Failed Opportunity – An example

Talking of failed opportunities, I read this news on NYTimes of a new Website called Cookstr. Cookstr plans to “showcase the recipes of star chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Mario Batali, as well as those of less-well-known but highly regarded cookbook writers. The idea, ultimately, is to sell copies of these authors’ books”.

Now this news appeared on the NYTimes which had 20 M Unique Users in September. Anyone would have kept their site ready for the traffic the news will bring to their site and they could have 1000’s (even millions) of conversions just because of this coverage. But Not Cookstr. While the news article does say, that the site will go live this month, you would assume that Cookstr would have done their research on NYTimes readership and would have been ready to showcase their new site to millions of readers. This is what you see when you are taken to the website.

Now, my dear readers (yes the two of you) that’s a classic example of Failed Opportunity.

Another reason to use Live.com

While the Live Search has improved drastically in the past few months, Microsoft now has one more reason to have more people using Live Search. The photographs from Olympics (available in US and few other countries only at this time). The images are amazing and very well placed.

Starbucks Economics

[via Aplia Econ Blog]

Rather old article, but nonetheless fascinating if you are interested in Economics.

Starbucks Economics - Solving the mystery of the elusive "short" cappuccino.

Can Do/Will Do Evaluation

While developing Competency Models for my groups, one of the popular performance analysis tools that I have come across is the Can Do/Will Do Evaluation chart that Kenneth Carlton Cooper has described in his book, Effective Competency Modeling and Reporting: A Step-by-Step Guide for Improving Individual and Organizational Performance. Below is a representation of the same.

Here “Can do” refers to employee’s qualification to do the job and “Will do” refers to employee’s motivation to perform. The results are four alternatives:

• Can Do/Will Do - Ideal Situation. The employee is fully qualified and doing the job as desired. The Manager should motivate and incentivize the employee suitably.
• Can't Do/Will Do - In this case, employee is willing to put in the efforts but is ill equipped skill wise to do the job. This suggests a competency gap and Training will help in this case.
• Can Do/Won't Do - In this case, employee has all required competencies to complete the job but still is not performing the job as desired. This shows a Motivational problem and counseling will help in this case.
• Can't Do/Won't Do - In this case, the employee is lacking in both skills and motivation. Employer needs to weigh the options of counseling the employee versus the success of such counseling. The result could be Job in Jeopardy situation. As Kenneth Cooper notes in his book, Attitudes cannot be developed, only counseled.

It is interesting to note that Can Do/Can't Do dimension of this model is competency based while Will Do/Won't Do is not since it involves dealing with motivational attitude.

Competency Management

One of my colleagues, Hemant Sathe has started his new blog through which he plans to share his experiences in technology and project management. Now Hemant and I have worked very closely in the recent past and so I am quite familiar with the topic of his latest post, Thoughts on building technical competency. This is an area where we have focused a lot in the last year or so. Let me run you through how we run the Competency Management program for our group. As Hemant has put out, we look at Competency development as a multi-step process. The step 1 is what we termed the Gap Analysis. Quoting Hemant on the same:

In the first step, we collected data about our existing competencies. The way to do that was to identify three top most relevant competencies of each of our team members. This also included the project leads and middle management. The focus was on "relevant skills". This meant that if someone had worked extensively on a particular technology some 2-3 years back we may not consider it in top 3. We rated the skills on a level of E1 to E4. Then we also mapped the target levels of each of these competencies in the current project or quarter or half year. Although we collected data from the teams, it was validated by the leads to reflect the usable level of the skills.

Once we did this analysis, we started analyzing the data and listing the E3 onwards level employees. These were called as the champions of the skill area. This list is useful in few key business areas; recruitment, training, responding to proposals, estimation, solving problems of projects, knowledge management.

Along with identifying the champions, we also identified the laggards who are bringing down the whole competency level average for the group. We then looked at their past year's performance assessments and decided relevant competency levels they need to attain to stay in the group.

