SROYS

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…

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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…

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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.

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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.

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Did you know that I don’t want to buy a wallet at 64% off? Yeah… it’s unbelievable right! But I am happy with the one I have. Did you ask me what kind of deals I was interested in when I first gave you my email address and location? Did you ask me my gender or age?

Clearly you didn’t! You do need to reduce friction but you do also want me to come back to check out new deals don’t you?

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So, the latest trend is that we understand that a child needs to explore and learn their potential. Things like “let the child learn what he wants to” are being said a lot by new parents these days. Of course most people also do understand that certain other things are important too…

1. Basic language, science and mathematics
2. Basic behavioral and social science
3. Basic physical education and sports

I have often wondered if what I learned in high school (10-12) helped me in any way - I mean trigonometry, calculus - I frankly cannot remember any of it. So was it of any use?

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Seems like the perfect service they should venture into - they have paying retail advertisers and they can easily create a program where these retailers are allowed to add special offers into their listings for a small extra price. Give them an interface to add coupons for special items. They really have an opportunity to revolutionize this industry and possibly completely replace something very basic and important on our mobile phones which we use all the time. Let’s get into it step by step…

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Jack Dorsey in my opinion is one of those people who are going to influence a lot of change in the coming future. He is the founder and ideator of twitter.com, which has clearly revolutionized real time sharing. But what I think will really make him what he is going to be is “Square” - or what it will become eventually - the company which allows you to use a small gadget to receive credit card payments. He and his team are working to reduce the friction that exists in making payments.

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