Today's meetings were with a large PR firm called MSL Group and a young startup called Sqwiggle. Our first meeting was with MSL and we met with their president Bryan who talked with us about the PR business and his company specifically. One of the things that he talked about was the nature of startups and the atmosphere of the Silicon Valley in general. He said that the nature of the Silicon Valley and technology firms in general was so competitive that it led to (as he said it) a nature of "the second you're on top, someone is climbing over you". This continuous struggle to be on top of the market or a certain technology also led to the practice of "If it's not broken, break it", which I'm not sure if I agree with. Although I understand the need to be continually searching the market for possible breakthroughs and doing your best to stay on top of technology and the market, I feel it may lead to a "shooting yourself in your flagship product" situation if taken too far. If you have got a solid product that is dominating its particular market, if you were to try and change it or make products to keep up with every technological fad or startup, you would quickly go broke or lose your market share because consumers wouldn't want to keep up with those continuous and more often than not failing trends.
Another topic that Bryan talked about was the role of Big Data in the future with the development of so many "smart" gadgets. As we move closer and closer to a world in which most everything we do is connected in one way or another and is therefore gathering, transmitting, and storing data, an important part of that abundance of data is going to be filtering it and going from Big Data to Good Data. By having access to a lot of data gathered from our devices, companies will have to find a way to add value to this data by organizing it or using it in a manner which serves the user who is providing it. Without adding enough value to this data collected, I do not see a techno-weary population like the majority of the US adopting into this view of the future where everything we do is turned into data and companies and products have ready access to it.
The second company we visited was a startup called Sqwiggle which is developing a program that allows users to be continually seen by colleagues through the use of their webcams (anyone who was online had a photo taken every 10 seconds through their webcams and was displayed on other colleagues screens in black and white) while having the Skype like ability to start either personal or group video calling sessions and a group chat feature. While it was really interesting to meet and talk with Eric (one of the founders) about forming and running a startup, the whole time I could not help but think that this program doesn't really solve a problem in today's business world. Now granted some visionaries have begun to purchase their product for use within an organization, I have trouble thinking that this product will win the early-majority because I don't see this product either being a market leader in their market (something that pragmatists need to see) nor do I see their product solving any major problem. Now granted maybe they have found a niche market that I haven't thought about, but their only distinguishing feature is having videos of people to represent them being online rather than a little green icon. Unless Sqwiggle has some upcoming features to differentiate itself or has found a population that needs this, I don't see this company making it into an early majority market (who also will be weary about people having the ability to see them every time they start the program).
No comments:
Post a Comment