Harnessing Open Source to power the next level of Business: The Guardian's Open Platform initiative

In the age of open source and democratization of content it is just time before newspapers and news agencies join the open platform and social networking as a means to stay relevant. The challenge is to customize the business model around these to make money even while they reinvent the rules of the game. Guradin, The UK based newpaper has taken its first step in this direction by launching what they call the "Open Platform". While all newspapers have a blogs, content and online presence, Guradian's venture is different.

What guardian plans is to open up millions of of pieces of content: Stories, Photos, Slideshows and data sets to all who want to process all this data through web applications and mashups etc. In its present avataar, all this is Guradian's core product, which Guardian shall open up to the internet for free! Why would someone do that?

Three reasons:

1. Guardian plans to use this channel to push advertising. In effect, by being a host to users, developers and applications, it is creating a captive base and it will push advertising feeds into this outlet as well. This thus becomes an extremely scalable way to increase ad inventories and at some stage Guardin will venture out into targetted advertising through API (application programming interface). That like creating a new G Mail and adsense.

2. Opening up all its content inventory would attract a whole bunch of programmers and developers to this platform which would nurture innovations around the core product. In an age where news feeds are so commoditized, innovations from an open source can pep up the channel offering. All this development at zero cost. Developers have already started throwing up interesting results. API maps matches news content with locations aroudn the world to create a crowd sourced geo tagged database of news. Content Tagger allows users to create web tag on Guardian database.

3. If nothing else works out, the effort is going to create branded content and applications, at no incremental cost. With no incremental costs again, Guardian will probably create plenty of new consumers and a new level of brand awareness.

All in all, an interesting piece of work, which would give us reasons and ideas on what works and what doesnot in terms of Monetizing efforts around the social networking platform in this age of Web 2.0 and Freetardonomics.

Hottest Gadgets: The T3 Hot Gadgets countdown

Voila! Palm was dead long time back... and now its back and How! It tops the 100 hottest gadgets on this planet list and the Palm Pre assumes the "iPhone Killer" title beating Nokia N 97 which comes third in the list (the next best Nokia is at 24 and is the Nokia 5800). Surprisingly Apple DOESNOT feature in the top ten (Can you believe it?). The first Apple is the iPod Touch at 12 and iPhone trails at 14. Sony is the comeback kid this time, with its age old Walkman X Series taking the cake at No 2, PRS 700BC Sony Reader at 6 and theP Series VIAO at 10! Bravia and others also make the ranks.
Read the full list here: http://hot100.t3.com/category/top-10/

Google and the art of maintaining relevance

Google is stuff of folklore now. It is more than a brand and a company, it is more of a movement, it is synonym of "search", to me it is Internet! Over the last some years i have observed, often awestruck of how this internet giant is moving from one success to another. From "just" a Search domain to an Operating system and Browser to maps to applications and more Google is ubiquitous! (While i try to stay away from singing eulogies, it is difficult to stay away from the influence of Google, if you are on the internet)

There is limited or no advertisement that Google engages in and it probably doesnot need to. Viral and word of mouth communication has taken the brand places already. How does it do it? For starter, i think Google makes headlines more than anyone else in the internet space. Whether be charges of monopolizing the web by US government, or Carbon footprint of its search engines, or the launch of Blackle, or Google Earth or Android or Chrome or Latitude or U Tube or Blogs or the outages on its email server, GMail or the bug on its search engine, there is no shadown of doubt on the fact that Google creates a headline every day almost.

Sample the latest from Google in terms of discovery of Atlantis.

Keen Observers had spotted what appeared to be the remains of a vast city under the sea, the size of wales on the floor of Atlantic Ocean. Thus the Atlantic Ocean was spotted on Google Earth! It was only explained later that the lines were the artifact of Google's map making process! These were the paths made by the boats using SONAR to record the sea floor terrain data. Atlantis or no Atlantis, Google was the news maker! Another very impressive application of Google Earth was the toad crossings mapped by Google Earth to avoid the number of toads killed by Motorists in accidents! Thats something that PETA would be in for... Amongst others Google Earth in reality has helped locate pristine forests in Mozambique, a house of a previously unknown species and ancient roman villas.

All said and all done, such discoveries, outages apart from its technology and innovation keep up the prominence of Google amongst people and populations... It keeps the buzz going outside of the internet space as well.