactive and will reduce banner blindness.  Create a document with useful information and allow download, email or print of the document. This will help the users document their research and maybe even share it with friends for a poll or generally.
This possibly needs to integrate with many of the Google products for easy access and sharing.

SITE PAGE ADS - Allows advertisers to create full html sales pages to be displayed in a light box - adapting colors from the page where it’s being viewed. This will give users the feeling of continuity. For brand advertisers it makes sense cause these might be cheaper as they won’t take away the user from the publisher’s site plus they can create full scale pages with youtube videos, subscription forms, social network etc.

On A Separate Note
GOOGLE PLUS UPDATE AUTOMATION - allow addition of items via automated services so we can automate updates to our Business pages on Google Plus. We had discussed other ideas for Google plus here:  http://sroys.com/post/14808648035/google-facebook-ideas-for-improving-our-social-sites

By far the best cross browser checking tool

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:13:00 -0500

By far the best cross browser checking tool:

Adobe’s Browser Lab is probably the best cross browser checking tool I’ve ever used. Fewer options in terms of the number of browsers and resolutions covered but most major ones are present. The best feature, other than the user interface, is the onion skin display which overlays each image screenshot to show you the differences.

#Sopa #Censorship Show them the money!

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:32:00 -0500

Power sits on top of humanity because it exists to control human flaws. Human beings are corrupt by nature - most would rather not do many of the seemingly right things - like pay for books, movies, music - which is why we need laws.

The SOPA idea is simply devious - it’s easier to shut down the site (Facebook, Google, Youtube… any site really) - than to go after the users. But it’s obvious that, with this law it’ll be easy to frame any company, it can actually effectively be used to find violations on all the government sites - of course they would put in a clause to keep them away from the ambit of this law.

It’s probably more important to try to create a law to force the media and technology companies to work together. We have in our hands possibly the greatest distribution channel ever made - use it!

The job of those in power is to identify and take out problematic elements which violate the laws of “Intellectual property”, “right to life and liberty” and “freedom of speech” and others - but surely not dampen the process which allows innovation and advancement of the human race by promoting those same fundamental rights.

We live in a complicated world and having laws which effect open communication is probably the most dangerous thing one can get into.

What the media companies should be doing is fairly simple:

There is existing technology which can assist in identifying content theft or near accurate content identification. Google by itself has technology which allows youtube to identify copyright infringement plus their search can pretty much find any content based on (hate) keywords.

Videos

Create a central organization which will get these media companies subscription money from online shares - make it cheap for users ($10 to see all copyrighted content which is distributed according to the number of views of each publisher).
Use the identification technology to place media company’s ads on video content - even if shared by someone else. Reduce monitoring needs by automating ad replacement if the user has placed his own ads. More money earned as per views. Google possibly already offer this to major publishers.
Direct ad space control - add trailer distribution, other promotions on copyrighted videos - the video companies will love this.

Copyrighted ebooks and text

Behavioral ads, promotions - they need to work with the ebook reader software companies to create technology to identify if the ebook was purchased or if it was downloaded for free.
Direct ad space control to copyright owner who should be able to put in any promotion they want or show behavioral ads.
Creation of a script which gives text based sites a way to easily be copyright complaint by adding a script which can place origin links and source attribution so authors can get actual traffic to their sites from where users should be able to download more of their books - which of course would have ads and promo space.

Music

Work with technology companies to identify and place ads - directly embedded in files or via the music players - huge boost in revenue for both media companies and independent artists.

Hate Speech

Really! after what goes on in the parliaments! But yes… this is a problem and it should be addressed by the companies by creating filters and letting people have access to these filters. Possibly also commit to take down requests when it’s an issue of national security on a case basis and move court if they disagree. But no law should be passed for prosecution of companies based on this - the wording of the judgement must include the content which is ruled for/against and should never be generalized.

The solution to content theft seems fairly simple, economized promotion space on the content and direct control to the content creator. It seems Google is the leading party which has a lot of this identifying technology but it also seems that the media companies are being to proud to ask “what does that button do” on technology they don’t understand completely.

Unfortunately it seems its up to “Google” to extend their helping hand and help out these media companies continue to be profitable - and both parties would also be raking in a ton of cash if they do this, not to mention Google will also live up to their “Don’t be evil” catch phrase. They need to open source some parts of this technology and also create a way for it to be used by other small parties who may not be so technologically adept.

