Facebook vs Twitter series 12/800: Twitter is down from FB hunting?

Sitting inside a conference room at Twitter, BlackBerry in hand, Kevin Thau is all business.In his first interview since taking charge of the San Francisco technology companys mobile business development a month ago, Thau is confident that cellphones will play a crucial role in helping the messaging service make money.

The four-year-old company, which has raised more than $35 million from Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and others, offers its service free of charge, and hasn’t yet figured out how to generate revenues.

Thau, 36, says thats about to change. He says the number of text messages passing through Twitters platform has grown 1,000% in the last year. Add to that the fact that users are texting more substantive observations and opinions in real time, and the company has a valuable information database it can sell to businesses.

Thau says Twitter is developing a range of analytics and metrics products and services built around the information contained in “tweets,” the e-mail and text messages that pass through its platform. “We can measure the tweets,” he says. “Were trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those.”

Thau, however, didnt say when Twitter plans to sell these services or how much it will charge for them.

Its an interesting business model, but can Twitter survive selling analytics and other services? “When it comes to enterprises, absolutely,” says Jeremiah Owyang, a social computing analyst with Forrester Research ($FORR ) . “I just got off a call with a client thats asking about how to engage on Twitter. There’s definitely interest.”

via ‘Forbes’

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India's new boom – Infrastructure, Lifestyle and Entertainment

If you have been following the India story closely, India’s new developments are focussed on Infrastructure and Retail along with giant leaps in the Entertainment business. You can look closely at the India stories at http://advantages.us/inframils to get a flavor of what’s happening. 

ADA Reliance (BIG entertainment) has today announced details of its venture with Dreamworks (Steven Spielberg) planning a 40% stake in the final entity capitalised at approx $830 million ($1b at USD rate of Rs. 40) with Disney holding another 15%. The Company holds a target of producing 5-6 films a year. BIG already has agreements with Nicholas Cage’s Saturn, Jim Carrey’s JC23, George Clooney’s Smokehouse, Chris Columbus’s 1492 Pictures, Tom Hank’s Playtone and Brad Pitt’s Plan B among others

On the other hand Retail Lifestyle businesses are increasingly attracting investors with Rabobank’s India Agribusiness Fund picking up a 25% stake in Kishore Biyani’s Aadhaar Retail. Modern retailing businesses in India are predominantly located in cities with FDI restrictions except for Cash & Carry Businesses (100%) and Single Brand retail (51%) Rural Markets may grow at a faster pace at least on the Drawing board. One such project which extends Bangalore’s urban footprint to Bidadi is the Innovative Film City which also showcases the marriage of the rural and the urban as Bangalore expands to the West and the East and remains the fastest growing City in India. The problems on the ground remain. While the new real estate projects are trying to make a strong statement, the depression blues have not gone anywhere. In the showcased retail fund in ET today, for example, apart from Rabo Bank, the other investors are the usual suspects, IFC Washington a couple of /developed/semi developed state development bank(s) and institutions and select private investors. Where is Investor access? Why is it still on the government to make it happen? The FDI limits and the others are fairly rational policies..but where are the investors? Why are global investors so selective about projects? What does it take for them to find out ground realities and put it in the appropriate framework? At the end of the day India’s share in the Emerging Markets Indices is just 5% and emerging Markets worldwide probably get less than 20% of the global capital flows. One Federal Stimulus by Obama will be enough to keep US bankrupt for the next decade. I am not sure we are doing this right.

Nanos will roll into homes by July end and IPL teams are already applying for trademarks as it looks set to become the greatest sporting extravaganza in the world, already ranked at #2 behind the NFL season in the USA. The 3G challenge will tear at Telecom companies’ profits in the coming years ( MTNL has managed 1000 subscribers in its sneak rollout) while public divestment targets were also subdued in the budget but are firming up. The Global ID cards will be implemented pretty slowly, starting off as a Central database, depending of departmental initiative to share information from tax to passport and BPL ration cards, credit card data and other biometric features to enable security and duplicate allocations etc. 

Health and Education have just recently been provided a long lost policy focus. But these investments will also yield success only when the fully integrate into India’s new Lifestyle Economy. Today the same investments are required in the US and the developing world. We need roads, we need power supply, we need an educated performing population and we need affordable healthcare. 

There are other things to be done. To quote the Policy pages of The Economic Times ( pg. 11, Arvind Mayaram) – While investments in roads, ports, airports and urban amenities have a cascading effect on the virtuous cycle of stimulating demand..the impact is the quickest and most spread out through investment in tourism infrastructure. India received just 5.37 million foreign tourists as compared to 57.6 million in Spain. Tourism arrivals grew during the recession worldwide as well.  

Global collaboration and Private enterprise cannot function without the appropriate investment infrastructure either. Investment flows are still uneven and the tenets of this new dream unpostulated. The new web has however found an entry point in global business with increasing discussions on structuring the global memes that bring in change. The question is, as they say in Hindi – Kaise hoga? How will we make it happen!

India’s ICICI Bank is redesigning itself, taking more control of Investment Banking and Venture Capital business while private sector banking players are watching from the sidelines with Kotak Bank and Yes Bank not having the underwriting power or the global reach to finance and provide institutional support to those like the Innovative Film City in Bangalore or even others in and around New Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore and the growing cities of the country making this new boom more a story on paper yet than on the ground. It will be private enterprise that will win in the end with divestments from the government netting probably Rs 50,000 crores to the government to provide the support ( current target is firming up at Rs 15000 Crores or $ 3.15 billion)

This is our story and we have to make it happen. When it does happen it will be a sterling surprise for India’s citizens. One budget cannot make it happen. But all of us can. And we have already decided to make it happen. Onward we move after Outsourcing, to new avenues for progress and growth. Will the Banking sector step up to the requirement? Will new social media bring in more than awareness and readership? How will we move forward? This is not about enabling policy. This is about hard investments. Anyone who can make a successful investment in India’s Lifestyle story will be able to create a successful brand and a successful business empire. Anyone who supports Private Consumption will have the right project skills to win for Team India. 

