Moi Moi Nokia

Today I had my last day at Nokia. The acquisition of cellity by Nokia brought me to this company known as the world’s largest handset manufacturer. I met many interesting people from various backgrounds and countries and also got into the Finnish way of corporate life. Now it is time to move on and start something new rather than keep working on exciting projects.

Leaving Nokia also means leaving Berlin, most likely currently the most amazing city in Europe. This city is changing so fast and so much creativity is currently located there (the relatively low living costs and the party scene support this very much).

Moi Moi Nokia and Moin Hamburg!

Questions and Answers

facebook has joined the Q&A game. But what does the rise of those question and answer sites mean and where are they useful?

Well for facebook it seems quite clear, because they want to get the brands to use more facebook as the best way to communicate with their user (and thus spend their marketing budget for facebook campaigns). Most of the other sites in this field are more keen about the unique content which means in return more Google traffic (longtail).

So these sites are doing the job most forums where doing in the past and it seems to work (so many people must have so much time…). Anyway I really think they are useful in terms of answering everyday life questions. But for the questions that need expert opinions and thus quality answers this just doesn’t work. If you have ever looked at the answers in the medical field or any technical sophisticated field it is quite scary (sometimes even dangerous) what you read.

Expert sites are kind of the answer to this problem, but they try to charge for an answer I don’t know how useful it might be (upfront payment). I think the companies itself should support places for answering very specific questions for free and let the brands pay for the service. This would be better for the user, the brands who can position themselves in a very specific situation and for Google traffic anyway. I am 100% sure that people are more likely to refer to an expert opinion than to another Q&A site and this means that these links could drive even more traffic to the expert site.

Focused expert Q&A site

A focused site doesn’t require much work in the long run (expect for the medical field). You just need to post the answers public and after a while I am pretty sure most of the questions have been answered and you just need to answer with an email that has already been written before.

Here is an intersting post about Quora, a larger site from the US.

habits x time x location = recommendation

These days many start-ups are focused on location based services or making money with the local merchants (many of them in the coupon field). Well, even though everyone is pointing to the incredible big yellow pages business most of might seem to not really think about two mayor issues:

1)      The local merchant

The owner of a Pizza restaurant or a fashion shop around the corner is a professional in his field, but (most of them) have very little understanding of online business and how much they can spend on user acquisition (average turnover per customer, customer life time value etc…). Until a couple of years ago there was only the representative of the yellow pages and maybe one local newspaper/magazine that were asking for some of his money in return of the shops appearance in their media. But today this person is getting calls/visits not only from the Yellow Pages guy, but also from Qype, Foursquare, Groupon, Google and numerous of other companies. But his Media Budget is limited and for the services itself the User Acquisition Costs are relatively high (without subscription it wouldn’t be affordable). However, he needs to decide to whom he should give his money to. I bet that most merchants are still going for the Yellow Pages since they know the sales rep very well and the rest of them might go with the bigger and well known ones. So why should this person deal with another partner?

(My personal view on this that it is time for a local business hub – someone who is doing the sales and then distributing this through the different channels. Look at all the groupon clones and how much they have to spend on sales.)

The merchant wants to spend his money wisely and he wants to drive more customers into his business. That’s why it also important to take the customer into this view, because without the right audience the merchant doesn’t even considers paying for it.

2)      The user

I really like sites who help me to discover things around me that otherwise would be literally invisible to me. So the review sites are doing a great job for me. Coupons are only relevant to me if I know the business, because I don’t want to spend anything on a bad service/restaurant etc.

The big advantage of the new services is not that I can search for something but that I get recommendations of what I might like. This is real value to me as user- Location based service should be more focused on recommendation than search (even though a good search is mandatory). So this leads me to the headline of this post: one killer feature for mobile lies in this business. If a service knows my behavior (I love Italian restaurants, but I really don’t like Indian restaurants) it can match this information with its database and check for similar results. This is very closely tight to my location and to make it even more useful to the time of the day. So this means:

Habits x time x location = recommendation

Such a service would be my daily guide and hopefully would surprise me with many new ideas about where to go. And this could drive many customers to new places. This is only possible with a large database companies like Yelp in the US or Qype in Europe have. So to all the Start-Ups in this field: Create a compelling product for the user, focus on the mobile usecase and when this is working it might be much easier to ask the local merchant for some money.

Rules for Business Success

I just found an printed copy of a Gigaom article about the the Rules for Business Success in Any Market by Paul Polak. I do not fully agree with his point, that he doesn’t invest in a company that can’t pay for itself in a year, but he made some good points about the customer. I very much like his attitude about listing to your customers. Here is some of his wisdom:

1. Go where the action is. “Spend significant time with your customers. This is how you learn what they need,” he says. Not hours, days. Polak lived with his farmers for 6 months.

2. Interview at least 100 customers a year. You do it. Not an employee. Listen to what they have to say. “Too many entrepreneurs build the product they want to build — not the one that’s needed.”

3. Context matters. If your solution isn’t right for the context, for example, if it costs too much for the customers you’re trying to serve, you won’t succeed.

4. Think big. Act big.

5. Think like a child.

6. See and do the obvious. Others won’t, which is opportunity for you.

7. Leverage precedents. If somebody has already invented it, don’t do it again.

8. Scale. Your business must have potential to scale. Remember, your market must include at least 1 million customers.

9. Design to specific cost and price targets. Not the other way around. (Celeste: it means — Do not price to your design, design to the price you need to hit to make your product appropriate to your customer.).

10. Follow practical three-year plans. Two years is too short. Ten is too long.

11. Visit your customers again. And again. “Any successful business in this country is based on talking to your customers all the time. A good CEO spends half his time ‘in the field.’”

12. Stay positive. Don’t be distracted by what other people think.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/11/01/paul-polak-15-rules-for-business-success-in-any-market/

About success and failure

I found this on Venturebeat. An intersting video from Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins about entrepeneurship and failure. I am glad that he is not only looking at the States but also on Western Europe and Asia.