Art of bullshiting

There is a huge voice out there about a company which is opening a office in Second Life called crayon, located at a virtual location called crayonville. One of the founders have a blog post and described what their business & business model is;

We’re not an agency nor a consulting practice as is traditionally defined. What we are is whatever you want or need us to be.

I like to think of us as a true mash-up that combines the best in traditional and new thinking about marketing, advertising and PR.

We’re a solution provider. We’re an extension of your team. Consider us a new breed of partner – one that keeps everyone honest and on the right path. Our client is not the consumer: our client is the truth.

Need an example for marketing craptalk or art of bullshit, this is one. With its lengthier blog post, Neil hasn't even figured out what exactly they are. Nick Carr was spot on in this.

What is more important is not opening an office in a virtual place, that can definitely be a marketing hype to bring in some initial hits into your website, but a solid fundamental and problem solving capabilities put across your organisation. Nick is right in his post, that will the truth pays the invoices. Its not even about the invoices, but more about the financial business model itself. What to my mind comes is, crayon seems to do all sorts of things for all sorts of requirement for all sorts of people. I am unsure whether bullfighter can trash these sentences as jargonish dump, since it uses simple english words, yet so confusing & so vast. They are to me, doing a chinese math, than an actual business model. Remember great companies are built by doing a focussed act and not doing chinese math.

secondlife crayon Technology Advertising PR Marketing

Microfinance & helping poorest citizens

Microfinance's future in Knowledge @ wharton - Excerpts

There is evidence at all levels that microfinance is growing dramatically. As of the end of 2004, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, more than 3,000 microcredit institutions reported reaching over 92 million clients, two thirds of whom "were among the poorest when they received their first loan." (Microfinance includes microcredit as well as other related services such as insurance and savings accounts.) In addition, there has been a sharp increase in institutions -- such as New York-based WWB -- that advise microfinance agencies. CitiBank is partnering with WWB to train microfinance institution managers.

microfinance society world Technology

Is AWS is a game changer?

Sadagopan asks a question about Amazon's Web Services are Game changers? I am unsure about saying this as Game Changer per se. But again, Amazon is the smartest company presently cashing on the Web 2.o frency. Unlike your post, i dont think, Enterprises are not going to shy away completely from the offersing of Amazon. More and More enterprises [Amazon S3 even lists Microsoft in a case study]are now under tremendous pressure to deliver value. Managing huge infrastructure itself is a big job by itself. If a vendor like Amazon manages things for them, i think, they can outsource large volumes of data to Amazon. I strongly foresee, Amazon comes with an enterprise offering sometime later. The other company which can utilise the same is Google.

With Google Mini, they are already providing "box-packed" products to enterprises. I wont be surprised, if Google comes with their own way of utilising their data centers & infrastructure somewhere connected along with their lines of activities. Think about this, Google now gives you email, rss feeds,storage [the rumoured GDrive], payment facilities, [Google Checkout], writely, spreadsheets and lots n lots of SDKs for developers and end customers. How long will that take Google to customise a solution similar to EC2 or S3 which will be tightly integrated with their offerings. The best part then will be Google has to release low cost computing which will be seamlessly be integrated with their wi-fi plans for selected regions.

What is more important here is that with S3 & EC2 things are going to be lot more liberated from vendors. We can certainly look forward of things like Coghead , Ning or Sampa which will completely alter the development landscape if done well, where these services will certainly play a major role in their offing. For example, i am no longer using Thunderbird and i have switched over to Google Hosted Email service. This allows my office to completely work anywhere, without the issues of restricting our emails in a single machine. Every email service provider gives a web based access, the case in point is, Google's infrastructure and its distributed computing architecture, which makes it unique and worth to be in.

The future of computing is not definitely going to be on PCs, so the data delivery & recoverability needs to be centered around somewhere in the servers. This one single factor, will be the key pusher for these webservices or infrastructure based technologies.

Google Amazon S3 Technology Webservices Ning Coghead Sampa Distributed Services

Chinese Math

Self Reminder: Dont' ever get into this Chinese Math trap :)