When I was working on a travel-related start-up idea last year, I had a call with a senior executive from a major web travel company. What she said really surprised me - that the majority of America still decides on where to go based on the following technique: when they see a compelling destination [...]
A World About to Change…
You are currently viewing the author archives of vinaysethmohta
Author Archives
Google Chrome and domain name squatting
For the longest time, I have been particularly irritated about domain name squatters (many have talked about the associated issues, so I won’t rehash).
Given that users who are not tech savvy often type search queries into the URL bar, I always wondered what the value was of the URL bar. Clearly, their intention was [...]
SaaS == ASP == out of business
Lawson’s chief executive, Harry Debes, just did a short interview with ZDnet Asia where he talks about the upcoming demise of SaaS.
I find several of his assertions wrong and in fact contradictory to other statements that he makes in the same interview. My takeaway: this reads like a classic case of a company not [...]
Outsourced business intelligence
As more infrastructure moves into the cloud, we have also started to see a migration of applications into the cloud. Salesforce and CRM were the early movers. More recently, I have been seeing entrepreneurs explore how to move much larger applications (like SAP) and application stacks (like BI) into the cloud.
My most recent discovery [...]
Firefox-based enterprise support business
A few weeks back, I read something somewhere that talked about the fact that Firefox could increase its enterprise adoption if there were better enterprise-quality support for it. Seems like an obvious business idea with a business model similar to the RedHat support model. Are there well-established businesses out there already doing this?
UI innovation at the gas pump
For the longest time, I have wondered why credit card readers at super markets, gas pumps, parking garages, and just about everywhere else require you to insert the credit card only in a single orientation. Well, finally, the Mobil gas station down the street from us has all new gas pumps where the magnetic stripe [...]
Inline commenting on the web
I recently started reading up on the Django framework. The creators of Django, Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, recently finished publishing a book that describes Django and how best to use it. They published both an online version of their book as well as a print version.
The online version has a UI innovation [...]
A capital framework for evaluating career choices
My brother recently proposed the following framework for thinking about career choices or rather, choices “for your next gig.” It is a capital-oriented framework where traditional capital (money, equity) is just one part of it. He defines five different types of capital:
Financial capital: traditional capital falls into this category e.g. How much money [...]
Revenue - cost = profit
One of the simplest and yet striking ideas that I’ve heard for thinking about case interviews has been - always start with the simple framework that you are trying to maximize profit, which is the difference between revenue and cost. Everything else should be done either to increase revenue or decrease cost. Similarly, [...]
UI improvement for Google Maps / Google Local
I noticed a nice UI improvement for Google Maps / Google Local today. I looked up a restaurant and was presented with the usual maps / results page:
I noticed the little ‘+’ link in the upper right-hand corner of the pop-up (something that I haven’t noticed before). That click resulted in a much larger [...]