The next step in the process is Competency Upgrades. Now, this is the area where we did a lot and lot remains to be done. Some of the things we did right included,

• Generating Quarterly training needs - This was done in liaison with Learning and Development (L&D) group. What it meant was coming up with the group needs based on the different competency levels and how we wanted to move people across these. Start of the quarter, you hand over the training needs for the entire group to the L&D team and work with them to schedule/conduct the training's. This helped L&D team to plan for the training in a better way and avoid ad-hoc requests which generally had very less lead time to close.
• Strong Induction Programs - As a part of Induction we included few checkpoints. We interviewed and took test of all Trainees who joined the group. Since most of the desired competencies in our group required strong OOPS, Data Structures background, we made sure that we get people who are from Computer Science and IT education backgrounds. The Induction was also streamlined and we are now having almost 30 person days of Induction training. During this induction we have started assigning mentors to the new joinees so that they have somebody to talk to understand the work our group is involved with. Generally these mentors are from project groups where these new people will join. For experienced people, the induction is of lesser time as we recruit by identifying the competencies that we want in the new joining person(s). In this case also we have a strict Interview process which is championed by the E3+ level employees as Hemant mentioned in his post.
• Certifications Tracking - This is another area we encouraged our employees in and are tracking this closely. There is a schedule which allows us to find out who is undergoing which certification in the next quarter. Some cool corporate initiatives like free certification drives and exam fee reimbursements helped our employees to go for the same without any fear of failures.
• Knowledge Sharing Sessions - As Hemant points out,

  Our main focus last year was on conduction knowledge sharing sessions (KSS). For these KSS we had different types. These were,
  - Formal training/ presentation on a technology area
  - Workshops for areas like design
  Hands on sessions
  - Project showcase to demonstrate the in-house skills and build a sense of pride

  
  

  KSS went well for some time and then it started fizzling out for various reasons (including busy schedules, laggards outweighing front-runners, lesser incentives for the Knowledge sharers etc) but we are determined to make it happen. The importance of KSS is enormous and apart from what Hemant described, we want to do well because KSS sessions are a great step forward to improve Employee communication and presentation skills. This is so important in today's world with such great focus on outsourcing and working globally. 

The next steps will include the following:

• Competency Assessment - We are assessing the employees by their performance in various projects, customer satisfaction surveys and various feedback mechanisms (peer and manager, half-yearly and yearly assessments etc). Also, we are planning to assess the competencies by engaging employees in different role plays working individually and in groups.
• Incentivizing the whole thing. Some people will do all this because they will realize this as important to their career progression but not all fingers are equal, right :) We need to come up with different mechanisms to incentivize the ones who are the front-runners so that others also follow their lead.
• Another thing we are doing is linking various sub group level competencies with the strategic focus of the group. Say for example, we expect to do business in forthcoming .NET 3.0 technologies like WPF, SilverLight, WCF etc while we currently are doing a lot of work in .NET 2.0 space. So in this case, we align each sub-group to the strategic intent of the complete group. What this will mean is that the chosen sub-groups will participate in the new training programs that we conduct.

Are we doing the right things? Are there any laid out processes we need to look at? How are you all managing Competency Development and Management in your orgs?

Microsoft bids $44.6 billion for Yahoo

Some great news coming out today.

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. offered to buy search engine operator Yahoo Inc. for $44.6 billion in cash and stock in a move to boost its competitive edge in the online services market.

Microsoft bid $31 per share for Yahoo, representing a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's closing stock price Thursday.

Now, this is what I call Breaking News :)

Happy New Year 2008

Reflecting on the year gone by (2007), it has been quite some year for me professionally what with so many prizes/awards (1st prize for Collaborative Logistics Mashup for Mashup Idea and Assembly, 1st Prize in the wireless competition for the Connected Services Sandbox, 1st prize for Session Search CSF competition and the overall Series winner). All these awards came with good prize money so even more rewarding :)

This year lady luck smiled on me even in quizzes with me and my partner Abha Shah coming runners up in the Pune Tata Crucible. We could have been the winners if we were a little faster with our fingers in the buzzer round. A good commentary of the same is on Jay's blog (Abha's husband). Last year, 2006 I had come 3rd in Pune round of Tata Crucible.Then there were few awards at my Company level, Best Speaker award, Innovation award (which I am very proud of).

Professionally, my wife Monica also has been doing great with she delivering successfully one of the biggest projects in the company. She now moves on to take higher responsibilities.

