More than half of India’s population is younger than 25 years. By 2050, 39% of the U.S. population will be above 65, 53% in Germany and 67% in Japan. In India, only 19% will be above 65.
If India’s young population is well-trained and appropriate jobs are available, this will be an amazing demographic dividend that we can reap.
The companies that were at the forefront of the PC revolution in the 70s were SMEs. As the market grew, many of these companies grew to become gigantic enterprises, while some of them fell by the wayside. There are strategy lessons in the stories that we can learn from and apply in our businesses.
In 1975, the IBM 5100 was launched with an IBM proprietary CPU that had been developed internally. Its prices started at $9000. Designed for the mid-sized business, it took 2 years to develop. This was a major achievement, considering the computer industry at that point of time, and IBM’s history in developing mainframes.
The brilliant Ed Roberts ran an MSME called MITS with 20 employees. In 1975, his company designed and launched the Altair 8800 computer with an Intel CPU, and with a do-it-yourself kit. Designed for the hobbyists, its prices started at $439. Computers at that time were a series of lights and switches as input and output devices. The average user needed to first solder and assemble the machine, and then use machine language for programming and using the device.
Roberts was hoping to sell 200 units to break even, an unthinkably large amount. He had negotiated a bulk deal with Intel to get chips with minor surface defects for $75 instead of $360. Altair got lots of free publicity as the “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models”, and was deluged with thousands of orders.
Sensing an opportunity, a home-based company Traf-O-Data requested for a meeting with Roberts. Traf-O-Data was an MSME, with just 3 employees in 1975. Roberts was wiling to take a chance with the two young boys. They sold Altair BASIC to Roberts for an initial fee of $3000 and a royalty of $30 per copy. Roberts sold BASIC bundled with Altair for $75. The software was a work of love, and its founders and developers burnt midnight oil to deliver the product. However, many hobbyists simply borrowed the software instead of paying for it – software programs were not eligible for patents till 1981. Bill, the 20-year old founder of Traf-O-Data published appeals asking people to pay him for his software and not use it for free. In 1975, Traf-O-Data’s revenue was $16,005.
At $439, the Altair was just a break-even sale – the profit came from sale of memory boards and other add-ons such as BASIC. During the Altair’s brief life, 60,000 units were sold. MITS had the biggest exhibition spaces, sponsored conventions, had full page advertisements, and was a first mover. However, Roberts failed to keep up with its avalanche of orders for Altair that far exceeded projections – leading to a problem of plenty. Add-ons that were released were faulty and delayed (customers were offered refunds, but they wanted the computers). Other suppliers stepped in to capture the add-ons market. MITS’ distributorship model failed miserably. His cash flow got squeezed. Other companies stepped in to meet the market demand that Roberts had so successfully created. He was now competing with smarter businesses and marketing geniuses, all of whom launched a range of newer computers with better design, pricing and distribution.
By 1977, Roberts felt burned out. He was tiring of his management responsibilities, and sold MITS for $6 million to a larger hardware supplier. He walked away from the computer industry with his share of $2 million. He bought a large farm, became a farmer, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor.
The home-based Traf-O-Data went on to change its name as its focus changed from handling data from traffic counters to developing software for computers. The company was now called Micro-Soft. Microsoft’s revenues today are $70 billion per year, with profits of $23 billion. Its founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates are among the richest people on Earth, with net-worth of $13 billion and $59 billion respectively.
Altair 8800 sparked the computer revolution, but the company MITS and its founder Ed Roberts could not scale up – a problem that most SMEs face. They were brilliant innovators but not so great at business, and left the computer industry when it was still a baby.
Our Online Lead Generation services are designed to help you generate business leads from the internet.
You Pay Per Lead – pay only for the leads generated. The payment is thus linked to performance. This Lead Generation model is quite different from a PPC campaign model where a service provider would get paid more depending on the number of people who click on the advertising. Here, we get paid more depending on the number of leads that we generate, and not on the number of people who visit your website, or see your advertisement, or number of web pages.
After a detailed brief from you, where you tell us about your products and services, competitors, and business objective, we independently research and then setup an online lead generation campaign on your behalf. The potential customers will reach our pages created especially to capture leads for your business. Every lead that is generated will be logged into our system, or sent to you by email. The online lead generation campaigns would use the best of SEO, PPC, SEM and other online tools around websites created and managed by us to ensure that you start getting business leads from the first week itself.
Contact us to get started with our Online Lead Generation services.
We build Professional Real Estate Websites backed by a stable feature rich Real Estate CMS. The CMS (Content Management System) is web-based, and built on PHP and MySQL. You can use it to easily maintain a property website, be it a single property website, or a multi-property website of a real estate agency.
Unlike other software companies who sell a product, our service is backed with our own experience in using the Real Estate CMS every single day in our own Real Estate division at PropertyInIndia.co.in and its network. The CMS also powers the website of the Rotary club that we are a part of.
