Good Marketing is an Efficiency Choice for startups

For startups we have to look for maximum impact by the marketing effort. The key is Efficiency. How much ROI can u get from the single rupee spend.

This site wanted more new registrations. How can we do that ?

"Create Artificial Scaricity".


Designers of this site have carefully positioned it as "Request Invite" instead of just one common "Register" for all users.

Actual Previous Registered Users may be very less (lets say 50  but no one knows that)

Now all the other users feels insecure for not being part of this Exclusive Club because entry is Invite only.


In normal case with just one "Register" button in the site, it may have lost most users who have visited the site but for "Request Invite" case  most users would definetley hurry to be the part of  the invitation list.


This is a  simple brilliant design to route more users to the targeted action. "Registration"

Ouch! High Salary can Hurt Me!

The Story from Employee's Point of View

Its a great joy to work in a place that you are passionate about.

When we join a new company, we are actually both excited and curious to know

• "How is to work here?"
• Experience new Culture
• Meet new people
• Explore new work place
• Learn new things
• New Responsibilities

This is a great time for us, but overtime this joy wont last and you would feel 

• Its a Boring place
• Same old people
• Relatively same Responsibilities
• Nothing new to learn
• Same old Customs and Pratices
• Very Mechanical

Overtime everything becomes opposite of what u felt when you joined. You are no longer motivated to work in that place and you want to migrate to a new company. Ahh! now is the time when High Salary is going to cause you pain. 

If you are receiving high salary then opportunities for a new job is scarce. If you salary is well above the market price then you are going to find it very difficult to bag a job opening. 

High Salary will become the transparent chain enslaving you to do the miserable work.

From Employers point of View

What a great weapon, if we want skilled people to work for us.

For a business to sustain, customers must trust in the service or goods provided. To build the best quality service or goods, we need highly skilled people. Skilled people will find it easy to transition to another company. This is one of the big problem the employers face 'Attrition'. Losing a key employee, will slow or stop the development or business process. To replace the key employee, with the right candidate takes some time and money.

• Time and Cost to find similarly skilled person
• Time and Cost to train the domain knowledge
• Time to get accustomed with the Company Customs and Practices

This time lost to replace a key employee will hurt the business  and its brand very badly.

A employer is afraid to bid for a tender or sign a new business contract  because he is worried what if the key employees migrate to another company during the development phase or later during the support phase. The employer can sleep peacefully only when he knows that his key employees are not going to migrate anywhere. For employers, the human is the only emotional and unpredictable resource needed in the production. So the best tool he has in his arsenal is High Salary.

Understanding your Business Model

Having a idea is the romantic period but to execute is a lot of effort and work.

For pitching your idea it is essential to know ur  business structure and plan. First entrepreneur must have clear idea of the busines model with all the 9 blocks.

Who is your customer segments ?

Mass Market has more chance to get investment but the segment is highly competetive.

Niche Market is a highly specific customer segment. eg like Defence Fighter Jets, Rolls Royce Car

Segmented Market is a customer base with different needs. eg like Ice cream packaged in cups and family packs.

Diversified Market is diversifying your infrastructure to two unrelated customer segements. eg like post office used for banking service or mobile telecom companies  selling customer data insights, push free partnershippped applications/service

What values can u provide to your customer?

• Is the product/service a new or unique,
• improved Performance, 
• Design and Brand value,
• less Cost, 
• more Functional use 
• and/or Accessible. 

Accessibility is making it more availalbe like Rolls Royce charging only for the number of hours the Jet engine is used instead of selling the engine.

What would be your revenue streams?

• Sale of items,
• Usage fee, 
• Subscription fee, 
• Leasing, 
• Licensing,
• Brokerage 
• and/or Advertising.

What kind of Customer Relationships ?

• One to One Assistance
• Self Service
• Automated Service
• Community
• Co-Creation

Co-Creation is like a Book selling ecom site Infibeam allowing customers to  write reviews which create value for book readers.

What are the Key Activities ?

• Production
• Problem solving
• Customer Relaionship
• Product Innovation
• Platform /  Network

What are the Key Partnerships ?

• Strategic Partnership with non-competitors
• Stratetigic Alliance with competitors inorder to devlop a new technology eg. Android OS
• Joint Venture to devlop new businesses
• Buyer-Supplier relationship to assure reliable supplies

Characterisitcs of Cost Structure

Fixed Cost : Cost remains same regardless of volume of goods and services like Salaries and Rent.

Variable Cost : Cost remains proportional to voulume of goods and services.

Economies of scale : Cost per unit output decreases as the number of unit output increases

Economies of scope :  Reduce the cost by leveraging on unused infrastructure or operation. like Amazon opened up Cloud Computing Service developed for ecom platform.

