The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.
March - 2007 - issue > Cover Feature
Spotlight
si Team
Founded in October 2004, Blue Dot is a Seattle-based company whose mission is to help people stay connected with their friends. Through a new type of communication described as Social Discovery, Blue Dot’s free Web site allows users to find, save and share interesting online content with friends and family.
We will see the proliferation of Web2.0 technologies in the enterprise. The core features that define Web2.0 – tagging to organize unstructured data, easy publishing via blogs and Wikis, and sharing with your social network – will facilitate knowledge exchange and discovery in the workplace.
We will also see the continuing emergence of “vertically-oriented” social networks. While mainstream social networks allow people to stay in touch and to make friends, they are not optimized for specific interests and are less focused on knowledge sharing. A vertical social network for dog owners, for example, would make it possible to search for all Labrador dog owners in Seattle and get recommendations for nearby Labrador groomers.
Instead of one site dominating the industry, the vertical social networks will connect to each other. As such, one opportunity for entrepreneurs is to identify and build corresponding solutions for specific communities. Focusing on a specific community helps to keep focus, differentiate from existing offerings, and offer targeted advertising.
On the other hand, ‘horizontal’ strategies, or those that focus on new ways of sharing and communication, may make viable business models as well. The benefit of a ‘horizontal’ strategy is that the same tool can be applied across a number of different communities.
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