I watched the movie Pi recently. It is a gripping movie about a number theorist by name Max, who is obsessed about unraveling the mystery of nature by understanding number patterns. There is one dialogue between Max and his mentor that brought a twinkle to my eyes. Reading this would not spoil the fun of watching the movie if you plan to. Hence, read on…
Mentor: You remember Archimedes of Syracuse? eh?
The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he received is solid gold.
Unsolved problem at that time. I tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks. Insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, an equally exhausted wife, forced to share a bed with this genius, convinces him to take a bath, to relax.
While he is entering the tub, he notices the bath water rise.
Displacement – A way to determine volume and thus a way to determine density. Weight over volume and thus Archimedes solves the problem.
He screams “Eureka!” and runs naked to the king to report his discovery.
Now, what is the moral of the story?
Max: That, a breakthrough will come
Mentor: Wrong! the point of the story is the wife. Listen to your wife, she’ll give you perspective.
Meaning, you need a break or you’ll get nowhere
Posted on 3 September '09 by Nithya Dayal, under Movies. View Comments.
The concept of charging users for an on-line community platform is quite a departure from the conventional preachings of the internet. ‘Freemium models’ are most often dismissed as an overreaching effort to increase revenues. But there are a few good reasons why I strongly feel a freemium model would work better.
One of the toughest challenges in building and sustaining an on-line community is establishing trust among users who have never met in the real world. Most users are wary of false identities and this inhibits the formation of trusted interpersonal relationships online. Paid account holders carry a certain level of authenticity and thus establishing mutual trust among such users gets easier.
Charging users creates a decently high barrier to entry and any barrier acts as a filter that ensures a certain quality in content. This also ensures that as a business owner you spend much lesser resource and time on moderating/flagging content to keep the place clean.
And last but not the least, users are not threatened by the possibility of the service shutting down due to unmanageable costs.
More revenues, lesser overheads and better trust – What more do we need to believe in this model?
Myself and Prateek were discussing the other day about how existing brick and mortar companies would alter their business plan and functioning if they got inspired by the internet companies. The core objective is this – Never charge your customer for your core competency(offering). Give it away for free to attract more customers. Make money through something not directly related to your offering.
It is evil to charge your customers. It is your problem if you are not creative enough to come up with other attractive ways to make a business of your offering.
I am jotting a few of them here. All contributions welcome.
KFC, Mac D and the likes
Everything in the menu is free. The company takes a cut from the tip to the waiter ( Tipping is not mandatory).
Automobile companies
The vehicle is free. The customers will be charged for all accessories and maintenance
The Wall marts and the Big bazaars
All items on display free. Customers will be charged for parking space
The above examples sound hilarious, almost ridiculous. But the this is the norm in the internet world!
Let’s see how the whole ‘attention economy’ thing unfolds!
In my opinion it hardly is. By saying its an alternate career option are we trying to tell the students that they can choose to work with Wipro or Infy or heck, they can do something on their own? Well entrepreneurship is not an alternate choice, its a personal option chosen by a person after having some experience to understand himself and what he wants and how he wants it.
I am immensely puzzled by the sudden trend to promote entrepreneurship in colleges through courses as a part of the syllabus. Well it definitely makes sense to learn how to draw up a business plan but thats just a part of a business course! Entrepreneurship to a large extent is about perseverance, patience, ability to take initiatives, responsibilities and myriad challenges. When such is the case how is anybody gonna teach all this in a classroom. If there was so much logic and science behind entrepreneurship that it can be taught in a classroom why are entrepreneurs still dabbling?
Well, what made me twitch was this . If I am not wrong, its NEN conducting a course for teachers to teach entrepreneurship to students. Is something grossly amiss about my understanding of things?
Is NEN sure about what its goals are? If they are out to create an ecosystem around entrepreneurs and startups, it can have tangible benefits. But pumping resource and energy into spreading and celebrating entrepreneurship at college level when nobody has any clue seems to undermine the true spirit.
Orkut is undeniably the biggest and the most used social network in India. But slowly the Facebook fad is catching up here for many reasons- their cool apps, the privacy settings, the american population etc etc., Also, am really not sure how the apps on orkut are faring. I have not received feeds from friends on them adding or using apps or for that matter even invitations for apps. If thats not the case, am not sure how users are supposed to discover apps on Orkut. And sad enough when I visit friends profiles, it takes so long for the applications to load that, by the time it happens I am done with my job there and long gone!
To top all this, I see lot of google ads for Orkut which invariably have irrelevant ad description. If I am not wrong this is the first time I see google advertising for its own product and worst still is the fact that the ads grossly lack class!
To many of us, Google has meant class and zen which they definitely have across all their products. Well in my opinion the first exception is Orkut. There is a strong possibility of Orkut losing out to Facebook in the SNS game which is right now the biggest wave on internet
Personally this is the first slip I have seen from Google!
It is not fashionable anymore to say that Web 2.0 is not as much about technology as it is about people. When this is an accepted truism of such degree, it is worth spending some time to analyze the dynamics of a such a model.
