Tag: TechCrunch50

  • Cause and Effects

    Sometime back I’d written about the potential of the net, and especially the latest community version to do good to humanity. One of the startups that was presented at TC50 (had written about TC 50 in the last post) was CauseCast. Its aim is to bring ten non profit companies into the spotlight every month. How does it do this? By getting celebrities involved, and communicating about the companies through videos, events, and showcasing the activities it does. Every activity has its own celebrity who champions the cause. The causes are broadly divided into animals, arts, community, environment, health, human rights and youth. They also have contextual news for each category. For example, I saw a  news item on Army killings in Manipur under Human Rights. The best part is how it involves the user community. The user can make a portfolio of the causes he has donated for. Over a period of time the list would start reflecting the performance of the companies. The portfolio can also be publicised using a widget on the user’s blog, for example. 

    There are ways for brands to get involved in philanthropy too, in ways which make business sense. Philips has a wonderful program, referred to as ‘philanthropy by design’ which is aiming at social innovation, designing things that help bridge the gap between technology and people. In what’s a very long term vision, it tries to “provide people the means of generating the income necessary to pay for your products.” There’s an interesting Indian piece of this here, which explains how this designing is tied up with employment opportunites and micro financing. The ICICI effort is more than a month old, but is in context. ICICI tied up with an NGO named Dignity Foundation, and created a portal DignitySecondCareers.org, whose aim is to “provide the retirees a platform to explore opportunities that will enable them to continue to utilize their expertise and to encourage them to lead an active post-retirement life.” (via WATBlog).

    As the examples show, these initiatives may not be the cash cow projects in terms of revenue, but the effect it has on the social and human side of life, and the equity it can thereby create for the brand is immense. With some tweaking in the organisation’s mindset/perspective, it can gain tremendous long term benefits.

    Mashable has a good read on starting local support systems, and again, bridging the gap between the real world and social media.  Speaking of local causes, I happened to come across Rang De (via HeadStart), a non profit organisation that has set up a Peer to Peer (P2P) lending platform to connect the socially conscious with those who are financially disadvantaged. “Rang De’s mission is to make microcredit accessible to all by lowering interest rates by doing things differently.” I went through the site, and their model is win-win for both parties – the lender and the borrower. Yes, you would get better returns if you rode the sensex waves, but hey, if that’s the criterion, this endeavor is not for you. I think the concept, like Kiva, is amazing and begins to address India’s substantial need for micro credit very well.  The geographical spread is right now limited to Maharashtra and TN, but its quite scalable, I think (i already saw 3 towns about to be added).  I am going to try Rang De out very very soon, and shall update on my experience. Meanwhile, on an immediate basis, I’m playing the quiz, in this very cool effort – HelpBihar.in, by Quasar Media and Cadence to help those affected in Bihar. Go on, do your bit.

    A few days back, we (my wife and I) made what some might call a strange decision. We chose to go through Give India, rather than Helpage, both are non profit organisations operating in roughly the same space, though Helpage is more focused. The strangeness comes from the fact that Give india takes a percentage of the sum we give for covering its expenses, Helpage doesn’t mention that. The value it adds, and the reason we shifted loyalty was because it sends us a mail every month (or whenever you make a donation) giving us the details of exactly how and on whom the money was spent. While Helpage’s site is far better designed than Give India, the latter has a web 2.0 characteristic I value – transparency. I guess even when we save humanity, we have changed such that we need some accountability. 😐

    until next time, be human

  • Twitter – the official version

    There were some pretty interesting new things that came out at TechCrunch50 last week. TC50 was a conference that took place from September 8-10, 2008 where 52 of the ‘best’ startups were launched in front of an audience that consisted of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, and press. I guess that would be bleeding edge. I followed it, thanks to some excellent coverage by StartupMeme. And that’s where I read about Yammer.

    Yammer intrigued me because of its utterly simple premise of ‘Twitter for business’. Where Twitter asks ‘What are you doing’, Yammer asks ‘what are you working on?’ I was even more intrigued because that’s a question LinkedIn has been asking for sometime now.  While the premise is simple, it does create some interesting new propositions – it only allows logins through official mail ids, making it quite secure, it lets users start their company network, invite people, and then serves as a database with individual profiles and conversations. For any user, it would be like a Twitter limited to his colleagues. All this is free, and if the organisation wants to play admin, it has to pay. Yammer already has Blackberry and iPhone apps. Apparently its demand was such that about 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

    And then Yammer just went ahead and won TC50. Chris Brogan smartly notes that the Twhirl client + a laconi.ca backend would amount to the same thing, with the added advantage that Twhirl also allows tabs of Twitter and Friendfeed. RWW just ripped the Yammer model threadbare.

    Now, I see some contradiction in all this. Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity, and a quite transparent way of communicating, and sharing. There is no officiating, there is nobody looking over your shoulder. To me, Yammer sounds a lot like Intranet 2.0, and assuming that organisations do allow it, later, if the organisation takes admin charge, I don’t know how many employees will still be comfortable using it. And why would organisations want control in the first place, if the idea is conversation? I’m wondering whether the existence of Yammer will make a Twitter enterprise solution irrelevant.

    There’s been some stuff happening over at Twitter too. The recent coverage of a funeral via Twitter led to questions about privacy issues. (via RWW) My take is that in a social environment, you avoid people whose conversations you don’t like, just like in the real world. In the long term, it will help people decide what they talk about and how. I’d mentioned two tools in my last Twitter post. A cool tool for marketeers – Twitterise, and Twiggit, a good mashup of Twitter and Digg. I came across two more tools – Tweetburner, a sort of feedburner for Twitter which could be a great tracking tool for brand and PR guys. Read more about it here, and Dwigger, another Twitter+Digg tool, but different from the earlier one i mentioned. In this you can paste a twitter message URL, or a new Dwigger only message, all in the by now familiar 140 characters, and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. Hmm, more on that here. I also found a personally useful tool, which gives an analysis of your Twitter usage. They have done it using Yahoo Pipes, and rendered it using the Google Chart API. Very interesting. Check it out here. Meanwhile, Mashable has just posted their review on Fidj.it, ‘a micro-blogging service that’s like a Twitter and Pownce mashup.’ Shall check it out soon.

    To conclude, there are more and more twitter tools being developed for different user needs. If Yammer actually becomes a huge success, through some radically fresh employer attitude, I’d like to see a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users. It could be quite an awesome combination.

    until next time, feeling fidgety already?