e Magus

Since the time it launched few weeks back, Google Buzz has been just doing that. Creating Buzz… While the critics are mentioning about the privacy issues (Facebook too had faced privacy issues about a year back), many have started experimenting with this new platform… For Google, it was necessary that they integrate the Buzz with their ‘star performer’ – Gmail (search engine being the sacred cow they cannot fiddle with). Google has been dabbling in the social media space for past many years, but somehow the success has been elusive. Their strike rate in social media is close to zero. While Orkut is popular in Brazil and India… but in markets that matters, they hardly have been able to make a dent. Flickr has far more traction amongst the online users that Picasa…and Google Wave just managed to create a ripple. Twitter, since it hit the market in 2006, has been gaining popularity worldwide. The reasons for the same can be attributed to the following: - Simplicity: Most people are normal...

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content… The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and th...

No one will argue the fact that we all live in a networked world. You connected to me, connected to another, and another, and to the whole world. True? Well, not quite. Take a detailed look into this networked world; you will find that it is a chain of islands, with spaces between each other…. It is islands of online communities, groups, niche networks, etc… You realize that this online world (especially the social networking) is not one big homogeneous society, but a collection of different types of groups. But looking at our past we know that human advancement has been on basis of creating a homogeneous society… From being a small group of hunters and gatherers, to forming large communities, building villages, city states, empires, and to nation states of today… Now that we have the technology and the medium to create this homogeneous society, even if it is online, why do we shy from doing so? If we look back at the start of the Internet – it was a repository of information that can ...

The recently concluded Copenhagen summit on climate change and non-conclusion of the countries on any accord made me wonder what could be the thing that can bring about a change in the eco-system… The answer was staring on my face. Digital. The growth of Internet and Mobile has been so phenomenal; I guess today most of us cannot imagine a life without this two. Most of the stuff we do in our professional or personal life is eased due to the use of these technologies. Some of the areas that will have direct impact of digital would be: - Travel & Transport - Automotive - Entertainment - Shopping & Banking - Media Trends rising out digitalization of our world: - We will travel less for work or personal reasons. In fact most of my work can be done Out of Office. Similarly, as we shift more and more into services economy from manufacturing economy…. Digital would help in fulfillment thus reducing the need of physical presence. Video Conferencing especially in the personal space – Fr...

As we approach the end of another year, there would be multitudes of new people who would have joined some social networking site or other. Well, there are dime and dozen reasons for the success of Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, etc…. but is there any common thread or insight that binds the success of these SNS sites? We humans spend most of our waking hours in building and maintaining ‘relationship’. This behavior is embedded in our genes. The activity of ‘grooming’ in primates, a human child crying for attention, the activities we, as adults, do in our day to day life – like the friendly greeting to colleagues, the discussion over cup of coffee, meeting the client deadlines too :) - All these actions is related to building and maintaining relationships. One of the core objective of building and maintaining relationships is to create an opinion about oneself in others mind. The way we talk, what we speak, the way we dress, the way we walk, all communic...

The Yahoo! ad campaign in India is on for about 4 months... (Its You campaign)... I was wondering how successful this campaign has been in terms of increase in users of Yahoo! India, and also in terms of visitors to the site... While I have no authentic data on the above, a quick glance into Google Trends for Yahoo India website gives a very sorry picture.. The chart shows a steady decline in the Unique visitors to the Yahoo website since starting of 2009... While one thing to note is that Google Trends do not consider sub-domain, and will only be tracking the TLD (Top Level Domain).. it still is not a good sign for Yahoo! This resonates with my thoughts that Internet Time is a limited resource for the users in India... The growth in usage of social networking sites is cannibalizing into the usage of other Internet websites.. A Google trend chart (given below) on Facebook & Twitter would confirm its rising popularity. While I wait for authentic source of information - I would go wi...

Google has released the latest Zeitgeist for 2009. While the overall results shown are predictable (basis the different headers)… there are some things which were interesting. Let’s have a quick recap of important happenings in India over the past one year – - General Elections (by far the biggest event) - Indians win at Oscar - The Budget presentation (during the time of recession) - Interest in the Economy (the ripple effect of the global economic scenario) - And of course: the staple diet of most Indians – movies, cricket, celebrities Google search queries correlate to the above happenings with Budget 2009, Election Results, Slumdog Millionaire etc., all being the top search queries of the year. However, some interesting search queries too were to be seen. ‘Bhuvan’ too was seen to be the fastest growing search query. Launched in Mid-August, Bhuvan, the ISRO’s Geo-satellite, which can zoom to 10 square meter (similar to Google, or Wikimaps), would have been of interest to many. I hav...