Growth Fusion

The familiar Target Aisles in the front that carried $1 goods is an excellent hook for users. And a great way to dispose unsold inventory. However, Target has quietly introduced products that are at the $2.50 price point in the same aisles. The price tag is there, but its unlikely customers are noticing it. Many customers must be assuming that all products are at $1. A classic habitual response.
At least this is what happened to me and another shopper. A Hawaiian style straw hat looked like a very good buy at $1, only to realize later that it was priced at $2.50. Increasing the price point makes financial sense, but I wonder if customers will feel cheated if and when they find out that their purchase was not such a good bargain after all. There has to be some sort of visible delineation/marker between these products. At best, these aisles will lose their effectiveness as a purchase hook. At worst, its an easy way to lose customer trust. A bit at a time.

In the latest sign of the networks going the way of distributing current/recent content to online viedoe networks, CBS has announced that it will make available previously shown episodes of CSI, NCIS and others. The deals are interesting in that it covers several online players, both mature start-ups and those that are just taking off. The players are:

CNET - Text content + video

Brightcove - Youtube like model

Joost – in private beta (need an invite from a current user). While Youtube focuses on UGC, Joost seems to focus on syndicating content from TV networks.

Netvibes - Just made their US/”universal” debut after making their name on their hometurf in France. This deal will fit very nicely with Netvibes strategy of providing as many feeds as possible to users.

Sling Media - It will be interesting to see how Sling will use CBS content, since the Slingbox out in the market now is essentially to enable “location shifting”.

Comcast - Online video play for a cable company?

Veoh Networks

I was trying to get some traffic stats and I went to Compete.com to get it. The links on the home page were not working and so I decided to register. They asked me some prickly questions:

• Salary
• Gender
• Year of Birth

I was a bit unnerved about being asked for these tidbits, but since I wanted the data, I continued with the registration. After the registration, I checked my account options. It turned out that they decided to sign me up for their newsletters, without asking for my permission.

So they are following an auto opt-in strategy. I had to take myself off their emails.

While start-ups need traffic, I think its unethical to sign-up users on email lists without asking their permission. When a company adopts this approach, it runs the risk of getting caught by spam blockers. Its much easier to press the “report spam” button (in Gmail for example) than it is to unsubscribe. Overall, an unhealthy approach to increasing traffic.

The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) reported today Advertising.com, a subsidiary of AOL will be Ad distributor for the as-yet-unnamed NBC – News Corp. joint venture for online video. It seems like advertising.com is leveraging some of the IP it got through AOL’s acquisition of Truveo back in Dec 2005. The technology allows advertising.com to insert ads into video clips seamlessly at any point in the video. I can see advertisers being very interested in this. Imagine a Kellogs ad right as a family sits for breakfast in the video or a Circuit City ad just as viewers are in the middle of watching a football match.

The ads that appear at the top of my emails in my Gmail account have become extremely targeted lately. I can’t seem to stop clicking on the ads that show up. Google has figured out my interests in start-ups and travel. I get mostly content links from Business week, NY travel and others that are right down my alley. Scary on one hand, but superb targeted,relevant content on the other.

http://sustainlane.com/

Check out this page from the Bessemer Venture Partner site. An interesting (and witty!) profile of missed opportunities.

http://bvp.com/port/anti.asp

Full Disclosure: Bessemer is an investor in the company I work for.

Are corporate-types finally waking up to the need for enviromental responsibility?

Here is an extract from a Wall Street Journal article (behind a pay wall)

NONDALTON, Alaska — Soaring in his private plane above the pristine tundra here two years ago, Robert B. Gillam experienced a conversion: The money manager and pro-business Republican became an impassioned conservationist.
He took the flight after reading reports that a Canadian company planned to build North America’s largest open-pit gold and copper mine in Southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. The proposed Pebble Mine would stretch two miles across and be deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building. And it would be scraped from the headwaters of rivers that feed the world’s largest wild-salmon fishery.
So Mr. Gillam — whose Alaska investment firm holds more than $1 billion in mining stocks for clients — launched a second career. He has become the unlikely front man for a band of Native Alaskans, fishermen, hunters, environmentalists and business leaders opposing the project. Mr. Gillam, 60 years old, has helped pay for ads, lobbyists and polls to convince Alaskans that Pebble Mine could be an environmental disaster.
“Mining is no longer the ideal of a prospector with a pick-ax and pan,” he says, “but a dirty, industrial business.”

The Heavenly ski resort at Lake Tahoe is planning to cut-down hundreds of trees to make way for a chair lift. Here is an extract from an article in the Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall).

…ski resorts, which cut down forests to create ski slopes and build condos, still haven’t completely won over environmentalists. A group called the Sierra Nevada Alliance recently condemned a proposal by officials at the Heavenly Mountain Resort at Lake Tahoe to chop down hundreds of ancient fir trees to make way for a new chairlift, even as it praised the participation of Heavenly and its parent, Vail Resorts Inc., in the global-warming campaign. “While some of the resorts are thinking globally, they aren’t thinking locally,” says Autumn Bernstein, land-use coordinator for the alliance.
Officials at Heavenly say they plan to mitigate the loss of the trees by working to protect old trees in other parts of the forest. “What environmentalists need to understand is that we are excellent stewards of the environment,” says Heavenly spokesman Russ Pecoraro.

I was in Bangalore recently and could not help but notice the apartments that are popping up everywhere. Real estate prices are at an all-time high. So are the stock market valuations for apartment builders. The IPO of ‘Soba builders’, a local builder, was oversubscribed 108 times.

Finding 5-star hotel rooms is also difficult. There are only 5 such hotels in Bangalore and apparently they get booked a year in advance. The availability of 5-star hotel rooms is also at an all-time low. A silicon valley VC I was chatting with a couple of days ago mentioned that he paid $650/night to stay at the Leela palace (which is close to one of the IT hubs in Bangalore). More than what he pays to stay at the Waldorf! Another bay area company that has a substantial presence in Bangalore pays $350/night for its senior execs to stay at the Leela. The reason they got a better deal?:) They have a long term contract for the rooms with the Leela!

Given this pressure on land prices (and on cost of talent), some of the capital is likely to move (or is already moving) to Tier 2 cities near Bangalore or to Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras), Poona among others. Mysore is likely to benefit from this capital flight. It is about 3 hrs from Bangalore. But with a new multi-lane highway being built between Bangalore and Mysore, the commute time will decrease. Moreover, Infosys already has presence with a large training center in Mysore.