I hope Lady luck stays with us the next year too and enriches us both professionally and personally. Hope the same for all the readers of my blog. A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year !!

Mixx no match for Digg (so far)

According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch Digg Refugees may be heading to Mixx. I don't quite understand what he means by Refugees but anyways, what I pointed out in this post was how Mixx is an upcoming Social Digging site and how Digg is way ahead of Mixx right now.

Below is the list of top media news websites which allow their stories to be shared using community-based popularity websites like Digg, Reddit etc.

Site	Digg	Reddit	Mixx
The New York Times	Yes	No	No
MSNBC	Yes	No	No
CNN	Yes	Yes	No
Reuters	Yes	No	Yes
Washington Post	Yes	Yes	No
Guardian	Yes	Yes	No
WSJ	Yes	No	No
Portfolio.com	Yes	Yes	No
ABC News	Yes	Yes	No
Fox News	Yes	No	No

 

Now as you can see, except for Reuters no other big Media/News websites allow their stories to be dug directly by Mixx. Support for Mixx is miniscule as compared to Digg and that is what gets reflected from the stats too.

HealthVault - Platform Service Offering from Microsoft

Ray Ozzie's Software+Services strategy seems to be taking shape. During the 2007 Financial Analysts Meeting he spoke of platform approach to services. To quote him verbatim (emphasis mine),

Services is going to be a critical aspect of all of our offerings from Windows and Office on the client to Exchange and SharePoint and Dynamics and other things on the server, and in order to gain leverage across all of our offerings, we're taking a platform approach to services, giving each of our products the common benefits of cost, speed, scale and monetization that a platform approach offers….

We're building a platform to support our own apps and solutions, and to support our partners' applications and solutions, and to support enterprise solutions and enterprise infrastructure. We are the only company in the industry that has the breadth of reach from consumer to enterprises to understand and deliver and to take full advantage of the services opportunity in all of these markets.  

With HealthVault, Microsoft has done exactly that. From the press release:

Microsoft^® HealthVault, a software and services platform aimed at helping people better manage their health information. The company outlined its vision for ways that HealthVault can bring the health and technology industries together to create new applications, services and connected devices that help people manage and monitor their personal health information, including weight loss and disease management, such as for diabetes.

What's exciting is that since it's a Platform service, it is already augmented by other Live Services such as Live Search (in this case, Live Search Health), Live Id etc. Also, with the HealthVault SDK, Microsoft has made the service extensible by developers, ISV's and Partners.

For more on Software + Services aspect of HealthVault, read the blog post by Dan Kasum

Live ID: Core of Microsoft's Online Services Push

Over the weekend, I read and re-read all the transcripts from Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2007. While few things stood out like focus on Software + Services, next era of Consumer Electronics, Microsoft Services Platform (see Ray Ozzie's presentation) etc, Kevin Johnson's talk on Online Services and Advertising, more particularly discussion on Live ID's took my attention. According to Kevin, Microsoft has 380 million active (user that signs in and uses one or more of our services every 30 days) Live IDs and these are driving the breadth of usage of Microsoft (Live) Services.

There are four key things that are important. Live IDs in these services are sticky. People sign on and they use these services because it's about contacts that are important to them, data that's important to them, information and their profile in services that they use that's important to individuals. So it's a very sticky service.

Number two, it's revenue monetization. We can drive what I call direct revenue per live ID, the display ads or the in-screen videos or the searches done from these services as well as indirect revenue for Live ID. Indirect revenue per Live ID is as they come into the network, our ability to route traffic and flow them to other services, other parts of the network creates another revenue monetization opportunity.

So you have two things, sticky users, and you've got revenue production. Direction revenue for Live ID, indirect revenue for Live ID. Third, it enables ad serving. This creates significant amount of opportunity for us to know more about the users when they are signed in versus just a cookie or an IP address. As users are signed in, we can do a better job of behavioral targeting or ad targeting to these particular users, which is good for the user, more relevant advertising, and it's good for the advertiser. It's more targeted at the audience they're trying to get after.

And we have some momentum coming out of fiscal year '07. We grew Live IDs in fiscal year '07 by over 20 percent to get to that 380 million. Where are we going in fiscal year '08? The next release of Windows Live will be coming out this fall. It is a suite of user services, a single suite of user services. A single download, single download and install to the PC that will enable users to use these services whether they're on the PC, on the phone, or just directly from browser to Internet. A very rich set of services.

