Now the problem with justdial is, though they have the unsubscribe link, it just don’t work!

Here is what my unsubscribe link shows

It is hard to believe that justdial programmers can make such basic error of using $variable = $variable in their code, I am seeing this for the last 4 months now and the problem hasn’t’ been corrected so I am going to assume that justdial don’t want me (and anyone else) to unsubscribe from their list. And the biggest disappointment was, I had never even subscribed to their mailing list, I never filled any form where I checked any checkbox saying that justdial can contact me with their offers, it seems they are working on an opt out model with the optout option not working.

So in the last 3 days, my feed reader is filled with Apple iPad related news, mostly with negative reviews talking about how feature deficient the product is so after going through the list of its features, here is my review of it and what I think about the whole fiasco -

1. There is No Coolness Factor with iPad – iPad is not a new product in market, is not offering any new features and is overly costly.
2. I am not even sure if Apple was ready to launch the product, I mean it don’t have USB and flash support and for me it is hard to believe any hardware nowdays without USB support. There are some other hardware limitations too limiting the user functionality.
3. Most of the people are still not sure what the device is for – I won’t be surprised if many still wondering, what exactly iPad is supposed to do ? is it targeted towards tech savvy crowd or a common men ? I am myself not very sure if I get iPad, what I will do with it
4. I don’t believe in product name should be great but they could had come up with something better then iPad as apple’s target crowd is tech savy so something more tech sounding would had been better.
5. You can not take your loyal customers (even fanboys) for granted – Yes,, even apple has huge loyal fanbase but if Apple were thinking that people are willing to pay $800 for iPad just to have another Apple product, then they are wrong.

What Indian Companies can Learn from Apple iPad Launch Failure
1. Launching a product which is not ready for market is a recipe for disaster no matter how big you are. Many Indian companies do this and I myself have been guilty of doing this.
2. Underestimating the customer and taking them for granted – no one will just come and handle you the money because you are so awesome, infact in India, getting money from the customer is even more difficult so you better don’t take them for granted.
3. Is the product even worth buying – In his 10 rules for web startups, evan williams has talked about you being the user of your own product, I wonders how many of the apple executives will be using iPad (it is not about being able to afford it) in future.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

(right now Hi5 is leading the race of spamming my inbox)

This kind of tactic is not new and I am seeing it since 2006, infact this is a very good way to increase membership of social networks but only as long as its genuine, and these mails certainly don’t look genuine. The worst part is, these sites do not even allow you to opt out for such kind of mails!

And even if this kind of spamming do work in getting more members but then those members who join do not care about the site and don’t even look back at it. I don’t think a person can be active in more than 2 social networks anyway (for me, linkedin and facebook are doing fairly good).

I wish these guys understand that this “Spray and Pray” method doesn’t work like this, but then, it is not costing them anything, so why they should stop ?

I am indeed surprised on these numbers as I don’t think twitter is in mainstream that much among India as say Orkut or Facebook, there are lot of Indians with twitter account but the interconnections are not that big (mostly having 20-30 followers) IMO but India is certainly a great market for them to grow. Twitter will appeal to Indian net users and is also kind of fun to the 16-22 crowd.

Ideally by now they should had launched twitter.in supporting regional local languages of India to appeal to bigger non techies crowd too, something which they are able to do in USA (with oprah and kevin spacey on letterman talking about it)

On the other hand, talking about local players, it seems in.com has run out of steam, i am not seeing anything really good coming out from them and they are probably in consolidation period, rediff,sify and indiatimes have pretty much given up trying to be a leader which IMO is creating a void in Indian web space for a new killer service/product. Anyone listening ?

This simple matrix can easily increase your ROI by few hundred percents as I have seen how badly people build their ads even knowing that high performance of the ads can result in better quality score.

and here is a full matrix with ad samples

I think its a good time to launch youtube premium service, lets charge $5/per month to view youtube without any ads (I don’t think anyone of them is clicking on them anyway) along with some more services and features (to make $5 look justifiable and people also feel special that they have something which others don’t).

Even if 1 million people opt for it, here is your 5 million USD per month (that million subscribers can easily be achieved in a period of 12 months imo)

now the thing is, I don’t see any reason why can’t the 8 sites owned by the company be managed from basement but by keeping eemployees, now the found can think of expansion and bigger ideas and to implement them. So do soemthing nice, test it, find your niche and when you get it, hire others to do it and scale it.