Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:08 PM PDT

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon.

In response to that, they are proposing a solution to do both pre-hiring and post-hiring. Prior to hiring, for example, training managers need to assess where candidates have been trained, and what is the quality of training that they provide. In addition, there are additional training needs post-hiring, which training managers address often by hiring training vendors.

The key question that Guruvantage needs to answer is whether training managers are willing to pay for the solution or not. If the answer is yes, then the next question is how much are they willing to pay? What this leads us to is first, value proposition validation, then business model validation, followed by pricing model validation. Each stage of validation helps enhance the valuation of a company. And in 1M/1M, we always emphasize the best practice of building as much value, validation and valuation upfront.

In addition, we had a specific discussion about segmentation alternatives - based on size of company, vertical, and geographical. Guruvantage has a large vision of doing this kind of training assessment for a wide variety of sectors ranging from engineering to business to the arts. All very well, but they have to pick a segment to enter through. As I told them, by trying to cater to everybody, you end up catering to nobody. You HAVE to go segment by segment.

ARROW

Devesh Verma was up next to present ARROW, a finishing school solution that helps college graduates become employable. Devesh addresses the issue that a large portion of Indian college grads are not employable because of a lack of essential skills, especially communication. Devesh has three colleges that have told him that they are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for training 30 students on ARROW. He expects to be able to deliver a 30-student session within Rs. 130,000. Not bad.

Now I want to know whether Devesh can find 100 colleges - tier B and tier C colleges since the tier A colleges tend to have their own offerings - who are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for ARROW. If he can, then there is a business worth building here. And pay attention to the segmentation of who is adopting vs. who isn't; it will provide great cues to where the highest velocity entry points to the market are.

Devesh asked me, "Is the Indian education sector ready for something like ARROW?" My answer is: "A sector's readiness is a function of the customers' readiness. So by answering the question - Will more colleges buy? - you will also be able to answer the broad question."

Global Experts

Then Rahul Jain presented Global Experts, a community of business experts who will be tutoring, coaching and mentoring business students. Rahul has assembled a lot of content on business and management curriculums, and wants to use that to attract potential customers who will then pay to access more personal engagements with experts. In essence, he is proposing a freemium model whereby he uses content to draw in users, and then try to convert a percentage of them to paying customers in the U.S.

Well, the paid content model in the U.S. has really imploded, so I have some skepticism about the viability. There are some competitors who seem to have validated the business model to a degree, like http://www.studentoffortune.com. So Rahul's next step is to SEO-optimize the content he has put together and harness a group of users ti see if he can convert a percentage of them (average freemium conversion rate is usually 2%) to paying customers.

If Rahul can get to about 5,000 paying customers, paying $250 a year, then he can get to the $1M mark. The question is, can he attract 250,000 students with his free content and then convert 2% of those to paying customers?

For these three and other online education entrepreneurs, I would like to take a moment and point you to some online education case studies on my blog. Take a look at Apex Learning, Archipelago Learning, KC Distance Learning, Revolution Prep, and Global English.

Intelligent Monitoring

Next Vikas Hazrati and Narinder Kumar discussed Intelligent Monitoring. Vikas and Narinder have identified an interesting pain point that IT managers seem to have: a large volume of alerts from various IT monitoring systems without the ability to actionable correlation analysis. They have feedback from three to five IT managers, including one that is willing to pay them to build a solution.

To them, my advice is to leverage as much of the "consulting" money that clients are willing to pay to solve the problem, and use that cash to bootstrap the business. I love this kind of customer intimacy through working closely with customers, and getting paid for it. If they can talk to 100 IT managers in the SME segment and get 10 to 15 to pay up, the entire product design and development process can be financed by customers! I referred them to the Bootstrapping To Billions case study in Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One.

Simplogy

Up last was Hasnain Zaheer for Simplogy, who wants to offer marketing strategy and execution services from Australia. My advice to him is to zero in on specific marketing processes that can be offered in a remote mode, which could be email marketing, or SEO, SEM, Web design - all those being highly competitive areas - but strategy consulting cannot really be sold online.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series. You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions.

The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Photo by Mary Gober.

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Program could help train a green work force for North Port

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 08:37 PM PDT

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OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Posted: 17 Jun 2010 07:54 PM PDT

June 17, 2010

News convergence isn't easy for student journalists, either

By Aaron Chimbel
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The Millennials in our journalism classrooms are supposed to be wizards of the Web. After all, almost their entire lives have been spent consuming media in a converged landscape, reading newspaper stories and watching TV reports online while communicating with one another via online social networks.

