Why are transnational webportals invariable based in USA?
This is the discussion and the comments to the question i posed in the IIMB alumni group at linkedin.com
Why is it that web-portals with multi-country users invariably based in the USA? What could be the barriers for and Indian or say a German website for having globally distributed user group?
I looked up the details of top 200 website on alexa.com. Looking at the country based usage I could see a pattern emerging. I could broadly classify the websites into 3 categories.
1. Free with global users: (google, yahoo, etc)(long tailed distribution of users) almost all websites in this category were based in USA
2:Payment and Global Usage:(eBay, Amazon) (Broad but short tail) Mostly based in USA.
3.Country/Language specific: (Baidu.com, rediff.com, yandex.ru)(Spike distribution) Based in individual countries.
What surprises me that most of the websites in category 1 & 2 are based in USA!!! Surprising because internet is supposed to remove all barriers. A person visiting a website does not need to know where the website is – but still we have this marked concentration of global websites in the USA!
I wonder why! I have a few hypothesis. I would like to know your opinion on the cause.
The answer to this question will i believe be of profound strategic implication.
Comments:
1. One simple reason is that US Traffic converts more than any other geography. This simply means that a user from the US is more likely to have a monetary transaction online than one from any other geography.
So really, its just a demand and supply issue. Google, Yahoo are free but make most of their revenue from online advertising. So is the case with Facebook (it just kicked off Microsoft as its Advertising Partner because it doesn’t wana share any of its Ad Revenue) or any other portal.
Why is online retail (for example- groceries) in India not that prevalent. The mindset in most of the population is to gather information online, but not to convert it into an actual purchase.
2. How many Indian/ US authors in management, per employee billing of IBM Vs. Infosys?
We do not understand strategy or strategic implications !
Joseph Manuel, www.firstdiscipline.gaia.com/blogs
3. It may be true that we do not understand the strategic Implications, the situation being as it is; what do we do now?
If i want to internationalize my website, what constraints do i face? and how do i overcome the hurdle?
4.Go ahead and do it. Winner stakes ALL
Strategise. Look for allies, partners, show them that there is more than what meets the eye in doing it
5. I think its the ecosystem issue. US has a great ecosystem which fosters technological innovation.
Paul Graham has an interesting essay on this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
Business 2.0 Continued
I just chanced upon this talk by Fred Wilson @Google Talks. It felt like dejavu of my previous post. Fred talks about the disruptive impact of Internet on business models. Then goes on to speculate which industries would be vulnerable to disruption. I highly recommend that you watch this video..
Here is the link
http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks#p/u/84/mAk1MX3ES_g
Business 2.0: Who’s next?
Internet has fundamentally changed the way we conduct our business. The impact though has not been uniform. Some traditional business have embraced it and are thriving well (banks). While many old business models have become obsolete (travel agents). Internet technology has further given rise to new business models.
There are many businesses and social areas which remain stuck to the old way of doing things. My guess is that each of these areas will eventually see a fundamental change. The task now is to identify the sectors which are more vulnerable to transformation and transform it. Any one such transformation will unleash great value for the society and the agent who brings out this change.
Some areas that should be scrutinize under this lens are
i) Education: How do we most efficiently educate the billions.
ii) Property Markets: How do we reduce the brokerage charges to minimum.
iii) Poverty: How do we create opportunities of income for everybody?
There will be many more areas. If you can think of any more .. write about it in the comments.
What is the purpose of Examination?
Every educational system inevitably has exams! So why is it so important?What utility does the exam system have for learning?
To my mind there are two very basic reasons. First exams certify to the learner and to the world that the student has learned the subject. Secondly it provides incentive to students to put sustained effort towards learning the subject. While the above two reasons are valid, examinations also distorts the learning process. It is the only reason a naturally curious child likes to learn but eventually end up hating the school system.
I would say that exams are a very costly way of measuring learning. This is because the exam system distorts the very purpose of learning. Ideally education is supposed to develop a deeper understanding of the world, but under exam system, getting good grades becomes an end into itself.
In physics when we measure a physical state, the rule is that the measurement process should be the least disturbing, otherwise the measurement is not dependable.
It is therefore imperative that we devise a way of measuring learning which is least invasive. I believe that the present technologies can be leveraged to design such a system.
How to become a billionare in a short time: have all the golden eggs without killing thegoose?
Today I was talking to a 10 year old boy, I was trying to explain to him the concept of discounted cash flow. I came up with a very intuitive way of explaining it using the fable of “the goose that laid golden eggs”.
Suppose you are the guy who has a goose that lays golden eggs every day. But you are not satisfied! You cannot wait for the whole thousand days to have thousand golden eggs. So what do you do? Do you kill the goose to extract all the eggs at once! Well that would be stupid, that is what the story says. So is there any other way to get rich in one day? Fortunately there is! The solution is to sell the geese today. Why? because the valuation of the geese will include the total number of eggs that it is going to lay in its whole lifetime discounted at a certain rate.
So how do you use this insight to make billion dollars in a short time. Well start a company with profits in the range of $100 millions and then sell the company. The valuation of the company will be in the range of $billion. Woah!
Idea#1: Tree of Knowledge
Context: The sum total of data on the Internet is huge and continues to grow at an exponential rate. This creates a problem of making sense of all these data. What do we do to navigate through mountains of data? Use google search or other search engine!
Problem: Google search gives us millions of results in a list format. The problem with lists are that they are i) not the most suitable format for human cognition. ii) One cannot see instantaneously what other concepts/webpages are near a particular node. iii) This impaired visibility means that we cannot look at the global structure of the knowledge ie we cannot see the context of a particular page to the overall knowledge, we will never know what we don’t know!
The Idea!!! : Map all the data on the internet on a Giant Multi-scale Visual Graph (Tree or any other suitable topology)[1]. Much like a “Google Map” where one can zoom in from the highest level view to progressively finer resolution with greater details. When viewing a particular node one will be able to see the nearest connecting context.
Why this blog?
Hi Friends!
Welcome to the Globe Ideas!
Let me first introduce myself !
I am Amrendra Kumar a PhD student in Management at IIM Bangalore. Like they say “every person on this planet is unique” , so what is unique about me? I have been a hoarder of information/knowledge through out my life. As a byproduct of which I occasionally get these Eureka! moments. In those moments i seek people to share those nascent ideas before it gets lost in the melee of mundane thoughts inside my head. So far I have been putting fleeting ideas into a notebook, which i rarely look back. This blog is an attempt to preserve, share and develop those ideas.
As i said earlier that i am a hoarder of information, my interests are quite spread out. My recent interests are Education, Business Ideas, Economics (Information Asymmetry, Development Economics, Game Theory), Possibilities of Web 2.0, International Relations, Ideas for India, Ideas for Bihar and many more.
Hope you will find my ideas interesting enough to comment , critique and extend it.
You will know more about me as make more posts.
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