The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

Mahesh Murthy, one of India’s greatest experts on digital media marketing, was at SearchCamp unconference in Chennnai this morning. The house full audience was all ears as Mahesh laid out his eight predictions for 2008. Mahesh’s eight trends for 2008, as he forsees them:

1. It is not just about Search alone: As per Mahesh, companies would like one agency to handle all digital marketing handled by one agency, which could include SEO, SMS, online marketing etc. Right now companies go to different vendors for different initiatives within digital marketing.
2. It won’t just be about Google: Mahesh feels, over time, a set of competitors would emerge to Google. Marketers would have to evaluate choices from others such as Yahoo, MSN, and local leaders such as Baidu in China, and others in Korea, Australia, Russia. It will require expertise to target specific markets, which is good news for SEO professionals.
3. SERP formula would be broken: It is now possible to create a site and guess about its treatment by the search engines even before it goes online. Almost. In due course people will decode the black box logic.
4. The World will move for Pay-per-performance(P4P): The current model where advertisers pay for so many impressions, or so many clicks will probably give way to a model where people will pay commission on the business brought in by various channels. The SEO/SEM agency would make money this way, which will be more challenging.
5. P4P will extend to other media: The above mentioned P4P model will see adoption in traditional marketing channels. Advertisers will become more aware.
6. It will all be Global: Companies spending dollars in digital marketing will start demanding a global reach, and more universal campaigns. ( Not sure I agree with this one)
7. It will be democratic advertising My phone rings at this point and I go out to take the call so no more details here!)
8. The Model will change, India will be in Control: Mahesh forees the emergence for companies that will adopt the IT model, where the marketing offices would be spread across the world, but the knowledge based work will be done in large centers in India.

Mahesh Murthy’s talk was peppered with details and examples, and he made no bones about his thought that he does not consider Google to be infallible. In his own words, ” The Google Killer is probably out there. We don’t know who is it yet”.

Mahesh, that was an interesting talk. Thanks for that and we remain all ears as we move towards 2008.

(Mahesh Murthy is the CEO of Pinstorm)

I was at BlogCamp in September last year, and became a big fan of guys who were behind it. There is another event coming up coming October and this one sounds very promising too. SearchCamp is all about SEMs and SEOs, terms that are widely spoken about, but in my frank opinion, understood much lesser. SearchCamp on 6th & 7th October, (again an Unconference, wow) and promises to bridge that gap. I look forward to it, and hope to see you there.

No, Google is not distributing PR 9 as complimentary gifts here! See you there!!

Few months back, a friend of mine sought to transfer some money from his ICICI Bank account to to my ICICI Bank account. We choose the most convenient route, which was an online transfer. Was it that that convenient indeed?. Read on.

It so appeared that the account number I sent by mail to my friend was wrong by exactly one digit. A real costly mistake indeed. My unsuspecting friend promptly executed two transfers and the money, a sum of few thousand rupees, landed in a third account, which wasn’t his intention.

As soon as we learnt of the error, we reported to ICICI Bank, and surprising enough, this completely wired bank decided that this cannot be reported to the call center. One has to visit the branch. So be it we said, and dutifully filed a written report at the ICICI Branch where my friend has his account. We were advised, that the Bank would seek to reach out the third account holder, and after his/her permission , reverse the transaction. Not so simple. For months, my friend kept following up with the ICICI Bank staff by phone.In the course of this period, the bank kept saying that the delay is because the customer has not updated his/her telephone number and not responding to postal communication.

We then visited the branch once again. We were pointed out that bank really cannot give any SLAs on rectifying this error, since the error has happened from the customer side. Also, that the receiving account was short by ‘some amount’. We also learnt that this is not an unheard of occurrence at that branch.

The error happened because in ICICI Online Banking money transfer, there is no payee validation mechanism to ensure if the account indeed belongs to the person who you are seeking to transfer the money to. A paper instrument, bears the payee account name, and has to be deposited along with the correct account number. In case of a mismatch, it would not be processed. In ICICI online system, it just vanishes behind a number. So risky.

So with much follow-up, a major part of the money was transferred to my friend’s account, which I helpfully took from my friend, and the mode chosen was non electronic. The deficiency of an amount of over thousand rupees, one understands, is because the wrong payee had that much deficit in his/her account. So, whatever he/she owed to ICICI Bank for whatever reasons has now become my friend’s liability and therefore, mine.Cool!

