LinkedIn worth a $1 Billion Valuation?
Many of you may be using LinkedIn already, if not, LinkedIn is a professional networking site. You connect with people you know and they connect with who they know. This way the network grows and now LinkedIn boasts that around 20 million people are in its database. All the people voluntarily keep their profiles up to date. If you want to reach a person in Company X, you find a path through your network of contacts each of them then relays your message until you reach the desired person. Depending on who is in your network it is just 2 hops and can take more hops if you don’t have connections to the desired party.
The company makes money by providing a job board and fees to getting introduced to unknown people. I don’t know how much revenue they have but according to an article on TechCrunch, the current round of funding values the company at a cool $1B. Now I don’t know if it is really worth that much. I think a lot of people signed up for curiosity thinking it will help in the future. Now whether they are actively using the network on a regular basis is unknown. In my personal case, I use it occasionally just to keep up with what my contacts are doing. I used the network very sparingly to reach someone. We will just have to wait and see if the company continues to thrive or the usage patterns tail off once the novelty wears off. Is this part of a new bubble? I don’t know.
PS I wanted to check something out on LinkedIn.com while composing this post but the site is presenting a blank page! Perhaps the support folks are busy counting money 
Update 8.28 am: It’s back to serving regular content:
Metered internet
With soaring gas prices and huge profits for oil companies, some big internet service providers (AT&T, Comcast) are now thinking of charging customers based on the bandwidth consumed to get more revenue. The argument is that while one person is using minimal bandwidth for occasional emails vs. there are those who download movies and other rich media thus consume more bandwidth.
Having a limit on bandwidth usage will restrict or even change the usage patterns for internet users. Guess what consumes least bandwidth, pure text based traffic. Will websites be rewritten to optimize bandwidth usage? I don’t think so.
You would think that due to competitive markets, large companies would do everything in their means to woo customers. Instead they follow suit and thus impose similar metered policies on their customers, if one player begins metering. Wouldn’t it make sense that they observed over a period of time if the users are really abusing the service and then work out an altenate arrangement with specific users. I guess that would be too much work to deal with customers on a case by case basis. My local internet service provider is now offering fiber to the home with unlimited usage and their policy is to enable people to develop businesses and when the bandwidth usage is way out of line, then ask them to pay business rates. If you are in the service area for one of these large companies, please make sure you voice your opinion otherwise you might get stuck with a service plan that will make you think twice about which sites and content to view.
Here is an article from NY Times on this topic: http://tinyurl.com/4de2ro
Update 6/17:
Most home users may not be using much bandwidth but home office workers may not want to think about bandwidth for the convenience of working from home. In other countries internet usage is already metered so it is a matter of getting used to tiered pricing but I doubt the base rate for minimum usage will be very low.
One side effect of metered downloads might be that people may start using internet at work to download large files such as Linux distribution images or other software.
Shopflick - use videos to sell your products
If you live in the US and have watched QVC or Home Shopping Network, then you know you how tv helps sell products. Many companies experience a huge surge in sales after a successful appearance on HSN or QVC. Of course getting an appearance on the specialized sales channels takes a lot of effort. The internet has enabled a lot of businesses to sell online but video based selling is not that popular.
I came across a company called ShopFlick which provides a platform for creating and selling using videos. It is meant for the small business owner who might have unique products to sell and want to sell using videos. Unlike Flash based ads, these are ads that allow you to buy the product right after viewing.
I think this type of service can help a number of businesses located in rural US which make and sell unique products. If the owners themselves get involved in the video, then it might establish a better relationship between a customer and the business owner.
Here is a sample for selling skateboards:
Shopflick: Get this! |
Get your own Store!
We will just have to see if the YouTube type phenomenon catches up with selling products online using videos. What do you think?
Floods of 2008 (Iowa)
Iowa gets attention in national news during election season. This time though it is due to natural causes – not twisters but rain. Excessive rains are causing record-breaking floods. I used to work on some of these streets, it is just unbelievable that there is so much water. Take a look at some pictures from NY Times:
http://tinyurl.com/5udgum
It is going to take a toll on the lives of private citizens as well as businesses affected by these flooded city blocks.
Interestingly enough, recently there was a photo blog on Boston Globe site about “Water Everywhere”: http://tinyurl.com/5s5qlv
Update 7/3/2008
Boston Globe has another blog entry on the floods. The pictures are really high quality and worth a look: Mississippi Flood waters in Iowa
Hilarious Video about Internet/Tech bubbles
I came across this video while surfing the net. It is pretty hilarious and pokes fun at how technology hype/bubble works. Take a look and relax (it is less than 3 minutes). You need to hear the audio as well.
