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Being in the software product development we often get questions like how are software product development firms any different from offshore outsourcing firms? What is your differentiation?What do you offer that infosys and wipros do not offer?

These are valid questions but not surprisingly they often come from people who are not looking to innovate a product, people who are looking to innovate a product or service inherently know in their minds a regular software development firm will not fit the bill.

To start with a innovator looking to create a product or service is like rugby player who has the ball in his hand and is running towards the goal post like his life depends on it. And it does.

Only an innovator can understand an innovator. Period.

The major offshore outsourcing companies have been around for decades yet they have never attempted or delivered a product. This in the face of an appreciating rupee and shrinking margins.

There are various factors  that differentiate a outsourced product development firm from a regular software outsourcing house.

We mention the top 10 reasons why an outsourced product development firm is completely different from software outsourcing company.

1. Approach

2. Process

3. Delivery

4. Design

5. Trusted Partners

6. Risk Ability

7. People

8. Project handing

9. Service level agreements

10. Ownership

We will discuss all the points in details in the coming postings. Meanwhile if you would like to provide your point of view feel free to comment and let us know.

SaaS or Software as a service has been around for a decade but never really took off into the mainstream, the main reasons why it never took off were security reasons, reliability & availability, user adoption,  preference of major players to keep SaaS out, technology limitations.

Salesforce.com was the first one to break the barrier to entry into SaaS enterprise space forcing major players like oracle, sap, ibm, microsoft to get on the SaaS bandwagon.

The bigger players had a vested interest in enterprise software remain on legacy systems. few reasons are stated as below.

Since the hardware is shared in SaaS the sale of hardware in the enterprise segment will go down for server makers.

Its easy to sell software to less for more.

Making software available online also means letting the intellectual property in the open for smaller players to immitate the same software and pose a threat by reducing margins in the segment.

SaaS levels the playing field up for smaller player, which is something bigger players will not want.

In a 5 part series we take a look at the history of SaaS, its failures and successes, advantages and disadvantages, technical perspectives and architecture, issues in user adoption and marketing of SaaS and what the future holds.

The web(in context of social media optimization) can be divided into the following parts:
1. Social networks
Myspace, orkut, hi5, linkedin etc.
2. Social Bookmarking sites
d*gg, stumbleupon etc.
3. Content sharing sites
Slideshare, esnip, scribd, youtube etc.
4. Forums and community sites

sitepoint, webmasterworld, small business forum etc.

5. Blogosphere

influencing opinion by blogging yourself and promoting popular blogs like instapundit, boeing boeing, engadget, gigaom, specific and/or industry user blogs hosted on worpress blogs, typepad, blogger etc. and/or blogging communites like seomoz

6. Virals

7. Promoting feeds of your content using RSS, articles sites ezine,

8. PR sites/News Press releases on PR sites like prweb, spreadings news on news submission sites like topix.net

The list is by no means exhaustive. Each of these parts can be influenced to some degree in your favor.

The terms social media optimization is just another wannabe term to be honest its like search engine optimization which makes no sense as no one is optimizing a search engine here.

The cycle goes like this analyze:strategise:create: execute: track: iterate

A term like “social media promotion” is more adept for this than a confusing term like social media optimization in my opinion as with Google opening up open social platform will in effect make the whole web/mobile platform more social.

Recently Googles orkut followed footsteps of facebook and opened orkut website to developers, which means developers can built apps that cna be consumed by orkut members and use orkuts data.

More importantly Google has built orkut on the open social platform which promises to make every social website a container which can lend itself to be used by application developers to harness the social data that these social networks have to make application which can leverage these relationships between friends and networks.

In the coming time as the race to become a container for opensocial platform becomes hotter, application developers who know how opensocial platform works and facebook application will see a huge demand.

As stated on google blog a social web is good, but it will not come without its share of problems. We will write more about the negative impacts of the opensocial platform in the next series.

Web promotion is a important part of any companies marketing strategy. But most companies and individuals are get lost in the available sources online.

