It’s been a busy week. Amazon’s S3 – standing for ‘Simple Storage Service’ – launched; and it’s supposed to be a ‘scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure’. Great news for developers looking for a storage service backend – just take a look at their costs: something $15/month for 100GB of storage, and $20 for transfer!
It looks like a lot of sense for front end services who don’t want to spend too much on back end, but the question is this: will businesses, even small ones, actually want their infrastructure core (mostly apps bulging with data) to be dependent on 3rd party interfaces? The worries are obviously about pricing/service consistency and, of course, quality. A march has definitely been stolen on Google Drive, though…
ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer feels that Amazon is “building a system to sell digital goods”. A step beyond retail it is for Amazon, and it may be as Schmelzer says – “They want to be seen as a platform for Web 2.0 applications”. Now that’s a vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big thing (as Douglas Adams would have said), coming from the ‘world’s largest selection’.
Speaking of Vast, that’s another launch – this time of a search service that extracts and structures classified ads all over the web, and then (hold your breath) makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. With over 15M listings already available for cars, jobs, and personal profiles, Vast already has one of the largest databases. For more, check CEO Naval Ravikant’s blog, startupboy.com. Will it be able to give the bigger job boards a case of jelly knees? The user experience at Vast is still to be improved, apparently, if you take MikeH’s word at smashfly.com
Monday, March 20, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Ether
www.ether.com launched more than a week ago. There wasn’t much to herald it, but it’s seems that this new Web 2.0 gizmo can make some great connections.
A division of Ingenio, Ether enables the sale of services over the Internet by just about anyone, but one would assume that this would be useful to tech people, lawyers, psychologists/counsellors, entertainers, bloggers, and more. “Anyone with something valuable to say can earn money by talking on the phone with their audience,” so sayeth Ether. Ingenio has previously run keen.com, a similar service that has since devolved (?) to adult chats and psychic readings, so some questions are surely being asked about Ether – is it just a rehash?
Some of the usual comments come up about good ideas that fall short of expectations, but one can quite easily view this from another perspective: maybe where these good ideas end up is actually the market that works best for them (some of the services on keen.com are far far away from cheap). A similar service has existed in Germany since 2000 – www.questico.com – and it’s almost wholly focussed on the astrology/clairvoyance domain. An attempt was made to offer financial, technical and medical advice, but nothing came of it.
So, will Ether head the same way? It looks fine on the surface, and folks are understandably excited about the possibilities for certain breeds of professionals. The customer side of it seems a bit hard though – think about this: you want advice (and you usually want it now), but you have to register first and pay upfront. As a seller, you can have a delayed response/callback option which can also be a bit of a turnoff from the other side. Ratings are another issue. Interestingly, there isn’t a pay-per-minute model, as many professionals feel that that doesn’t work very well. However, it’s quick to integrate into a Web site, forum, blog, etc – definitely a plus.
It remains to be seen if Ether can indeed become an e-bay for services.
A division of Ingenio, Ether enables the sale of services over the Internet by just about anyone, but one would assume that this would be useful to tech people, lawyers, psychologists/counsellors, entertainers, bloggers, and more. “Anyone with something valuable to say can earn money by talking on the phone with their audience,” so sayeth Ether. Ingenio has previously run keen.com, a similar service that has since devolved (?) to adult chats and psychic readings, so some questions are surely being asked about Ether – is it just a rehash?
Some of the usual comments come up about good ideas that fall short of expectations, but one can quite easily view this from another perspective: maybe where these good ideas end up is actually the market that works best for them (some of the services on keen.com are far far away from cheap). A similar service has existed in Germany since 2000 – www.questico.com – and it’s almost wholly focussed on the astrology/clairvoyance domain. An attempt was made to offer financial, technical and medical advice, but nothing came of it.
So, will Ether head the same way? It looks fine on the surface, and folks are understandably excited about the possibilities for certain breeds of professionals. The customer side of it seems a bit hard though – think about this: you want advice (and you usually want it now), but you have to register first and pay upfront. As a seller, you can have a delayed response/callback option which can also be a bit of a turnoff from the other side. Ratings are another issue. Interestingly, there isn’t a pay-per-minute model, as many professionals feel that that doesn’t work very well. However, it’s quick to integrate into a Web site, forum, blog, etc – definitely a plus.
It remains to be seen if Ether can indeed become an e-bay for services.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Sales & Marketing, version 2.0
‘Sales and Marketing people’: more often than not, they’re lumped together like popcorn, and seen as fulfilling essentially the same role. We know that’s wrong – marketing is all about getting mindshare, and selling is all about getting the money. But given what’s happening online, this line is getting increasingly blurry.
We had recently examined behavioral targeting, and it’s clear that the options now available for B-to-C or B-to-B interactions are much more specific, configurable, and more importantly, profitable. With relevant ads showing up in the user’s browser windows, the gap between ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’ has the potential to narrow down to a fine sliver, indeed. When an ad appears on TV, consumers may not yet be ready to buy; when an ad tracks a consumer down on the Internet, based on his recent activity and behavior, he is already primed to hit the ‘add to basket’ button.
With Web 2.0 on everybody’s lips (and everybody’s marketing buzzword as well), companies that think ahead have already begun building online communities, carefully nurturing and encouraging customer ‘evangelists’ who can actually be much more effective at marketing than a huge ad campaign, per dollar spent. Or at least, that’s the assumption.
This ‘virtual sales force’ has enormous potential to create goodwill, interest, and actual purchase of your products/offerings. The sales and marketing angle here is, on the surface, related to the older definition: customer evangelists foster and spread mindshare, so calls that come in can then be handled by your sales team. But now your consumers are your marketers as well… Recognizing the possibilities with such marketing is all very well, but it’s also clear that this is far from being a sure thing. The Skype and Apple success stories may be the blips in the graph. Given the hit-or-miss angle, can this be the new paradigm?
We had recently examined behavioral targeting, and it’s clear that the options now available for B-to-C or B-to-B interactions are much more specific, configurable, and more importantly, profitable. With relevant ads showing up in the user’s browser windows, the gap between ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’ has the potential to narrow down to a fine sliver, indeed. When an ad appears on TV, consumers may not yet be ready to buy; when an ad tracks a consumer down on the Internet, based on his recent activity and behavior, he is already primed to hit the ‘add to basket’ button.
With Web 2.0 on everybody’s lips (and everybody’s marketing buzzword as well), companies that think ahead have already begun building online communities, carefully nurturing and encouraging customer ‘evangelists’ who can actually be much more effective at marketing than a huge ad campaign, per dollar spent. Or at least, that’s the assumption.
This ‘virtual sales force’ has enormous potential to create goodwill, interest, and actual purchase of your products/offerings. The sales and marketing angle here is, on the surface, related to the older definition: customer evangelists foster and spread mindshare, so calls that come in can then be handled by your sales team. But now your consumers are your marketers as well… Recognizing the possibilities with such marketing is all very well, but it’s also clear that this is far from being a sure thing. The Skype and Apple success stories may be the blips in the graph. Given the hit-or-miss angle, can this be the new paradigm?
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