Business in the Cloud

Cloud Applications are like an iceberg. The ‘portion above water’ is what most people have seen. What lies below is yet to come. The obvious as well as hidden potential of cloud apps is driving its business value upwards and costs of implementation downwards.

For the average Joe with a smart phone and a laptop to boot, cloud is the buzzword. With the internet connectivity to mobile devices touching a point of ascendance, the cloud becomes even more relevant. You can place that average Joe anywhere on the consumer normal curve – be it the innovator, early follower, early majority, late majority or the laggards – the usage pattern and the value sought from the cloud application remains more or less the same. The jury is out on whether one can actually classify the ‘cloud app end-user’ based on the mentioned categories because of the sheer proliferation of such cloud apps as Dropbox, Google Docs etc. which have made adoption and use as easy as point/touch and click. But what is evident is the propensity of people around the world, to using a cloud app for a purpose or many purposes, as the case may be.

In my daily work and play motions, apps have become an essential part of the way in which I function, interact, communicate or consume. With Android becoming a green pasture for many a cloud app startup to happily graze on my life couldn’t have been better. The following is an attempt to share with you, the reader, three of my favorite things on the cloud.

Google Docs

A real godsend in terms of functionality, this cloud app is one of the most essential tools in my ‘garage’ of an app collection. For people like me who lead two lives, one inside the office and one outside of it and both equally vibrant and demanding, Google docs becomes the easiest way to create, share, edit and move on. The devil is not in the details in this case. While MS Office clearly outshines Google docs, the attraction quotient for me is its simplicity, its complicity to my existing documents and the fact that I have so many friends with whom the docs can be shared for tweaking, editing or creation. The fact that it’s free makes it simple, lucid and a win-win proposition for consumers like me. With the arrival of Google Drive, the value proposition just got the shot in the arm it needed.

Dropbox

The name says it all. One of my earliest brushes with cloud apps was through Dropbox and it sure did impress me. Combining one of the most basic functions that behoove a cloud with the basic need of storing files on the go, Dropbox has come a long way since its inception. Originally an answer to the conundrum of a lost USB drive, Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox did something that now benefits close to 50 million users worldwide. One of them, lucky me, finds the app the easiest to use when it comes to storing my photos, documents or presentations, that I know would eat up space on my HDD. Even with the Android Market awash with alternatives, my allegiance to Dropbox is unwavering simply because it has improved rapidly over the years and maintained its parity and differentiators vis-à-vis other players. The ‘Point-click and store’ activity never had a more apt name.

Yuuguu

The name has an Indian touch to it. Anish Kapoor, one of cofounders of this extremely useful desktop sharing and conferencing website, admitted that the idea behind Yuuguu was borne out of the need to collaborate and work inclusively. The idea caught on with Philip Hemsted and together, Yuuguu was launched in 2007. The underlying idea of the app is a multiprotocol messaging program that supports the biggest IM services--Yahoo, MSN, Google, AIM, ICQ, and more recently Skype. And it sure does deliver in terms of quality of sharing, IM messaging speed and usage simplicity. What is the killer-blow in this case is its ability to allocate to every conversation a private global conference bridge which therefore ensures smooth data flow and collaboration. In my book and considering the work that I do, Yuuguu is the best ‘Web 2.0 certified’ (if there is such a thing) desktop sharing and web-conferencing tool out there!

[Written for Recruiterbox, 2012]

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The Agile Redemption

The landscape of business in the 21^st Century is being shaped by the resurgence of the small firm. Be it a bakery, a niche restaurant serving exotic cuisine, a small mobile phone app maker or a startup offering web-development services – the importance of the ‘small business’ is being sharpened in today’s economic landscape. A coherent analogy would be the McKinsey view of the modern economy shaped as a barbell – few large firms on one side, the mid-sized firms populate the middle and thousands of small firms balance the other side. The growing importance of small firms on one side seemingly balances the few large firms on the other side. But how is all this happening?

A number of factors contribute to the answer to this question. But the focus here is on the ‘agility’ of the small firms, the technology and how that is an enabler. The best example of how technology is enabling small businesses capture significant mind shares and market shares is the power of software and the ‘agility’ it attributes to businesses. From providing analytics to building a better customer relationship through web services, software is paving the way for small companies itching to serve the market they target. However, one would be missing the wood for the trees if one fails to realize how critical the methodologies are to developing a piece of well-functioning, targeted and customized software. And when one talks of methodologies in the 21^st century, one most definitely hits upon the term Agile.

Agile & Small Businesses

Small businesses run on tight purse strings. Things are piecemeal and nothing is done without keeping an eye on the results it should deliver. Hence the ‘IT” part of businesses or small software development firms take on a huge responsibility when saddled with some initiative like developing a creative piece of software that captures X amounts of data/insights and delivers Y dollars worth of results. The fuzziness of requirements coupled with the fog over the end result is what Agile flourishes in and delivers results that not only work but deliver excellence.

Agile & the Development process

Although there are several different flavors of an Agile methodology, the fundamental facets remain indelible and unwavering. The principal objectives of Agile are – shorter delivery lifecycle, smaller teams, continued customer collaboration and iterative development. To break down the aforementioned into simpler steps – Close and repeated Collaboration with customer to understand business needs => Cross-functional teams break work into smaller pieces of functionality => Work executed in priority order => Delivery of working software in short frequent durations => Iterative development, testing and deployment =>All stakeholders work together to communicate what is valuable for business, when it will be delivered, and enforce ongoing commitment. What this does is offer managers strategic and operational benefits such as lower costs, lower defect rates, flexibility to change, and the ability to leverage new technical or business information for rapidly changing/dynamic business needs with a need for fast time-to-market or delivery. In other words, working through the fuzziness of requirements and the fog of results just became interesting and fun!

