Business Week's 10 Indian Companies to Watch

Here. The 10 are: Tata Motor, M&M, Bharat Forge, Rediff, Infosys, Wipro, Dr. Reddy's, Airtel, Reliance and ICICI.

Twitter

Charlene Li writes: "There is real potential for a service like Twitter in several areas: 1) for small, trusted groups to keep up to date with each other; 2) publishing information easily; and 3) as an aggregator of information."

Online Advertising Economics

Scott Karp writes:

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, but it also exposes a deep flaw in the way online media is currently valued and sold to advertisers.

According to Jeremy, untargeted, run-of-site page views are worth about $1 per thousand. It’s RPM because it’s taking into account ALL forms of advertising on the page, including display ads sold on a cost per thousand impressions basis, pay-per-click ads, and pay-per-action ads. $1 per thousand sounds about right, but it’s also deeply disturbing.

Voice and Portals

Andy Abramson asks: "Does voice have a place with Web Portals or is Voice really an Internet play, not a portal play?"

My guess is there not concerned YET. You see I’m looking at Voice 2.0/3.0 and more as evolutions of voice 1.0, not as a the next big thing—YET! The reason I say YET is the market uptake keeps showing that the consumers aren’t ready and the facts prove it.

Enabling phone service with presence is one of the first steps towards creating higher levels of utility, and in turn higher volume levels of communications. What’s funny is the IM players know all about presence, but one has to wonder who is Present and Accounted for when the decisions on how to make money are being discussed by those portal players. Surely no cash is being rung up that matters.

One Number to Ring All Phones

The New York Times writes about a new service from GrandCentral in the US:

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

TECH TALK: Good Books: The Marketing Gurus

The second book I bought was “The Marketing Gurus” by Chris Murray. It is a collection of summaries of some of the best marketing books. It’s a good concept – one can get a flavour of the best recent ideas in marketing.

Here is a review from Publisher’s Weekly (via Amazon): “As the editor of Soundview Executive Book Summaries, which distills business books into 5,000-word recaps, Murray offers 17 such summaries of marketing books published in the last 15 years. It's arguably a narrow range for the best "of all time"—even with big names like Regis McKenna and Sergio Zyman on board. Each book summary begins with a quick summation, often making redundant the introductions written especially for the collection. And though the condensed versions manage to extract the key ideas from each text, some authors fare better than others. Faith Popcorn's unique voice survives compression, for example, much better than Seth Godin's does. The selected books are sequenced to suggest a broader argument that runs from connecting with customers to marketing in the 21st century, but the actual connections between the various works are largely unstated. Unless you're completely new to marketing research, chances are you've come across at least one of these books already, but Soundview's summaries are a good introduction for those with no background.”

This is what the book description says:

Since 1978, Soundview Executive Book Summaries has offered its subscribers condensed versions of the best business books published each year. Soundview’s summaries have won it acclaim as the definitive selection service for sophisticated business book readers.

For the first time ever, Soundview is bringing together summaries of seventeen essential marketing classics in a single volume…The Marketing Gurus distills thousands of pages into fewer than three hundred, making it ideal for busy professionals, students, and anyone curious about how marketing has evolved.

I have in fact bought many of the books summarised in “The Marketing Gurus” but never got around to reading some of them. I thought the summaries would be a good place to begin revisiting some of the recent marketing ideas. And so it turned out. I have read some of the summaries, and it’s an excellent introduction or refresher, as the case may be.

Tomorrow: The Marketing Gurus (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Strategy Paradox (Part 4) [March 16, 2007]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Strategy Paradox (Part 3) [March 15, 2007]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Strategy Paradox (Part 2) [March 14, 2007]
TECH TALK: Good Books: The Strategy Paradox [March 13, 2007]
TECH TALK: Good Books: Buying Books [March 12, 2007]