4 C's of Digital World

This post from us aims at coming out with some of the upcoming trends that is going to seize our digital world in future. It took a great visionary like Bapu to foresee the future and say things like ‘Customer is the King’ that to at a time when monopoly of companies was at its peak in India. Today, when the leitmotif of almost all the companies is to satisfy its customers, we can say that he was truly a great visionary to envision such a thing. So in this post we will try to bring out ‘4Cs’ which can help a company to acquire a significant share in the digital domain and achieve the desired level of (C)ustomer satisfaction.

CONVERGENCE:
Generally convergence is associated with technologies and information, but there is much more to it in form of multi-skilled and multidisciplinary teams which can be converged and made to work towards a common goal. The isolated departmental structure within companies is a history now; various verticals today collaborate and communicate seamlessly to achieve the targets.

An excellent example of this is smart phones which are catching the eyeballs of customers because it is providing them with features of a PC, a music player, a cellphone, a camera and many more digital devices.

CLOUD:
There had been a lot of buzz about the word Cloud. We can define it as a digital world which is independent of any particular technology, device, platform and operating system. Cloud Computing will not only benefit medium and large size companies, but it will also act as a boon for the small and upcoming companies, reason being that companies will not have to put in the large upfront cost to set up an IT infrastructure instead they can directly use the IT infrastructure of a third party and pay it on the usage basis. As part of the same trend we can expect to see rapid growth in software as a service – hosted on other company’s servers.

CROWD:
It has been wisely said that: ‘A person is never perfect but a team is’. Gone are the days when innovation was restricted within the boundary of a company and was responsibility of a person or a department. Today, we are living in an era of open innovation where boundaries of organizations are blurring with each passing day. This mindset of open innovation can be termed as crowd-sourcing. Companies like Wikipedia and Twitter are harnessing the intellectual power of communities to solve complex problems fast in profitable ways. In future, crowd-sourcing will be largely applied to fields like computing, innovation in green technology, and also in health.

CONTROL:
Corporations can only embrace the above mentioned three Cs by building much more sophisticated controls to monitor their performance. Companies should properly define various processes which will help them to come up with a controlled innovation environment.

Make or Buy IT Solutions?

In today’s world of extreme competition IT has been acting as a game changer and is helping in creating success stories all over the world. But this success doesn’t come free of cost. Creating an IT enabled environment in a company may cost a fortune to it. Also the success of doing such a BPR activity inside an organization is not guaranteed. This leaves the companies with very few alternatives – Whether they should form an IT department and handle all the IT activated through it or whether they should outsource their IT activities to other companies which have been operating in the IT domain since ages.

Gone are those days when companies used to have an in-house IT team which used to work on developing systems which were unique in nature and helped them to drive their top line by automating their processes. High capital expenditure was a mandatory for such companies because they had to operate and maintain a large number of servers, software, hardware and human resource.

Today, we are witnessing a world of outsourcing – a world of specialization. We are living in a world where acute competition is eating into the revenues of companies. In order to minimize their operational costs companies have started to outsource the non essential activities to other companies which are having some expertise on the same. C. K. Prahalad’s theory of core competency also talks about it. It says a company should concentrate on the thing which it does best and should outsource the other activities. For eg most of the telecom majors of India like Airtel and Idea have outsourced their IT activities to IBM.

Companies today focus more on proper branding and marketing of their products. They rely heavily on three things –

1) Finding a gap in the market

2) Forming an impression of their product on the prospects mind

3) Ensuring that proper quality initiatives are taken up by the vendors which further leads to good quality products

So our mantra for various companies (especially SME’s) is that they should back their area of expertise by focussing its resources on it and should let go of the activities which do not add much value to its product.

Upcoming Trends in Telecom

Businesses all over the world are dominated by either the IT goals or by the business goals. Telecom is the only sector in which these two set of goals overlap each other; this is because of the acute competition existing in this domain which has lead to a freefall in the ARPU of the industry. Today, Telcos have started aligning their business goals towards sharing of resources so as to reduce their cost of operations. Indus Towers is one such initiative taken up by the top 3 giants of the Indian telecom industry namely AirTel, Vodafone and Idea.

Telecom industry operates in a very unique manner, it behaves like a FMCG till the point of sale (think of a nearby mom and pop store selling both a Coca Cola and an IDEA recharge voucher or a SIM card) and as a service industry because the minute a SIM card is sold the user is registered with the telecom operator and the operator starts providing the user with the required airtime.

Operating in a cluttered environment (more than 14 players exist in Indian market) has made the life of Telcos very difficult; therefore even a small glitch in the service can cause a loss of customer.

Many initiatives are being taken up by the telecom operators to remain profitable in the current environment. These initiatives can be broadly divided in to two categories –

a) How to increase their market share?

b) How to bring down the operation (network) cost?

Various trends are shaping up in the market to take care of these questions. One such trend is that many operators have now started to study the usage of their customers and are offering them with various innovative offers based on their profile. Such initiatives from the operators side ensures that the customer does not switch and remain loyal to them. Other trend which can be derived from the market is that Telcos have started joining hands in order to lower their network costs by sharing their resources with other operators. In future we may see such sharing in 3G also because none of the operator has 3G license in all the 22 circles.