Since almost all media is moving to the internet - it makes sense to try to solve the problem with technology rather than prosecution. The law should be to create and make companies use this technology and be complaint and possibly even give the distributors a cut for being compliant.

But will these big boys ever work together - maybe if there is money to be made!

Zomato may change something very fundamental - #food

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:35:00 -0500

Every now and then there is a company which has the potential to change or rather inspire quality by showing organizations a promise of more business. Zomato is right now at that place, where they have a statistically significant amount of data on Indian restaurants to help create a change.

Not many years ago - eating out in India was almost always concluded with some form of unhappy abdominal pressure. Having the restaurants care about a rating will make them cleaner and possibly even make them look into innovating unique offerings. But there seems to be some fundamental problem in the system of rating and this can be improved in some ways… It’s a long list but please read slowly and carefully to understand the ideas…

Getting people to give a simple star rating is a good start but it’s not sufficient - have a link appear after the initial rating asking people if they would like to subscribe and rate the various aspects. Show them the aspects - ambiance, customer care, food quality, kitchen cleanliness etc. Make them register to make specific changes & get specific interest details - that way you get more people to come back when you send them promotions about the kind of food they like - ask for their permission and interests first.
Restaurants will be more keen on getting registered if they are shown clear indications that the site is giving them more business. Include a way on your mobile app for the user to get a photo of them clicked by someone in front of the restaurant and post it to the restaurant listing. Allow only positive photo votes - so it works like - the more photo votes you have the better you probably are.

Let the listing owner remove any photos they want. This way you will remove the fear from the restaurants perspective for negative votes. Give people an easy way to post the photo simultaneously to their social networks like facebook, Instagram, twitter via checking simple check boxes.
Add focus on important aspects like locality, cleanliness, chef credentials, manager speak, special events. Inspire these places to be more interactive with their customers and be more open. Create chef channels where users can immediately send a “Pat on the back” if they like the food. Almost everyone will have an Android phone soon - so create that app first and promote it among the chefs so they get the feeling that they are doing an important job. If you can get the chefs and the owners to care - people will have a valid way to send feedback and will automatically embrace this.
Allow users to upload water marked (zomato plus restaurant name, address) images of the food they are eating. Again allow the listing owner to remove anything they want to remove from their listing.
Create an app specially for the restaurant manager to keep track of their listings - to view their position add/edit details, view/remove social photos etc. The more feedback you are able to provide them directly the more connected they will feel to this service - the more people will care.
Use the foursquare model and create a community around locations with mayors (big foodie, giant foodie etc). People will care for these positions as they want to feel important and will create regular updates on places. Make it so that no one misuses these powers to harass restaurants (very important).
Let these restaurants send out special promotions to carefully curated lists of people (the list you created when you asked people for their interests) who are in the locality and like certain kinds of cuisine. Charge them per email. Automate this process as much as possible so you make the highest profit and don’t need to add staff to get this done. Have a help desk maybe and teach the restaurants how to do these promotions themselves by creating visual “how to” guides and possibly a telephone help desk for the people who are just not able to do it.
Simplify the process of getting listed - create steps to get them on quickly. The on boarding process can be much simpler. Ask them to fill in the details and upload everything themselves and then review the listing and ask for corrections. Don’t first ask them to copy paste the form into excel and email you. Just because you think they can’t do it yet is not reason enough to not make them learn - it’ll work to your benefit in the long run. Create an interface that is intuitive - provide language translations and helpful tool tips.
Keep cost to the minimum and create a community around your site to make your voters tell restaurant owners about you. The more real interactions you can provide the more you will be known.
Now that you have the largest database of listings - you should move into creating an intuitive interface for online ordering. There needs to be an app on both sides - easy ordering on customer’s side and easy editing of the menu/prices on the manager’s side. Keep a fee for yourself - another revenue stream. There is of course a lot of things that need to be taken care of inside the ordering application.
Allow future checkin to the restaurants and give the option to the owner to display it on their listing (option because they may not have many checkins and may not want to display it) - something like 16 people are having dinner here tonight. Again give options to update foursquare and facebook checkin system (and twitter post) to make the event social. Privacy is a concern here so see if there’s a way that users can choose the group to which to post the event.
One of things I find missing is crowd demographics - the social sharing of the photos will tackle the problem to some extent but there should be some classification of what kind of place it is. Is it suitable for family outings or is it a teens place, easy access for the elderly, play area… many such things. There needs to be some sort of easy categorization for such details.
Food is something very personal and has the ability to give people a lot of joy. When I go to a restaurant I want to see that the people serving the food are excited about it - I want it to be festive and not some dull experience of eating with some nice background music. Unfortunately I find this to be very rare.

