All posts by Madhavan

Search Engine Optimization – A History

Social Media, Technology, Web,

Having worked in a highly web-oriented company before I ventured on my own, I had heard a lot about SEO and how to build a brand and generate leads through SEO. I have always been sceptical about the long term sustainability of using SEO without having good content. (Seth Godin’s blog on the problems with SEO is here). Irrespective of my scepticism, it was quite interesting to go through the History of CEO, as presented by HubSpot. It confirms what my take on SEO is – it is all about content.

The presentation by HubSpot is given below.

Steve Jobs and “Focus”

Business, Leadership, Literature, ,

Who was the most iconic CEO of the last decade? Very few people will disagree with the choice of Steve Jobs. No wonder there are so many books about Steve Jobs and the Apple story. While many of the books are interesting, the most read book is likely to be “Steve Jobs”by Walter Isaacson. The book is about 600 pages thick and naturally, it would be quite comprehensive and would cover most important aspects of his life(I haven’t read it yet).I am sure the book is also the favorite of many of his admirers, fans and probably even critics.

While there are so many things that can be learned from Jobs, one of the most legendary aspects of his life has been his razor like focus. In his popular daily blog, Fred Wilson(a Venture Capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures), writes about this aspect “Focus”. He says that “Focus is critical when you are three people, when you are twenty-five people, five hundred people, and ten thousand people. You can always get farther faster by saying no to too many projects and too many priorities. Pick your shots carefully and hit them. That’s what Jobs did to turn around Apple and that’s what you can do with your company too.” The full blog can be read here.

As an entrepreneur myself, I have been trying to apply this principle of “focus”. At our company, we have been focusing on only one vertical and that has served us quite well so far, especially we are so much resource constrained. And “focus”is required not only in new firms, but also in every aspect of life. Do you agree?

Prezi – The Power Point Killer?

Technology, ,

The title of this blog is a bit dramatic and I don’t think Power Point is going away anytime soon. But then, Prezi “appears” to be an alternative. But why “appears” to be an alternative? Because I haven’t seen it used by anyone  till early this week when my colleague showed me a presentation “NYC : Is it Sustainable”. The interesting part, he explained, was that the slide deck was made in Prezi, which is a cloud based application and has a free version. The Prezi presentation about NYC is given below.

I had forgotten about Prezi after that, but was reminded of it again by an article in the July edition of the Toastmasters International magazine. In the article, the author Christine Clapp, DTM quotes Angelie Agarwal, the founder and head trainer at Learn Prezi (learnprezi.com), who recommends Prezi for people who are craving a change and want to do presentations in a drastically different way from what is possible with PowerPoint or Keynote, the PowerPoint-like software offered by Apple. According to the Prezi website, the cloud-based presentation software has a “zoomable canvas [that] makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them.” Christina Hoyer, a Copenhagen-based presentation-skills trainer and the cofounder of Imprezzing (imprezzing.com), points out that zooming makes Prezi special. She explains, “Prezi is fun to work with and you can make beautiful designs with a few simple text elements and basic images,” she says. “Prezi encourages you to do things in a simple and elegant way, but not necessarily a linear way.” 

Prezi has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The author lists the following.

Advantages

  1. Showing ideas, connections and the big picture
  2. Easy integration of images and video
  3. More creativity and flexibility
  4. Compatible across computers

Disadvantages

  1. Difficult to manipulate initially
  2. Zooming can be disorienting
  3. Not easy to make handouts
  4. Subscription required for private presentations

Curious to know more about Prezi? Click here and start “Prezi-ying”

 

PechaKucha 20X20

Social Media,

The first time I heard about PechaKucha 20x 20 was during the annual conference of Toastmasters District 82 – Ovation 2013. There were 3 presentations and I found each one of them interesting. The beauty of PechaKucha is that each presenter can present 20 slides, each for 20 seconds for a total of 400 seconds or 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The slides are timed, so each slide will make way for the next after 20 minutes. More details of it can be found here.

What really surprised me was that PechaKucha Nights(PKN) have spread virally and are happening in more than 600 cities around the world. In an interview with smartplanet.com, Mark Dytham, Co-founder of PKN shares the history behind PKN and the reason for its popularity. He makes an interesting statement that ”There’s nothing social about Facebook or Twitter”, because there is hardly any social physical interaction in these online media. He believes ” that the next phase of the internet will focus on digital to physical interactions. Already, startups that use online networks to connect people in the physical, such as Airbnb and Taskrabbit, are doing increasingly well. As a presentation format that connects disparate groups all over the world, PechaKucha is something of a precursor to this.”

Read more about PKN and Mark’s ideas here.

How many books can you read in a year?

Literature

How many books can you read in a year? 5? 10? 15? How about 200? That is the target that Claire Diaz-Ortiz has set for herself in 2013. Claire is the Manager, Social Innovation at Twitter. She is a regular contributor to the LinkedIn Influencers section and in the series “What Inspires Me?”, she had mentioned that she is inspired by books. And that where she also mentions about her goal of reading 200 books this year. She claims that she has been reading more than 100 books every year for the past few years and had gone past 150 books in 2012.

How easy is it to read 200 books in a year? This number translates to approximately 16 books a month or 4 books a week. Even if one reads so many books every week, is it possible to retain the gist of each book? I do not know. Only Claire can answer that.

Claire’s obsession with reading books reminds me of Seth Godin’s obsession with writing. He has been blogging almost daily for the past 12 years and recently completed  his 5000th blog post. His landmark 5000th blog inspired me to resume my writing and I had set a target of writing every day. I have not come anywhere close to that, but the journey has begun.

Coming back to writing, when I try to recollect how many books I have read this year, I can count about 12-15 books in 7 months. I could read a maximum of 10 books in the next 5 months. That will still be only about 25 books in 2013, which is a far cry from what Claire has been achieving consistently over the past few years. Should I even try to read so many books? Perhaps not.