Salary Information
Yesterday TechCrunch, a website dedicated to technology news, published an entry on a new startup called Glassdoor. Glassdoor allows people to find out how much your peers are getting paid. There is some free information available but you have to give some information about your own situation to access information about other companies (other than free offerings). This information is collected anonymously. If you want to read the original post, please visit: http://tinyurl.com/6jxwvs.
While this information is amusing in the beginning, it is only useful when you are ready to make a change or want to make your life miserable by comparing yourself to others. It goes without saying that job satisfaction is more than just salary. Also, compensation packages will include other things such as flexibility of work hours, vacation days, other perks. It will be interesting to see if companies like this can survive in the long run. I have found that surveys in magazines vary and quality of information depends on people reporting their salary information honestly. In the meantime, if you are not getting the salary you deserve or want to amuse yourself or you need a reason to give yourself a raise by jumping ship, visit Glassdoor.com.
Amazon.com Outage and Cloud Computing
If you are a regular Amazon.com user or you have read about outage of Amazon.com’s public facing site, then you might assume that cloud computing (i.e. web services) were also affected. Web services and international sites were not affected.
Unfortunately the way news gets reported, such important details are buried in the long body. See http://tinyurl.com/5jh4w7 The fact that web services and international sites were not affected is noted towards the end of the article.
Personally I would like to see a summary format where important details are communicated within the first few seconds. Here is an example:
BREAKING NEWS SUMMARY
AFFECTED SERVICES
CONTACT DETAILS FOR MORE INFORMATION
Life After 40s in IT
My father introduced me to the writings of Subroto Bagchi, one of the founders of Mindtree Ltd – a Indian IT Consultancy company. Though I don’t remember the original article which was forwarded to me, I spent some time reading other articles by Subroto. His writings are now archived at http://www.mindtree.com/knowledgecenter/subroto_speaks.html.
One of the articles that is hidden in the archives is a presentation titled “Life After 40s in IT”. Though the presentation is not transcribed, the slides are sufficient to give an idea of the talk. During a recent conversation with a friend, we discussed this topic and some of the points raised reminded me again of this presentation. As a follow up to the conversation, I decided to write this blurb and include a link to the presentation.
Sanjay – here is the link to the presentation – http://www.mindtree.com/downloads/life-after-40.pdf. Let me know if you agree with the points in the slides.
Gmail feature improvements
Gmail is officially still in Beta mode. They keep rolling out new features in small increments. I don’t know if they follow the Agile methodology but the outcome seems to be the effect of Agile processes. Periodic releases with incremental changes. It allows the users to ramp up to the new features without too much disruption. The same principle seems to apply to Google Docs as well.
Companies like Google and Salesforce.com are able to fine tune their offerings by constantly refining features based on actual usage. This allows a company to be more dynamic and responsive to user needs. Constant updates to browser and other applications will also be welcome by users if the features are incremental and upgrades are not disruptive. There are several applications that already do this but each has its own mechanism for achieving the end goal. It will be helpful to see some standardization so that the overhead of running many “updater” programs is reduced on the client machine. Right now I have a Google Updater, Java Updater, Adobe Updater, Microsoft Updater and the list will continue to grow depending on the number of applications from different vendors. People will get sick of all these updaters and will likely stick with one vendor who can provide all the relevant updates. I guess Microsoft is in the strongest position there. What do you think?
Given below are the relevant screenshots to access the new features on Gmail.
(Click on the images for a larger image)
Backups and password protected files
As I was browsing some old news, I came across this article from Mercury News about Wells Fargo offering the first online safe for storing vital records. Original article can be be found here: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8629483.
It got me thinking about digital encrypted files and backup strategies. I wrote an article about data formats – Data Formats – Do you care?. When it comes to storing vital records whether online or offline (i.e. digital or physical form), you want to ensure that your loved ones be able to get access to the data incase you are not around.
There have been reports of computers/files that have been protected and then the original person passes away. The data is lost or not accessible easily thus causing turmoil for family members. When you are thinking about storing documents or other information in encrpted files or file systems, you should also consider how to communicate the access details so that your family can access the records in a timely fashion. Of course, this assumes you do want them to access the data in case you are not around. If you don’t care, then it is a non-issue.