15 Startup Commandments :)

These are funny, but very very very TRUE!

1. Your idea isn't new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You're not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don't have scaling problems, you're not growing fast enough.

4. If you're successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you're in that position, and hope that you're smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that's really the case, you shouldn't be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don't need business development people. If you're successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you're not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it's like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn't succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What's it going to be?

13. If you don't pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You're doing a web app, right? This isn't the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor's most polished software application.

Courtesy: Startupping

Interesting Forward! :)

Google And Yahoo To Take 90% Of Paid Search

Mike Sachoff, WebProNews

U.S. Internet users did 75. 8 percent of their January 2007 searches on Google or Yahoo, according to comScore media, and Nielsen//NetRatings found the combined total to be 76.4 percent.

"In fact, over 90% of US paid search ad spending will go to the two search giants in 2007," says eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman, author of the new Search Marketing: Counting Dollars and Clicks report.

"One side effect of this degree of concentration is that it can often make marketing on second-tier search engines often a better value for the money - less competition for keywords means that advertisers get broader reach for fewer ad dollars."

Paid search comprises the largest portion of the U.S. online advertising market and has since 2003.

"The point to note, however," says Mr. Hallerman, "Is that with its 42.5% contribution to the online total in 2007, according to eMarketer's estimates, paid search's spending share has remained fairly level at the 40%-plus plateau since early in the decade."

Paid search is the main force behind U.S. online advertising, and spending on paid search in 2008 will surpass the $ 9.6 billion that was spent on all online advertising in 2004.

There are a number of reasons to believe that there will be even more paid search spending.

According to the "State of Search Engine Marketing" from SEMPO, 44 percent of the companies advertising on search engines started doing so in the past two years. These companies are likely to increase their budgets as they discover the results of search ads on their marketing.

Also, as marketers become more comfortable with advertisng on search engines, they buy more keywords. The more keywords they buy causes competion and leads to higher prices, which causes more overall spending to increase.

"The SEMPO research shows 36% of advertisers saying search marketing programs get their budgets newly allocated funds, rather than shifts away from existing programs," says Mr. Hallerman. "Again, new money continues to enter the arena."

Courtesy: WebProNews

ACC BBA Pics

TYBBA- Volcano - Dumb Charades and Dance Competition

Welcome Party for juniors (FYBBA), when we became seniors :)

FYBBA Class tour (read: Industrial Visit :D) to Daman

Fashion Show in college -- Oh my my! all "future" (which neither happened nor is expected to) models! hahahaha

SES New York (April 2007): Pumping Up Video Search Optimization

David A. Utter, WebProNews

Making video more visible means working on its appeal to video search engines. A morning panel at SES New York discussed Video Search Optimization.

Attendees headed to the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York under a mostly clear sky today. A session on video search and optimizing for the engines that index it awaited those hitting the Multimedia and Mobile Track at a running start.

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics, spoke about what he was seeing new in the world of video search. "These include file tagging which I refer to as 'scene tagging'. These are often user generated tags. This allows viewers to just watch the parts of a video that pertain to you."

One insight Eric gave involved the actual keyword, 'video'; he believes there is still a good opportunity to brand a site to it as a keyword. "If you have a good position with the word 'video' with search engines, you are going to do well down the road."

Don't neglect paid search, either. Eric said search marketing can help you "capture complete and comprehensive real estate" when trying to reach online eyeballs. In the United States, some 123 million people watch video online; more than a quarter of them watch something at least once a week.

Google Video gathers most of that traffic, snaring about 68 percent of the relative share of viewers. YouTube's popularity has continued to grow, even as major media companies like Viacom challenge the video sharing site over its practices.

There are other roadblocks to video that have to be overcome, as we are still in the early stages of its adoption. Taxonomies vary from producer to producer, as there is no consistent, simple list of terms to use for labeling content.

Finding video with conventional search depends on text from the video's corresponding web page. Eric said links and anchor text are "still king" when it comes to Google's video search.

Unattractive, SEO-unfriendly URLs can also hinder the indexing of videos. Just as many bloggers have been moving toward URL rewriting to make their posts more easily indexed by search engines, videos should benefit from a similar optimization approach.

Courtesy: WebProNews

Success!

Success- well defined!

Failure leads to success, gradually - a present generation example..

it can't get better :)

School, College, Leo Club Days!

Hey Guys,

relive the gud old days thru these pics from d school-college days' albums ....thought of uploading them to share with u ppl.......

Umesh's Party before he left for Dubai!



Only ppl in this pic know who is who....hehehehe.....:D:D:D:D:D:D:D



The great LEO Club of V.U.Nagar....Good 'ol golden days:)


It's NOSTALGIA!!! :)

Cheers,
Jiggs

Wisdom of Crowds Is Dead

Jason Lee Miller, WebProNews

The problem with the human condition is that it involves humans. Bringing that condition online, fostering it with the Wisdom of Crowds philosophy, is slowly but surely proving what philosophers have said since humans first learned to write: the anonymous mob is powerful and passionate, but no more rational than an angry swarm of bees.

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. – Friedrich Nietzsche.

Why the philosophy lesson? Well, I was reading Neil Patel's post at Search Engine Land on "How Not To Be Buried on Digg." Adding his research to Danny Sullivan's advice on how to baby-sit Digg burials, we know certain things:

Diggers don't like SEO/SEM or online marketing articles and make great efforts to bury them and label them as spam – whether they are or not.

Diggers don't like articles about Microsoft or Sony – no self-respecting post-adolescent geek would like them. Microsoft and Sony get the same treatment as SEO.

Digger's don't actually read the articles they're voting on, but base their digging on the title and description alone. Instead of the articles, they read other Digger's comments and decide who is the geek-chic'est.

Patel, who is doing well in his SEO wager with Jason Calacanis, then proceeds with advice about how to trick Diggers into digging your stories. Diggers don't trust anybody over 30, so appear youthful and be funny when possible. Cuz these guys are silly, and you'll need to be silly too.

And I thought to myself: What a sad position to be in. People with legitimate content, looking to maximize traffic find themselves having to pander to what's become the Web's In-Crowd. It's true, we all want to be in there, but there are rules, even if the rules seem arbitrary and ill-informed.

It's also true that we have to be there. We have to be present to get ahead -- it's exactly like the hated good ol' boy system.

Is this what Digg has become? A social news clique; the reversed reincarnation of 80's movie villain jocks and their cheerleader girlfriends; Squealers walking on their hind legs?

Don't answer that. I like Digg, I really do. And I like Wikipedia. Both are great concepts, great information sources – as long as you don't mind that one community is gated, and the other community is, like humans, often wrong.

I'm not the first to make this declaration about the herd. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Thomas Jefferson and I, if alive at the same time, would have been drinking buddies – probably with the guy that drew this cartoon.

But when you cover this industry, you notice patterns: mature professionals lowering their denominators for the latest buzz-builders; Wikipedia vandals proving the need for something more structured like Citizendum; Facebook users staging revolts because they don't understand public information isn't private.

Google, originally a fan of crowd wisdom, learned its lesson the hard way. Links were scored heavily in the algorithms until the crowd abused them with link spam. Now it's authority Google's after more than apparent popularity. I think we'll see a greater emphasis on authority in other Web places in the future.

Wisdom of crowds, indeed. Hopefully this Wikipedia page, which outlines failures of crowd intelligence – too homogenous, too centralized, too imitative, too emotional – won't be changed before you get to see what I saw.

Humbly submitted by the elitist, iconoclastic, egghead jerk that I am.

Courtesy: WebProNews