For better resolution, click here.

Speed Optimization – GTmetrix is webpage speed analysis tool that tracks your page for load time and gives you a list of potential improvement areas. GTmetrix is a combination Yahoo’s YSlow and Google PageSpeed. GTmetrix analyses the page structure and meta fields to give actionable suggestions under Content, Images, CSS/JS, Cookies and Server.

Social Media Tracking – SocialMention is a social media search and analysis platform. It aggregates data from all possible user generated content platforms like twitter, Facebook, blogs from across the web to analyse your brand’s standing. One powerful thing about this tool is the Sentiment analysis. SocialMention tags each update into neutral/negative/positive type to give you a feel of what people perceive of your brand. You can also set Social Media alerts for a given keyword, like you set a Google Alert.

Search Engine – SEO-Browser is crawler that gives you a basic view of what Google’s (or any other search Engine) crawler will see in your page. It gives you a set of data points that matter for a search engine. Some of which have to do with speed and size of the page. The tool also gives you links to other popular tools for analysis. SEO-Browser may not be the best tool for this purpose but gets the work done neatly.

These tools only let you measure the performance. Do take some steps to improve.

Share some tools that you have been using at your startup to track performance.

[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]

The Morpheus, is looking for 10 early stage startups to be part of its fifth Batch of Startups. Morpheus is a 3 yr old firm with a portfolio of 27 young exciting startups. They focus on working with super early stage startups , provide 5 L of funding & 4 months of intensive (& insane) support as a limited co-founder and more.
Does that fit what you are looking for? If it looks interesting, you can apply for the next batch – http://themorpheus.com/apply/

Catninja – Practise questions for CAT and other MBA exams in fun way.

CAT NINJA, http://catninja.in is a web-app where you can practise questions for CAT and other MBA exams in a fun and engaging way. Small sets of questions are presented as matches between you and the computer. You have to solve questions correctly to win to survive/win the match. Users have weapons such as shuriken(hint), by2bomb ( like 50:50 of KBC) and Shinobi(Time extension of 90 seconds) which they can use to help then win matches. By winning/surviving matches you can earn achievements and flaunt it to your facebook friends (integrated with facebook) You also compete with other players to become the TOP Ninja in the Hall of Legendary Ninjas (Hall of Fame).

Payment Gateway

Is the business of “Payment gateway” that bad? Why aren’t any big players entering the market to set up better structure and take control of the upcoming boom?

How is online advertising industry doing?

I see corporate ads but none for start ups or small to medium companies!!! Does online advertising really work?

Enterprise as platform

Recently I read about http://bettermeans.com/front/index.html on opensource.com(redhat community blog), it proposes a radically different organization model as platform.
Where can it be applied in context of Indian start up scene.

Reuters Market Light, part of Thomson Reuters, wins prestigious World Business & Development Award

Reuters Market Light (RML) has won a prestigious World Business and Development Award (WBDA) in recognition of its efforts for improving the lives of India’s farming community.

This information service launched in India in 2007 offers agriculture related information on various crops, pricing, market geographies, and climate/weather conditions and forecast helping farmers to improve their production and reduce marketing risks. RML, which began in 2007 in Maharashtra as a pilot project, has grown to a pioneering business that now operates in 13 states of India. The service is estimated to have reached over a million farmers and covers nearly 1,000 markets and over 250 crops and varieties.

- Register here to participate in Pluggd.in forum and connect with Indian Entrepreneurs.

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checklist for web designers http://bit.ly/aaUvnG

Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: Research Findings http://bit.ly/9UxzGV

How effective are you at driving inbound leads with social media? http://bit.ly/de5dKi

Apple’s Startup Culture – http://bit.ly/bikKAR

The Economics of Copyright – http://ow.ly/17JPDI

Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: Research Findings http://bit.ly/9UxzGV

Inside versus outside financings: the nightclub effect http://bit.ly/bnQzCd

How Sequoia forced Tony Hsieh to sell Zappos http://bit.ly/bkXiWB

Actual Script that hacked AT&T’s site to get 114K iPad Owners E-mail Addresses http://bit.ly/aKbHJt [via ScepticGeek]

Two videos worth watching:

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

Look at yourself after watching this

» Follow us on Twitter/Facebook for more of such resources.

