Archived entries for

  • November 20, 2008
  • In Business
  • 2 comments

Free stuff, but only if you give out your private information

I was thinking about the economy and what others are saying.  There is a surge in food bank usage, people are foreclosing, and even universities are asking for donations for education and not so much for building names.  The concept of getting something free for your demographics information has been around for awhile.  Lately, I have been thinking about the value of getting free stuff (excluding celebrities who get free stuff just because).  I came across a website that let you sign up for a free logo’d t-shirt from businesses and another website that gave me free products to test out.  They’re all great, but isn’t the goal to get people to buy your stuff?  You could argue that it’s also to get feedback, but I will completely ignore that for the sake of my argument.   I am thinking that the target market is really not the free stuff enthusiasts. I will make a hard claim that the people who want free stuff are those who won’t pay for such things or do not have the money in order to do so.  So my advice to you is think twice about giving out free stuff.  What are you trying to achieve?  Who are you trying to win over?

A Berkeley student turns an idea into a very bootstrapped startup

I would say a few months ago, I met a UC Berkeley student at a Women 2.0 event.  She was very outgoing, spunky and we’ve kept in touch since.  A few months ago, she was talking to me about an idea that she had.   She wanted to create a website that focused on student internships.  Of course being me, I challenged her on the idea.  She had some good answers, some others she had to get back to me on.  I told her that if you could get the website out there fast and cheap, then might as well try it without doing all the research.  At least that’s my philosophy.   I know that there are some people who over think ideas so much that they end up not doing it at all.  They have convinced themselves that the idea wouldn’t work.  That’s no fun.  It’s better to try than to not try at all especially if it could be done fast and cheap.  What do you have to lose?

Now, this Berkeley student and two others have launched the site InternshipIn.com.  On top of that, these students spent less than $500 to get the website out there.  Well, I guess you could argue that if you coded it yourself, then you don’t have to shell out money for the expensive programmers.  Check out the article on TechCrunch.

Discussions about cellphone texting versus calling

I was at a conference last week and had a short discussion about cellphone texting with a colleague.  Basically he did not understand why people text instead of call.  He felt that we were going back in time rather than forward.  I thought about it for a bit and somewhat agreed with him.  If you’re like me, I text in the most non-English way (e.g., “omg”, “c u l8r”, etc).  Have we gone back to a hybrid of morse code and telegraph way of communicating?  Maybe.  Unlike the good ole days, cell phone texting does not require a dedicated “telegraph” line, so you can just text anyone from anywhere.  Okay, so maybe that’s a step forward.   Alright, now why use texting over calling?

Well, I think of texting like post-its.  I’m just leaving a short note for someone which does not warrant a full on discussion.  To me that’s enough of a benefit.  Also, I see texting as a very social interaction.  I text you “let’s go to dinner”, you text back “where”, I text you back “japanese?”, etc etc.  Another thing that texting lends well to is multi-tasking.  You’re sitting in a meeting hearing “blah blah blah blah” and flip open your cellphone to text or read texts from others.  You may be ignoring the speaker now, but at least you are discretely ignoring him.

In any case, I am still perplexed as to why an inferior way of communicating (e.g., short messages with hacked-up words) is starting to dominate.  Think of Asia, texting is huge there.  Why?  I don’t know, I haven’t done my research.

Who’s (Not) Building Datacenters?

I posted this on my blog at http://theec.blogspot.com, but thought it would be interesting on Sophia’s blog as well.

The recent economic climate has put many datacenter construction projects on hold. I know of several, major, South Bay-area projects (totaling approximately 700,000 square feet) which have recently been scrapped or delayed indefinitely. Those that are being built are also facing rising energy costs (a major component of the price of operating a datacenter).

What will these delays and rising costs mean to businesses? For large businesses, these factors might delay datacenter buildouts, which can impede or delay IT equipment purchases. A 10,000 square foot datacenter might hold 7,000 servers. At a price of $4K each, this would be $28,000,000 worth of servers. A rough guesstimate might place the IT equipment value that those 700,000 square feet of datacenters could hold at roughly $2B. That’s a lot of Silicon Valley business for Dell, Rackable, IBM, HP, Sun, Cisco, Juniper, and others that can’t be fulfilled until there is a place to put those servers and power to power them.

Another possible impact to business is that rising costs and declining datacenter availability might help propel SaaS offerings (think Salesforce.com) and cloud computing platform providers (think Amazon EC2). Perhaps the tradeoffs between an SAP-based CRM module and Salesforce.com will tilt a little more in Salesforce’s direction when there’s no datacenter floor space to hold new servers.

  • November 5, 2008
  • In Business
  • No comments yet

Is it possible to offer affordable personal assistance?

Ask anyone and they will tell you that they need someone to do this or do that.  Ask them how much they would pay and most would say not much, well at least the price (per hour) threshold is low enough that they would do the task themselves.  So then I think about about other countries such as Thailand or even China where labor is ultra cheap, but products are expensive.  In the US, it’s quite the opposite (disclaimer - in general!) meaning labor is not cheap and products are cheaper relative to income levels.  If there’s a big need for personal assistants (e.g, clean home, pick up kids, drop off dry cleaning, etc), how come there isn’t a slew of companies offering such services?  Well, I did a quick google search and found a few companies who do offer these services.  Some offer affordable prices but for very limited services, others are more expensive and very customizable to your needs.

To bring this back to my original question, is it possible to offer affordable personal assistance?  It depends.  Like most expensive things, you either have the money to buy it or you don’t.  For those who don’t, lease or do a timeshare.  Maybe that’s the way to go with personal assistance. Hmm…

Event listing for upcoming week

Copyright © 2004–2009. All rights reserved.

RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and uses Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.