It's Rishi

Do you ever need to search more than one city at a time on Craigslist? I do…on what seems like a regular basis. I came across a useful site called Crazedlist which allows you to do just this: specify a Craigslist search and choose several cities to search all in one query. When selecting cities there is no “Select All” action but you can either fire off rapid [spacebar] [tab] sequences or simply modify the HTML to create and save your own template for the page with all the cities you want selected.

It sure didn’t take long for Yahoo! to rebrand the media center and DVR software they recently purchased from Meedio. The result is Yahoo! Go Beta. It pretty much has the standard features you expect: photo managing/viewing (via Flickr and Y! Photos…kinda cool), watch video content from Y! video search and also some Hollywood teasers, and stream music from their Launchcast radio service. All of this, of course, is designed for users who have their PC’s hooked up to a TV. This immediately makes Go a niche, albeit growing in appeal, market product. However, what is important to point out is that Go does bring media center functionality to the vast majority of Windows users who are running XP Pro or Home, not the special MCE. That is huge. There has been some media center software packages in the open source community, such as MythTV, but for reasons such as lack of awareness and setup difficulties, they have generally gotten interest only from the geek community.

Initial comments of Go have generally been satisfactory at best with most people indicating that MCE is without a doubt the superior product. That isn’t a huge surprise since MCE has been around for a while now. Clearly, Go is unlikely to be successful if it’s simply a cheaper, but-not-as-good alternative to MCE. You can expect that much of this functionality will be in all versions of Vista and will server as a death sentence to Go if Y! can’t innovate to justify the product’s existence. So how can they innovate?

1) Add wireless streaming functionality – Streaming multimedia content to cellular phones and other wireless handheld devices is gaining traction fast as devices are getting more powerful and broadband cellular networks are becoming ubiquitous and cheap to access. Orb has been offering a free download which enables exactly this functionality from any Windows PC. You can stream your music and video (including recorded DVD content) to wireless devices. The best part is that it’s free and relatively easy to setup. Y! should license this technology and bring it to Go ASAP. The reports are that Vista will have this functionality as well, but Y! can beat them to the punch. Also, you can bet that Microsoft’s implementation will be anal about DRM issues as well as being incompatible with DivX/Xvid out-of-the-box.

2) Create special versions of Y!’s other properties to Go. I want to see Y! Games, Fantasy Sports, News, Mail, and Finance. Sure, since you’ve got your PC hooked up to the TV, you could just fire up your web browser, but because the TV environment is so different from the PC (in terms of screen resolution, viewing distance, input devices), it’d be a lot better to create new UI’s designed specifically for access via a TV. Imagine having customized Financial news broadcasted to you on your TV. Forget the Bloomberg channel, let’s focus on my portfolio and the markets that I’m interested in. Why not overlay my league’s realtime fantasy sports stats on top of the game that I’m watching right now. If you’re like me, when you’re watching TV, you probably have your laptop in front of you. If done right, a marriage of interactive content with broadcast content would shock and awe the TV viewing masses.

3) Integrate simple BitTorrent search and client software. Okay, Okay, this one is pretty controversial since that may suggest Y! endorsing piracy. For me though, BitTorrent is the only DVR I need. I’ve talked about it before but with the combination of BitTorrent and RSS, I have access to all the shows I want, when i want them regardless of whether I get the channel or remembered to record it. Again, I could just use the software I have on my PC already but a simplified, TV-based interface (integrated with TV Guide listings!!! *gasp*) would make it a lot more accessible to mainstream folks.

4) Add video phone functionality. I’d much rather use my TV to engage in video telephony instead of my PC. Y! could do a promotion on webcams. To begin with, they could just support between two Go users. Down the road, maybe somehow tie this in with Y!’s VOIP service and maybe there’s some interesting interopability that may be possible.

I think it’s exciting that another big player is stepping up to this space. Competition should spur some much-needed innovation. All the necesary pieces (broadband in the home, broadband on our phones, HDTV, digital video content everywhere) that we’ve been dreaming about for a decade now is here and it’s about time we try to bring convergence to the masses.