We build Professional Real Estate Websites backed by a stable feature rich Real Estate CMS, a web-based system built on PHP and MySQL.
With the surge in popularity of Social Media like Facebook and Twitter, more and more brands are putting in place dedicated people for Social Media Marketing. TripAdvisor, for example, has tens of millions of reviews and opinions by travelers. All reviews cant call your hotel the best in the world. Some will be negative :-)
Hotels do their best to get customers. They produce the best brochures, get expensive photographers to plan and shoot elaborate photos under the best lighting conditions with smiling models and well laid out tables and rooms, and hotel website designers develop beautiful hotel websites. Customers traditionally trusted hotel websites and brochures completely, but with increasing competition, some hotels spent a lot on the first step – beautiful websites, but forgot the most critical steps – maintaining a great hotel property with all the amenities promised, delivering excellent customer service from the moment the customer checks-in till the customer checks-out, and delivering value-for-money without ripping off the customer.
With the shift in power from the hotel to the consumer, many hotels have come under scathing attack from consumers. Negative reviews on TripAdvisor, Facebook and Twitter have embarassed hotels. Guests talking about rude customer service executives, dirty toilets, smelly rooms, stale breakfast, incorrect location description. Guests have uploaded realistic photos that customers trust more than the photos taken by the hotel.
If you have only positive reviews and none that are negative, customers may believe that the positive ones are fake. Monitor your Online Reputation to get fake reviews out, but respond quickly and maturely, and address the issues raised in negative reviews – Your customers will trust your ability to solve problems.
Many hotels will (and do) pay in some form to post positive reviews about their own property, and negative reviews about their competition. This will be done by paid employees or third party service providers. Customers will learn to give less importance to such tactics. The winning hotels will be the ones that focus on actually delivering excellent customer value and service. While this may not ensure that you will get only positive reviews, most of your customers will walk out happy, and that will ensure long term business !
The Azim Premji Foundation has developed a few hundred CD titles for classes 1st-8th in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and English to improve the quality of learning for the child. CDs are on numerous topics including Listening Skills, Grammar, Maths, Science, etc.
If you are with a school, or an NGO working with schools, get the school to apply directly to the Azim Premji Foundation. It is essential that the school has PCs, and preferred that the teachers have to be trained to use the CD as an effective supplement to classroom teaching. The e-learning content is available free of charge for any school that does not charge fees for its students and does not have restrictions on admissions on the basis of Religion, Caste etc.
Azim Premji is an Indian business tycoon, philanthropist, and chairman of Wipro, one of India’s largest software development companies.
The demand for video can only increase exponentially, especially as devices converge and connectivity improves globally.
A growing number of professional video content from established players is hitting the Internet, and advertising through Videos is only increasing. Videos on YouTube (YouTube was founded with $11.5m funding from Sequoia Capital, launched in 2005, and snapped up by Google in a year in an $1.5b all cash deal) are indexed very quickly for keywords (provided you add the keyword to the title of the video). Your video marketing investment can break through the clutter relatively easily on youtube than as a web page.
Businesses that include video that streams on PCs and mobile devices will be able to differentiate themselves.
Listing your hotel on Google Maps is one of the most critical tasks for a hotel Internet marketing manager. Its free, its easy. Here is how:
1. Check Google Maps to see if you are already listed. If you are, do not add a new listing – Google allows business owners to claim their listing.
2. Add your hotel to Google Places – you will need your busines information, contact information, photos, video, etc. Make sure you select the correct categories. Unlike plain vanilla websites, listings on Google Places are verified by google using a PIN that is sent by phone or postcard.
As usage of maps and location-based services on phones increases, this feature will drive more business to you. Early adopters will benefit from having a higher number of reviews. Since Google Places verifies listings by phone or postcard, customers will trust its results much more than listings verified by sending an instant auto email to a free email address. At some point, pricing information will also be added to Maps, making it the biggest driver of online bookings.
Before making a booking, the customer can see limited information about the hotel. Travelocity says “In order to preserve the secrecy of our Top Secret Hotels, we may have changed the descriptions for some of our hotels. You may be pleasantly surprised.”. typically, you will know the general location, star and basic information about the amenities.
Why it works for Travelocity:
Targets the price sensitive buyer:
You want best price, you get best price. The customer gets discounts of 40-55%. However, the Top Secret Hotel bookings are non-refundable and non-changeable.
Reduces shop hopping:
Chances of customers using Travelocity to check pricing, and doing the booking on a competing website drop as you dont know the hotel name until the booking is complete.
Travelocity Top Secret Hotels is a good example of showing how you can monetize your knowledge, especially in businesses where you are paid for your knowledge. Once you provide the information to the customer, there is no guarantee whether the customer will buy from you. Travelocity‘s Top Secret Hotels is one way to enure this knowledge is not passed on for free – a great tool in the knowledge economy.