"web" Archive

Google Fight

With over 200 million searches everyday -- not to mention a pending $15 billion IPO -- Google is the king of content on the web.

So, today, I saw an intriguing site (Google Fight) that compare the popularity of two words on the Internet. It's not end all evidence for anything but interesting, nonetheless.

• Free beats money by almost a 6:1 ratio.
• Happy beats sad by a 4:1 ratio.
• But Gates beats Gandhi by 6:1 ratio.

by Nipun Mehta on Apr 5 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Emptiness, Even with Emails

I often get asked how I preserve my sanity despite getting ~500 emails/day! The short answer is that I'm plotting an escape to the Himalayan caves. :) Long answer was something I wanted to write up, until I ran into a paper by Mark Hurst.

The crux of the strategy is this: keep your inbox empty.

In other words, clear out incoming e-mails before they pile up too high in the inbox. Delete most of them, file some of them (in mail folders or elsewhere), but most importantly, get them all out of the inbox before they really begin to pile up. Keep the inbox empty.

It may be a simple solution, but it's not easy. Achieving simplicity -- or emptiness, in this case -- takes time, practice, and continual improvement. It's difficult but better than the alternative: drowning in e-mails, causing the user to become less and less effective. Only an empty inbox will allow users to take full advantage of the benefits of e-mail.

Emptiness is always a powerful concept, whether it's an efficient Inbox, an artistic feng shui house design, a productive organization, or an enlightened personal journey.

by Nipun Mehta on Apr 8 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Soul of Money

She has refused seven figure checks for the hungry and yet raised over $100 million dollars. That's why Lynne Twist has the authority to talk about the Soul of Money:

You do not need to be wealthy to be a philanthropist; in fact, 88% of the money given to charities in the U.S. comes from individuals, not corporations. And, surprisingly, of this group 75% of these people make less than $150,000 dollars a year. And, philanthropy is not just about cold hard cash. Committed philanthropy enables people to invest their wealth, not only in dollar amounts but also with the energy of their intention, their resources and/or assets. Sometimes those resources are financial. Sometimes they are sweat equity and sometimes it’s one person’s devotion and passion to hold a vision for what’s possible.

by Nipun Mehta on Apr 29 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Just One Question For Bill

Matt Henning, one of four volunteers on the first CharityFocus project, told me recently that if he had one question of Bill Gates, it would be this: "If I was not concerned about money, but wanted to make a difference in the world to make it a better place, would you recommend that I work for Microsoft or for the Gates Foundation?"

Giving away billions of dollars is not an easy task, even if you're Bill Gates.

by Nipun Mehta on May 22 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

People to People

cShops project is hoping to radically shift paradigms of supply-chain and marketing -- use distributed volunteer base to destroy the operational overhead and a peer-to-peer outreach strategy to flip traditional marketing strategies on its head. This is why cShops outreach is significant, to paraphrase Seth Godin:

Advertisers spent the better part of the 20th century trying to control and measure and manipulate the spread of information--to count the number of eyes and ears that they could reach with a single message. But the most successful ideas are those that spread and grow because of the customer's relationship to other customers--not the marketer's to the customer. For years, this contradiction lay unresolved at the heart of American marketing. No longer.

Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.

by Nipun Mehta on May 23 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Changing the Way We Organize

I don't think "social entreprenuership" is the answer. This suppossed happy medium between corporate greed and saintly selflessless-ness is actually just a facade for people to do whatever they wanted anyways. I have watched social entrepreneurs -- myself being one of them -- for a while, and the problem with us is that no matter what the middle path is externally, we still continue our selfless service or for-profit mentality internally. At best, you have a MIT guy dropping out of corporate America to start Greyston Bakery and give employment to the poor or SF's own Mimi Silbert who used ex-cons to build a $30MM business from a $1000 loan. Unfortunately, that only scratches the surface. They bring in some relief, which is great, but the problems will manifest again and again. As Einstein said, "you can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created". If we operate in and propagate the same constructs that created these problems in the first place, we won't get a cure.

If you follow that logic all the way, you are left with what the sages say-- find the source of all problems, within you. That's really where I'm going with this, but I'm not quite as far as the sages. My suggestion is to change the rules of the game by changing the way we organize.

[ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on May 25 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Declaring Email Bankruptcy

I always wonder if someone else has an "email solution" that I don't know about. I'm practically a nobody but I have started to get about 700 email messages/day, with 400 spam. How in the world do the somebodies of the world manage email?

Lawrence Lessig, founder of the visionary Creative Commons, recently filed for email bankruptcy. He wrote, "Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail, I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy."

Hmmm. :) Combined with spam and viruses, I'm thinking of running organizations without any email aliases but rather make it all web-based (which, of course, the spammers will hack into, as they have with this blog).