We were told, in slightly coated words, that the Bank has taken some precautionary steps to prevent such an error, and we have neglected that. The hint was to an sms message that goes to the payer whenever he/she adds a new payee to make a transfer. The sms contains a numeric code, which has to be keyed in to complete the process. According to the bank, we should have noticed the error at this stage. I am tempted to challenge this. A real validation would happen only if the sms comes to the payee who would pass it on to the payer.

So, next time you are about to make an online payment via ICICI Bank, look at the good old cheque leaf as a valued alternative. Or consider transferring an amount of 10 rupees first, call up the other party and check if they received the same. Do not assume fancy systems to be more robust and foolproof. An application is only as good as the process design given to the programmer.

I recently moved this blog to my own domain.Bloggers using Blogspot and considering migrating to their own domain may like to read the impact analysis.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Solution architect who succeeded Bil Gates for that position, did something on 27 Feb 2007 that leading executives of Microsoft are not known to do- acknowledge the succcess of business rivals. He acknowledged that Google’s success with its advertising model was a “wake-up call within Microsoft”. Many within Microsoft would possibly consider such an acknowledgement as nothing short of sacrilege but it clearly shows the yeah-they-got-it-right-we-didn’t thought process in Microsoft’s top management quarters.

They possibly acknowledged it silently by allowing you to choose your own search engine such as Google and ASK in IE 7.0 i search box rather than force MSN/Live search on you.

Another interesting development is his comment about the success of MS Office as having withstood the onslaught of the likes of Zoho and Google Docs saying they ‘compromised functionality’. Not sure if he was asked on the declining marketshare of Internet Explorer but surely his take on Firefox would be something of interest to many.

Microsoft is known to orchestrate large programs and projects which take years to mature(start with a ‘code name’, make the ‘code name’ public, build excitement over years), where most successful web comanies such as Google and Yahoo remain nimblefooted and keep a very sharp eye on promising startups which they acquire and make it as part of their services block, recent example being YouTube, which Google acquired for USD 1.6 BN, which incidentlly Steve Ballmer reportedly likened to a copyright disaster waiting to happen. They are also yet to figure out who is their competiton in the Web 2.0, merely few named companies(which if they acknowledge would be good) or the mushroom kind of evolution pattern of the internet(which if they acknowledge would be better).

Another possible aspect possibly overlooked is the service versus product issue. The service vs product line has somewhat blurred in the recent years, and Web 2.0 is dominated by things such as widgets. The internet usage itself has changed over the years, it is not just a platform where corporations run websites and users visit those sites- lot of users themselves create content, and I am not sure how Microsoft is enabling anyone other than providing a browser.

All said, Microsoft remains a great company, and a well organized one. Perhaps too well organized for the Web 2.0 era, where organizational chaos often leads to innovations.

Detailed Yahoo Report

Microsoft

If you chugg your laptop along across your company’s locations in different cities or buildings, chances are that you may need to change the proxy server settings in your browser to access the internet, which at times can be such a pain. Even if you do not need to do so, chances are that you are using your laptop with a proxy in your office and direct connection while in Hotels or at Home.

Proxy switcher is one cool utility that helps you take the pain out of the whole process of remembering and changing proxy server settings.

All you have to do is let the tool know about the different proxies with location identification such as Locations Office A, Office B and so on.Proxy Switcher sits in your system tray and changes the proxy settings at the click of a button.The biggest appeal of Proxy Switcher is its ability to switch proxy on the fly across Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. To use on Firefox for example, as a one time action, set the browser proxy to locahost and port as 3128.

Few weeks back I signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain, now called just Google Apps for my college alumni. It was tempting, since we were already holding a domain, and running a WordPress blog hosted by WordPress.com(via domain integration). We were a little unhappy with WordPress since it put lot of limitations in our ability to do anything with the scripts, which it does not allow, till you take their software and host it elsewhere. We defined our objective as follows:

We succeeded in some steps quite easily, and learnt some steps the hard way, and yet to figure out some missing ones.

I knew something was up in the air when Kiruba created Extrabed.in in a wiki format and began talking about wikis more frequently on his blog. Well, I am glad that we have another unconference in Chennai, this time on wikis.Last September’s BlogCamp was a great experience and I feel it will be the same at WikiCamp. 25th Feb is not far away, but if someone tells Jimmy Wales is going to be there, I cannot wait. The big question on Wikipedia’s revenue streams is definitely going to be fielded, but that is not the only reason why we should be there at WikiCamp.Never mind Time Magazine’s announcement of ‘You’ as the person of the year, I know very little of Wiki as a format.See you there guys.