MindBytes

Whenever i read a lot of articles about the Dabbawalas in various Management articles, I always feel proud of this team and sometimes dream of achieving a similar fete along with my team members in the field of my working domain.

The Dabbawalas of Mumbai ,have made a place for themselves in the top business schools of the world .Harvard Business School recently has prepared a case study for the students, presenting them an organisational strategy which is purely dependent on social and human ingenuity , with an accuracy of 99.9999% to convey over 170,000 meals to their destinations each day at right time and place.Their accomplishment does not depend on any analytic models, technology or efficient business practices which most of the corporates follow. This is something extraordinary which they have achieved over 20 years experience with a team of 5000 employees and have been awarded Six Sigma Certification for an error rate of one per 6 million.Amazing isnt it!!!

Characteristics of the present Gen X(Also called Gen Y defined as 13yrs-31yrs in the entertainment weekly) which should help the marketing managers while crafting a strategy for Gen X products or for Brand cultivation

• They are plugged in all the time either to their IPod or IPhone or any other electronic portable gadget(leaving Television)
• TV doesnt attract them anymore
• They dont have time to watch the Ads unless it has something to do with their social connnections or friends
• Their life is just not bound to work, they have life beyond work. Work place has to be fun for them
• They want to find what others are doing
• They want to create their own brand identity by way of blogs,twitters
• They dont think to switch brands
• They always want to try different
• Information through Digital gadgets is digested very fast. for eg Podcast,SMS,Internet TV,Internet Radio,Amazon kindles etc
• They beleive in telling others what they are doing through Social Networks

A German Publisher Bertelsmann,is planning to publish a single volume of the Wikipedia(the most popular articles ) for a cost of US $32. Now this seems to be a good business plan , but a risky plan for the publisher.After Wikipedia was launched in 2001, the major publishers of encyclopedia i.e, Britannica and others saw a plummeted sales year over year.
The book is planning to include most visited 50000 articles from wikipedia under the GNU-FDL license .

I sincerely hope that this publisher atleast donates 50% of his net proceeds to the foundation.

Also Wikipedia has been facing a lot of criticism over the authenticity of the articles. Some of the countries like China have also blocked access to wikipedia articles. Few Universities do not accept the citations of the Wikipedia articles in their students work.

Some Statistics of the Wikipedia i collected from the internet:

• 7th most visited website as per Alexa ranking as on today
• Nearly 4 million articles in 200 languages
• 4000 new articles a day
• 2 billion pageviews a month
• Traffic volumes doubling every four months

A Web Site stats.grok.se to display statistics has been created by Wikipedia admin Henry.
The raw statistics are also available for further research at http://dammit.lt/wikistats/

Now if this is the kind of growth for wikipedia in about 7 years, how is it going to sustain without going commercial? The community doesnot want Wikipedia to go commercial , as it might no longer be available freely and may even be available to those who can afford to pay a subscription . Currently , it is running on the various voluntary donations from all over the world. The Wikimedia foundation requires around 5 million dollars/year to sustain the website.Presently it is able to collect only 1.1 dollars/year. So how is it going to sustain, is the main worry?? So all those people who use wikipedia for their work and research, please step forward to donate before this Knowledge Bank shuts down.

I have been reading over lot of articles about the the Chinese control over media which includes all the mediums. Now when i actually think about the way this is being managed, it must be a heavy job for the law enforcers in the country. I beleive the Olympic games coordinators in the country have requested the Government to open up the internet gateways during the Olympic Games as a good will gesture. A company like Google, with a high global presence, has also been forced to listen to the Chinese terms and conditions to operate in the country i.e., the Google Search Engine results are completely filtered. If you actually search for any information on Tibetan protests , not a single article comes out of the Chinese Web portals . If everyone remembers, around last year, there was an article in the Indian News papers about the satellite image of the “Presidents Estate – Rashtrapathi Bhavans ” on Google Earth ( The software used to view the satellite images ). This was definetly a breach of National Security. Now when Google was told to drop such images , it never bothered to do so. Even today , on Google earth, one can easily sift through the satellite images of various places which are of National importance. Such is the India’s control over the media. Now coming back to Google, which proclaims itself to be a pure Organic Search engine and has denied on various occasions that the results are not tweaked and tampered……..this has to been seen with in a wider perspective.