The Wait

He sighed in relief as he heard her voice, and looked at the time.He had just 5-6 minutes left for his presentation.He wanted her to be with him.He wanted her to see his final work at college.He was trying to reach her since he arrived last night but her phone was switched off making him restless like anything.She confirmed her phone had gone wrong and she will come soon. As the call ended, he looked around carefully to see if anyone was around. There was none.He just had to be there before the professor caught/called him again for the last and final call.The date for his presentation was originally two days before but he kept on postponing it till he finally became the last one in his batch. Professors couldn't wait any longer , they clearly mentioned it.He had waited all long for her to be there, and he really couldn't wait any longer even if he wants to.

He came out after presentation, not sure what to do next. Perhaps he was shocked to see noone was an audience to the presentation except those two professors. Perhaps he never expected that she wont be there even. He didn't said a word. He didn't said anything even to himself and quietly went down sitting outside college gate giving a hopeful glance to every other bus which passed by.But she didn't came.

Just when his eyes started getting moist someone gave a pat on his back. He turned back in heaven thinking it is she. But again he got disappointment finding it to be one of his batchmates. He gave a last look to his college, thanked and prayed before he entered inside a cab with his friend.

He was still anxious, he was still waiting, he was still hopeful. He kept on looking inside every other bus which passed by from the opposite direction until they reached to the junction where they have to turn away from the bus route. But his conscience told to persist and continue in the same route.They continued and stopped outside a restaurant which he specifically chose as it had see through glasses from where he can still keep an eye on the road.

The moment he came out of the cab, he saw a bus passing by and he saw her. Even she saw him. It was like a miracle for him and he thanked God. The bus went on to the next stop. He was running towards the same knowing that she would get down at the bus stop. He thought she will wait for him after getting down. Perhaps she got down even before the bus stopped. He was half way crossing the road to her side when he saw her very nearby coming to his side. He stopped there...breathing heavily.

As she trotted up to him, their eyes met. It was worth it, he found himself thinking. The agony, the urgency, the tension, the endless wait - it was all worth it.

There she was standing in front of him , milky-white in a brown-colored suit smiling like a Goddess. He was mesmerised. Deep inside..he knew and he felt she was all his......though aware that he was seeing her for one last time and even this wait will not be possible hence forth.

---

Have you ever had an unforgettably magical moment when you felt two strongly opposite emotions? Love/Hate? Elation/Sadness? Anger/Sympathy? The desire to move forward yet run away at the same time? 

Please share/brief your story in the comment section of this post.

PS: This Blog has been written as part of IndiBlogger's Fire and Freeze Contest Powered by Close-Up. Please Vote/Promote for it on Indivine

Also visit the CloseUp Facebook Page and share your story.

Porter's Five Forces : Social Coupon/Deal Market

Future of such markets:

• More growth in space
• Consolidation and verticalization
• Integration with traditional media bundle and SEO/SEM
• Emergence of Group Buying Technology Solutions Providers (Close.ly, GroupCommerce , Offerex)
• Increase in offer aggregation (The DealMap, Yipit, Aubaines.org)
• Emergence of offer re-selling (Secondary market) - At sites such as Lifesta.com and CoupRecoup.com , people can sell their unused deals/coupons bought from companies like Groupon.
• Emergence of niche players(eg : T-Shirts , Travel deals)

Groupon Hype

Groupon seems to be benefiting out of all the hype surrounding it !

10 Reasons why GroupOn will struggle

Yes please don't get carried away with its US $ 15 Billion of IPO valuation ,  they are into an Easy to imitate , Difficult to Sustain business:

1. Location Based Services will be able to provide instantaneous on the move deals.
2. Easily imitable: Comparable services: StealTheDeal, 8coupons, BuyWithMe, Coupang (S. Korea), Half Off Depot, Jasmere.com, LivingSocial,  Thrillist, Woot, OfficeArrow , Groupilicious, CouponYou, My Little Deuce Coupon, CouponDeville, Grouper With A Squeeze of Lemon , Valpak
3. It cannot be a niche player while others can be. Travelzoo launched a Groupon-like daily deals Clone and is now valued at $400 Million after just 4 months
4. With more players, the margins/cuts/commissions will go down.
5. Groupon.cn – .How will you beat this Chinese copycat mastery?
6. Deals will get commoditized : As a user, it doesn't matter from where the email come from whether Groupon or LivingSocial or from anywhere else. With the large number of deals offered, they can just use a daily deal aggregator such as http://www.shopway.com to check the available deals in one go. 
7. At the end what it does is just lead generation, a new customer acquisition channel like non-deal CRM platforms such as  Facebook and Twitter. It can be alternatively done by Google Adwords , yellow pages. There are ample substitutes once the price convergence of the deals will occur.
8. There are more empowering models coming up -Dealo, which plans to allow merchants to post their deals, is a free service and allows the merchant to handle the deal completely from managing the discount amount to setting their own caps and the duration the deal will last (unlike Groupon).
9. The cat will be out soon ! Majority of deals are marked up higher and then discounted. So they are never a big deal in any way.
10. Groupon makes public the amount of money saved by its customer but ask it how many of the merchants are actually making money out of it. Majority of them are just aggressively trying to acquire 'lost leaders' buyers through the hot-credit-card-ready leads generated by Groupon. The challenge is to lock-in these acquired customers.