A Pew Research study from February backs this up: "For (Millennials), these innovations provide more than a bottomless source of information and entertainment, and more than a new ecosystem for their social lives. They also are a badge of generational identity. Many Millennials say their use of modern technology is what distinguishes them from other generations."

The study cites technology as the top factor that those born after 1980 say makes their generation unique. At 24 percent, it's twice the rate of that of Gen-Xers. But the twist to all this is that our journalism students are not so different than grizzled veterans of legacy media, at least not in practice.

They know they spend their entire lives connected, but it doesn't mean they automatically default to multimedia and a convergence culture in the classroom or the workplace. They seem to have a hard time translating how they consume news and information to how they should produce it. Many, though certainly not all, of them still see themselves as part of traditional media. It's a sense that's reinforced when campus newspapers and radio and television news staffs remain in separate quarters, rarely (or never) working together.

Bringing them together in the same room was the first step toward converging. Last fall, the Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University opened a new 2,300 square foot Convergence Center, the centerpiece of a $5.6 million renovation of the facilities for the school. The facility is home to the TCU Daily Skiff student newspaper, the TCU News Now broadcast and Image Magazine. The three were previously in separate rooms and their content kept separate.

"As a print journalism student, just being close to the broadcast students made sharing content much easier," said David Hall, the fall 2009 editor-in-chief of the Skiff. "We'd constantly bounce ideas off of each other and share news content, and sometimes students would do a print and multimedia element to their story, something unheard of back in the day of separate newsrooms."

The Convergence Center is built to facilitate what the name implies. Every one of 36 Mac computers is loaded with Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver) and Final Cut Express. The center also has a high-definition video camera and TelePrompTer that are connected to a new studio.

"Because News Now and Skiff staffers were working in the same newsroom, we were much more aware of what the other one was doing than we were before," said Julieta Chiquillo, the Skiff's managing editor in fall 2009 and editor-in-chief the following semester. "Even then, we had to establish a system to better communicate."

And that's the key. While the outlets are now all in the same room, the process to convergence requires more work.

"Prior to this new facility, I felt that student media were very disjointed. They did not share information or work together. Instead, they had a mindset of 'competition' with the other outlets," said Christina Durano, the News Now news director in Fall 2009 and convergence producer the following semester.

Students truly working across platforms had its moments. There were times when a reporter, like Durano, produced a breaking news video for the Web, worked on a text story for both the Web and Skiff, and later a broadcast story. Still, that was the exception, based more on an enterprising student than standard organizational practice.

"While moving to the convergence center undoubtedly helped the Skiff and News Now feel more comfortable with each other, both outlets need to improve on communicating their expectations of each other if they are to successfully converge," Chiquillo said.

Changes in the curriculum are helping, too.

Separate degrees in news/editorial journalism and broadcast journalism have been replaced with a new overarching journalism degree that exposes all students to multimedia, although there are traditional certificates in broadcast, convergence and news/editorial for students wanting those designations.

Current courses have been updated. Accompanying text stories and a multimedia element are now required in addition to the video story for all News Now stories students produce for classes. In the traditional print reporting course that feeds the Skiff, multimedia stories are now required.

The challenge is getting all of the content where it needs to go with any regularity. The organic approach of simply putting everyone together hasn't produced consistent results.

We have to keep in mind that students are still learning. Expecting them to be able to report across platforms while they are maneuvering around the basics is a lot to ask, although a realistic demand of the marketplace – and that's not taking into account that their work in student media is just a small piece of their college life, not a full-time job.

That's not to say there is nothing that can be done. Student leaders from the Skiff and News Now began holding budget meetings together, sharing ideas and pooling their limited resources. The new student leaders are continuing the work and are developing systems to ensure better content flow and integration of all of the media.

"I think the biggest challenge was changing the mindset of reporters and developing a system through which to converge," Durano said. "Convergence is a process – and we certainly aren't finished yet – but we are a thousand times more converged than we were."

Aaron Chimbel is an assistant professor of professional practice at TCU's Schieffer School of Journalism. He also advises TCU News Now. Before this TCU grad returned to campus in 2009 he worked for television stations in Texas, most recently WFAA-TV in Dallas. There he won five Emmy Awards and a national Edward R. Murrow Award.

More about: journalism education, newsroom convergence
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