Tags: Global Investing, BRIC, Emerging Markets, India, India Infrastructure, Retail Lifestyle, Infrastructure, urban infrastructure, rural infrastructure, Power, Roads, Entertainment, Advantage zyaada, zyaada, zyakaira, Lifestyle Economy, Amitonomics

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The new Pepsi logos

You already heard, and it wasn’t shaking twitter and facebook..but the Tropicana Orange juice logo just got withdrawn and back to the traditional one with the orange. And the ‘Marketrazzi’ like zyaada used email and (my thought waves) to push the envelope and tell YUM and PEP that the new brand designs were flawed.

There has been a lot of similar talk of the new smiling face of Pepsi (see below) and not so much of their social strategy ( remember sobe diet , it was a big twitter on superbowl time with gator) They are obviously under fire for the social web has empowered voices that were killed by the health revolution ( I am told, it is still on at Pepsi, because of my compatriot CEO Ms. Indra Nooyi )

here is an extract directly from the  bnbranding.com team :

Great design speaks for itself. You don’t need a physics thesis to explain it. It just works.

My 11 year-old daughter likes the new Pepsi logo. (Says it makes her happy.)  And now that I’ve read the exhaustive brief, I know why…

It’s a smiley face! An overanalyzed, underwhelming, million dollar smiley face. It even comes in a variety of grin sizes. (Apparently regular ol’ Pepsi gets a smaller grin than the newer versions of Pepsi, like Pepsi Max. Whatever that is.)

Pepsi’s going to spend more than a billion dollars redoing all their packaging, vending machines, trucks, POP materials and everything else. The new logo’s going to be EVERYWHERE!

So I’m kinda glad Arnell changed the old wavy logo into a smiley face. I’m just not sure about their methods.

Actually, it was Pepsi and it still looks like a very soft target out on the web but this brand insight has changed my moind, though i still remain all things coke at heart.

more from the blokes at brandinsightblog.com

The 27-page design brief entitled “Breathtaking” reads like a scientific white paper loaded with marketingese and unprecedented levels of highly creative BS. In fact, Fast Company Magazine called it branding lunacy…

“Every page of this document is more ridiculous than the last ending with a pseudo-scientific explanation of how Pepsi’s new branding identity will manifest it’s own gravitational pull.”

The L.A. Times was equally critical:

“Behold, then, the scattered and burning debris field of one of corporate America’s most misbegotten image makeovers… According to the brief, the new Pepsi logo lies along a trajectory of human consciousness that includes in its arc the Vastu Shastra, a 3,000-year-old Hindu architectural guide; Pythagoras (the Golden Section); the Roman architect Vitruvius; the Fibonacci series; Descartes; and Corbusier.”

Oooookay.

Get a load of  it at:  http://drop.io/pepsipdf/asset/pepsi-gravitational-field-pdf

Well, i can guess the criticism directed at me as well, because i don’t like to muddy waters when someone else is equally bright and so there is less of authorship in my blogs than elsewhere, ( it also helps me concentrate on zyaada ‘s social strategy and branding exercises and attend to my work..but i believe that even if they do change the logo back it wouldn’t hurt to love this logo.

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Burger King campaign targets all groups, regardless

zyakaira notes: this should now probably be a bank campaign punch strategy..an all you can eat account with safe underwriting ..if bank of america far behind ( they had a great in-store ad just a few months back, the day obama got elected!

In an effort to keep making horrible ads that have nothing to do with whatever Burger King’s brand identity is they’ve come out with this pile of crap:

Let’s not forget their past insulting work here, Mexican get sizzled, and here, Slap that booty.

Obviously the only branding strategy Burger King can come up with is to be controversial. Brilliant.

identity guru writes: So I’m out of the Burger King loop. They obviously want people in the business to write negatively about them because what women is gonna run out and buy this sandwich now? And do men really think they’ll get a blow job? No, the only thing Burger King wants is press, so stop giving it to them, they don’t deserve it.

Ads are meant to do one thing…sell product, period.

via Branding Blog

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New advantages.us family additions

The lighter web site from http://advantages.us is now instantly available on your mobile. This is thanks to the amazing instant mobilizer with the new dotMobi sites. Do try it out and let us know. Also, my Markets and Branding blog is similarly co-hosted by instantmobilizer at zyaada.mobi
 
http://twitterone.com remains ‘Social Networking and New markets at http://twitterone.com. There ain’t a better place than dotcom..
 
Bookmark http://newadvantages.mobi and http://socialone.mobi on your mobile browser and iphones
 
Amit Mittal
On the web Advantage ‘zyaada’ http://advantages.us/zya

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What a play that was!

Did you see Shane Warne in action yesterday? The man was thoroughly lost and broken. Abhishek Nayar made it happen for Mumbai. Almost. And then Nayar got out at 35. The same yesterday someone did for the Bangalore Challengers match – Got out at 35. But those who stayed on with a strike rate of 300 and above! Hats off to Ross Taylor for his 81 off 33. Hayden with the Orange Cap and not to forget Adam Gilchrist and our own Gautam Gambhir and Sachin Tendulkar. Viru has a lot of catching up to do, if he wants to..we can go on and on but this is a prestigious one, IPL

Thinking if I can help tsunami victims somewhere, till then it is the #IPL in South Africa. Check and Please participate in this poll

Who will make it to the finals?