6 AM Pacific

Google Voice – Different and Useful

I have been a user of the Grand Central service for a long time, but I didn’t switch over completely until Google relaunched the service as Google Voice. Google acquired Grand Central a couple of years back after which there was nothing but silence for a while. When they relaunched in March, the new service had a couple of nifty features, but what tipped it over for me was that the relaunch indicated that Google was firmly committed to the future of Google Voice. After all, you don’t want to go handing out a new phone number to people and then have to change it again if the service was discontinued.

Google Voice is a pretty unique service. It is like having your own personal PBX system for free. You get a phone number when you sign up for the service. Calls to this number can be routed to a different number (home, mobile, work etc.) or sent straight to voice mail based upon time of day, caller ID or rules that you set up. More »

More on IT Unpolicy

In my previous post IT and the Role of Government I objected to Atanu Dey’s arguments against having an IT policy for India. He proposed, what I called an “IT Unpolicy” – basically, do nothing.
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IT and the Government

Atanu Dey has a series of posts that criticize the IT Vision Document released by the BJP in the runup to the Indian elections. In his latest post The Rational IT Policy, he proposes an IT policy that basically does nothing – an Unpolicy, if you will. It requires government to stay out of the way of individuals and the market which will make their own decisions about using IT or not.

To me this seems wrong-headed. I think it is important for any government that comes to power to nurture and encourage the use of IT in government, business, education and at home.
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Zoho and the Bottom of the Software Pyramid

Last week Sridhar Vembu the CEO of Adventnet, makers of the Zoho suite of software, was featured on the Economist’s Face Value. This may seem like a big deal for the CEO of $60 M company (The Indian CEO featured before Sridhar was TCS’s Ramadorai). But you have to hand it to the Economist. For a magazine that covers politics, economics and business, it has the pulse of the software industry. What Zoho is attempting to do can be game-changing for business software. More »

The Nature of Switching – Implications

In my last post I described a framework to understand how individuals make switching decisions. Using this framework, let’s examine its implications for marketers of technology.

At the most basic level the framework says that to maximize the chances of switching you should maximize Switching Benefits, minimize Switching Costs and make Research and Trial really easy.

Maximize Switching Benefits

If there isn’t a compelling feature or two in your product that will get a large percentage of your target user base to check out your product, it won’t work. When you introduce a product, it is more important to focus on the Switching Benefits than on lowering the Sacrifice. If the Switching Benefits aren’t there, you won’t get enough people into Research & Trial. If the Switching Benefits are there but the Sacrifice is somewhat high, at least you’ll get the trials and perhaps some early adopters to switch. You might also get some parallel runs, where users use both products for a while. But most importantly, you will get feedback.
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The Nature of Switching

Last week I switched from Windows to Mac. I have used a Windows computer all my working life and the switch was something I agonized over for more than six months. I wanted the performance, stability and design coolth of the Mac, but I worried that the switch would require me to learn a totally new OS. It would cause me frustration, loss of productivity and just plain wouldn’t work for somethings like demoing our Excel product which is not supported on the Mac. What eventually tipped me over was that a couple of weeks back Microsoft pushed an update down and Windows kept insisting that I restart the machine. I decided to restart 15 minutes before a demo to a prospect to avoid the reminders from interrupting the demo. Twenty minutes and a couple of memory reference errors later, it still hadn’t booted up. I had to reschedule the demo.

But this post isn’t really about Windows vs Mac. More »

Charts on my mind

We’ve been working on doing some cool things with charting on our research platform. Thought I’d have some fun with it. Charts courtesy Google Charts API. Irrationality courtesy US Presidential elections.

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New Look for the Blog

As you will notice, 6AMP has a new look. The old theme worked well, but I was tiring of it. The new Wordpress theme is called Statement and is from Blogoh!Blog that I was happy to learn is now run by Jai Nischal Verma of Delhi.

The theme is clean and functional but easy on the eye. Migrating to the new theme required some work, but no major challenges. Had to figure out how to edit a psd file without having to buy Photoshop. GIMP did the trick.

I think I have everything working. Let me know if you find anything broken.

Farewell Facebook

I finally did it. I deleted my Facebook account. New York Times had an article about this [link]. A little bit of effort and some waiting and I got it done. I am now permanently out of the house of Facebook.
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Gridstone and the Top-Down Approach to the Semantic Web

What does Gridstone Research do? If an Equity Analyst asks this question, the answer we give is what our home page says,

Using cutting-edge technology, Gridstone assembles, analyzes and structures unstructured company information into financial data, guidance, operational data and structured text. Information that could take hours to assemble is available at your fingertips, at our website or directly in Excel.

This describes the end-user benefit. But for those who are interested in such matters, it still doesn’t answer the question of what we actually do. More »