UPDATE: For some screenshots of the user experience with Go, click here and here

The big headline on t.m today has been an insightful blog post from Mike Davidson titledMySpace: Unstoppable Force or Unnecessary Click Factory?. Mike raises an interesting point about MySpace. Basically, because of poor site design, users are forced to perform more clicks to complete a given action versus competing sites. Thus, pageview stats for MySpace are, in a sense, inflated and shouldn’t be compared directly to competitors. Moreover, because most of the pageviews on the site are produced as the user is traversing from point A to point B, these intermediary pageviews have little advertising value and may be a significant cause as to why MySpace’s average advertising rates are so horribly low (~ 10cent CPM). If you have a minute, read the post.

Some of my own thoughts:

- It is being suggested that MySpace intentionally has not redesigned the site to reduce the number of clicks to navigate the site because they want to maximize their pageview statistics. While there may be some truth to this pre-acquisiton, I don’t think MySpace has really benefitted that much from the hype spurred from it’s lofty monthly pageview stats. The typical MySpace user simply does not care about this. The only people that do care about stats like this are the people who have just recently created MySpace accounts to see what the fuss is all about (and afterward blog about how they finally “get” MySpace).
- It is true that MySpace is notorious for being flaky, cumbersome and just plain slow. While the site leaves much to be desired, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t deterred adoption by users. People come to MySpace to interact with people. There are an excessive number of clicks involved, but soon becomes automatic to the typical user.
- All this focus on CPM, pageviews, etc. is a waste of time. Instead of looking at pageviews, what really matter is maximizing the the average length (measured in time, not clicks) of a user session. Instead of looking at CPM, the only thing that matters is the total dollar amount extracted from each advertiser. Ultimately, advertisers will pay for performance upto their hard budget limit. If I have 10MM to spend on an online marketing campaign, I will identify which channels are bringing me maximum conversion and proceed to infuse as much of my budget into those channels as possible. It doesn’t really matter if I’m paying $.01 CPM or $100 CPM. All that matters to me is the conversion rate. (Of course, measuring conversion for a branding campaign for offline brands like Coke is difficult) The only way to increase conversion is to increase ad relevance. In this NY Time article it is mentioned that MySpace is currently improving ad relevance by serving ads based on deeper user profile and behavior data. This is what matters folks. If MySpace can successfully do this, they will quickly see more advertising dollars flow in from a larger pool of advertisers.

Last month I wrote a mini-essay titled “It’s cool…but I wouldn’t pay for it” in which I briefly discussed a phenomenon that is becoming more and more common. A company launches a good service but has trouble finding users who will actually open up their wallet and pay for that service. This has led most recent web-based companies to either offer their service free of charge – relying exclusively on ad revenue for cash flow – or give away the basic service free and try to upsell premium services.

After making that post, I started to think about what does make consumers open up their wallets. What are their motivations? I want to answer the simple question: Why do people buy stuff?

After a lot of thought, I came to the hypothesis that each purchase is motivated by the following 2 factors:

Functional – Many products we buy fulfill a tangible function. In other words, they have a measurable utility to us. Each function of a product has varying utility to each consumer depending on his or her needs. For example, a BMW M5 has a top speed of 205MPH. For the average buyer that function is offers little utility. But for a German driver who needs fast transportation on the Autobahn, the utility might be very high. Similarly, the fact that a buffet is all-you-can-eat may have high utility to a football player but little utility to someone dieting. On the other hand, a bottle of water has universal and similar level of utility to most consumers.