1. Entrepreneur is an Engineer and an MBA
2. Entrepreneur is an Engineer alone
3. Entrepreneur is none of the above – drop outs/oblique entrepreneurs

Who has the higher professional & emotional conviction to doing business? Do chime your views in comments below!

Case 1: The first case is that of a guy who has a degree in Business Administration and Technology both. Now is such an individual armed with all the ingredients of becoming a successful businessman? Well the answer is no, as one needs to understand the reasons why such an individual might not become a successful entrepreneur at all.

Manager’s Ego:  Individuals who have spent few years on coding and then completed an MBA are unlikely to become successful entrepreneurs. Reason is simply confusion. One comes across a lot of individuals who took to MBA to get rid of “coding-shit” and that’s exactly an ego – or frustration – that would delineate a businessman from a serviceman. There are plenty of wannabe post-MBA entrepreneurs who say “I take care of the business, and have an access to a network of developers who do the tech for me. Outsourcing, you see”. Entrepreneurship is not about creamy work only.

Course Imperfections: There are individuals who took up an MBA only to boost their careers or salary. And entrepreneurship was only one of the subjects there while everything else (99% of remaining course-work) centered around the norm, the industry, standard practices and about the established school of thought.  And did ever the selection process of regular MBA’s measure the risk-taking potential of an individual? And if it did what was the probability of that 1% stimulation in the course-work of an MBA to result out 99% effort-oriented psychology for an enterprising individual?

Industry Connections: Quite often, from entrepreneurial groups I hear a  point-of-view that it is the worth of connections with VC’s, Angels and the accomplished class of people that justifies the investment in an MBA. Really? But how does it stop a desperate individual in category – 3 (i.e. without MBA or Tech degree) to reach you and not access your network? Or that of category – 2 group (engineers only) from hiring you for their own startup and thus driving you away from your own higher tree of entrepreneurship? Think

Sounds like an instance of liquid-oxygen, isn’t it?

Case – 2: For the tech guys immaturity is the single most big reason for a failure. Despite exposure in Industry at working a level, there is every chance that the engineer might fail to foresee the industry trends and benchmark oneself for commercial stuff like sales, procurements, partnerships etc. Desperation to go out and strike deals might also be lacking and there will be a constant pressure of sticking to pure tech work so that one could land a secure job anytime soon.

Self-esteem: Protecting against a constant nag from society (peers, friends & family) of not-being an MBA, an engineer entrepreneur might also face an additional challenge to protect oneself against a competing MBA guys out there. The only upper hand a techie might have is of lowering the pre-launch & maintenance costs as compared to that of an MBA. But imagine how a VC asking about “no- MBA” would send jitters down the spine of an engineer while seeking an investment? Again a liquid-oxygen of MBA or none at all.

Lazy bums: Engineers are lazy. Whatever engineers create is just another way of adding more laziness to life. While entrepreneurship calls for an exact opposite trait. While an engineer might start off his/her project with great enthusiasm but the routine pressures might flatten his tyre out before even reaching the next re-filling station. Mostly engineers are attracted to development work that is close to algorithms, actual coding work and do not care about usability and business scenario from customer point of view. The vision is thus inward and often lowers the probability of making him a successful entrepreneur.

Case 3: Dropping out of college on the other hand is a measure of risk-taking potential of an individual. While such an individual will definitely have a steep, rather almost over-throwing, climb against crumbling self-esteem but the effort might just add to his/her probability of succeeding in entrepreneurship. And pay off sooner or later.