The wonderful webs we weave. ;)

by Nipun Mehta on Jun 5 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Gujarat Earthquake

When the Gujarat earthquake on 26 January 2001 destroyed much of Kutch, tons of money poured in. I wondered about the effectiveness of this money, until I saw this post de-facto report from Geneva (pg 29-30 have a summary).

After any disaster, people and resources organize without planning into coordinated, purposeful activity. Everything happens quickly and a little miraculously. These self-organized efforts create effective responses long before official relief agencies can even make it to the scene. But, unfortunately, we still haven't fully grasped the power of decentralized self organization ... it takes a lot of trust to let go of control. :)

by Nipun Mehta on Jul 8 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

An Awesome Curse: Poverty and Digital Divide

It's an awesome curse, and at first look, it's hard to see how digital technology cooked up by some entrepreneurial do-gooders can relieve hunger or thirst or guarantee a better crop. No laptop, however cheap or durable, can compensate for India's lack of a nationwide power grid, or a comprehensive network of highways. But digital technology can deliver information -- information the rural poor desperately need -- about crop conditions, fertilizer prices, health care, and more. Reliable information can help India's poor stretch their resources -- to plant the right crops, deal with bureaucrats more effectively, operate on a level playing field with customers and merchants. The digital revolution in India is largely an information revolution.

--from Business Week article on 'The Digital Village', India's high-tech dynamos are turning more attention to the needs of the nation's countless poor.

by Nipun Mehta on Jul 10 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Power of Impossible Thinking

Peter McGinn and I generally meet for long board meetings for the Seva Foundation. Whenever we find each other during the coffee breaks, we tend to discuss organizational theory (he manages 3000 employees at his hospital in NY). This week, he sent me an intriguing article from Wharton, titled What’s Behind the 4-Minute Mile, Starbucks and the Moon Landing? The Power of Impossible Thinking.

Howard Schultz’s creation of Starbucks, Oprah Winfrey’s transformation of the talk show, the “strategic inflection points” that Andy Grove used to dramatically change Intel, all depended on challenging and transforming the current mental model. Over the past few years, the music industry lost tremendous amounts of revenue by clinging to an old model of delivering albums on CDs. In contrast, Apple Computer became a significant entertainment player by rethinking the model with the iPod and the 99-cent songs of iTunes. With fast, complex changes, making sense has become an essential skill for managers. As John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox and director of the Palo Alto Research Center, once commented, "In the old world, managers make products. In the new world, managers make sense of things."

by Nipun Mehta on Jul 14 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

The Corporation

Shawn, aka Shanti, dropped his career as a nuclear physicist to become a carpenter! Today, we were talking about the movie: The Corporation and how we are doing collectively what none of us really wants individually.

In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal “person.“ Imbued with a “personality“ of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation’s rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth. But at what cost? The remorseless rationale of “externalities”—as Milton Friedman explains: the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third—is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.

by Nipun Mehta on Jul 20 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

100,000 Hours of Work

I ran across this excerpt by Seth Godin:

What if everyone had guts like that? What if everyone reading this article realized that the point of our careers (2,000 hours a year, 50 years in a row, that’s 100,000 hours of work) isn’t to crank out yet another widget? What if, just maybe, we quit making stuff and started making a difference? [...]

Here’s the crux of the matter: organizations where the people doing the work are the very same people who are making the decisions are more likely to succeed in the long run. Just about all the sins of American business (from environmental despoliation to accounting fraud) can be pinned on the anonymous bureaucracy. Entrepreneurs can’t be anonymous—it’s your decision, your policy, your work, your business—and so you’re fast and honest, or you’re out. There’s nowhere else to pass the buck.

[ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on Jul 21 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Inspiring Signatures

I've had Gmail since its first week (courtesy of Eric and Deepak) but it was only until two days ago that they finally added a key feature -- signatures.

It's true that after a while, signatures get old. But what if you had an option to have a creative, randomized, unique signature everytime? What if you didn't even have to do the work for it? What if we created a repository of killer one-liners for inspiring causes (somewhat like Enlightening Messages), and then asked Gmail to create an option for users to sign up for dynamic signatures?

Imagine seeing stuff like this in the billions of emails that traverse the web daily:

People make money. Not the other way around.
Give back. www.justgive.org

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 2 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard researcher, builds an interesting thesis: professionally run and donor-funded organizations are trampling grass roots in America. As a result, elites dominate and democracy suffers.

Typically, all large movements lose the grassroots feel when they can't effectively decentralize or they get caught up building their brand. The web -- as Weinberger once described the web: small pieces, loosely joined -- has the potential to solve both problems.

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 8 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Fooled by Randomness

Naseem Taleb is a very interesting guy -- a stock options trader, an essayist, an observor of life. He studies randomness and sums up his work in one sentence: "We don't know that we don't know."

