What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight On India
For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we teamed up with the Indian Angel Network (IAN).
First up, Nimesh Khiara from Mumbai, India, discussed StopWaitin, a restaurant reservation system that includes managing waiting lists and is similar in concept to OpenTable. Nimesh has a couple of corporations that are interested in beta testing his solution to offer corporate discounts to their workforces, and a few restaurants are also interested.
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One of Nimesh’s questions was that he is discovering that the BPO/call center industry does not give Internet access to employees; hence, the solution would not be accessible to them. Well, this is a clear indicator that he should avoid the BPO/call center industry and focus on industry segments where corporations not only provide Internet access to their employees, but the employees themselves are tech savvy. Fortunately, there are numerous such companies in India.
I advised Nimesh to focus on getting a couple of large corporations in Mumbai and a dozen restaurants in the beta program, and get the business going. As he grows, he can simply focus on increasing the restaurant portfolio and getting more corporate clients. I also advised him to avoid consumer marketing and market his service through the HR departments of the corporations as an employee benefit. It would be much cheaper to acquire customers this way.
FEED
Manivel Karuppasamy from Bangalore, India, presented FEED (Funding Entrepreneurs, Encouraging Dreams), a crowdsourced funding marketplace for India. I did not get the sense that Manivel knows anything about raising money for businesses, and he wants to cover not only entrepreneurial fund-raising but also funding for musicians trying to produce an album, and so on. That’s a broad charter, with huge scope, and I asked Manivel how he proposes to establish trust in the exchange and prevent fraud?
It turns out that Manivel has experience raising money from philanthropic projects from his alumni association, which gave me the idea that he could create and manage whitelabel exchanges on behalf of various alumni associations; this approach would have built-in trust and validation mechanisms to prevent fraud.
I advised Manivel to reposition his company to cater to institutes that want to develop private funding exchanges and conduct a thorough customer validation process based on that assumption.
Subscription Carpool Service
Next, Gurdip Singh from Gurgaon, India, discussed a subscription-based managed carpool service that would create groups of four people, each responsible for driving the others to work one week a month. The ROI is straightforward and compelling; however, how do you prevent people from finding their buddies to drive with and stopping the subscription?
Well, it turns out that Gurdip wants to do reconfiguration of alternatives if one day there is a no-show after 30 minutes, so that all his subscribers have rides without any disruption to their schedules. Now, this is a hard problem to solve, but I can see that if Gurdip can solve it, it would mean that the service is worth subscribing to on an ongoing basis. I advised Gurdip to figure out how he would do the reconfiguration because his business depends on cracking that nut.
i-Globify
Edward Varghese from New Delhi, India, pitched i-Globify, an outsourcing service catering to the niche travel vertical, focusing on building Web 3.0 back ends for medical, religious, sports, and other kinds of tourism solutions.
Edward has a medical tourism portal customer for whom he is building such a solution. I liked his approach to building an outsourcing solution: focusing on a niche and building in-depth skills and credibility within that vertical. I think that Edward can not only build a successful outsourcing services company based on this premise, he can also build an IP portfolio and potentially a platform product that would make it more compelling, specialized, and higher-margin business than any old labor arbitrage shop.
Next week, we are focusing on entrepreneurs in Latin and Central America. You can register for the next roundtable here.
You can also listen to the recording of today’s roundtable here and select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.
Sramana Mitra is the founder of the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative, an educational, business development and incubation program that aims to help one million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant, she writes the blog Sramana Mitra On Strategy, and is author of the Entrepreneur Journeys book series and Vision India 2020. From 2008 to 2010, Mitra was a columnist for Forbes. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sony working on a Cyber-shot camera with 3G cellular connectivity?
If the warm, soothing waves of IEEE 802.11 are beaming down on your location, there are certainly several ways to send pictures directly from your camera to the cloud, but Sony’s reportedly prototyping a camera that won’t need a single bar of WiFi to get your upload on. Our friends at gdgt cite anonymous sources that say Sony’s got a camera with a built-in 3G modem in the works, and we’re not talking about a cameraphone. While Sony’s cellphone CMOS sensors may have improved, gdgt says the prototype unit will probably be a dedicated point-and-shoot, though the publication says their moles aren’t sure it’s actually coming to market. If it does, though, here’s hoping it comes with some Whispernet so we don’t have to foot a monthly or (perish the thought) per-picture bill!