Zomato should try to think of ways for these restaurant owners to liven up their service so there is more and more reason to go out to eat and experience different cultures (without worrying about health hazards). A kind of a revolution for restaurants in India. Absolutely NO ONE is doing this or have the capability to promote new ideas. If Zomato can create a team and an advisory blog for restaurants to help create new fun ideas it would really be awesome.

There is one restaurant in Gurgaon which created a jungle safari atmosphere - but when we went there we found the place sticking of alcohol - clearly the idea was not followed through properly. Creating a support service for restaurants will help Zomato really stand out in this niche.
Get into listing and rating of catering services and event locations - we do not have enough data on either - we are never really making an informed decision in these matters.

(List may get updated if something else comes up)

Very old documentary about Next - the company Steve Jobs...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:19:00 -0500

Very old documentary about Next - the company Steve Jobs created. The video contains a lot of footage from their internal retreat meetings when the company was being formed. It was a NeXT Computer that was used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN that became the world’s first web server. Apple later acquired NeXT and got Steve Jobs back eventually.

Hugh MacLeod - Cartoonist, bestselling author, marketing apostate.

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:21:00 -0500

Hugh MacLeod - Cartoonist, bestselling author, marketing apostate.:

Very modern and accurate depiction of our state of affairs.

The Last Question - eerie!

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:44:58 -0500

Complete at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54421334/last.png

Offline Vs Online Retailing - FIGHT! Don't actually.

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:37:00 -0500

Maybe I am just being naive but to me it makes perfect business sense. The retailing industry players, it seems, have still not realized that one or a few very large companies can’t really provide an optimized shopping experience - at least not in the way we are expecting this business to be conducted. As more and more people want to be treated as “Humans” the solution we’ll have from the big players will always be a compromised one. We would all love it if things were better than what they already are.

Shopping is a very personal thing - I am very picky when I go in to buy things for my son - I would definitely like someone to go give me some personal attention. Right now where I live the idea of”customer satisfaction” hasn’t really peaked - people are still learning that “customers are kings and queens” but in more mature markets this is pretty much the norm - you do more business if you treat your customers well and go the extra mile to serve their needs.

The large and small, online and offline retailers should go into a search <-> publisher/retailer <-> consumer model that is usually followed on the internet for content consumption. The major brands will become the search, the little corner shops and retailers will become the publishers and the consumers will use a local inventory to find and choose the best places to shop (according to their needs) or get the stuff delivered. This would be the most efficient and the most profitable for all parties.

Let’s take a use case: I have a list of things to buy -

Clothes for my son
A gift for a visiting friend
Some groceries

The three items have very different personalization needs. I would like to see and then do a try out for the clothes for my son. I want ideas for the gift - then I want to see it. For groceries I just have a list of items but I am open to getting some extra nick-nacks.

The way I do it now is I either order in the groceries on the phone or go pick it up (I don’t really want to do that) - I go in search for a nice gift to the malls - at the same place I check out the kid shops and get my son to try out some clothes. Simple but not efficient.

The way I see it happening in the future is I’ll use choose one shopping application (from one of the large retailers) on my desktop or mobile phone - preferable synced via the cloud. I add my items to buy as and when I think about them - then when I have time I sit down to do my search.

I see a listing of the local grocery store in the app who has all that I need - I check out some nick-nack options and I push the order to them - and since they are 5 minutes away - the order is delivered to me very quickly. My linked account is debited. Done.

Then I go on to search for the gift - I feed the data about who I am looking to buy for - the shopping app possibly is aware of the person’s profile (maybe even facebook/twitter feeds) so it checks what options are most suitable and gives me a list. I “like” a few items - the shopping app gives me options about shops where they are available (checking from inventory) nearest to me. I shortlist the stores and I move on to my next item in the list.

I then check some baby clothes - again mark the ones I like and then shortlist the stores for this item. Then I ask the shopping app to optimize my route - if there are 2 gift items I likes and 1 kids store I liked in one location - that gets more priority than if one gift store has 3 items I liked.

So now I know exactly what I want - I know exactly where to go and all the retailers have a made a profit - the big retailer search app, the local retailer.

This option will work beautifully because many times I don’t really want to spend my time to go out to look for some item - I don’t mind ordering it and waiting a couple of days for the delivery. But if the big/small retailer partnership existed this would become even faster.