"Much of what happens in history", he notes, "comes from 'Black Swan dynamics', very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable 'outliers', while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them. We have a bad habit of finding 'laws' in history (by fitting stories to events and detecting false patterns); we are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced we are looking ahead."

"Why are we so bad at understanding this type of uncertainty? It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world."

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 16 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Seven Day Weekend

Ricardo Semler's favorite question is "Why?" Why do people routinely bring work home on the weekends but never go to the movies on a Monday afternoon? Why do we need to sit at the same desk every day? Why do we have to fill out time sheets or need an HR department to file them? Why are we interviewed by our bosses but never get to interview someone who wants to be our boss?

For the last twenty years Semler has been doing a lot more than asking questions -- he's actually been running a company by breaking every tenet in the traditional rule book. Semler encourages his employees to play hooky. He tells them not to bother with growth plans. Employees choose their own salaries, set their own hours, and have no job titles. Ridiculous? Inefficient? A recipe for chaos? In his book, Seven Day Weekend, he explains how.

Semler's ideas definitely work. They work so well, in fact, that his company, Semco, has grown from $35 million in revenue to $212 million in the last six years, and even with more than 3,000 employees, it has virtually no turnover.

His top six principles: [ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 18 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Social Enterprise, Social Good

I happended upon a nice thought in the online diary of Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. I'll paraphrase it here:

Thus far, we've seen two generations of social enterprise. The first generation looks for profits and redirects them towards social good. The second generation was where the very act of making a profit creates social good, a business with "positive externalities."

One wonders when we'll evolve to the third generation ... where there's no need for social good.

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 21 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Wisdom of Crowds

In Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

His rubric covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. Google, for instance, is smart because of its information from the "crowd". (See also the clever JellyBean Contest).

But in order for the crowd to be smart, it must satisfy four conditions: [ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 22 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Change This

Here's an excerpt of the manifest for ChangeThis:

In the old days, we had the time and inclination to consider the implications of a decision. Everyone wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry. At the same time, most conversations (and most arguments) were local ones, conducted between people who knew each other.

Today, it’s very different. Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one. Radio has become a jingoistic wasteland, a series of thoughtless mantras, repeated over and over and designed to fit into a typical commute. (more)

by Nipun Mehta on Aug 27 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Thinking Inside The Box

The Association for Computing Machinery has a great on-line magazine, Ubiquity, that published an interview with Andrew Hargadon, author of "How Breakthroughs Happen".

Hargadon's thesis is brilliant: Great ideas don't come from thinking outside the box; they come by recognizing good ideas that are already being applied in a different way -- that is, inside some other box. It is not especially helpful to tell someone to "think outside the box." How do they do that? Instead, suggest that they increase the number of boxes they are in and make connections between them. This is both an easier, more practical recommendation to follow and closer to the reality of how innovations are made.

by Nipun Mehta on Sep 10 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

To Don't List

Tom Peters turned 60 this year and wrote an article on 60 TIBs -- Things I Believe. Here's #48:

I once watched a highly energetic chief ripped asunder by a senior member of his board. “Richard,” the determined board member almost shouted, “you are smart, energetic, creative to a fault, perhaps even a genius. But much of your 'genius' is dissipated because you apply it to ten different things at a time, albeit with great skill.

"Let me tell you what you need," he concluded. "A 'to don't' list."

I don't know about "Richard," but for me that was a profound moment. Fact No. 1: We all have 50 genuine priorities. Fact No. 2: If we get even two Big Things Done in a six-year tenure on the current job, we will have had a...Great Ride. Axiom No. 1: Therefore, what we choose not to do (the sole subject of that "To Don't" list) is at least as important, or more important, as what we choose to do.

And, finally, effective "To Don't-ing" is far, far more difficult than effective "To Do-ing."

by Nipun Mehta on Sep 18 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

The Apple Way

Apple has a history of spreading ideas. Jesse's Garrett brilliantly picks Six Design Lessons from the Apple Store:

• Create an Experience. Not an Artifact.
• Honor Context.
• Prioritize your Messages.
• Institute Consistency.
• Design for Change.
• Don't Forget the Human Element.

I'm attaching Cliff Notes below. :) [ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on Sep 26 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Word of Mouse

An incredible testimonial of "word of mouse" power from this month's Wired:

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called 'Touching the Void', a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with the demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the NY Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueld recommendation, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

by Nipun Mehta on Oct 23 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

How Change Doesn't Happen

Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. And then write bestseller about it. That was his plan and Jim Collins did just that with 'Good to Great'.

He's spot on about how we change organizationally. But I would add that this is true even of our personal transformations!

Everyone looks for the "miracle moment" when "change happens." But ask the good-to-great executives when change happened. They cannot pinpoint a single key event that exemplified their successful transition.