Before one builds a website (hence a service) on the assumption and wish that users will come forward to generate content, one needs to understand what it takes to drive those users to contribute content.
The following things need to be kept in mind while trying to build an active community on-line.
Is Your Service Different
During the whole thought process – while planning to start, build and maintain a new website- if ever this question sounded cliched within yourself, you are sure to come up with a non-starter for a service. Unless there is something unique in what you offer, how fair is it to expect people to spend their time in your platform to generate content, when either, they are already comfortable doing the same elsewhere (or) they do not see a new source of satisfaction in your service. This satisfaction as your uniqueness could be in any form for the user expression, recognition, entertainment, social and business networking and so on and so forth.
For muziboo.com the users have overwhelmingly let it known that appreciation from fellow Patrons, through constructive criticism and comments, stands out as our uniqueness that drives them to generate and share content. It soon graduated to the next level, where rewards from fellow patrons and users have become financial – in the form of offers to sing/ perform in public platforms and functions and offers for teaching opportunities. It did not stop there; this culture came up with a pleasant surprise for the owner too. The establishment of this uniqueness started giving us rapid growth, as even people uncomfortable to sing/ or record any form of music started becoming active members to be able to give their appreciation and comments on the work of other people. The demographics of active users in muziboo.com is hence a healthy distribution among musicians who record and comment and non-musicians who are happy to enjoy and comment.
Initiating And Driving A Culture
Once you have decided on what should differentiate your service from similar others, you as the owner should become one of the patrons and initiate that culture among users, which will in-turn give the desired uniqueness to the service. As the first few hundred users go a long way in giving a face and feel to your service, it is vital to have given due thought about your uniqueness at a very early stage of conception of the service. Also, one has to be around constantly, driving it in the positive direction. Majority of users need handholding while you wait for them to acquire the taste of what you have to offer. This is the only way to bring in the kind of culture (that showcases the uniqueness) that you want to offer. Because if you leave it to the users to bring in uniqueness all by themselves or give them a good idea and not follow-up with efforts to involve them in building the same, the only guaranteed result is the establishment of a culture characterized by stagnation and inertia among the users. Do not forget that this need for handholding is not a reflection of the users intelligence if you can come up with something too exciting that it needs no handholding, then good for you read George Oates’ blog to understand that community managers had to work hard to establish the uniqueness of Flickr
Here it is important to note that this uniqueness refers to a dynamic aspect of the site, which has the potential for exciting or enthusing users to contribute. It rarely or seldom refers to the uniqueness in technology that the site has adopted. And, more often than not, only while enjoying the uniqueness will the users be spending the maximum chunk of their time when logged in even if it is a little peripheral to the main service that you offer.
For muziboo.com, the main service is reflected in the tagline ‘Getting an Audience’. We worked on growing what we decided should be the uniqueness for the service – discussions and participation from the users regarding the generated content. It was per se peripheral as the main service is to be able to host people’s music. We took time to start threads where we explained (through diverse inputs again) how the user gains through active interaction when using the service.
So this initial push to uniqueness has to be from the owners. Unfortunately some websites after getting a whole lot funding, start operating on the premise that marketing the whole service will encourage people to register and generate content. It is not enough to sell the website, you have to sell the uniqueness of the website after establishing one in the first place.
Post Sign-Up
User assimilation is a slow painstaking process. The new user should immediately be made comfortable with an interactive interface. The business manifestation of this interactive interface phenomenon for a new Muziboo user is the ease with which she can get acquainted to the other members of the community. Another of those is a way by which he is presented and recommended with the appropriate links of content to browse.
Recognizing User
Most on line community members like recognition (rightly so) either for the content contributed or for participation. Couple of ways to do that would be featured articles and featured users. believe it – such energy and fun in those sessions.
Empowering Users
Empowerment is a great form of recognition and by doing the needful on that count, as an owner, you manage to stay away from ruffling yourself with too many responsibilities. By empowerment I refer to the minimal barriers that you put out for content acceptance. All generated content need not go through great levels of moderation or quality checks before being published. The motivation to contribute from the users end is highly dampened if they get spiked. For Muziboo empowerment was seen as a gesture of our trust on them, as owners we have proprietary strictures to deal with, and there are temptations among rogue users for piracy. Also if you shackle users with too many do and donts, you will have a lot of fire fighting to be done everyday as the service scales up. Democratize as much as possible. Let most things be decided on user votes and ratings in Muziboo even piracy related rejections are recommended by the users.
Having A Balance-So Much Democracy
In the nascent stages many users come forward with their ideas both functional and business. Some will always be more relevant than the others, the others being the ones that do not align with your vision of the service. It is for the service owner to handle this embarrassment of riches without stepping on toes. You do not want to paint yourself in a corner while asking for ideas, because when not implementing those bonafide suggestions, you are likely to come across as rude or technically in-competent- both equally hurtful for your image.
