Wednesday, 05 August 2009 00:00 | 
Written by Mohit Agrawal
Nobody thought that Twit
ter would be so successful but then nobody had thought the same about SMS as well. The simplicity and non-intrusive nature of SMS made this paging like service popular amongst mobile users. Twitter brings together the conversation of social network and brevity of SMS to provide super fresh real time updates on the web. Success of Twitter confirms my belief that the future of social networking is on mobile.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. One might wonder what can one write in just 140 characters but people have found the knack of communicating in less words and use smaller URLs to share links. It is the cocktail of social networking, live search and link sharing that makes Twitter so popular. There are many third party companies that have made search a live stream of tweets possible (I missed the live stream search in my post on Future of Mobile Search). I do not know if this is an early trend in replacing the hegemony of Google on search as the Google algorithm does not make live search possible.
A hacker in July managed to get internal Twitter projections on revenues and user base which were published on TechCrunch. As per the hacked documents, Twitter is expected to earn revenues for the first time in Q3 of 2009 and aims to cross the user base of 1 billion by 2013. From a modest revenues of $400,000 in Q3’09, it plans to scale it up to $1.54 billion by 2013 with $111 million of net earning. Twitter has far exceeded its target of 25 million users by end 2009 (Refer the figure below that has been sourced from TechCrunch)
Last Updated (Monday, 31 August 2009 03:08)
Tuesday, 04 August 2009 00:00 | Written by Mohit Agrawal
 Hate them or love them, online communities are here to stay and are likely to have a big impact on the consumer behavior. Patrick Dixon in his lecture (video at the end of the post) has outlined how social media is likely to impact our personal lives, behavior and the way we do business. Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. The way social media is defined, it includes the social networking sites, blogs and social book marking sites. Common social media marketing tools are Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Facebook and YouTube. Given the high usage of social media across the world, it is an unexplored goldmine for marketers. Social Media started as a medium for people to connect but with the passage of time, as the communities grew in size, companies started to use it to increase their brand visibility and connect directly with the consumers. Since this platform provides a possibility of 2-way communication, it is a double edged sword. The companies can get great feedback or rave reviews of their new products but at the same time they must be prepared to hear the issues related to customer care being faced by consumers. One bad experience quoted by a consumer may prompt other consumers to cite their bad experiences and soon the entire social media can turn into a brand bashing forum. Hence, there needs to be a clear social media strategy on part of companies with perfect alignment across all functions including sales and after sales service. It is not the job of marketers alone to enhance presence on the web but the other functions also play significant role in it.
Last Updated (Saturday, 08 August 2009 04:45)
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Friday, 03 July 2009 14:06 | Written by Robert Syputa
Brief 2005 sketch of ideas
WiMAX is a framework platform for Long Term Wireless Evolution; ‘Fixing’ WiMAX as just being suited for fixed, mobile or any single application is false thinking about how wireless will develop over the next 20 years. WiMAX was not designed to be a system that just fits current needs or a narrow application. To understand the context of wireless developments and why constructing this understanding of WiMAX is so important, first start with the question “What is needed for the Next Generation Network of communications?”
Last Updated (Friday, 10 July 2009 16:55)
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