Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

BizHobNob, is an global online platform that enables people to find service providers they can *trust*, based on recommendations from within their communities and friends. BizHobNob is a network of service providers. It can be used by anyone to find an appropriate service provider for their business or personal needs. BizHobNob is deeply connected with existing social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Trust is emphasized by recommendations from family, friends and communities.

Very often, when looking for a service provider, we either call up our friends for recommendations or turn to the yellow pages. While the former is a very trusted model, but limited in scale, the latter scales very well, but is untrusted. BizHobNob seeks to fill the gap in between.

Bizhobnob is a Bangalore based startup and was launched in Beta stage in December 2010. Bizhobnob is founded by Sapna Chandiramani, an alumnus of University of Rochester and also a Yahoo Veteran where she headed global engineering team and hold multiple patents.

Bizhobnob is an invite-only platform, it thrives on referrals. Popularly referred to as a “LinkedIn for Service Providers”, it does not seek to build another social network, but to simply leverage existing ones.

While the platform is free to use for anyone looking for a service provider, and even for service providers looking to list themselves on BizHobNob, the latter can benefit greatly from the paid subscription, priced attractively at Rs. 100/month!

Bizhobnob indirectly competes with Yellowpages like JustDial and classified sites like Craiglist etc.

So, the next time you are seeking a service provider – be it a party planner for your kid, or a web designer for your firm, you know to look no further!

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

I was pleasantly surprised to see the personalized diwali greetings from Deep Nishar- VP Products and User Experience, Linkedin in its homepage.

Very simple but impressive messaging from Linkedin.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Cisco recently launched social media monitoring tool called SocialMiner.  It is a social media customer care solution that can help you proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites.

By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your social media customer care team, company can respond to customers in real time using the same social network they are using.

SocialMiner makes use of  algorithms to keep a watch on social network like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube for keywords and phrases that are relevant to customers. The software then synthesizes and filters the most significant and relevant ones, forwards them onto a customer care executive who can take care.

Cisco SocialMiner provides:

• The ability to configure multiple campaigns to search for customer postings on the public social web about your company’s products, services, or area of expertise
• Filtering of social contacts based on preconfigured campaign filters to focus campaign searches
• Routing of social contacts to skilled customer care representatives in the contact center or to experts in the enterprise–multiple people can work together to handle responses to customer postings through shared work queues
• Detailed metrics for social media customer care activities, campaign reports, and team reports

With Cisco SocialMiner, company can listen and respond to customer conversations originating in the social web. Being proactive can help your company enhance its service, improve customer loyalty, garner new customers, and protect your brand.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Greylock today announced a new $20 million seed fund. This announcement was made by Reid Hoffman a founder of Linkedin and partner with Venture capital firm Greylock Partners. It was announced by him in TechCrunch Disrupt a annual Startup event conducted by TechCrunch.

This fund is affiliated with Greylock for small scale investment into startups. It comes from the $575 million fund and each partner can invest small portions of it as they see fit without committee approval.

Good news for Indian startups is this fund will cater to them also since Greylock partners operate in India and Arvin Babu is partner overseeing the investments in India. Indian startups can look up to him for granting the seedfund. Recently in India Greylock Partner invested in Taggle, a group discount portal.

Four companies have been funded by the seed project so far, though recipient companies wish to remain secretive.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. In simple words Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc. then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

Things to consider before implementing Freemium business model-

• Freemium may work for u if u have: great long term retention rate, product value increases over time, low variable costs.
• Create a business service with business processes which is highly robust, so it is scalable and doesn’t need large numbers of people to grow.
• Analyse how user use your system and assess the data, you will come across gaps in the system which you can address through premium service and it means more sales.
• Make sure you show them the value of features and how they can leverage features coming with premium subscription.
• Have reasonable pricing for premium subscription, if its too high competitors can cause dent to your business. High free user base tends to keep away the competition.
• Tease users with data on premium stuff and thus continue to entice them.
• Dont try to target 40-50% user base to convert into premium users, 10% conversion is too good rate.