Agile & the statistics

A recent survey by the hallowed Harvard Business School revealed – using Agile delivered 50% reduction in engineering efforts, 55% improvement in time to market and 925% improvement in the number of changes allowed during the development process. The same study stated a 50% improvement in quality associated with iterative development. No wonder case studies of Agile include that of a small die-cutting shop in Ohio, a mid-sized law firm in Washington or a small chain of sports goods stores – all with similar requirements. They all wanted to harness the power of software, customized to their own business needs and they all wanted it done within a definite budget and timeframe. Agile is what they embraced. And excellence is what they experienced. 

[Written for Recruiterbox, 2012]

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Zynga & the Game of Growth

It’s all about the game, and how you play it. Mark Pincus, an undergrad from Wharton and a Harvard MBA sure knew how the game could be played. But the jury is out on the fate of his creation, Zynga that in today’s financial reality trades at $6.03 a share and has a market cap of $4.44 billion. Will the proverbial fortune favor the brave or will investor sentiment spill water on a carefully designed plan, drawn on the canvas of the teeming and writhing world of social networks and ‘Web 3.0’? Once the fat lady sings, you know it’s over but till then, here is a synopsis of how Zynga came to rule the roost.

Mark Pincus was never the one who saw himself as climbing the ladder by taking orders as a subordinate. After numerous experiments of trying to work as a regular employee, when Pincus eventually got fired, entrepreneurship appeared to him as the logical next step. So he took it, with open arms and consequently began the journey, dotted with startups such as FreeLoader (web-based push company), Support.com (later Supportsoft) and an incubator called Tank Hill which he co-founded after being inundated with cash post the public listing of Supportsoft. But the venture that set him on course to tech-stardom was the one where he partnered with Reid Hoffman and bought a small stake in Facebook in 2007. The stake brought him in contact with Mark Zuckerberg and gave him an inside entry to the social media revolution.

Zynga, according the Pincus was formed after he failed with TagSense and Tribe.net. It was during that time that Facebook opened up its API for programmers and riding the wave of people flocking to acquire ‘Facebook land’ was Pincus, armed with ideas of making it big on the social networking platform. In his own words, Pincus had always been a closet gamer and with the advent of social media, he did the math and it told him that ‘Friends + Social Network + Games’ could be a win-win proposition for all. This wasn’t a new idea at all, considering that rivals like Slide, RockYou and the 2008 'springster' Social Gaming Network emerged as big rivals to makers of games on Facebook. But the timing on the part of Zynga was bang on. The fledgling start-up hung on to the coattails of Facebook and rode the journey to the throne of online gaming.

Facebook’s growing popularity helped Zynga grow its user base in leaps and bounds. Coupled with that was Pincus’ focus on rapidly evolving its games to suit user tastes and demands. His vision was simple – Zynga’s business should be metric-driven, combining intuition and data. Insights and analytics would help Zynga rapidly iterate and drive reach, retention and revenue. This is exactly how Zynga differentiated between itself and others; it learned what users wanted and modified its games quickly, sometimes overnight, to better provide what the users wanted. The iteration reached its zenith when Zynga started testing every idea. In those heady days of tech entrepreneurism, one usually perceived Web 2.0 companies behaving in this fashion, but game companies for the most part didn’t.

Monetization of online games was seen as a big challenge by companies during the advent of social media. Pincus saw a way around it and brought into the scheme of things, what he likes to call ‘Web 3.0’. Virtual objects for sale – the idea on the face it seems innocuous. But the revenues it generated were staggering. In contrast to conventional gaming parameters, Zynga did not restrict the amounts users could pay to play. This resulted in some users, across Middle East and Europe paying as much as $100 for poker chip packages. The trend, as it would in a network, caught on and the proverbial ‘Network-Effect’ took over. The results were evident as the user base grew. By April 2009, Zynga had 40 million monthly active users and its poker game was the top title on Facebook. The game, Texas Hold’em Poker, was the first one to reach more than 10 million monthly active users. Following close at heels were Mafia Wars and Farmville. Investors flocked to pour money into the burgeoning gaming ‘whiz-kid’ - In a deal announced Jan. 15, 2008, Zynga was able to raise $5 million from Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and other angels.

However, the growth wasn’t all hunky and dory for Zynga and Mark Pincus. Since the days it broke into popular consciousness with famous gaming titles, Zynga has had to suffer the ignominy of being called a ‘Copy-Cat’. Cases were filed against it by Dave Maestri, designer of Mob Wars (allegedly the original of Mafia Wars) and Playfish, a fierce competitor. At one time, the industry had considered it a foregone conclusion that Zynga would die its natural death, cloning games and ideas. But it was Pincus’ bull-headed approach to moving fast that proved the detractors wrong. Ideas were brought to the table, designed iteratively, tested in real-time and the ones generating users were accepted. The ones that couldn’t were summarily rejected. The continued efforts, with the opening up of an office in India, finally made the difference with the launch of Frontierville, Café World, Cityville, Empires and Allies and the acquisition of OMGPOP.

The present day realities for Zynga are a mixed bag. While Project Z (code name for Zynga’s vision of its own social network for gaming) is the next step forward for Zynga (breaking away from the ‘Facebook dependency’), Pincus isn’t shy in buying companies out there, doing good work and producing games that have promise and a market potential. “Draw Something” has a tremendous user base among iPhone and Android users which naturally gives Zynga another network (within a network) to tap into. But, although its revenue has seen growth in the past, its operating income and margin has taken a dip from 2010 to 2011. Although Wedbush Securities is of the bullish opinion that - "Zynga remains well-positioned for long-term growth” what will be interesting to see is how Pincus and his crew steer the ship amid stormy waters in the years to come.

[Written for Rrecruiterbox, 2012]

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