Telecom is a sector which is changing with the pace of light. The time has come when these companies should get together and work on an altogether different concept of ‘Sharing and Caring’ because already the ARPU in India is one of the lowest in world and if it continues to fall then it will be very difficult for these telecom operators to generate profits.

How to Transfer Mails from one Email Account to another for Free

There can be various reasons for you to switch email service providers.

Reason 1) Your existing email address gets too much spam so you plan to dump the old account and switch to a new email address (a form of email bankruptcy).

Reason 2)  You are leaving your existing job for higher studies and need to transfer all personal emails from the Microsoft Exchange server to your new university email account.

Reason 3) You want a single account from where you can access all your mails.

Reason 4) Your ISP's email service isn't reliable and you therefore plan to move to a free web based email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.

Reason 5) You think the new email service from XYZ Inc. offers more features than your existing mail provider and hence want to make the move.

Moving Emails from One Account to Another

The illustration below will help you visualize how to transfer email messages across the three most popular web email services. The transfer will happen online and you just need to specify the credentials (user name & password) of your old email account (from where you want to move message out) and your new email address (where you want to move messages in).

Moving to Windows Live Hotmail

Windows Live Hotmail is integrated with TrueSwitch so you can easily transfer emails from Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail, Live.com, .Mac, etc. to your shiny new Hotmail address. The same service may also be used for copying old email from an existing Hotmail account to a new Hotmail address.

Moving to Yahoo Mail

Like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail too provides integration with TrueSwitch so you can easy copy mails from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Juno, Rocket Mail, etc. into your Yahoo! account. With TrueSwitch, you can also copy mails from one Yahoo! inbox to another without upgrading to Yahoo! Mail Plus.

Moving to Gmail / Google Apps

Gmail (or Google Apps for Email) has a built-in Mail Fetcher feature that lets you download email messages from 5 different email accounts that support POP access. You may therefore use this feature to move your old Hotmail or AOL messages into Gmail as both these service provide free POP3 access.

The migration from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail is slightly tricky but possible. Keep reading.

Trick: Move emails from Yahoo Mail to Gmail or Outlook without POP

The free account of Yahoo Mail doesn't provide IMAP or POP3 access so you can't move these emails into Gmail or a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook.

The Yahoo! Mail Plus upgrade will add POP3 access to you account at $20 per year but if you want to save some money, here's an alternate but simple trick:

1. Create a new account at Windows Live Hotmail and fetch all your Yahoo! mails into this account using the free TrueSwitch Service.

2. Now that your mails are inside Hotmail, you can setup POP3 configuration to fetch those Yahoo messages into Gmail via Hotmail.

Migrating Emails Away from your ISP Account

TrueSwitch mentioned above supports all popular ISPs including Comcast, Verizon, CableVision, AT&T, etc. but if your ISP is not in the list and you don't have the time to configure your email client for POP3 or IMAP access, check out Yippie Move.

It's a online email transfer service similar to TrueSwitch but supports an even larger number of email service providers including the .edu addresses of certain colleges and universities in US. With YippieMove, you can choose folders (or labels in Gmail) that you want to copy to the new location without having to move the entire mailbox. The service is quick and easy but costs around $15 per email account.

Copying emails from Microsoft Exchange / Outlook

Every organization has a different policy with respect to corporate email so check with the administration if your Exchange service offers POP3 or IMAP access - if yes, you can easily transfer messages into any of the free web mail accounts directly as listed above. Also see these guides:

<!>Export Outlook email to your Gmail Account

<!>Copy Outlook Mail to Google Apps

>>Transfer Mail to Hotmail via Outlook Connector

Email Transfer Complete? The Next Step

Now that all your message have moved to your new email address, you can set up a vacation responder in your old email account to auto-inform contacts about your new email address. Also check this guide on how to manage multiple email addresses.

Concept Ads

Today we are living in an age where the line between genius advertising and over-the-top advertising is getting blurred with every pretentious advertisement that comes out. The fact that today information and technology have become synonymous to each other is making that line get murkier and murkier with each passing day. In order to cope with this situation, companies have already started to come up with the ads which describe their existence in the world of tomorrow.

In the market place where innovation is the key to success manufacturers are willing to do whatever it takes to make their brand a top-of-the-mind brand for customers. This has led to the upsurge of a new concept in the field of advertising that is Concept Advertisements.

Technology intensive companies are putting this concept to a great use by presenting its prospects with an image of its product few decades down the line. Many companies have now started to work on a unique leitmotif of coming up with futuristic ads. Some of the companies which are pioneer in it are Diesel, Audi, Apple etc. We will be giving a short review of the Apple ad.

Apple with its concept ad which has recently been uploaded on youtube has taken advertising to a whole new level. It showcases what all an iPhone will be doing 30 years from now. The ad wonderfully places brand Apple above the brands of other companies competing in the same segment.

Concept ads have provided the marketers of technology with a medium to differentiate their products vis-a-vis that of the competition by positioning them along the lines of future. Such advertisement instills in its viewers euphoria of using the product in future this in turn helps the brand to gain the top of the mind position amongst its potential customers.

Considering the success of some of the latest concept ad campaigns we can say that they will soon be soon used by the marketers as a positioning tool.