Social Entrepreneur: Harish Hande (Part 3)

Here we delve into the philosophy behind Selco – what makes the company what it is. We explore not only the operations philosophy, but also some of the social and cultural philosophies of the company. SM: Can you explain the business of Selco at this point to us? HH: The whole philosophy of Selco is

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 10)

SM: Would you give us some examples of your larger and smaller customers? RF: We work with an education related network called HotChalk, we work with a network of do-it-yourself home improvement types called HouseBlogs, we work with an entrepreneur called Robert Kadar who is starting a network called GoodHealthAdvertising, he is an expert and

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Social Entrepreneur: Harish Hande (Part 2)

Harish focused on creating an energy solutions company in rural India. Here, we discuss locations and other issues of getting Selco off the ground. SM: When you moved back to India, where did you set your headquarters? HH: We headquartered in Bangalore. My mother is from Karnataka, so it was a choice between Orissa and

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 9)

SM: What is your business model? RF: It is always based on some metric based on throughput and performance. We have folks working with us who, although we love them as customers, they are very small businesses who are going to run $20,000 a month in media. We also have folks with us who are

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Social Entrepreneur: Harish Hande (Part 1)

Dr. Harish Hande is the co-founder of Selco, a rural sustainable energy company which has over 80,000 installations and 25 retail sales and service centers all over Karnataka, a state in Southern India. Among its many accomplishments, Selco has created India’s first rural solar financing program using regional banks. I recently talked with Harish about

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 8)

SM: You are then providing the ad network infrastructure to these aggregators? RF. Yes, we are a technology and services platform that allows any network operator to build and maintain their own highly targeted ad network. If we had existed back in 2004 our pitch to FM would have been that instead of spending millions

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 7)

We talked about the fragmentation in the media business, with the long tail developing a stronger influence overall. Adify’s genesis is in this trend. SM: What is the significant opportunity you see in the fragmentation phenomenon? RF: First we realized that brand marketers are going to have a challenge.

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 6)

SM: Let’s fit Adify into this framework. What is the value proposition, what is the business model? RF: When we started Adify, what we saw was the ad networks were trying to aggregate bulk amounts of inventory and apply targeting algorithms to that in order to sell a huge amount of direct response advertising. That

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