Of love, life and the internet

Hello folks (plural is optimistic, given that the analytics predict all of 0.23 of a person reading this post today)

As the London summer sun’s been kind the last week, I’ve been doing my own wandering around and thought I’d share some bits:

Two new startups that I like

• bookfresh - You know how you like making online reservations for your restaurant online. Well, this allows you to book an appointment for ‘anything’ - your barber, plumber, dance class, psycho- therapist… open APIs, SaaS model…  watch out for these guys.
• aardvark - enabling human touch to online queries through your network of friends. check what pluggdin has to say. Quite a cool bot.

News from the week

• alootechie - games2win getting 13mn visitors a month
• alootechie - komli says CTR is not effective measure for success of online marketing (surprise surprise)
• Google blog - Adsense for mobile launched..
• Tech Crunch - iporn is finally here with iphone 3.0 (maybe now my SEO will kick in and this blog will get more hits!)

Blog of the week - www.gapingvoid.com. Cartoons on the back of business cards. Is this the new Dilbert?

Acronym of the week - HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)… ever noticed how decisions are taken in a corporate setup?… Ashok would know a thing or two about ’stakeholder management’ in big companies

Take from the week - Wanna be a millionaire? Think of any micro business process that is done by any and every business out there.. from that super set…think of the ones that can be done online…  can you create that process into a service through an open API based model? for e.g. appointy or google calendar offers the calendar process as a service, bookfresh offers reservations and scheduling, hmmm… top of my head here are some ideas… voice mail? employee reference check?

(the author knocks his head back as he visualises the millions pouring in.. and decides to celebrate with strawberry youghurt)

Wikipedia - A widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML -based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation

Righto. umm.. err - so what was that again? Basically you know the ‘BBC’ or ‘joke of the day’ box you see on igoogle - that’s an example of a widget. So what’s so cool about that again? Technical details aside - here’s what’s so revolutionary about widgets.

Media Variety - A widget can take just about any media type… text, pics, video, audio, flash based games. Which reminds me of one of my favourite widgets - super mario (Yes! you can actually play right here!)

800K installs of this widget and growing

Omnipresence - It can go anywhere and everywhere. You don’t have to code again… and it’s got the poetic beauty of of drag and drop. Imagine you have this brand new video you want to show the world. You put it up on your website and you wait for people to come and see it. AAh…. what if people could take a copy of the video with them and deposit it all over the internet… on facebook, on their blog, on rediff, on in.com … etc - check out this radio player

Now - you’ve never heard of this station before… but at one glance I’ve already found 150K people who have installed music widgets like this.

Monetisation Don’t wait for those eyeballs on your site. Embed that advertisement in your widget. Whatever the topic, whereever you are, let the long tail take your widget for a ride. Instead pumping in PPC dollars to pull visitors… your widget will get the impressions and clicks.

Here’s a widget for my blog. Click on ‘Get Widget’ and take it everywhere with you.. You can probably see the ad in between

Measurement Analytics aren’t too far behind… data on number of installs, views, demographics/ geographies… you’ll know whether your campaign is hitting home or not.

So - if you’ve read down till here then congratulations. You’ve completed Widget 101. Now the sales pitch

Gaboli helps Indian content publishers, advertisers and enterprises get more bang for their buck by widget creation, distribution, monetisation and measurement. If any of the above interests you - we’d be glad to help you widgetise your assets.

(PS - the blog took 2 days cause i kept playing the mario game in between.
PPS - i just made up the phrase ‘widgetise your assets’.. sounds quite cool doesn’t it?)