From 1976 to 1999, one dollar invested in Walgreens beat one dollar invested in Intel, GE, Coke; it beat the general stock market by more than 15 times! I asked a key Walgreens executive to pinpoint when the good-to-great transformation happened. His answer: "Sometime between 1971 and 1980."

Walgreens's experience is the norm for good-to-great performers. Leaders at Abbott said, "It wasn't a blinding flash or sudden revelation from above." From Kimberly-Clark: "These things don't happen overnight. They grow." From Wells Fargo: "It wasn't a single switch that was thrown at one time."

We keep looking for change in the wrong places, asking the wrong questions, and making the wrong assumptions.

by Nipun Mehta on Oct 30 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Publishing 201: Blogs Are For Real

The history of the Internet has been about people trying to get the same things they already get, but cheaper, faster, or more easily. Banner ads are just online billboards. Email is just an online fax. Search engines are just a better, faster library. We didn't change our lives--we just used the Net to make our lives faster and more flexible.

Until blogs came along. A blog is a basically web site, owned by an individual or group, that's written with a human voice. There are many services that make this very easy for non-technical users to jump aboard. So what's the big deal about these online diaries?

Stats are telling us that people love blogs: a new blog is created every 7 seconds! Experts claim there's about 4-7MM active blogs right now. 11% of Internet users read blogs everyday and big companies, like Yahoo and Google, are betting their money on that number ramping up rapidly.

Because blogs are easily linked to each other, they are also shaping opinions. Bill Clinton, Trent Lott, and Dan Rather blog, thanks to scandals that first broke out in the "blogosphere". Friendster recently fired someone because of blog posting. Yesterday, Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban was fined by the NBA over a recent post on his weblog.

Blogs are for real.

by Nipun Mehta on Nov 9 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Internet is a Blue State?

As I was driving today, I heard an interesting question on the radio: Is the Internet a blue state? Considering how the eVoter fraud theories have come to surface, that larger portions of the youth demographic (who overwhelmingly voted for Kerry), and sites like sorryeverybody.com ... it sure seems so.

This week's Nation has a great article on Open-Source Politics, by the way.

by Nipun Mehta on Nov 11 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Google Scholar, ChangeThis and Wikipedia

Google just launched Google Scholar (I love how they launch amazing stuff in an almost no-hype, silent way, relying on demand pull systems to carry it through). 'Scholar' basically allows you to search scholarly documents, including peer reviews material. Good content without shifting through the noise. It rocks!

I'm also a big fan of the Change This. And of course, the Wikipedia. All three of them, as variants of the same, idea-merchant-esque, free content models, are shaping an interesting model for future of the web.

by Nipun Mehta on Nov 18 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Building A Brand Without Branding

Today's NY Times profile a company that is 'Building a Brand by Not Being a Brand' ...

Perhaps most important to younger consumers who have grown suspicious of corporate branding, there is not a logo in sight. A business built on the mystique of no mystique, American Apparel had sales of $80 million in 2003, which are expected to double this year, as they have in each of the last four years, Mr. Charney said. He is planning to open 14 more stores before Christmas. Fast outgrowing its status as an under-the-radar phenomenon, the chain is seen as a new model for the marketing of hip.

Next generation consumers don't need to be told what they want; they're smart enough to figure it out with free information widely available on the web. Marketing 201 is about showing people that you'll give them whatever they need.

by Nipun Mehta on Nov 23 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Open Source Laptop?

Needless to say, I'm big fan of open-source. In fact, open source everywhere.

Since I'm trying to load up a new Dell laptop with all the necessary features, I was wondering if the opensource software really is upto snuff. Here's my list of needed software. Maybe it can all be open-sourced?

[ read more ... ]

by Nipun Mehta on Dec 14 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'

Ben & Jerrys vs. Amazon.com

Joel Spolsky does an interesting contrast between Ben & Jerry's and Amazon about which companies are better suited to 'grow big fast' and which should 'grow slowly'. But it's not exactly a fair comparision. CharityFocus, for instance, has qualities of both (I really want to write "manifesto" about what makes CF thrive ... one day :)). Here are Joel's key points ...

Ben & Jerry's	Amazon.com
Lots of established customers	New technology, no competition at first
No network effect; weak customer lock-in	Strong network effect; strong customer lock-in
Little capital required; break even fast	Outrageous amounts of capital required; breaking even can take years
Corporate culture is important	Corporate culture is impossible
Mistakes become visible lessons	Mistakes are not really noticed
It takes a long time to get big	You get big very fast
You'll probably succeed. You certainly won't lose too much money.	You have a tiny chance of being a billionaire, and a chance of just failing

by Nipun Mehta on Dec 15 '04 | add comment | permalink | more 'web'