Microsoft + Hollywood

Don’t be surprised if the rules of the content business change dramatically in the future. For example, a successful movie may be turned into a book!

Cricket on Cell Phones: India’s killer app

For Yahoo and Nokia, this is an example to take some cues from: Understanding the cricket ecosystem will provide numerous clues into the consumer psyche of a few hundred million Indians, and working that understanding into their local strategies would prove immensely lucrative.

Yahoo! starts beefing up

Between Yahoo and Google, I still like the former, despite the latter’s sky-high stock prices and current halo-effect. Long time back, Microsoft won against IBM and Apple (and many others) with a Fast-Second strategy. Yahoo may not be at the fore-front of innovation anymore, but some of the properties they have – especially My Yahoo! , Yahoo! Groups, and HotJobs – could be interesting leverages, IF they spend the cycles to figure out how to take those to their true potential. Now, with the focus on better technology and usability, they can, if they fix Product Marketing next.

The Personalization Potential of Konfabulator

Yahoo! Konfabulator should pay a lot of attention to what widgets people want, because mosquito conditions in a certain area, I am afraid, is not exactly a killer app. However, finding the right clothes from the private desktop of big, fat women may well be one!

Twenty-First Century’s Best Venture

Twenty-First Century’s best venture is the Harry Potter franchise. Starting with a great set of thrilling stories, J.K. Rowling’s marvelous boy-hero has started off a whole generation of youngsters on paths of reading, courage, friendship, adventure, and Rowling herself, on a path of great riches. Traditionally, Venture Capitalists did not finance content plays. But if you look at the numbers, one begins to wonder whether or not they should start … books, music, films, toys, games …

Starbucks and the Music Business

Perhaps, a natural extension would be to start having live-music and dancing at Starbucks cafes as well, with carefully selected musicians, in carefully selected musical genres!

Intel gets inspired by Apple in more ways than one!

MovieLink has apparently not got much traction for two reasons:

(1) It takes way too long to download a film
(2) Once you download on your PC, there is no wireless PC-to-TV connection to watch it on the TV easily

Wonder what is going on in Intel’s head, to fix these two adoption road-blocks on the Video-on-Demand roadmap and what Morgan Freeman knows, that the major studios don’t!

Pixar: Animation = ?: Online Shopping

The online world has changed in the last ten years from a basic user experience to a vastly more involved and integrated user experience. And yet, the online shopping experience is still fairly basic, elementary, and non-experiential. Beyond the basics, however, today’s experiential shopping opportunity online has become many times richer and more attractive. Broadband has become ubiquitous. Publishing tools are orders of magnitude more sophisticated, easy, and accessible, and visual merchandising needs to correspondingly evolve to the next level.