Entrepreneurship, Ideas

Disrupting the paints industry…

What happens if the cement manufacturers start doing research and find a way to add color to the concrete itself? Will consumers accept this approach to color their homes? I do not know if this will disrupt the paints industry, but sure will open up a lot more opportunities for the cement companies to differntiate their offerings (as currently, all cements look the same and the only differntiation is in the branding). Add to this, if the cement manufacturers find a way to create concretes blocks with designs in different colors, I am sure that will make an interesting phase […]

Business Model

European courts allow online re-sale of Oracle software

In a landmark decision, the European Court of Justice dealt a major blow to Oracle on Tuesday, ruling that the software maker cannot block the resale of its software online. More information about the news @ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d54ff9e6-c515-11e1-b6fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1zo4cMsO3 What does this mean for other software makers like SAP or Microsoft? I am truly surprised by the ruling. This does not answer many questions like How does the vendor keep track of who is the current user of the software? What happens to the Support fee? How can you track if a customer has made copies of the software? What happens in a case where […]

Ideas

How can you manage risk without the right tools?

Marks raises a simple but an important question. “How does your organization manage risk?” This is one of the kinds that you do not realize the cost of not doing this right until something terrible happens. Then the cost is much more than if it was done right in the first place.

Entrepreneurship, Ideas

The Art and Science of Timing Decisions

This is a very interesting post by Jonathan. He talks about the two differing points of view on decision making – Instintive decisions (as argued by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Blink” and taking time to make your decisions (as argued by Frank Partnoy in his book “Wait: The art and science of Delay”. In my opinion, what style you use to make decisions is mainly a function of your personality. For example, I prefer instinctive decision making and that has worked really well for me. So, we should reflect about our own personality and use what works best for […]

Business Model, Customer Engagement, Ideas

What should twitter do?

Recently, there has been a lot written on Twitter sending emails to users to lure them back to twitter. In my opinion, instead of trying to lure the casual users back to twitter, they should be thinking about why are they not using twitter more often. I know quite a few casual users of twitter and based on my discussions with them, I think twitter should give a thought to the following: 1. A new user generally done not know, what to do once they sign-up. What can twitter do to ease this confusion. They can send a link to […]