The Business of Inertia & Twittersphere experiment
Inertia is an amazing phenomenon since Newton formulated our laws of physics for it. As is the case with any enduring physical truth, there are always economic transactions built on those physics foundations.
And hence we have the M & A of small client-rich companies being bought out by the 800-pound gorillas hoping to use the inertia of the clients to stick with them in the long run.
Inertia also has to its credit a fair-share of financial institutions that tap into its human counterpart - laziness. An amazing vice and a not-so-amazing virtue exploited ever so subtly by many institutions and the most obviously telling one being the credit card companies.
Sample for example, the credit cards business for individuals. It runs simply on one simple truth: that the credit card users will be lazy enough to not to pay her dues not before the due date. Its a clinchingly simple logic that trusts a basic human trait - chilling but effective.
Credit Card (henceforth called as CC) as instrument of finance taps into the deepest sacrosanct evil rule of personal finance.
- Thou shalt not do the crime if thou can't do the time a.k.a Don't buy it if you can't afford it. CC makes it chillingly simple by providing a hand-loan for a interest free period of 30 days or so.
Armed with a CC and unlimited temptations we have hundreds of well earning guys taking to the temptation and entering that unending cycle of bad financial karma.
Anyway now that we have proved beyond doubt that laziness or simply
inertia can itself be a good business model, a new wave now sweeps the golden lands of bits and bytes which is lovingly called the internet.
andrewbaron has put up his twitter account for sale which at one level is a horrid sin to the community to commit and at another level is a damn interesting social internet experiment.
A twitter account by nature of the micro content created has a single author (content creator) and many readers (followers / consumers). A follower starts following a twitter account on account of one of the following
- he is a close friend of yours (and thus trusts the 'author')
- loves the content produced by the author (and hence again adds the user because of the trust he places on the 'content').
- just follows because he wants to track the author & the activities (not trust but more of a voyeuristic pleasure)
- just nothing better to do
On the other hand, though a buyer faces one of the following
- People who trust the author will leave.
- People who love the content will stay as long as the content still stays original to the soul. In this case, the buyer does not have to put in effort in marketing his twitter account as long as he is good at content.
- People who will stay for sometime to just see where it goes.
Of this the buyer gains obviously from the second case but thats hoping that the inertia of followers will gain over the indignation of having sold their trust. And which we have already proven works! 
Either case this is a interesting social experiment to see how the trust networks and content communities work together.
Announcing BarcampHyderabad5 on 16th @ Google
Its that time of the year again that we folks here call the BarcampHyderabad. And Google has graciously accepted to give us some good space, free food and some goodies to let this get going. Hopefully, we will be able to sneak out some photos of the spanking new Google campus near Kondapur.
The lead team planning out and spreading the message is quite a few this time and hopefully that reflects in the turnouts & participants too.
What about:
Technologies, demos and startups- betting on Web2.0, Social web, Semantics Web and beyond!
Thats prolly the longest ever Barcamp topic ever! Anyways so if you are a startup guy, a been there done that guy, a research dude or a company eager to show their baby - make it a point to drop in for the party. Hopefully, yours truly too can make some presentation thats worth something.
How to participate?
Go here for joining into the party & participate. How about making a presentation on that spankingly awesome thing you were working on? Think we can get to know something about it? How about giving us a sneakpeak. We are aware of atleast of one startup planning to demo there. Why not you?
For more details and to signup for the camp, go here.
Oh and btw Spread the word!
Hyderabad has a tech community (?)
Reaching out to the right folks and nurturing a community of tech crowd has been a stumbling block for the barcamps' campaigning. We did try a couple of initiatives - to create a blogroll, to create a hydtechblog, metroblogging for hyderabad - but nothing panned out as expected. Nada. Zilch. Nothing.
And there was the apparent conclusion that our tech community was not exactly thriving - a conclusion that ran counter to our intuition and common knowledge that there are lot of product tech companies in Hyderabad as well as some really good geek gods here.
Intuitioneva Jayate (Intuition alone triumphs). Introducing to you ladies and gentlemen (drum rolls please) Twincling - a very vibrant open source community from mana Hyderabad. Get to their page to know more about.
And if you readers, are aware of any such communities, do give us a tip about them.