Sony working on a Cyber-shot camera with 3G cellular connectivity? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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HTML5 billiards proof-of-concept is dangerously addictive
Agent 008 Ball is a timed pool game by Pixel Lab in which you play Agent 008 and are tasked with preventing the terrorist organization CHALK from winning the International Billiards Tournament.
The game was commissioned by Microsoft as one of the showcase sites for the Internet Explorer 9 launch, asking Pixel Lab for an app that felt like a natively installed application. Agent 008 Ball uses HTML5′s Canvas and Audio features and a JavaScript physics engine for an end result that feels like something written in Flash or for the desktop.
It’s dangerously addictive, too. Click through at your own peril.Pixel Lab
How to Convert a Facebook Profile to a Page
We’ve discussed previously why it’s important for businesses to create a Facebook Page, rather than a profile. Pages come with detailed analytics and unlimited fans (as opposed to the 5,000 friend limit profiles have). Perhaps more importantly, representing a business on Facebook with a standard profile is a violation of the site’s terms of service and can result in the account being shut down.
It’s easy enough for companies just getting started on Facebook to create a proper Fan Page, but what if you’ve already established your brand’s presence using a standard profile? Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t provide a magical button that automatically converts profiles to pages, so it’s up to you to manually make the switch.
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First, Create the Page
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to create a Page for your company. In many ways it will mirror the profile you already have. Do this from your personal Facebook account, not the account you used to create the ill-fated company profile, which we’ll be deleting later.
Use this time to add your company’s general information, branding, third party integrations, and custom designs you may want. You can also choose a custom URL such as www.facebook.com/yourcompany, which can help make marketing the new page easier.
Scale Back the Profile’s Privacy Settings
By default, your profile is easily found by others. Whether it’s via their internal search engine or friend recommendations, Facebook very much wants people to find each other in general. To discourage new people from friending the soon-to-be-defunct profile, you’ll need to scale back the privacy settings so it’s not as easy to find.
Since the point of Facebook is to connect with others it doesn’t offer the option to completely exclude your profile from search or to not accept any friend requests. The next best thing would be to change these settings so that instead of “Everyone” being able to find and friend your company, only “Friends” or “Friends of Friends” can. Any privacy settings that have the “Friends Only” option should have that selected.
Set a Deadline
The process of converting a profile to a page is very time-sensitive. You want to be quick about it, but not so fast that you fail to get the attention of your existing friends and end up losing those connections without an explanation.
Setting a deadline is key. Give yourself about two weeks. That should be enough time to effectively communicate the change to everybody without jumping the gun.
Inform Your “Friends” (Soon-to-be “Fans”)
Now for the tricky part: Explaining the change to your profile’s existing friends and politely encouraging them to become fans of the new Page.
The easiest and least intrusive way to do this is via status updates to the original profile. For the first week, you’ll want to put up one status update per day letting people know that the change is afoot and giving them the opportunity “like” your new Page. After a week or so, considering posting two per day, at different times of day.
The status updates should differ slightly in wording each time, so as not to appear automated and robotic, but they should communicate essentially the same thing: 1) That your company is converting to a profile and a page and 2) That you’d like people to click through and “like” the page, to which you should provide a link.
So, a sample status update might read something like this:
Hi, friends! We’re in the process of switching over to a Fan Page. Will you join us? Please click the link below and then click the Like button.
You can, of course, craft this message to match your company’s brand and personality. The tone is up to you, but the message should be clear.
One potential source of confusion is bound to be use of the word “like.” Some users may read that and think you want them to hit the Like button included on the status update itself, rather than clicking through to your Fan Page and hitting the button there. Try to be clear about that.
As the deadline date approaches, consider clarifying the fact that profile is going to be deleted and that in order to stay in touch, your friends are going to need to take the extra step of converting to fans.
Don’t Get Spammy About It
We can’t stress enough how delicate the communication stage of the process is. It’s important to get the message across without annoying users. Never post more than two status updates per day about the change, as even that can come off as overbearing or repetitive to many people.
It might be tempting to post on people’s wall’s individually or send them multiple direct messages. Do this sort of thing at your own risk.
You’re almost certainly not going to get 100% of your friends to convert to fans. Ultimately, it’ll be up to them to decide whether or not they feel like clicking through and hitting that “Like” button.
Delete Your Company’s Profile
Finally, once you’ve reached your deadline and converted as many people as you could, it’s time to delete the original profile. Unfortunately, this is the only way to ensure that the it stops accumulating friends and maintaining two separate identities on Facebook can confuse people.