References:

http://.ecommerce-digest.com/revenue-streams.html

http://www.slideshare.net/hskochi/how-to-effectively-pitch-by-rajesh-nair-associate-director-markets-ey

Custom Virtual Host in Apache2 in Ubuntu

cd ~
mkdir public_html

Now for each domain create a folder with following template

 
mkdir -p public_html/domain1.com/{public,private,log,cgi-bin,backup}

NameVirtualHost *:80
Listen 80

Make sure this setting is set either in ports.conf or apache2.conf or httpd.conf or in sites-available/default

Now create the vhost file for domain1.com in /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain1.com

with the following settings

<VirtualHost *:80>
  
  ServerAdmin webmaster@domain1.com
  ServerName  domain1.com
  ServerAlias www.domain1.com


  # Index file and Document Root (where the public files are located)
  DirectoryIndex index.html
  DocumentRoot /home/username/public_html/domain1.com/public


  # Custom log file locations
  LogLevel warn
  ErrorLog  /home/username/public_html/domain1.com/log/error.log
  CustomLog /home/username/public_html/domain1.com/log/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Now to enable the site in sites-enabled

sudo a2ensite domain1.com

and then restart the apache2 server

sudo service apache2 restart

Modify the host file '/etc/hosts' 

127.0.0.1    localhost 

127.0.0.1    domain1.com

 Now set the owner permissions

~/public_html/domain1.com$ sudo chown -R username:www-data cgi-bin log public
~/public_html/domain1.com$ sudo find ./public -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
~/public_html/domain1.com$ sudo find ./public -type f -exec chmod 774 {} \;

likewise for log and cgi-bin

References

1. Apache Virtual Hosts

2. Permissions for /var/www/html 

3. Chmod only to folders and its subfolders 

Wireshark NPF driver isn't working

Wireshark is an network analyzer. Wireshark depends on another utility process called WinPcap.

If the WinPcap service is not running in the background then we get the error "The NPF driver isn't running.  You may have trouble capturing or listing interfaces."

Solution

1. Open Command prompt by right clicking on it  and "Run as administrator".
2. Goto "cd Windows\System32" directory
3. Start the "net start npf"
4. After the success message, Restart the Wireshark

Codenameone Flow Order

This is the flow order of functions that is loaded when an application created using codenameone framework starts

 1. ImmuntiyMeterApp.init(Object context)

 2. ImmuntiyMeterApp.start()

 3. StateMachine.initVars(Resources res)

 4. StateMachine.beforeMain(Form f)

 5. StateMachine.postMain(Form f)

 6. StateMachine.StateMachine(String resFile)

The Web Developer's must have Tool - Firebug

Without Firebug i wouldn't have learned the HTML, CSS, Javascript or the working of Web very quickly.

Firebug is a add-on that is available with  firefox browser and a firefox-lite with chrome.

So what is so great about the Firebug? 

1.  Firebug lets you inspect each HTML elements (like <a>, <div>, <table> ...) and when you inspect the element then the element, its margin, padding, border gets highlighted.

2. On inspecting a element, you can also the view the CSS used to style that part. You can also manipulate and tweak the css to view the result on the fly.

3. To see what all resources are loaded when a page is requested.To find out the time taken and the order in which the resource is loaded. To find out the status, url, domain, ip, size and Header info.

4. To debug JavaScript, to trace the stack flow of the script, to break the script and inspect the DOM and other elements at that time.

Irony of Science in Eid al-Fitr

In today’s world, the science has grown incredibly that we have Hubble Space Telescope  launched into space watching the universe in different spectrums. We have satellites for weather predictions; we have Terrestrial Space observatory Telescope's watching for flares in sun and climate in Jupiter. We have even accurately and safely landed man on the moon. 

We can even accurately predicate solar and lunar eclipse, the exact points in earth where it would be visible. We have even predicated the next arrival of Halley's Comet  and also the distance away from the earth. The next arrival of Halley's Comet is on 28th July 2061, and then on 7th May, 2134  and it will pass within 13.9 million km from earth.

In spite of all these feats, we still haven’t been able to predicate accurately the Eid al-Fitr. In India, all banks and govt office calendars marked 28th July as Eid al-Fitr holiday but it was predicted a day earlier.

The date of Eid al-Fitr for a region is confirmed by the sighting of the new moon.in that particular region. In countries like India, where even the whole nation has same time-zone can't still predicate when the new moon will occur.

How much is the Advertisment Revenues in Media

Advertisment is the primary revenue for most media.

Media	Revenue
TV	18 b$
Newspaper	5 b$
Magazine	1 b$
Radio	1 b$
OOH	444 m$
Cinema	92 m$
Pay TV	166 m$
Others	300 m$

Industries that are spending  in online medium.

• Electronics
• Fashion - Men
• Fashion - Woman
• Baby Care
• Video Games
• Fitness
• Health Care
• Car
• Bike
• Jewellery
• Dating