May | 2011 | Abhinav Jain

Apps for Business (wo)Men

Until Sept 2010, I was yet another conventional mobile phone user carrying around so called communicating ‘brick’ in my pocket; Those simple 13+ key phones which alternatively could be used for playing a tossing game with your friends in your living room. I was also the one who use to laugh at a crying friend coz his(er) smartphone accidentally received a scratch at a beach. However, now I’m one of them carrying an Android phone and a subject of laughter for my other ‘brick’ carrying friends.

My motivation to write this post was the article on inc.com -’Best Business Apps in 2010‘. The article highlighted some interesting apps which came out in 2010 and helped businessmen around the world. Out of all the highlighted apps, I found the following apps useful for early stage entrepreneurs (which also means free apps only).

1. Dropbox [Android|iPhone|iPad|Desktop]
Dropbox is a new ‘in-the-cloud’ storing environment. It is a good replacement for box.net however the nice thing is that unlike 1GB free space from box.net, Dropbox provide 2GB free space along with a provision for receiving 250MB free space once you refer it to your friend. You can use a web access to download/upload file anywhere on the go (However the login function miraculously vanished from their website when I urgently wanted to print a document stored in the dropbox and end up installing dropbox at cyber cafe’s desktop client). Check out this article by Amit Agarwal if you want to remotely print file from your smartphone. Again, you can also remotely monitor you PC using Dropbox. Overall, its a great software and a free replacement for box.net, Microsoft Groove etc.

Does ‘first-mover advantage’ always work!!?

If you happen to be at a business school sometime in your lifetime, or an entrepreneur mentored by a seasoned businessmen who loves to talk, or just happen to take a course on market development, then you’ll be very familiar with the term ‘first-mover advantage’. In layman’s term it says that whoever moves first to a new market (or create a market) has the most advantage. Well, it sounds pretty obvious and I ‘used to’ firmly believe that too. However recently I’ve stumbled upon some interesting data which do indicate that that may not be the case always. At this point of analysis let us make few things clear:

The cost and effort invested in entering or creating the market will be gigantic!. How? Because you are putting everything together from scratch. You’ll have to carry out exhaustive (and mostly expensive) market research, plus first contact with the suppliers or distributors, and lastly advertising and branding.
Today’s market is no more a ‘need-driven’ market, It is more of a ‘value-driven’ market. It is not anymore about using a motor grinder over hand mincer, or using an age old razor blade which can kill you with just a slightly wrong twist over a safety razor; It is about how you product is valued by the consumer. Whether you can push him a 3D TV or whether he’ll love to have a voice-recognition power switch at home is the major thing to tackle.

Even in today’s world (iPhone was not the first smartphone), it is hard to imagine products that benefitted from first-mover advantage (Amazon AWS may become an exception one day).

I think, Prof. Eric Laithwaite captured this thought beautifully in his book: An inventor in the Garden of Eden when he explained why products also go through an evolution cycle as does other living beings.