There are many reasons why the large online retailers would want to do this:

It’s easier and cheaper to deliver if there are local retailers in your team. Both small retailers and large retailers do MORE business by optimizing inventory.
Even the online orders can be delivered much more quickly - the users are happier and spend time on more productive things.
The big retailers are not cutting out the local retailers but rather making them a part of the process - giving them accurate data about what they should stock and when - they know this from the search queries and if they had to send a user more distance than was necessary.
The big retailers are able to outsource the personalization factor by training their retailers.
Logistics and demand planning can be optimized to serve the users in the most effective way by forwarding order requisition to the retailer who has the “most” of the item and is nearest depending on whether the person wants to pick up the item or if it is to be delivered.

Thanks to @Leenarao for writing this article on retailing on techcrunch - I ran into it through @jackabraham ‘s comment on his twitter.

Update: Turns out milo.com is already doing something to this effect (sorry I just started writing after I read Leenarao’s article) through their milo fetch software here https://pointofsale.milo.com/ - no wonder they got acquired by ebay for $75 million. I haven’t checked out their shopping app (or if they have one) but if it does the kind of stuff described above it would be awesome.

I still think Amazon can do this better and should get behind the local retailers and make them part of their chain even if just in words “Amazon Enabled” and build their phone app to do the stuff making it really simple for people like us to shop.

Followerwonk - find who you should follow on twitter

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:38:39 -0500

Followerwonk - find who you should follow on twitter:

Looking for prospects? Whether it’s new talent, customers, or just friends, we help find whom you’re after.

Google+Facebook : Ideas for improving our social sites!

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:02:00 -0500

The basic problem is that no one is really sure what the perfect social application would be - Facebook, twitter are their best bets right now but there is immense room for improvement and there will be changes which will come in the future which will get us closer to a real online life social experience.

What is being social? Social means different things to different people - to the constant chit-chatter sister it’s about hyper connecting with all her friends, to a family person who wants to remain in touch it’s about sharing, liking replying to various family updates, to a business person it’s about developing new connections and keeping the existing ones. Each group has a different idea about being social and the reason Facebook is winning is because of it’s modular design.

This is a very long post about some new things which can help improve our online social experience.

Why is Facebook winning the biggest pie of online socializing?

most or all of family connections
some of the business connection (possible lead: linkedin)
some of the event connections (possible lead: Google)
some of the news sharing connections (possible lead: twitter)
some of the interesting article sharing connection (possible lead: twitter)

Ease of use, modular design, the stories about Facebook, first mover into the news feed model, gained momentum so most new people joining already had friends with active accounts and relevant content for them to read.

Why is twitter winning the news/article sharing battle? It’s fairly obvious - I don’t want to read elongated paragraphs about what you are saying - keeping it short, simple and fast wins hands down as I can focus on more people and connect with more people much more quickly. Twitter is a different breed and will become the plugin for shorter versions of your public post for any social network that emerges.

What exactly is Google+? real life sharing, rethought for the web. Google+ aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. That’s their goal. The tag line on the sharing box says “Share what’s new…” Hmmm.

Facebook’s share box says “What’s on your mind?” - anyone can see which seems more human or rather which would seem more “real life”. But let’s not rattle around such small issues like tag lines - the issue is much deeper and we can possibly get better if we attack the problem rather than trying to see which little thing each company is doing right or wrong. I just wanted to start with that because that is what most people seem to do.

So let’s get on with the problem.

The problem we want to solve is building the perfect online social platform. Social is never JUST about sharing (stuff on our mind or in our hands or computer) - it’s also about connecting - that is what we expect when we go to any social gathering. Share stories, photos and also meet new people - talk about new experiences and opinions. We also talk about news, politics and stuff. So if we are to move this to an online platform we need to look at different aspects.

Design: Making it easy to share “what” we want with “who” we want - I think the Paul Adams presentation has drilled this well into the minds of the designers at the top social network and they are making good progress in solving this problem - circles or ajax dropdowns both work well - and one may only give the network an aesthetic advantage. But that said the Google+ circles interface is really quite a feat.

Here’s what I think will be part of that perfect social network.

