Are bloggers entrepreneurs? How about those developers?

Stumbled across an interesting article at trak.in, and the question the writer asks is, “are bloggers entrepreneurs” and toeing the same line as the article, that is including only people who have registered their domains, paid a few dollars per year to get their blog started, do you consider them to be entrepreneurs?  

Lets define something called “life style entrepreneurship” which essentially means you are an entrepreneur by the day, have your own venture, put in a lot of time and effort into it (putting in lot of money is probably not as relevant since through the internet you can essentially start a business with almost no money), and then you have the others, people who create things as a hobby (and that could possibly turn into something serious later) and not worry too much on it, or are not solely dependent on it. So if we follow this taxonomy, bloggers who are serious, spend a lot of time on the design, the CSS, building a network around the blog knowledge etc can be considered entrepreneurs since there is a lot of effort involved, and possibly more money over a period of time. 

In essence, majority of bloggers are not just mainstream / lifestyle entrepreneurs, and hence its not fair to bestow upon them a title of an entrepreneur if they blog . And mind you, the output (here number of readers / traffic / hits) is not necessarily a yardstick to define if you are a life style entrepreneur or not. And just about the same way, how about developers who put in about 100 or so USD to develop those iPhone Apps and things on the SKD? Are they entrepreneurs? And this is again a brain child of new media that fall into the grey area with no exact classification or yardstick to tag!

Practical Branding and Marketing

At the practical insights into branding and marketing event organized by NOC Alumni @ China One. The Facebook Page for this event can be found here.  The speakers for the evening are Andrew Wee who is going to focus on internet marketing techniques; Jacky Tai on Branding and Kelvin Lim on Guerilla Marketing. 

Excitera Innovation Challenge kick off

I am at the Excitera Innovation Challenge (EIC) kick off and trying to blog live. Just walked in at 18:45 – thanks to a conference call that I had all the way till then. Anyways, here I go

Björn Touqan – MyQuran.mobi:

He talks about the challenges both technical and in terms of convincing the VC’s for getting the idea out into the public domain. Some of the concerns highlighted :

- Religious service in a secular world
- Islamaphobia
- Service from Sweden into the Arab world
- Making money out of personal beliefs and religion.

Facebook Garage – Stockholm, here we come (LIVE – At least trying)

Nordic’s first Facebook Garage!

So the action began a bit late (as usual). Well one lesson here – NO events on a Friday but when you don’t have a choice, at least make sure that it is not before 17:00. Anyways, we are good to go!

And it started off with an introduction by myself on behalf of the organizers about the event, the information about the wireless networks, the event wiki, the flickr page, the jaiku account and the rationale behind the idea of throwing this event. Beata the moderator was then introduced and she being the charismatic queen of Sweden took the stage by storm with a very precise introduction about the event and some small stuff that I had forgotten in my speech. She is the real rock star of the event:)

Songza = breathtaking

Manas turned my attention to this new service called Songza which is something similar to what Spotify / Lastfm is. But the best part about Songza is they require no signup’s. no downloads and they have an awesome interface done wholly in flash. They use cookie / some kind of tracking mechanism whereby they have the last song list that you played although you have not given any information (like sign up, login etc). Although this could spur one more round of “privacy bickering”, I think it is a damn cool service.

I feel a little more “closer” to Songza as they have very good collection of Indian music apart from the Western numbers. Probably that is making me a bit biased but I guess as an avid music listener I cannot ask for things better than Spotify & Songza to keep me entertained and on my toes every single day!