This next release of Windows Live is the must-have free upgrade to the Windows experience. And so we're going to drive very hard on continuing to expand the number of users we have using these Windows Live services. Let me give you some perspective. We're at 380 million Live IDs. We're getting ready to release this next release of Windows Live in the fall. Yahoo is about 245 million active registered users; Google has approximately 75 million signed-in users.

Our ability as a company to better connect to the Windows experiences such as mail, Photo Gallery, as well as the experience on the phone and extend those into services experiences, I think, will enable us to expand Live IDs and really grow our reach in the network. So that's one key priority our engineering teams are focused on, our marketing teams, our field teams.

The core thing to note here would be more relevant advertising that Microsoft is targeting based on the knowledge of who the Live ID user is. This is where Microsoft has edge on Google. Google while having more number of users using it's Search services, have not really paid much heed to getting to know it's users and have relied on using IP address and search terms to target ads/services. Knowing Live ID user can open enormous opportunities for Microsoft to target ads to the users. Consider this fictitious (soon to be real) scenario, Your friend X bought a pair of Nike shoes and when you search for shoes on Live.com, Microsoft using Windows Live Contact services has identified your friend and will in return show you the same shoe telling you this is what your friend bought. You wanna buy that? :) How cool would that be.

Collab+Logistics on DDJ

It's an honor to have been interviewed by Dr. Dobb's Journal. Dr. Dobb's journal interviewed me on the Collaborative Logistics Mashup win at Connected Services Sandbox Mashup Service Design competition. You can read the interview here:

Mashups: Networks for Collaborative Logistics

Mobile + Internet in India

Contradictory to my blog post on number of Internet Subscribers on Mobile phones in India, a new TRAI report is suggesting that 31.30 million users in India are accessing Internet through their mobile handsets—GSM or CDMA—to read and reply to mails, download content and for online transactions. Now that means 1 in every 5 Mobile users (considering 165 Million Mobile subscribers in India) is accessing Internet using their Mobiles. That is a ridiculously high number, one that does not reflect in the ARPU reported by the Indian Telcos. For e.g. Airtel charges anything from Rs 100 to 250 under different plans for one month of Internet access.

Something's amiss from this report. I have a good enough techie circle of friends who have Internet capable phones too, but hardly 5-10% of these are accessing Internet. I wonder how the number of users were calculated.

Anyways, all in all good news for the Mobile Content developers in (or targeting) India.

According to Indian Cellular Association (ICA) president Pankaj Mohindroo: “India sold 65 million handsets in 2006, of which 35 million were Net-enabled. The propensity to use Net on the mobile is very high and the figures would be much higher if sufficient bandwidth (spectrum) is made available for high-end data services and more websites have mobile-friendly content.” ICA tracks handset sales and trends.

Another good set of news is for SmartPhone makers like Microsoft.

About 5% of handsets sold in 2006 were smartphones—sophisticated devices mostly bought by corporate users—that allow execs to stay connected to the Web and their office intranet.

Phones with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform, which commanded a 17% share of the new smartphone additions in 2006, has seen volumes grow four times year-on-year and are projected to cross the 200,000-unit mark in 2007.

And finally some good news for CDMA operators too.

After a year of declining average revenue per user (ARPU) per month for mobile services, signs of reversal are on the horizon. However, this is so far limited to operators offering services based on the CDMA technology. Blended ARPU for CDMA operators for January-March 2007 increased by 3.08% over the previous quarter to Rs 202 per month.
GSM service providers, on the other hand, maintained a declining trend, with blended ARPU falling from Rs 316 in the December 2006 quarter to Rs 298 in the three months ended March 2007, according to a survey by telecom regulator Trai.

Nearly 73% of subscribers use GSM technology in India and the rest are on the CDMA platform.

Related News:

Advertisers prepare to go mobile to catch eyeballs

Yahoo gets smart by targeting "You"

Yahoo is launching a new display advertising product called SmartAds, which allows marketers to offer ads that are customized according to the user's demographics and online activities.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

While the news look straightforward, the technology I presume powering SmartAds will be quite complex. From the same NYTimes article:

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement.

