a la 360 by Gadi Shamia

There is an incredible amount of buzz surrounding the launch of the iPhone app store today. You walk around University Ave. in Palo Alto, CA and it sounds like everyone is building an iPhone app… Before you had out and build one for yourself, here are some things to remember:

• Watch the numbers- Apple is hoping to ship 10-12 million iphones this year. This is 1% of the total estimated phones shipments this year. When compared to the total number of phones in the world (3.3 billions), the share is even smaller. If your success rely on mass penetration, go look elsewhere.
• Ignore the numbers- Read more »

In his fascinating book, Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes the lure of the zero priced item. Dan provides examples from the real life: in his experiments, people selected Lindt truffles for 30 cents over Hershey kisses for 3 cents, but when given a choice, preferred a now free Hershey kiss over 27 cents truffle. The conclusion from this experiment and many other is clear: we love free.
No other place as the Silicon Valley has ever produced more free stuff: we have a free search, free reviews, free price comparison and free web conferencing. Almost everything is offered for free, in an attempt to win us over and break our old paying habits. In a rational world, we would have carefully considered the benefits of each option and select the best for us, no matter if it is free or not. In Ariely’s predictably irrational world, we will always go for the free option. Read more »

Last week I wrote about measuring customer satisfaction using only one powerful question. Between then and now I was approached by two companies to gauge mine: Netflix and Telenav. I like both services a lot but Netflix proves time and again that they have mastered the web 2.0 techniques of measuring satisfaction and performance whileTelenav looks like it outsourced customer engagement to an agency from the 90s… Read more »

Last week I wrote the first part of the Is SaaS for me post. It talked about two important distinctions of the SaaS model: It changes the power play between the customer and the vendor and assures that the vendors work for the customers every day. This part will cover some more distinctions like simplicity, security and maintenance. Read more »

People write a lot about SaaS and focus on the famous “no-software” phrase that Marc Benioff coined. What many people fail to discuss is that the SaaS model, even if one ignores the products themselves, brings real value to customers and puts them in the driver’s seat for the first time. So for once, let’s not talk about technology or delivery mechanisms, but rather focus on the change in the most basic rules of the game that the SaaS revolution is creating, with or without a planning hand from the SaaS companies side. Most of this change is affecting my favorite segment, the Small and medium businesses (SMBs), so let’s talk about how SaaS impacts the way SMBs treat IT. Read more »

There is no doubt that SaaS and on demand are here to stay: if five years ago on demand solutions looked like an Internet version of the mainframe days (strong central server, no logic in the terminal, bad user interface… sound familiar?), the SaaS applications of today look appealing and offer a good alternative to the on premise world.

Continuing with the “seven things about Saas” Theme, which started with Seven reasons why SaaS is not main street in SMB and continued with Seven reasons why SaaS will be a great success, I would like to turn to the vendors now and offer some do’s and don’ts for the industry… Read more »

“There is a new SaaS, Something as a Service every month.” This is how I mused a month ago when writing The next SaaS post. Newsweek has the story about the new Amazon reader, Kindle. The device (that looks anything but kindling) will be sold for $399, and will act like an iPod for your books. Kindle will offer more than iPod in one sense: it carries its “iTunes” with it, allowing owners to purchase and download books whenever a wireless network is in sight.

This is new and innovative in the books world but not really new when we think of what Apple did with iTune and iPod. The big difference is that Amazon created a new entry barrier for the avid book reader—buying the Kindle. Different? Yes. For the last 150 years or so, listening to music meant buying a device to play the music. From CD players, Walkmans or MP3 players: we first bought the device, and then bought the content. The music played on our device. Read more »

I was in New York this week and came to think of three very different product innovation problems, stemming from three different root causes. It will be great to get your examples for product innovation issues so I can learn as well…

The first one has to do with one of the simplest products to operate by the user: an elevator. What I am about to describe now happened to every single one of you. Guaranteed. You go in the elevator and press on your floor button. Say 47. The full elevator is getting empty around floor 12, but floors 13, 14 and 41 buttons are lit. You really want to get to your room (you know, nature calls after a long day out) but the mindless lift will stop four times before you get there. Why four if only 3 extra buttons were pressed? Aha… This is the man in the 37th that pressed both up and down buttons when he actually wanted to go down and now is showing you a blank face. How come there is no “Cancel” button that allows you to cancel the unneeded stops or the up button that was mistakenly pressed??? Read more »

The long tail has been here forever. Seth Godin ended his blog post about the topic with the following: “The question isn’t, “Is this real?” The question is: “What are you doing about it?” Since I aim to please, I sat right away trying to help the readers answering this question: What should I do about the long tail? Read more »

I actually didn’t plan to write about Facebook any more. In my recent post I claimed that Facebook is not solving any real problem. My readers were kind enough to prove me wrong… Jason thought we were just too old, and Jose thought that the problem Facebook is solving is loneliness. This is a big one to solve and a very good point… I scratched my head trying to reconcile the disconnect: Facebook is obviously successful and some people think they cannot live without it (one of the commenters, Radha, tested his strength by not logging into the ‘book for few days—this is how addicting it is). So how come so many people love it and so many others cannot understand the buzz? Read more »