Desperation & conviction might too drag his skills to a level of business-class competency. He will believe in Jugaar technology more than an MBA would do. He will know the worth of techies and believe in their critical skills. Business will be the only thing on his mind, and will therefore go out and meet MBA’s, techies, investors and customers with only more business in mind. So much for access to networking. And for sure, such an individual will not be lazy.

One might argue that hi-tech or hi-class businesses would more be tilted towards hi-class engineers/Phds or MBA’s but does anyone of us believe in the claim? If yes, then read about Elon Musk or decide whether a non-Tech-non-MBA entrepreneur can hire you for his hi-tech or hi-class business or not.

Simple.

Interesting findings related to Internet Advertising

• Participants in the study looked at 52% of ads that contained only text,
• 52% of ads that had images and text separately and
• 51% of sponsored links on search-engine pages.
• Ads that imposed text on top of images got less attention
• People in the study saw 36% of the ads on the pages they visited!

Eyetracking Study Heat Map

Findings related to Images on webpages

• Users are more likely to grant a fixation to an image if they can tell from a peripheral look that they will be able to decipher it.
• Iconic images do not get looked at if they are diffi cult to make sense of quickly.
• People are more likely to look at images of an object set against a very simple background than against a crowded one
• When users select a link to a photo section, they usually expect some value-add in that area, such as larger photos or ways to zoom in.
• People also look slightly more at images of a single object— 26 percent—than at images with multiple objects—20 percent.
• People look at unrelated or somewhat related images just 14 percent of the time

Download few pages of the book(pdf) (via)

Here are two videos that are really inspiring and come from people who have build the most hyped companies of the recent times.

Mint.com Founder, Aaron Patzer on Starting up

Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg on Taking your Site from One to One Million Users

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Most important takeaway from Kevin’s speech:

• Just release something (do it really well) and see what users do with it .
• Constantly ask what to remove

What’s your take on the advice from Kevin and Aaron?

What is a brand?

Without getting into a technical explanation, a brand is the perception an individual / community carries about the product/service/company.

The same product/service/company is different for different people.

So, Nike may be a good brand for Mr. X, who has heard good things about Nike, likes the swoosh sign and likes his Nike shoes.

However, Mr. Y has a lukewarm response if asked about Nike. His new Nike shoes tore in a few years. Usually shoes don’t last more than a year of hard use, but still, he had built up Nike so much in the head that he expected them to last a few years, at least.

On the other hand Ms. Z simply loves Nike. She’s never purchased a Nike product, but she’s seen her friends use it and thinks that they are cool. She loves Michael Jordan too and knows that if Michael Jordan says Nike is good, it sure should be.

You see? A brand is nothing but a perception. The perception may have a very good basis or none at all. As long as someone has an opinion about you as a brand, it should matter to you. It’s an opinion. This perception could be formed by various ways.

Branding is Simple! (Ripley's) Believe It or Not!

How is a brand formed?

This perception can be defined by:

• A customer’s perception
  • from the use of a product
  • of the product as defined by someone like:
    • media
    • friend, relative or colleague
  • of the company’s share price and growth
  • of what the shop keeper has to say about the product
• A distributor’s perception
  • of the product itself
  • of what customers say about it
  • of the kind of pricing strategy it adopts
  • of the kind of commission it shares with distributors
  • of the kind of advertising it adopts
  • of the way in which the sales guy dresses up and talks
  • of the car in which the sales guy goes to meet him
  • of the complaints a customer brings to him about the product
  • of the kind of gifts he gets on festivals from the company
• A supplier’s perception (similar to the way a distributor forms the perception)
• A media person’s perception
• An analysts’ perception

Image management

In such an environment when people can be forming perceptions out of thin air and unverifiable reports they read in the media, it becomes even more critical to understand the role and importance of image management.

Image management / PR is not just getting written about by and in the media. It’s ensuring that the service rendered and the signal sent by the company to anybody is correct and well delivered. It means ensuring that whatever the expectations be, the delivery is more than what was expected. That’s how great brands are built.