Make ALL the items the same size and balloon up larger versions of images or videos or text when the user interacts with them. NONE of the social networks do this well. It’s confusing and irritating to say the least - you brilliant ajax developers can DEFINITELY do better than this.
Make connecting with new/unknown people less freaky. What I mean is you need to create validated accounts if you want to do “real” new connections. In a social gathering we generally won’t appreciate someone just coming up to us and acting all friendly - but when a friend introduces us we respond well.
The core of the reason is the validation - you don’t always need people to introduce yourself to others in an online platform. Validation can be solved by doing credit card checks to identify people - piggyback on the visa verification process. Simpler and faster. Only people with verified accounts should be allowed to do public posts. Then identify the personalities and show glimpses in a separate section. AGAIN - making the items fit properly and ballooning additional information would make people more open to reviewing the material.

Social is also about collaborating - specially collaboration of ideas and organizations. There needs to be a well designed space for ideas or organizations inside the social networks. Pages are good but can be improved by addition of some collaboration tools and possibly some brand insights - I would pay to see what people are saying about my brand.
If brands can be identified in comments and if permission to copy the comment on the brand’s page can be asked for at the time the person is making the comment it would add a lot of value. For example someone saying “My Nike+ is awesome” and when they hit enter they are shown a dialog where they confirm if they would like to share it on the Nike+ page also - it would be a real connection and the person may then join the Nike+ community and be more involved.
There can be many such small improvements that can be made to help people make connections with other people, ideas and organizations.
Tagging can be made intuitive with the use of a little color on the boxes. It would help us visually segregate different kinds of items - in a real world social experience color plays an important role in our interactions.
Having everything - an article share, an opinion or comment look the same is not the best we can have. The idea is to try to replicate the reactions we have in a social interactions - for example when someone is telling a fascinating story the reaction and mode of hearing is different from say when someone is breaking the news of getting fired.
If an intuitive legend of colors (even if very light backgrounds) could be incorporated into the news feed it would really liven up the reactions and our eyes would flow smoother and stop at what interests us the most.
I guess some sort of AI would be required to judge the mood of the item and color them with a light tinge of the mood.
Avoid temptation to grow fast - when you focus on that you do silly things like put a youtube search bar on the side or try to encourage people to do things they don’t want to. Like when I clicked on the “Click to see popular posts” (this section looks different from the rest of the site - seems like a different designer) - I saw items which almost seemed like stuff my teenager cousin forwarded me - I am NOT INTERESTED in that - I don’t want it there! Stick to what you are here to do - and solve the problem instead of trying to promote other products or trying to push users from other services. Integrate it well and the users will flow to the social experience also.
Do not blend too much - keep services separate and clean from clutter. Do cross promotion carefully and in a minimal fashion. Google was on the right path with the toolbar at the top but they seem to be loosing it.
It seems that the +1 is somehow lacking some flare - in Facebook when I “Like” something - I am saying I really like this - but where I am not “Liking” an item I am not really saying anything. But in search I need to get this feedback which I think Google is missing out on. Google has a lot of data on each profile - so it should be possible to avoid fraud of negative marking. But this is important information they are missing out on. If adding a social element was the goal it’s important to embrace both negative and positive rankings. It should’ve been called +- or show the +- status with a slight indent in opposite direction. Users could click and drag the search listings which they thought were good.
How many people are public speakers? Remove the word “Publicly +1 this”… unless there is some important privacy issue being addressed but even so - this can be worded better.

Marketing: Anything Google does doesn’t really need marketing the tech space will hype it to oblivion but adding some in-product blending may get a lot of users. So here are some marketing ideas:

Millions of people forwarding emails - the so called laggards who are still not on twitter but use gmail - but it’s a decent size of the pie. Having a small +Plus to share the email in a nicely formatted manner may get the laggards in and connecting.
In the words of Sean Parker’s famous line “Drop the Google”. The name is not right - adding Google the “verb” into a product will always seem to have a search taste. Just call it “Plus” or “Circles” - unless there are some trademark issues - these seem like better names.
Find a way to intuitively integrate it into Android - the best way would be to have it seamlessly integrate into the contacts application - with beautiful notifications - make it free for people to sms and add content to their plus account in developing countries. The Samsung social hub doesn’t allow people to add Google Plus - this should’ve been addressed before they launched their hugely popular S2 and Note.
Do some marketing using Google earth and maps - invite merchants to create their plus accounts and business pages and link them to their local listing. Send them a sticker to put on their shop - it would probably cost Google 2-5 dollars to print 1 sticker - can you imagine what 100,000 customized stickers can do? Google/facebook can afford this.

