ecomZera Blog

Asterix is a very small but fearless and cunning warrior, ever eager for any new adventure. He lives around 50 BC in a fictional village in northwest Armorica (a region of ancient Gaul mostly identical to modern Brittany). This village is celebrated as the only part of Gaul not yet conquered by Julius Caesar and his Roman legions. The inhabitants of the village gain superhuman strength by drinking a magic potion prepared by the druid Getafix (French: Panoramix). The village is surrounded by the ocean on one side, and four unlucky Roman garrisons on the other, intended to keep a watchful eye and ensure that the Gauls do not get up to mischief.

Read more about him here and about the series here

As far as I can tell, Google 2.0 (or Google 2.71828 as I like to call it) has been mostly about SaaS.

Google is now to the SaaS industry what Microsoft has been to the desktop software industry. VCs are afraid to invest in something that Google may copy and co-opt.

However, just like how MS had failed to beat Quicken with MS Money and how they've failed to beat Adobe and Macromedia (which are one now) Google will fail to beat those who know how to run circles around it. One exit strategy for such companies may be a sale to Yahoo (just kidding, but why not!)

In general here is what SaaS companies can do to run circles around the likes of Google and Yahoo.

1. Let Google and Yahoo pend billions to expand their share of the general consumer market. You can't beat them there. Focus on a market niche.

2. Provide unique value through product differentiation.

3. Provide higher value through integration with partners' products and services.

4. Cater to the needs of your niche market on much more personal basis than Google or Yahoo can ever hope to accomplish.

5. Offer vertical applications that Google and Yahoo would not be interested in offering (too small a market for them) to enhance your offering.

Posted by Marc Fawzi at Evolving Trends

"We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating." - Paul Graham

1. Release Early.
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
3. Make Users Happy.
4. Fear the Right Things.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
6. There Is Always Room.
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
8. Speed, not Money.

Read more

Believe me, it affects you more than you know, better read these postings, before you go further:

1. The Death of The Internet?
2. Internet Mail 2000
3. 10 things you should know about website accessibility.

Published: September 20, 2006 in Knowledge@Wharton

As Wharton marketing professors George Day and Paul Schoemaker see it, the recent and well-publicized travails of the Ford Motor Co. offer a clear example of the distinction between vigilant leadership and operational management.

To explain that distinction, Day and Schoemaker -- building on research from their recently published book, Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company -- have identified four leadership traits: external focus, conceptual ability, organizational role and time horizon.

Vigilant leaders are more externally oriented: They are open to new ideas, seek diverse perspectives, listen to a wide array of sources and foster broad social and professional networks. Richard Branson, says Day, is an example: The inveterate inventor and promoter -- with 200 start-ups under his belt -- is now developing alternative fuels. Operational leaders are more narrowly focused, have less interest in outside opinions and confine their networking to familiar settings.

Under conceptual ability, or strategic foresight, vigilant leaders are more imaginative and "probe deeply for second order effects," Day notes, citing as an example a CEO who looked at China's victorious bid to host the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and immediately began to consider what impact that would have on steel and cement orders. Vigilant leaders also embrace uncertainty and learn from well-intentioned failures. Operational leaders are more predictable, stay focused mainly on the task at hand, rely on past experience and try to avoid mistakes at any cost.

In their organizational role, vigilant leaders are both enablers and visionaries who create slack that allows the company to explore areas outside their main focus; operational leaders are more controlling, focus on efficiency and cost cutting and don't explore outside potential. Finally, a vigilant leader's time horizon is longer while an operational leader's is shorter.

Casestudies on Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders

ecomZera has finally launched Send FMS - The Flower Messaging service for the next generation. You can send greeting cards with image embedded in the email successfully solving the problem of card numbers and images download. Your dear ones will never miss your card again.

It was good team effort with Raj Shekhar & Apoorv spearheading the effort.

ecomZera has successfully completed RSS feed generator - Using it, one can generate RSS feeds without having to have a blog and you can manually enter entries without hassles. It can be installed in three easy steps.

It was a good team effort with Sandhya leading the pack and successfully completing the project.

As i was trying to edit our website, i came through the section on Values and Management philosophy and wanted to share them with you.

We belive that a company is driven to success by the values it adopts. At the core of ecomZera operations is the value system of ecomZera:

• Honest and open communication
• Sharing Profits
• Define responsibilities & goals clearly
• Quality in all processes
• Make all processes Online
• "Fun" at Office
• Result Oriented
• Sharing Thoughts and Knowledge

Share your opinion about these values and any suggestions on how we could implement them, if they are not getting implemented now.