Here is are 10 most important steps for any company thinking of using internet to fill their lead pipelines.

1. Search engine optimization

In the information its best to attract your customers by information. Search engine optimization is a way by which you release quality content for your target audience and then nake sure the content is found on the major search engines.

This is why bigger companies like IBM, SUN, Microsoft let users create blogs on their website and write content.

2. pay per click advertising

Pay per click advertising means placing ads in search engines at the instant a user is searching for information, while being placed in the natural results would be the best option it is not possible to rank high for thousands of keywords. the next best thing is to pay search engine a per click price which decided by auction.

Be extremely careful with pay per click as it can rob of your marketing budget very quickly, the effectiveness of the campaign depends on campaign design.

This post is not complete, please visit back for further post.

3.  Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is increase leads and business by letting other people(called affiliates) and pay them a commission on sale or leads generated.

No successful business online can grow without an affiliate system in place, affiliate system lets you increase your sales power many times without actually hiring a sales team.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing as the name suggests means using emails to market your products or services. This can be the best form of marketing and lead generation or the best waste of marketing time you ever did if you do not do it rightly.

Email marketing can be further categorised as mass mailing, permission marketing to your list, permission marketing to someone elses list, email marketing to custom targetted lists developed by you or marketing to a email marketing database.

keep in mind everyone hates spam as much as y ou do. When you send a mail make sure its sent to a specfic audience who really would be interested in your product or service. Its waste of time and more importantly it hurts your brand.

This article is a stub and will be continued further…. 

We recently began experimenting with dotnetnuke portal framework in september 2007 and after being impressed and confident of capabilities of dotnetnuke portal we have started to offer development services on dotnetnuke.

The services we offer at this time are

dotnetnuke portal development
dot net nuke consulting
dot netnuke training
dotnetnuke hosting (web host for dotnetnuke)
dotnetnuke skins (skinning and user interface development)
dotnetnuke modules(development)
dot net nuke install service
dot net nuke templates development
dot net nuke c# development
dotnetnuke portals
dot net nuke forum installation and development
dot net nuke skinning
dotnetnuke 4 development
dotnetnuke portal
dotnetnuke support
dotnetnuke file manager development
dotnetnuke documentation
dotnetnuke framework

Please note the dotnetnuke onsite development is not available as for now we only provide offshore development from India as of now.

For more information please see this page
Regards,

Team

A Great company:

Sees an opportunity

creates a product

creates a market

A good company:

sees a market

sees the opportunity

creates a product

A bad company:

Sees the competitors market

Sees the competitors opportunity

Creates a product

The best companies do not plan to catch up the leader, they do not force into other peoples space, they find vacuum and expand into it.

 Sometime back on Matt Cutts blog mentioned that Google is testing new techniques to fight paid links affecting their search engine results.

According to Google webmasters who choose to sell text links on their website should use some method to dislose it to the search engines. More small webmasters use text link ads to generate revenues from their websites.

Its ironic how Google is using webmasters to serve its purpose and sting them back when its jobs is done.

Most of these text links are bought by search engine optimization firms to promote websites in search engines. Its easy for Google to say paid links are bad, but the content that Google serves comes from these webmasters, the ad revenues on Google search engnes should be shared with webmasters too then.

Instead of bettering their own search engine to counter these problems they are resorting to arm twisting whihc will never work.

But this brings me to the main point, has Google become too strong and godlike than we need? The answer is yes.

Something’ gotta give, maybe another good search engine or other ways of finding information on the web so that webmasters can create and sell content like they want rather than how Google tells them to.

As seth godin mentions marketers want to reach the unreachable, maybe something that helps them do that on the web too.

Found on seth’s blog orginally from guardian
1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.

Moslows Pyramid

In a conversation with Steve harmon wos a well known startup evangelist i realised how entreprenship has a relationship with maslow’s law.

According to maslow confidence achievement freedom comes at the top of te pyramid and security at the bottom.

Every entreprenur knows that freedom confindence and acievement comes before security for him