I also read a post yesterday on the evolution of service, which talked about technology making mass distribution of services easier, and the importance of personalisation of services. There was another interesting post and a discussion here, which was triggered by the launch of Yulop’s WAP site.

Yulop is essentially a Bangalore service, and I was wondering how important scaling up (in terms of other cities) was to them, in the long term. if personalisation and attention to details is increasingly becoming an important trend in products and services, could it be that even with a limited geographical spread and a set of users who are extremely happy with what they’re getting, a product/service can manage to be financially viable? The answer would possibly be quite dependent on the critical mass that the product/service requires.

To put the question in a different way, is it possible for a brand to retain its personalisation/attention to detail capability as it scales up? What are the brands that come to your mind when it comes to attaining a perfect balance of customisation and scale?

Meanwhile, I saw a new service which apparently is being tested in San Fransisco –  City Sense. You really must have a look…. and come back The potential of such a service is, as the cliche goes phenomenal. The service would, over a period of time, be able to suggest hangouts for you, basis your history. And quite obviously, this can be applied to activities other than nightlife. Imagine its mashup with say, a local social network (of course privacy issues will have to be worked out) and basis a segmentation of interests, using it to bring in more people interested in the same things, and it would just keep growing, quite like a twitter way of following and being followed. Only, in this case, because its segmented by interests, it would be a powerful tool for brand communication and timing and customisation of offerings.

until next, measuring with scales

I had a similar experience with an entity i wrote about (like a lot of other people did) a few days back – in.com. Like I’d mentioned, I skipped the mobile invite and was content with an email one. And as they’d promised on the site, it arrived within 5 days (4 days – customer delight?). And it wasn’t just one, i got 5 of them. I started out with the first one, didn’t work. I thought it was just me, and tried the second, that didn’t either. No, I wont bore you with single counts anymore, none of the 5 codes worked.

Since i love to give the benefit of the doubt to everyone but me, i started googling for similar experiences, and found out there was at least one more guy like me. But the number of positive entries there made me try again, still didn’t work, so I guess the cosmos’ message is pretty clear “Beta, it’s not for you’. Sigh. Fine, i get the message.

There’s another tangential set of experiences. I have always bemoaned the lack of a good ‘Amazon-like’ site here. So whenever i notice there’s a new player in the field, whether it be rediff’s feeble attempts, or newbies like gobookshopping or the flipkart guys (who i got to know of through a brilliant marketing exercise of giving away bookmarks outside the Strand Book Festival) I immediately sign up. The next thing I do is check out if they have stocks of a book that I’ve not been able to get offline.

The latest case is that of ‘Dublin’ by Edward Rutherford. I have asked all three entities for it, but have not got a response. Rediff actually billed me for it and then sent a mail a few days later stating they didnt have stocks.  And this is not the first experience of the kind.  However i keep getting ‘push’ messages from them about ‘latest releases’ and ‘mega discounts’. I wish they’d understand how much difference a conversation with the customer makes. Meanwhile, Strand would note it down in their book and give me a buzz as soon as they got the book.

until next time, action and satisfaction

I haven’t actually registered because it seems to concentrate on areas in which my interest is minimal. From the cover it looks to me like an ‘activity based’ SNS, because immediately after the (yes we all know that by now) make friends, its ‘what you can do’ covers MotorBiking, Trekking, River Rafting, Jeep Safari, Beach Volleyball, Weekend Football, Skiing, Snowboarding, Shopping, Partying etc. It also plugs sharing of creative ideas eg. Ad Ideas for Products like Colas, Jeans, Mobile Phones etc, 2D-3D-Flash Animation, Bike & Car Designs, Biz Ideas, Fashion Design, Movie Scripts, Song Lyrics etc. While a Facebook or an Orkut does have groups which do all or at least most of the above, an entire SN platform based on adventure sports/creative designing etc is definitely intriguing. Before we go further, other features include a chat platform (Talky), info emails (which would let you know about fashion, cool gadgets, Discounts & Sales etc), a public chat platform called Zap, music, blogs, videos, photo sharing, and a displaying of people who visited your profile. Overall, it seems more like a niche version of Orkut.

While focusing on specific interests is an intriguing proposition, I am not sure if the mix of adventure sports+ shopping+ creative designing makes sense. Maybe the idea is to broaden the base. In any case, I feel, to make it work will require a lot of activity from the makers of the portal outside the web. These will have to be local efforts which can then be later scaled up. For example, tie ups with holiday service providers who give adventure sports packages, efforts to make this a one stop shop for knowing about discounts (there are enough niche players in this already), corporate tournaments in say, weekend football and so on…

The creative designing itself spans a lot of territories, each of which require customised efforts – design contests in association with local ad clubs, bike car, fashion designs to be integrated with auto/fashion expos, and bollywood (since they’ve anyway started an SN site, they could adopt the other cliche too – reality shows for movie scripts and movie song lyrics).

So while I’m still wondering about its physical geographical location, it’ll be interesting to see whether they manage to brand themselves as a unique SNS or will fall by the wayside as yet another wannabe.

until next time, is there some numerology in the name (qq being a succesful chinese SNS)