For most, PR still means media management. That’s a very loosely held belief and fact.

Start-ups – Hit the road running

So, in case you’re a start-up and understand the need to maintain a particular image, you should be sensitive to every signal sent out by your organization. In case you plan to get a PR agency, ensure that you look at them as a partner that will consult you on every aspect of communication (not just media) and creating an image that can differentiate you from competitors. Every opinion matters in the game.

A formula that we use and that works well is to innovate in every aspect. Tomorrow you could be making visiting cards for the whole company. Before you create the standard visiting card and handover a template to your printer, the question you need to ask is, “Can I create a visiting card that differentiates us; that people talk about once we leave the room?”

Can your e-mails differentiate you as a company? Can your financial policies send a message to suppliers that you care about their working capital problems? Can you use glass cups for coffee instead of paper to convey to employees that you care about the environment? Can you give personalized gifts to employees on their birthday that tells them that they are more than a headcount? Can you call a customer to wish him on his anniversary rather than sending a mail merged e-mail?

Re-thinking every action and breaking down barriers set by tradition can ingrain innovation as a habit in the organization and build an arsenal of differentiators that will create an impact (assuming of course that the product and the delivery mechanisms are in place).

What’s your opinion?

LinkedIn’s startup story

You can’t perfect an idea while you’re currently in a job, because if you start talking to a lot of people and you start studying the market and you’re doing all of that, then you’re not doing your current job well. So I had ideas, but I hadn’t resolved it to, "This is it."

Read this interview interview of LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Hoffman- link

India’s Demographics: Favorable Today, Costly Tomorrow

What happens, however, to the Indian economy when the country’s dependency ratio tilts higher, as today’s youth begin to retire? The Indian workforce is on pace to transform into an enormous healthcare burden for the country as workers age, live longer, and demand more medical services, as well as pensions and other correlated elements of social security. India will have no choice but to spend more of its GDP on healthcare. – more

Never Let Your Ego Stop You from Learning

Most often you cannot receive more schooling, especially when dealing with critical issues that are fast-breaking and in which there is no body of formalized instruction. You will need to figure things out for yourself. For most leaders figuring things out is second nature; it is way they have arrived in positions of leadership. But the best leaders are those that are never afraid to ask questions. Rather than a question being a sign of ignorance; it is admission ticket to learning as well as a good way to build rapport and trust with colleagues. – more

Companies started during downturn

Procter & Gamble (1837), IBM, GE, GM (well!), United Technologies and FedEx. – 6 companies born during downturns

Usability Checklist
Irrespective of who you are and what your site is all about, you should take a look at this checklist (another one)

How to conduct redesign?
A case study illustrates suggested steps to take during a redesign (link)

Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website
Use this checklist from Smashing Mag.(link)

How should startups conduct usability testing
Solid advice (from us) – link

Common Usability Challenges in Web Design
“Say what it does” – and more

Watch this Presentation

Interesting piece of data:

Approximately 32 million HTML pages without a Title tag
Hop to this link and you will notice the carelessness (via @rahulg2)

Economists at Haas Berkeley did a series of experimentation (Denomination Effect) that showed people were much more willing to spend the same sum of money if they had smaller denominations instead of one large bill.

..experiment involved Raghubir standing outside a gas station in Omaha. She would have people fill in a survey about gas usage and then thanked them with either a $5 bill, five $1 bills or five $1 coins. People went into the store, and when they came out Raghubir asked them for their receipts. The ones with coins spent the most, people with dollar bills a little less. And people with one $5 bill kept that one in their pockets. – more

How David Beats Goliath (and Underdog break the Rules)

Great piece of insight by Malcolm Gladwell – read it here

Investors Pay Business Plans Little Heed, Study Finds

Researchers found that venture capitalists, who screen hundreds or thousands of solicitations each year, pay little or no heed to the content of business plans. Instead, the study said, because they make decisions “under conditions of high uncertainty,” venture capitalists rely on instinct and their expertise in ferreting out information by other means to evaluate the prospects of a business. – more
Aside, are you surprised with this finding? If yes, you shouldn’t be (but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare a business plan).