Some comments and more ideas from other people here: http://www.quora.com/Is-Google+-a-failure-Or-does-it-still-remain-to-be-seen

This should be addressed to all our members

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 07:51:05 -0500

Thank you very much for accepting me as a member of CiteHR. For the last 67 years I am a student, starting my learning and training from the laps of my beloved mother. I have a little time to stay in this world but have desire to learn. You are doing a sacred job by disseminating knowledge through CiteHR. My prayers are with you!
Riaz Shirazi

This should be addressed to the all of us - all members of the Cite community. Which is why I am posting it here for all to read.

Quora - will it be the greatest Q&A site ever?

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:07:00 -0500

There is a question on Quora about “What turns people off about Quora?” - I think I found my answer when this reply of mine somehow got collapsed right after posting because of some vaguely described reasons in their faq. Here’s the link and my answer:

http://www.quora.com/Quora/What-turns-people-off-about-Quora

I use facebook to connect with my family. I use twitter to follow the people I want to follow. I am now using Quora to read about and connect with people in the startup community. People go to Google for search, gmail for mail - people need classification of what the product does. More examples - airbnb, dropbox, elance, 99designs… the list goes on and on.

There is a trend here. It’s rare that a site would come up and say I can do all subjects - one such rare site is wikipedia. But on wikipedia the users are alligned to believe that they are building the greatest encyclopedia that ever existed - people want to be part of that - they want to own their subjects there.There needs to be an alignment of goals when building a product - for Quora it’s getting forced into being the greatest startup community Q&A site. But that can be changed if they allow people to own their subjects and content.

The only way to get out of it is to have many subject matter experts take up sections - but unfortunately many such people are running their own communities or personal brands. So the hook could be if they allow plugining in of their content into quora in such a way that the experts still own and control the content and it’s revenue. Maybe the solution could be to build ports for the popular softwares used by these community leaders so that all the content can be aggregated on Quora and then curated by the much larger community which would be formed.

Or another approach could be to extend the current Quora search engine and get all the Q&A sites to join and get indexed. Then build a layer that can be applied on top of all these single existing Q&A sites. The community owners would love the extra exposure that may come their way and Quora will become what it set out to become. I believe it will also significantly reduce the infrastructure and effort that will be required to keep the information up as it will get distributed.

The idea is to let these community leaders keep their community but be able to plug it into Quora.

That is the only way they are going to suceed into becoming the greatest Q&A product that ever existed. The idea of this change/addition is a daunting task in itself but it sits well with their goal.

Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.

One of my favorite classical performances… Tina Sani. The...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:46:59 -0500

One of my favorite classical performances… Tina Sani. The sound is as if some sort of awakening is being called for - at the end there is a verse which is recited - it says something to the effect “The one you called god, the one you pleaded, the one you looked for, the one who would rescue you… the one who didn’t come… it was you all along.”

Perceptions & preconceived notions

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:13:13 -0500

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OcQ9A-5noM

Such a great example of how perceptions & preconceived notions about you can go pufff… when you start performing like that.

Android screen filter app

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:05:47 -0500

If you are like me and think that some of the amoled screens are just too bright even at the lowest brightness setting - try the screen filter. http://www.appbrain.com/app/screen-filter/com.haxor It’s a life saver… Rather an eye saver.

Running an adwords campaign

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:02:00 -0500

So we have started doing a small advertising campaign on Adwords. We don’t really have a lot to spend so we have put in a daily budget of Rs.500. I think we are doing pretty well and Google likes us because we have spent a little time really optimizing the campaign.

Anyone who has done adwords will tell you that it’s a pretty optimized campaign - getting clicks with 2 pennies a pop for business related keywords is pretty optimized. Try this and go to images if you want to take a look at some campaign image shots.

We are talking about keywords related to business, human resource, employees etc. They are usually not cheap and when we first started we were spending about Rs.10 a click - but then smart pricing kicked in and we are now spending 2 pennies for a click.

And it’s pretty simple to do it also - just be very precise about the ad copy and the keywords you choose plus make sure the keywords on the landing page match the keywords you are trying to buy.

If you strain your eyes a bit you will see we have a click through rate of 4% for this keyword and the ad copy is optimized, the landing page gives you exactly what we say in the ad copy and we are paying Rs.0.46 - 0.70 per click. There is no reason you can’t repeat this for more keywords - you just have to WORK HARD!!

Founder of wordpress Matt Mullenweg at Startup School. Kind of...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 07:24:21 -0500

Founder of wordpress Matt Mullenweg at Startup School. Kind of the history of wordpress and how he started.