What Groupon can do?

• Deal Personalization: Extension of contextual advertising.
• Regional sites, rapid market penetration to get the first mover advantage.
• Evolve as Social CRM provider through Groupon Stores.

Network Effects Revisited

In network effect , the utlity of a product increases as more and more number of people use it. So the more ubiqitious the product becomes , the more valuable it is. Example includes mobiles , telephones, fax machines , Social Networks, web marketplace like eBay, Groupon (the higher the free subscribers the better are the chances to meet the minimum guaranteed number of purchasers for the deal to actually materialize),  Wikipedia, Stock Exchanges(yes , as the number of participants increases the transaction cost decreases). 

What about SQL?? (Why all/most databases use this as their basic language?)

The initial value of any of the examples mentioned above depends on the quality of its offering and not on the number of people using it. This is the value generated by the offering when there are no other users.The initial quality is the key to atract the users which calls on other users also to join say through word of mouth. The product overall value accelerates once a certain critical mass joins in and derives value from interactions/connections with each other.

Drawbacks

Firstly,  it leads to congestion and slowly after one point of time the value of the product starts diminishing. This happens in case of telephone/mobiles networks wherein if the infrastructure is not scaled at appropriate time , then each additional user will increase the load on the network and decreases the value for other users. Is this what we are seeing happening with the Google Search engine. As pointed out in the article 'Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google' , the search engine has become more of a jungle with spammers and marketers hunting around with their Ads and Sponsored sites and hence losing out on value. Thats what happened with Bill Gates who left Facebook due to huge number of friend requests pouring in; for him the value of the network started decreasing. Social Networking sites like Facebook surely will need to go an extra mile to safeguard the 'Spirit of Community' which will get destroyed with increasing number of friends/followers in one's network. The network will no more be social but again the same jungle of spammers and advertisers what Google is today.

The other drawback is that it causes vendor lock-ins wherein the customer becomes dependent on the provider for products and services and is unable to switch to another vendor. Microsoft has been doing that with its office products which required one to have MS Office to remain compatible with others many using it until Google Docs and OpenOffice's of the world came up and era of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) got some momentum..

If there are no competitors to a successful network , then the monopolism sets in and the network provider starts hiking its charges and put restrictions. These restrictions out of the monopoly nowadays are inspiring many firms with new revenue model. The best example being Linkedin which restricts almost everything except your capability to add connections(that will come soon ! its just the beginning , let them face some 'congestion'. There is certainly going to be an inflection point where each new user will make the life harder for existing users. Imagine twitters and facebooks of the world charging you for making a status update.What will happen then? Multiple networks will then compete on an even similar basis, the core product value will again gain prominence. Eg: There are more fax machines in the world now than ever before but its value has decreased because of other substitutes like email, scanner, faster courier , etc. So the numbers have lost value here while the product is inherently losing out with modern ways of communications).

And if there are competitors to a network , then the silos sets in wherein each player starts setting their own standards and benchmarks. Thats what we are seeing in Mobile Operating Systems war - from Nokia and , Blackberry to Google and Apple all players trying to form their own community which promotes their distinguised OS.

One other interesting drawback can be that the markets can adopt an inferior product in place of some superior alternative just because of the network effects. For example i feel that Macs PCs are superior to Windows one but still its the Windows who are dominating the market. Same case with Apple iOS and Android and its the Android which seems to be winning the race. And governments/regulators do realize that since markets cannot be matured enough to choose the best standards/practices/products/networks , its the government who should take the lead to investigate and monitor the firms intention of making any offerings. Hence we see so many antitrust actions !

----

Take this one now - Consider IT as an offering , is its value increasing with more and more of its adoption. If we go by Nicholas Carr argument , then slowly its becoming a commodity with no strategic advantage. So does it mean that IT doesn't have any network effect?

Google Adwords Free Advertising Trial

In case you are not an existing Google Adwords account holder , they are providing Rs.1500 advertising credits for you to try out. You can use the same to put your Google Adwords ads that might appear above or along the Google search results as Sponsored Links.

Fill this form to get the free credits

The offer is valid to only new Google Adwords advertisers. The terms and conditions as mentioned by them on registrations are:

Promotional credit must be applied to a new AdWords account within 15 days of creating the AdWords account and is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed signup accounts. Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount. Subject to ad approval, valid registration and acceptance of the Google AdWords Program standard terms and conditions. The promotional credit is non-transferable and may not be sold or bartered. Offer may be revoked at any time for any reason by Google Inc. One promotional credit per customer. Advertisers with self-managed signup accounts are subject to a Rs. 250 activation fee. Offer void where prohibited by law. Prepay customers must deposit Rs. 500 into their account for activation. Please note: After the promotional credit has been exhausted, your campaigns will continue to accrue clicks for which the costs will be charged to your credit card. If you don’t want to be charged for additional clicks, you can pause your campaigns at any time.

Unique Tutorial - An Introduction to Data Mining

Check out this interactive Tree structure map by Dr.Saed Sayad from the University of Toronto depicting the complete lesson on Introduction to Data Mining.

Click on the image