For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.

Yahoo is not the only one targeting user demographics and online activities. Similar thing is being experimented in Microsoft adCenter. Check out the Demographics Prediction and Local Ads by PC Address Tools from Microsoft adCenter Labs.

Demographics Prediction: You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model.
and

Local Ads by PC Address: Microsoft adCenter technologies can detect customer's location by his or her computer's IP address and then list relevant local ads based on this location.

More on Yahoo SmartAds.

Yahoo!'s New "SmartAds" Meld Brand and Direct Response Advertising

Apple iPhone to Generate more than 50 % Margins

Businessweek is reporting that according to Portelligent, a firm specializing in product teardowns and reporting, the cost of the materials used in the iPhone add up to about $200 for the 4-gigabyte version, which sells for $499 and about $220 for the 8-gigabyte version, which sells for $599. Thus Apple is making more than 50% is margins.

Portelligent estimates that the cost of the materials used in the iPhone add up to about $200 for the 4-gigabyte version, which sells for $499 and about $220 for the 8-gigabyte version, which sells for $599. Their estimate doesn't include costs of final assembly, but it does give some insight into the gross margin on the device. Historically Apple's gross margins have run ball park of 50% plus or minus a few points. "We had taken a speculative stab at what the costs would be back in January, when the phone was first announced and we were pretty close to the mark," Carey says (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/20/06, "The Skinny on Apple's New nanos").

This report is in line with what iSuppli reported in Jan 2007.

“iSuppli estimates the 4Gbyte version of the Apple iPhone will carry a $229.85 hardware BoM and manufacturing cost and a $245.83 total expense, yielding a 50.7 percent margin on each unit sold at the $499 retail price,” said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and senior analyst for iSuppli. “Meanwhile, the 8GByte Apple iPhone will sport a $264.85 hardware cost and a $280.83 total expense, amounting to a 53.1 percent margin at the $599 retail price.”

This kind of high margins although nothing new to Apple may well be offsetting the margin pressures on it's iPod business.

Collaborative Logistics Mashup

Recently I won the first round of Microsoft and BT’s Connected Services Sandbox Competition. My entry was an idea of a mashup enabling Collaborative Logistics which offers transport companies a revolutionary way to cut costs and streamline logistic operations. The idea is to share unused capacity in Trucks. Trucks which are not full can communicate the available space to the Mashup Service which will then broadcast the same to Mashup service subscribers using SMS. Similarly a Truck Owner can broadcast his unused space to subscribers through the Mashup service. For small companies this will mean cutting high costs of half full truck shipments.

My win was in first of three, two-stage Connected Services Sandbox competitions held jointly by Microsoft, BT and TopCoder. The Microsoft Connected Services Sandbox is a live proof-of-concept and demonstration environment that is designed to facilitate the ecosystem of partners, customers and developers to integrate and demonstrate the collective value of our solutions.

To share some more good news, subsequently I won the Assembly competition also for the same idea. Couple of my colleagues (Vikram Saraf and Sachin Bansal, both super-sharp developers :) ) helped me in this phase. The mashup service we created uses Microsoft's MapPoint Web Service and Virtual Earth SDK and three Web21C services (Authentication, Location, SMS Service). We also made provisions for usage of other BT services like InBoundSMS and Location service.

I see a great future in the area of Collaborative Logistics. The mashup targets the long tail of small and medium businesses. The mashup can be evolved by creating a community around the Service. Leveraging MapPoint and Virtual Earth API’s, users can create their profiles and provide links to their web sites etc. Remember, a loyal community converts into long term customers so even though the service can be initially provided free but at a later stage can be made a paid service thus sustaining itself and generating revenues too.

More links including my interview by Microsoft:

• Collaborative Logistics Mashup Wins First Round of Microsoft and BT’s Connected Services Sandbox Competition (PDF, 178 KB)
• First Place Winner Mashes Services to Optimize a Retailer’s Inventory in the Connected Services Sandbox Competition (PDF, 69 KB)
• Supply Chain Software: Will a “Mashup” Enable Collaborative Transportation Management?
• Microsoft Woos Telecom With IPTV Sandbox
• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Collaborative+Logistics+Mashup&btnG=Google+Search