business management, marketing, technology & entrepreneurship in a 365X24X7 world

I gave a talk last Saturday at IIT Roorkee titled - ‘Conducting a Market Study & Developing the Business Model’. This was as part of a lecture series that is being organized by EDC (the Entrepreneurship Development Cell) at IIT Roorkee. The talk was about a generic approach to conducting product feasibility studies and the way to go about developing the business model. I fell back upon our slideshare experience to explain some of the points in the presentation. The slides from the talk are shared below.

Roorkee incidentally, is India’s oldest engineering school and it was taken into the IIT fold in 2001. Before the talk, I had some time to spare and I spent that time going around the campus and took some snaps with my mobile camera (shared below).

Its great to see how most engineering & MBA schools in India now have an entrepreneurship cell and are making efforts at promoting it. This certainly was not the case a decade ago (when I graduated from engg).

The fourth edition of Mobile Monday Delhi is being held on the 18th of August. The focus for this event is on startups who want to demonstrate their mobile products/services. The event is sponsored by Nokia & MDI and the event is being held at the MDI premises at Gurgaon. Mobile Monday events at Delhi are usually well attended and allow for interactions with mobile enthusiasts, developers, entrepreneurs, investors etc. So if you have an interest in this space and happen to be in Delhi on that day, don’t miss this. Go add your name to the wiki now!

Here’s some SlideShare news that I would like to share with readers of this blog. We just announced the constitution of our board of advisors. Joining that board are Guy Kawasaki, Hal Varian & Ross Mayfield, all of whom are widely respected thought leaders in their respective fields. Actually, all three of them have informally been involved with SlideShare for a while now, but we thought this is an opportune moment to make the association formalized. They bring different perspectives and experiences to SlideShare. We look forward to their suggestions & criticisms as we try to drive SlideShare to the next level. Here are their brief intros-

Prof. Hal Varian– Prof. Varian is Chief Economist at Google. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers about the socio-economic dimension of the internet. He is a renowned economist researcher, teaches at the Univ of Berkeley, has written some of the best books about the information economy and writes a monthly column for the NYT.

Guy Kawasaki- Guy needs no introduction- Silicon Valley legend, former Apple think-tank, sharp marketing brain, investor, entrepreneur, A++ list blogger and something else that is of immense importance to us- he is an icon in the field of communications and presentations; his 10-20-30 rule for making presentations is widely acclaimed.

Ross Mayfield- Ross is the co-founder & CEO of Social Text, the world’s first and biggest enterprise wiki company. He is widely respected as a leading thinker about Enterprise 2.0. and has a very rich & diverse background, that includes a diplomatic stint with the Government of Estonia!

We welcome all the advisors to SlideShare. Something that we strongly believe in (and what I have also talked about very frequently on Webyantra) is the role of diversity within your startup as you take critical decisions about your product, strategy, competitive position et al. We have tried to bring that diversity to the board with this team.

Slideshare is looking to hire a content manager. This is a full time position based out of our Delhi office. Here’s a brief description for the position:

Role Description:

The person will be responsible for content realted aspects of SlideShare. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It has all kind of presentations that one could think of and its has a highly diversified user base- diversified in terms of geography, professional background, psychographics etc. The role would involve (but not be limited to)

1. creating and driving the content strategy for SlideShare
2. taking ownership of application’s content related sections (which constantly needs upgradation)
3. writing and managing our various blogs- the slideshare blog and another very interesting blog that we are soon launching
4. user engagement: we are from a user research background and SlideShare has been at the center of a serendipitous learning for us- the fact that in an agile development environment, heightened interactions with users can supplant conventional usability testing to a large extent. In that sense, we look upon user feedback & support as a strategic function. Proof of this lies in the fact that till now the job of answering support emails and user feedbacks (something that is usually accorded less importance) has been done directly by SlideShare’s three founders. Unfortunately we have limited time, but we feel the need for a smart, mature individual to take over that role.
5. handle content related aspects of events, contests, promotions on slideshare
6. represent & evangelize SlideShare in the community, media events..

Desired candidate profile:

1. the candidate must “get web 2.0″; he/she will should be living/breathing the web 24 hours/ day
2. “do what it takes” attitude with regards to work
3. be prepared to work in a small but fast growing, global scale internet company
4. ability to work alongside a hyper-agile software development team (bordering on extreme programming)
5. excellent written & oral language skills
6. prefer somebody with a strong interest/inclination in blogging, new media, social media etc (people authoring a popular blog are at an advantage here)
7. educational background: we’re not hung up about education, so this could be anything, though a degree in mass communication, new media, design etc might help.
8. experience: not more than 3-4 years, candidates with zilch experience are also welcome

Compensation will not be a constraint for the right person. If interested, please ping amit@uzanto.com

I was recently invited to participate in an online discussion about emerging trends in India in the fields of social media, user generated content & social networking. The discussion was initiated (& moderated) by Rajesh Lalwani, who is a Delhi based marketing communications professional and who writes Blogworks.in, a social media strategy blog.

The participants in the discussion included Alok Mittal (who heads the Indian arm of Canaan Partners, an early stage venture capital firm), Prerna Gupta (who is the CEO of the social networking website, Yaari.com) besides Rajesh and my own insignificant self. You can read the transcripts of the discussion on blogworks.in. The discussion is also slated for getting published in the Impact magazine.

Something worth noting is the different backgrounds that the participants came from. Prerna runs a pure social networking site, my own experience is from a content oriented community site while Alok in his role as a VC, is the person who writes the cheque to fund tech startups. You can easily make out how each person’s background influences his/her views on the issues discussed.