Promoting Offline Meets
Promoting local offline meets is also a way to create stronger bonds among the community members. Posting updates about such events on Muziboo has even enthused users from nearby cities to come to our meets. What a way that for celebrating your community?
It Aint Easy (because if it is, it aint fun)
Does this need elaboration??
Muziboo is offering a couple of interesting internship
opportunities over the summer. Candidates could be Ruby/AJAX hackers,
or music afficionados / evangelists
Location is not a constraint and we are flexible about work hours and duration of the internship. Stipend will be decided on a case to case basis.
It is fun to be a part of a strong growing community like Muziboo with a growing number of enthusiastic users collaborating with each other across countries to come up with real cool and contemporary music. And one of our talented users, Ronak felt the strong urge to popularise artists effort by coming up with the idea of podcast for Muziboo music and named it Muzicast. Went live last weekend! posting it here…Enjoy 
How often do you feel trapped by the routine of hearing the redundant play-lists of mainstream music? If you are a music enthusiast or an upcoming artist yourself, willing to lend an ear to innovative and unexplored styles of music, your destination is ‘Radio Muziboo‘. Experience the ride through the wild terrain of eclectic music by contributing your feedbacks to artists while enjoying the sounds.
Exposing and encouraging new talent and music to listeners and critiques is what Muziboo does best.
Muziboo.com, being an active community that comes together to recognize music talent, churns out a growing number of mindblowing songs and the radio is the next logical feature that can quench our eagerness to inform the world about the great music of today.
The uniqueness of the theme is the low barrier to entry for user’s music. Its a good starting point for a newcomer with a satisfying recording that stands on its own merit. The simple radio widget on its display gives basic details of the track such as artist name and title and also a link to the song page on the site which has a complete description of the song, the discussions around it and a link to artist’s portfolio. Currently channels are by language but eventually users will be able to create their own stations with content across languages and genres.
Be a part of this effort to promote talent by embedding the radio on blogs and social network profiles. An effort which is not televised or aired but through the far reaching new online medium of WWW. To get your music webcasted, join the community and upload your music.
P.S: Radio on the side bar
The World Wide Web (WWW) becoming the primary medium for information gathering and dissemination – from communication and business to education and entertainment – the threat this not so regulated sphere poses to the copyright ethics is immense.
The Unconventional nature of the Threat
Copyright laws provide incentives for creating by attempting to secure the work of the author. WWW has changed the way content distributors (authors) relate to their customers, and attempts at law making for copyrights are still in their nascent stages. That said laws could go only so far in thwarting online piracy, as the culture here is very dynamic – a shift in the paradigm every 2 years if not sooner. With the time and money (un) available to legal institutions, the long arm of the law, typically tries to make laws for bigger crimes to crack down on the shenanigans of big organizations, which in-turn use their financial muscle to fight the often long drawn battles, where the only winners are the lawyers on both sides. Those organizations even continue their business around piracy till a verdict, if any is reached.
There are always many arguments in favor of the time tested ‘rewards and punishment’ system that we have in the society now. And this write-up does not discount the approach of getting culprits to book through active legislation and enforcement. But again, the dynamics of this space is so fast, any efforts by predominantly non-techie law makers to help the situation is more likely to be reactionary than proactive. By the time one legal battle gets over, another war has already begun between different parties to leave the law- makers scrambling for newer laws and guidelines.
Need for the Preventive approach
The only ‘initiative’ that we are left with is to make people understand in their impressionable age that though everything in the web is available for free and in plenty, none of that can become a stolen tool to make a quick fast buck, neither for individuals nor for the organization that they represent. This approach of early intervention based on spreading morality is very relevant than before as the source of information is available for any interested user freely today as against the early days where it was accessible only to a privileged few. Hence the need to address the issue with the larger audience and again the need to address it at the earliest stage before corruption/ temptation sets in, and it can be achieved by pushing the ‘moral’ button.
A morally educated patron of the WWW is likely to ’stop’ a copyright violation in any form thereby increasing the pressure on powerful larger entities that he represents to fall in line. Piracy is a silent killer, killing the incentive for creation and hence the economy. So, considering the wide base of the users of WWW, the crusade to establish an order should focus its efforts at the grassroots. There has to be a sustained effort by individuals and organizations that care for copyrights to reach out to the younger lot that is going to occupy the web space in a few years from now.
Who will bell the cat
Who is to spend the money for this evangelizing is the next logical question. It can be surprising that there is not any need to spend money. The cheapest way to do it without upsetting any lobby is through schools. It is imperative for schools and colleges to spread awareness as part of their curriculum. As teachers are easily some of the soft targets of copyright violation, they will be in a better position to understand the need for this push.
The Silver Bullet Solution
The idea to fight illegal acquisition of wealth through education on morality cannot pass without a few sarcastic onlookers. But the enormity of the task of addressing such a huge ocean of users makes it imperative to think out of the box to fix the problem. Prior ‘Education’ is better than threats of ‘Punishment’.