Emotional – There are a few primary emotional states that all humans strive for (whether they admit it or not): happiness, security, attractiveness, belongingness, and, above all, a feeling of importance. The interesting thing about emotional-based purchases is that they have no bound. Humans always want more. A man who owns a Casio wants a Seiko. A man who owns a Seiko wants a Rolex. Similarly, people are generally interested in spending money to achieve higher levels of the aforementioned emotions.

this leads us to…

Rishi’s laws of Consumer Behavior

If your product appeals primarily to the consumer’s functional needs: That consumer will likely open their wallets to you, but will probably do so unwantingly. Nobody particularly enjoys buying milk, toilet paper, or store-brand cola, but they do so because it fulfills their needs.

If your product appeals primarily to the consumer’s emotional needs: That consumer will likely want to open their wallets to you, but will probably not do so. People want Porsche 911’s, Rolex watches but few buy them, even if they could technically afford it. Now, if you intend your product to be a niche-market, luxury item then there’s no problem.

If your product appeals both to that consumer’s functional side and emotional side: The consumer will likely open their wallets to you, and feel happy about doing so. Ideally, you want your product to fit into this last category: appealing both to the functional and emotional side. This is not so much a product design exercise but a marketing exercise. The art of branding is all about how to make a product sell for more than it would if it was perceived as just a commodity (only functional). It’s the reason why Ralph Lauren (declare to the world that you’re successful with the Polo logo) can charge $60 for an ordinary polo shirt or why Coca-Cola (make every moment a memory by drinking a Coke) can charge more than store-brand cola. But, to accomplish this, it’s also important to remember that you must also fulfill a clear functional need for your consumer. A great (if obvious) example of a product which accomplishes both is the iPod. There are several competing hard-drive based MP3 players which are very competitive. Apple is able to not only dominate the market, but do so selling it’s products at a significant price premium. Through a combination of product design, packaging, and marketing, Apple has consistently made each iPod hip and luxurious. They made the MP3 player be more than a functional purchase, they made it an emotional purchase.

Few companies in the computer industry have been able to appeal to the emotional motivations of consumers. Specifically, I can’t think of a single software company that has. Possibly video game software, but one could also argue that it’s also functional: video games provide the function of entertainment. What about on the web? Are there any websites that you pay for that appeal to your emotional side? This is something I’ll be thinking about for the next few days…

Last week, a good friend of mine that works for one of the Big 3 Automakers told me that as part of a company-wide innovation initiative, employees are being asked to submit ideas on what new technologies they would like to see in upcoming vehicles. When he pinged me for any ideas that I might have, after a few seconds of thought, I said I wanted a computer with Internet access.

Technically speaking, this is really not that much of a stretch. In fact, custom solutions are already available in the aftermarket. Take the same ~6″ lcd screens that you’d find in a typical navi-equipped car and instead of hooking it up to a dedicated navigation unit, hook it up to a PC in a compact enclosure. Input can be via touch-screen, joystick and/or voice. Internet access method would be EV-DO cellular which can already be found in vehicles, such as the Google commuter shuttles for employees.

Of course, a computer would offer navigation functionality that current systems offer except that it would be orders of magnitude more sophisticated. Instead of calculating routes based on static map data like current systems do, given network access the vehicle’s navigation client could utilize a central server to more intelligently calculate routes, incorporating dynamic information such as real-time traffic, road changes, weather, etc. According to this news item yesterday, Honda will be joining Volvo in integrating Google Earth satellite-imagery into future navigation systems. Uh, who wants that? Do you have the desire, much less the opportunity, to browse satellite imagery while your driving? I doubt it. And if we’re talking about satellite imagery as an aid for navigation, why can’t I just look out the window? Sure, having Google Earth would be nifty, but I would drop this in the innovation-because-we-can-do-it-not-because-anyone-wants-it bucket.

What the driver wants is access to information that is of value to him or her at the moment. And the real benefit to having a computer with Internet access lies, of course, in precisely this access to software and data that a computer provides. Don’t just blindly find any local gas station to fill up at. Find the cheapest Chevron or Unocal76. Not just any Italian restaurant to eat at. Find a highly-recommended one that’s open right now. The computer opens doors for in-cra communication as well. For example, voice-input-driven IM conversations would be a lot safer than chatting on a cell phone while driving because of the asynchronous nature of IM conversations. Music possiblities are limitless. Who needs an iPod adaptor when they can access their own personal music collections or subscription-based services. (Who needs satellite radio either?) A whole new genre of social applications based on route context will emerge. Stuck in a traffic jam? Rant about it with other drivers. See a hottie in the car next to you? Send her a message. And, for passengers, the Internet obviously gives new meaning to in-car entertainment.