Recommended Read: Demystifying a Business Plan – What makes one stand out from the rest?

Smartphones as appliances: Different phones for different usages

Good summary of Smartphone usage (Rubicon consulting) – link

TED in Indian Languages

Some of the TED videos are available in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu.
Watch Nandan Nilekani’s talk at TED:

Also read: TED is coming to India

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If you notice, these are mixed category of content that we share with you. Do share your feedback/suggestions on these collections.

These guidelines are meant to establish the minimum acceptable counting procedures for the media buying currency “clicks”. The guidelines are focused on when a click will count – the actual revenue  event. As with all measurement standards, click counting organizations including search engine providers, publishers and networks may choose to offer additional enhancements to these guidelines  for competitive differentiation, so long as they fully disclose these features while meeting the minimum accepted guidelines. – Download it here

Ignore Sunk cost

The most important decision-making rule you learn in business school is still largely misunderstood.

When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.  – Seth Godin

Radio Tunes Out Google in Rare Miss for Web Titan

..the radio effort failed because Google never came up with a good way to measure listener response. On the Web, he explained, Google can charge advertisers based on performance — that is, how many times users click on an ad. “But in the audio case, there wasn’t a good signal back to us about which ads performed.” – More

History of Fonts

..is also the simplest: make stuff that’s insanely great. ..That kind of stuff doesn’t need a hard sell, a new market, or a convoluted product range. It just needs to be.

Business model innovation is often self-defeating and self-destructive. The real problem withbusiness model innovation is that it dilutes the incentives to make good stuff in the first place. It lets boardrooms hide from the profound challenge of making insanely great stuff in the first place. [more]

Discovery-driven Growth: The Only Plan Is to Learn as You Go

For companies planning to launch new initiatives during uncertain times, it’s important “to know from the start that the plan is wrong,” . Assumptions are what get most companies into trouble,“the only plan is to learn as you go.”

Investors Switch from Alternative Energy to Efficient Energy

Venture capital is starting to move away from its infatuation with alternative energy and returning to one of its traditional strengths: applying information technology to improve the efficiency of energy consumption.

Many investors say developing new forms of energy can consume hundreds of millions of dollars over many years before showing any return. – more

Vodafone to Redefine the Mobile Internet Experience

Vodafone’s initiative will enable content partners and developers to create a range of attractive mobile internet services that can be rolled out to all Vodafone customers.
Developers will only need to create internet applications once in order to reach millions of Vodafone customers on any device and will be able to charge for it directly through Vodafone’s billing system. This will provide internet content partners, such as the media or game developers, with a cost-efficient and effective micro-payments system to reach all customers on mobile devices. [more]

Ogilvy’s Recession Site

Ogiilvy has launched a recession site, http://www.ogilvyonrecession.com/ to help brands optimize their advertising/marketing strategy during recession time.

While it’s also a self-PR site (painful navigation), there are quite a few useful tips for brand marketers.

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If you want to share such useful resources with others, tweet me.

Steve Ballmer Talks at Stanford

Has some candid suggestion for startups. Watch the entire video.

Starting over – as an Entrepreneur

Story of five people, who were impacted because of recession, and are now pursuing their passion.

Mobile Widget platform vendors :: comparative analysis [pdf]

Compares Nokia Widsets, Nokia WRT Widsets, Opera Widgets, Access Widgets, Motoreal WebUI, Yahoo BluePrint, Sun Java ODP, SurfKitchen Widgets

Social Entrepreneurship Takes off

BusinessWeek has a special report on social entrepreneurship.

And some fun:

Watch this Google Chrome Ad (created by Google Japan team):

If you are in the know of useful resources like these, you can tweet me that or share them in the comment section.