Archive for July, 2012

Building intellectual property

Friday, July 27th, 2012

For a product based company, their product innovation is their IP and possibly unique selling technique. I heard many times from many entrepreneurs, service companies does not have an IP. Being a founder of a service/consulting company, I was finding many days how to develop an IP.

After a long days of study I found the answer.  It comes with experience and domain expertise. Let me explain how. Your organization may have a set of experienced people who have domain expertise in three different domains.  May be, in the following vertical –  medical, insurance and hospitality. Those set of people have in-depth  knowledge in those industries and have implemented many software for them. So they know in and out about those industry and processes. They can guide those client companies how to improve their process and how software can increase productivity, cut cost etc.

Now you may have a different set of people who are good at new technologies available in market, in a word cutting edge technology. Those technical people once tagged with those domain experts, create an excellent unique service for your clients. You will find those services are innovative and unique in many ways since they are built to facilitate the process improvement of those specific industries.  This unique service  can be defined as intellectual property for a service company.

- Jay

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Few interesting facts on mobile app & mobile site

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Usage of mobile devices is growing rampantly, so do use of mobile website and smartphone apps. Recent study revealed few interesting facts about mobile app and mobile websites. They are as follows,

# By 2014, mobile user will exceed desktop user.

# 87% of the population has mobile device globally!!

# 22% of this mobile users uses mobile website at least once in a month.

# The  usage is growing at the rate of 9%/year.

# At the end of last year, 30 billion downloads made of mobile apps.

# Well those above mentioned statements may sound very optimistic but there is another concerning fact :( . Mobile users are very impatient. They have maximum patience of 5 seconds to see the website/app loading. Study says, if the app/site does not load within 5 seconds, more than 50% users leave the app/site.

# Hmm, you need to plan how to create a fast mobile site/app.  Well low latency network is a quick solution but the application development demands much more to create an optimized site.

Faster mobile apps from appsbee

Faster mobile apps

We can work together to catch the tantalizing market. A high speed mobile site or mobile app.

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Posted in Mobile Application, Smartphone application | No Comments »

Planning the site layout and content distribution

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Here in this story I will discuss how to plan the website layout in real world. Of course we will keep the information architecture methodology into back of the mind. Lets discuss the parameters which should influence the design.

# Historical data : We need to analyze the present information architecture of the current website and see what search/check the logs from different analytics which information is most frequently accessed from your site. That shows the trend.

# User requirement : You need to understand the target audience and their requirement. More precisely, what they need from your site or what they are looking for at your site.  How the present structure helps them to find it easily. If not why? Keep yourself in the shoes of those targeted audience and try to search the items at your site.  Try to share the site to different end users. Find what they are facing.

# Get input from your team: One person may not be able to recollect everything, rather get all your key players together and get input from each. See how the website is reflecting their expertise to the outer world. You will definitely find you have missed out some important capabilities to mention on your site which your team can perform well. Rather your site is reflecting something which you do not do :-p

Site layout and content distribution

Site layout or information architecture

Now this is the time to plan on the structure of the site. Lets discuss it in another session.

- Jay

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User behavior tracking and user profiling for behavioral re-targeting

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

Behavioral re-targeting is becoming a  buzz word in internet marketing world.  Lets find how it helps in up selling and force users to complete the purchase cycle. Report says 51-66% users on ecommerce sites starts browsing products but does not complete the purchase process. Behavioral re-targeting helps to bring back those diverted customers who actually started the cycle but not finished it for some reason.

Now the question comes how does it happen? The idea is to track the behavior of a user and collecting historical data. Depending on the historical data you can profile the customer. With the help of third party cookie, the large advertising sites/social networking sites try to capture the traversal path/clickstream of a particular user. From there they create user profile depending on their likes/dislikes of products or services.  Depending on the profile, marketers create the campaign which includes engaging emails, attractive text, videos etc. on that specific user. Again, campaign designing is a big chapter which requires different set of skills.

user behavior appsbee

Brand recognization

Now, let’s get dipper into third party cookie and try to know how it works. Before that we need to know what is first party cookie. If Appsbee.com sets a cookie to a user browser, only appsbee can track its cookie information. This is called first party cookie. Suppose Appsbee.com uses a banner from banner.com. Banner.com also can set a cookie to the user machine who are browsing appsbee.com. Here, the cookie set by banner.com is called third party cookie. If the user visits another site called anothersite.com which uses the advertising banner from banner.com also, it can recognize the user since it has the cookie saved previously to the user computer. If we consider the banner.com site has banners in 50,000 sites and the user visits 60 of them, banner.com can analyze the behavior of the user and it creates a mapping database may be with a unique id “user-945623” and banner.com comes to a decision that the user loves music J for example. Even though it does not capture your personal information. Interesting right?

Similar way bigger social networks like facebook tracks your user behavior by setting third party cookie from different sites wherever the sites use FB like, share or any FB button. I am not sure if any individual or company apart from those large social networks or advert companies can guarantee to provide those tracking data. This tracking or behavior analysis data is the key to design your next BRT campaign.

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How information architecture helps building an intelligent site.

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

Information architecture is a science which enables the knowledge of putting right data on right place on your web pages. This is very important to show right data(it may be a piece of content, infographics, video) to right people. Sometime you will find sites full of data but very hard to find the data you are looking forL. You get lost there. Here comes information architecture. Few things you need to fulfill while designing the site and putting contents into it. They are..

# People should understand about the goal of the site at a glance.

# Once the idea about the site is established, finding next set of data should be easy. So you need to read the mind of the audience and need to understand what they will find next.

# Again, you should not be totally driven or influenced about what people finds next rather you need to drive traffic to the page where you want them to go. May be that page is most important for you, since you will make money from there! The target page varies from site to site. When you are trying to sell something, the product detail page may be very important while for a video subscription site will drive traffic to some interesting video to right audience. So you need to plan very diligently.

# Now the question is how you will decide what people will like to look in what position of your site? Here you need to understand your product/service very well and that will help you to take the decision. That will give you the power to understand who is your target audience.

# Here in Appsbee we help you to take those complex decisions. Sometime, if we think alone, you will find we are missing lot of things, rather an expert team can come up with many ideas who figures out the same for many sites for many decision makers. Lets work together to strategies your next site.

information architecture

I will keep writing about information architecture for different set of sites which cater in different area of services and products. It differs for each segment.

- Jay

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