The goal here is to have a computer which runs an industry standard OS such that anyone can develop software for it. That idea is probably a difficult thing for an automaker to swallow, and justifiably so. The last thing automakers want is a customer bringing their car in for warranty service because the computer crashed due to a mis-behaved third-party software package. However, I think it is possible to build a system that’s open to third-party developers yet retains an appliance like level of simplicity and reliability.

The last point to make which gets back to the title of this post is, do people actually want this? It seems like everytime automakers try to add computing-like devices, it is received negatively from consumers. iDrive from BMW is probably the most prominent example of this. iDrive allows the driver to customize a variety of settings across many components of the vehicle. The level of personalization that systems like iDrive offer to the driver is unprecedented yet many buyers would rather not have it. I don’t have scientific evidence on this, but from what I can piece together, it does seem that older buyers are much more likely to hate such systems than younger buyers. It makes sense and I expect the trend to continue until one day, not too many years in the distance, computing will be an integral part of modern motoring life.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve suddenly experienced a huge influx of spam comments on this blog. At first I was very annoyed. My e-mail inbox was flooded with new comment notifications from WordPress. I had to login and delete (and subsquently blacklist) them all. After about an hour of being annoyed, a thought occurred to me. “Why am I getting attention from spammers all of a sudden?” In a way, it was actually kind of flattering. In the past, I have gotten just a handful of spam comments presumably because the spammers were busy spamming other sites that were more worth their (bots’) time. Then, I realized that maybe…just maybe.. my Google PageRank had gone up and thus made my blog more appealing to spammers. I checked and, in fact, www.itsrishi.com, is now marked as PR5. Now, to be honest, I’m not sure why I have a PageRank as high as 5. My backlinks don’t really seem to merit it. I’ve had some big (PR7-ish) blogs and aggregators point to some of my posts but those sites also have a large number of outgoing links. PR5 really does seem high. Is it a glitch? Possibly.

I’ll check my PR again later and monitor my metrics to see if I have any boost in traffic referrals from Google search result pages. If, in fact, itsrishi.com is a PR5, I should notice a boost in search referrals especially for popular keywords for which in the past I would be shoved waaayyy to the bottom, even if my post had good relevance.

If you found my post from last week discussing MercExchange vs. eBay even mildly interesting, you should definitely take a few minutes to read and digest Paul Graham’s new essay titled “Are Software Patents Evil?”. Paul covers his thoughts on why patents exist in our society, why software patents differ from those in other fields, patent trolls, and, finally, why he believes patents have little positive or negative effect on the software industry.

As he has a habit of doing, Paul incorporates a thorough foundation with thoughtful, easy-to-follow analysis. I really wish I could compose my thoughts as well as he does. His essays are my essays’ heroes. =)

I accepted an invitation to be on a “Young Entrepreneurial Careers” panel taking place during a week-long entrepreneurship summit organized by the Asian-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society at Stanford. The description of the presentation is:

What does it mean to be a young entrepreneur? Hear from panelists with recent entrepreneurial experience, people who still remember the trials and concerns that come with starting up a venture for the very first time. They will discuss some of the issues that young entrepreneurs face, such as making the first leap to entrepreneurship and balancing a “normal” job and life with the entrepreneurial venture. We will also hear from panelists who will discuss what embarking on an entrepreneurial career entails.

Many of the events on the schedule for Summit 2006, which takes place from April 10th to 15th, are open to the public, including a keynote speech – that I’m looking forward to – by Peter Thiel. For more information about Summit 2006, click here.