The Economist has an excellent overview of Water Desalination in the current issue. The Sea Water Reverse Osmosis technique that it discusses has been discussed here and on Forbes (Read Hydro-Alchemy) by me before in the context of Energy Recovery, Inc. which is about to go public.
Ramu Yalamanchi runs hi5, one of the leading social networking companies in the world. The company is recognized as one of the fastest growing social networking companies. Here I discuss the strategy behind hi5 with Ramu and gain some of his insights for the future.
SM: What is your read on some of the other travel and ad network players out there? There are some vertical travel ad networks which have been reasonably successful so far. SH: There are three things you need to do to have a viable vertical ad network. You need to get a set of publishers,
Yesterday’s discussion on Obama’s Economic Policy somehow got side-tracked to a discussion on venture capital compensation, which is not what I had intended.
SM: The major gains from purchasing SideStep were adding their display advertising business and their email marketing platforms? SH: That is right.
SM: Obviously you made a big departure from established business models in the travel industry. Can we discuss that in terms of growth? SH: Our business model is very similar to Google’s. We get paid for the referral. We are unbiased which is great for consumers because when you have an advertising driven model the
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SM: Let’s discuss the competitive landscape. What was it like when you started and what is it like now? SH: The market has evolved quite a bit but not as much as we expected it to. Initially the only competition came from two companies. One was called FareChase and they did not have a consumer