Some Possibilities for Re-inventing Video Advertisements

One of the most sacred piece of consumer advertising in the past was the 6 second spot in Television. Advertisers qued up to buy the spots and display their advertisements. Ad agencies and spot buyers were in vogue as they were the levers that enabled brands in their quest for more consumers. All this is about to change and the advertising agencies are in for a disruption. This opinion of mine is based on the following trends that I see playing out in the markets: Despite having changed medium (Television to online streaming videos), video advertising did not change. They […]

The Real Higher Education Challenge

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around Higher education and how this is creating student debt at an alarming rate. There are estimates which out student debt in US alone at more than a trillion dollars. The common thinking seems to be to look at ways to reduce the overall cost of delivery of education. MOOC’s seem to be the flavor of the season as they can obviously reduce the cost of delivery by leveraging technology. However, in my opinion, we are trying to address a symptom and not the root cause. I think that the root cause […]

Going from Products to Services

One of the biggest challenges that most product organizations face is to constantly innovate and be a step ahead of their competitors. Most of us tend to continue to remain in the boundaries of more features/functions or newer products, etc. Most of these changes will work for you for sometime, but soon your competitors will catch up. Then the whole cycle starts again. One way to break this cycle is to package your product into a service. Though this may seem a very simple idea, it is very difficult to execute. And precisely for this reason, the pay-off for this […]

New Business Model from Very Unlikely of Places #Publishing

I stumbled upon The New Enquiry by chance and was totally blown away, both by their content and their business mdoel. They are an Ad-Free online magazine & survive by the way of subscriptions (2$ per month) & donations. And they don’t have a firewall. So, for all practical purposes, they create and share content that is free for anyone to consume but still people are willing to pay subscription to receive the same content but in coherent, thematic clusters, which is more intuitive and easy to read. In an interview given to “Columbia Journalism Review“, the founders claim that they […]

Elon Musk’s HyperLoop – Hope or Hype

At last Elan Musk unvieled his design for ultra speed travel system – HyperLoop. I think that the idea that he laid out in a 57 page document, is as good an idea as we might have currently. However, After having read through the generic description, I think that this is a good start to the pursuit of sub-sonic ground transportation. However, in its current state, this concept is impractical due to the fact that the entire concept seems to have been designed with the Los Angeles to San Fransisco route in mind, which, is mostly without much curves in the […]