Frustration

A piece of advice about frustration

"Frustration is ambivalent.It can be good and bad at the same time. It is good in letting you find new ways out provided you channel it effectively and it is bad when you take too much of it to your mind and allow yourself to be stressed adversely affecting your physical and mental health.There are numerous cases where frustration has led to devastating results in peoples' lives.

Frustration is caused by many things, frustation on your boss, your wife, the government , in fact everything that can be named on the planet.People try to find ways not to fight the things that cause frustration but to escape from them, but the key to letting it out is to use the energy wasted in the frequent fearful thoughts caused by frustration to do something useful for your own personal good."

So , Confront and Fight, don't escape or oblige !!

Customer Hype

I guess I need to introduce the background before I start this post. I work for a start-up and am trying to generate some for my company through a few projects.

Lately, I've been noticing a trend in customers' behavior(at least among those I meet). Most of the customers that I reach out to for a project proposal ,presentation or initial discussions, seems to create a lot of hype about his knowledge of the internet and web and the technologies involved to develop a web application. He/She boasts about their knowledge of web much before Google started or how they've learnt using email much before I knew it or how even with a lack of programming skills or experience with a technology firm , they understand the intricacies involved in developing a functionality. Then there's another kind that simply thinks software isn't real estate or a factory, so it should be pretty cheap. As cheap as his monthly electricity bill.

All they want to say is - "We've seen it all"

All this seems to me as a ploy to indirectly tell me that - "Hey, I know what the hell you are trying to do and I very well know how much time it takes and how much it costs. So , beware, don't fool around with me".

Now, how do I get a customer out of this mindset and tell him that I'm there to help him and not milk him? Iam struggling at that.
Tough thing aye !!

Over to LinkedIn Apps

Though Iam posting this a bit late, but LinkedIn Apps have arrived and How..
It did stand up to it's need - professional networking.

As the LinkedIn blog says - "The nine applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn"

As you might get from the list of applications and their apparent use , LinkedIn does not look like it gave in to the pressure it feels from Facebook. Contrary to the apps on Facebook(a wild guess of about 20K+), Twitter and other social networks, I dont think LinkedIn is giving access to anyone for adding any application into it. It needs the developer to explain what his or her application is going to do and how it will help users on LinkedIn to accomplish a task. So no silly, funny apps, or games. LinkedIn means Business.
Just 100% useful applications that we could use on a professional level.


Checkout what mashable has to say about new apps that would enrich a users experience on LinkedIn . Looks like we could get updates and work done on LinkedIn itself without the need to open 10 different websites.
Let's see how users will react. Needless to say, Iam thrilled !!

Pricing does change things

These are my musings on the post by Seth Godin on his blog.

I guess change in pricing really changes everything. A friend of mine running a entertainment/gaming lounge has a multitude of games(along with food n drinks) to play but few customers chose to play for longer hours as it was priced on an hourly basis. Interestingly, his earnings were divided almost equally between the games and food because the longer time a customer stayed, the more he ordered. So, he offered a monthly&yearly membership to recurring customers and there were quite a no. of people who signed up.

Coming back to the post by Seth, he suggests a ticket auctioning system by airlines so that people can trade tickets, which to me, seems to be more of an eBay kind of system with all the features of time constraint, minimum consecutive bid, have-to-buy on winning bid etc etc.
But there's more to airline tickets than simply item auctioning. The products that you sell on eBay might not be available after a period of time but they aren't perishable or rendered useless.The seller can again put it up for sale with a renewed price structure. Tickets aren't that way.

It may seem plausible to auction Cricket or Football world cup tickets or Superbowl tickets(for Americans) on eBay, but to have a site just to auction travel tickets is going to be disruptive and destructive.
Imagine spammers buying tickets from LA to NY during Thanksgiving in multiples of 10s and just trying to sell it at double the regular price. You wouldn't have an option of buying one a bit later on at a seemingly affordable price if you are not an early bird. You could say there's a downside of doing so - if the tickets aren't sold, the auctioner will lose.At the price ratio I mentioned, he would break even if half are sold and sell the other at a lower price at the end. But I don't know who would want to fly to meet his family on the other coast and wait till the last day looking at a auction-site to get a cheaper price.

Instead, customers should be able to trade tickets online. Someone who wants to cancel his trip shouldn't end up losing his money when there are a lot others looking for a ticket. He can put his ticket for sale (at the same price he bought or at the current price) and let others buy it. The airlines can charge a nominal transaction fee from the seller and make it up. That way I guess there would be no need to put up unnecessary rules and regulations(that users wont even read completely) and put up an auction site

It's 'SNO'ing

I just came up with an useless acronym for this post. That's SNO for Social Network Overloading.
I recently happened to visit a social network related site when I saw this. My instant reaction was(and still is) "how many more ??".

OK, so I Stumbled Upon it , Reddit, found it Delicious , now should I Digg it, Tweet it, Furl it, add to Newsvine, put up on my wall, make it Live and share on Google ?!!!

Among people I know , some use Digg, some Delicious, some Stumble Upon, a few Reddit, others Tweet (re-tweet) to share information. Again , some of them use Facebook, some Orkut and a few Myspace.
Add to that your daily office e-mail, your Yahoo! e-mail, your Google e-mail, your MSN e-mail(if you are a MS aficionado/employee) , your instant messengers - Sametime at office, Google Talk, Yahoo! messenger, MSN Messenger, Jabber, AOL..phew !!
All this just for a couple of words and links, think about photos,videos,presentations,reminders etc...
And RSS/Atom feeds to finally seal the deal.,
I say "Just Imagine" .

So if you are hooked to the internet, here's what you'd do
1) Log in to your email - Thankfully, atleast you can choose to see your emails under one umbrella.
2) Log in to your instant messengers
3) Open Facebook/Myspace/Orkut/Twitter/Friendfeed. Now whatever be the mode you still open it right !
4) Check your RSS/Atom feeds for some wisdom/current affairs/entertainment.
5) Use the plethora of bookmarking sites to bookmark a few of them.
6) In between , read about an obscure, unknown thing on Wikipedia !!!

And among all these do some meaningful work too (dont you ????)


So, if I want to save my time and share information among all my contacts, I need something to consolidate all of these.
Now there's the catch and the never ending story - first some guy would come up with a tool/website to consolidate all social networking sites (which has already started with Flock Browser and People Browsr), and then the second, then a third(all these with active VC funding), and it continues...

Really, I wonder how many more social networking sites are going to come up in the following years. Next time, when I visit the very same site, I'll not be surprised if I see a scrollbar or pagination to checkout all kinds of options for "sharing information".