Archive for November, 2006

Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information

Friday, November 24th, 2006

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.

The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.

Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.

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Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information

Friday, November 24th, 2006

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.
The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.
Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.
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Open Source Java: What it means to an average Java developer

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

Sun announced that Java is now Open Sourced. It’s business as usual to the rest of the 4m Java developers. All we (yeah!) care is when I write “java” on the command line, the new version of Java has all the required classes to complete that task.
What I fear from this open-sourcing is hundreds of forks doing their own thing and going the route of Unix and Linux. Choice is good, confusion is not — In the end, RedHat, SuSe, etc. are making money on the work done by 100s of open source developers. Although, proprietary forks are not possible due to GPL v2, what we can clearly see is that multiple options would lead to non-concentrated effort in VM optimization and future development. Will the Open Sourcing lead to incompatibilities? Only time will tell.
The biggest winner from this initiative would be availability of Java RPMs and packages for installation on Linux straight from vendors and community supported distros. Right now, it’s a pain installing Java on Debian.

Web Applications with Portable Data: The next generation of Web applications

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Data portability is a big issue. None of us want to get locked down with a particular vendor. All the free web apps like GMail, JotSpot, Writely, et al come with a price — your data is in a proprietary data store. If you are not using pop3 and want to migrate from GMail to some other cool new email application, then there is no easy way out. The vendors rely on the lock-in of this data. For example, Google is offering E-mail services for SMB — what if you grow into a larger enterprise tomorrow and wanna have your own e-mail environment. There is no easy migration. Same goes for other next generation hosted applications like spreadsheets, wikis, office application. For a long time vendors rallied against Microsoft for proprietary formats — Talk about this one!
What’s the solution then? As Fred Wilson mentions:

I think anyone who provides a web app should give users options for where the data gets stored. The default option should always be to store the data on the web app provider’s servers. Most people will choose that option because they don’t care enough about this issue to do anything else.

I think we need a new breed of web applications which have pluggable storage. For example, all you get from a next generation GMail is a presentation and business logic layer. You get an ability to choose your data storage. It should work the way other desktop based applications work — You photo organizing software does not have data store attached to it, all it has a tonnes of logic and uses the file system. You can switch to another application and take care of the business.

Marketing Brilliance: Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Somebody just forwarded me a link to Dove’s new campaign. Considering, that only 2% of the women think that they are beautiful1, this campaign targets the 98% to be the real self.

A refreshing marketing campaign after a long time. Remember Coca-Cola’s “Always” campaign?
1Numbers based on a survey commissioned by Dove