Isegoria

In 2008, three guys in Manhattan started Ignighter.com, a dating site with a twist:

They sought to set themselves apart by enabling members to set up group dates: One member, serving as a point person, could arrange a date — a movie, say, or a picnic in Central Park — with a group of other people and thereby take some of the awkward edge off of typical dates.

By the end of the year, they had 50,000 registered users in the United States — not that many.  But they soon found love abroad:

“In January 2010, we made the decision that we are an Indian dating site,” Mr. Sachs says. And now, with almost two million users — and 7,000 more signing up daily — Ignighter is considered India’s fastest-growing dating Web site.

To put it another way, it gets as many users in a week in India as it did in a year in the United States. Next month, Ignighter will open an office in India and hire a dozen local employees. The company has stopped developing its American site, though it remains online.

As funding heats up for Web start-ups in general, some investors have taken notice of Ignighter and its potential in India. This month, the company closed a $3 million round of financing. Forty percent of its investors are based in India, including Rajan Anandan, Google’s top executive in India. In the United States, Ignighter is backed by Point Judith Capital, Founder Collective and GSA Venture Partners, among others.

“Here we are, a few Jewish guys sitting in Union Square, and we might have accidentally revolutionized the dating scene in India,” Mr. Sachs says of himself and Mr. Osit. They and Mr. Owocki, who is charge of Web development and programming for Ignighter, have never been to India — though they now plan to make frequent trips there.

Tech-savvy Indians probably read about the site on tech blogs, and it spread from there:

From there, it grew in part because dating in India is still in a somewhat embryonic stage. It happens in big cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad, but in many less cosmopolitan parts of India it’s still considered taboo for unmarried men and women to be seen in public together. Many couples, as they have for centuries, meet through arranged marriages that their relatives orchestrate.

But for some in this generation — those raised on a diet of MTV and social networks — there’s a desire to find new dating scripts, or just to hang out with a coed group.

The group dynamic also makes going out an easier sell to parents, who are worried about safety and propriety.

Why is Borders going bankrupt? Mark Evans answers:

This is a question that many of us at Borders asked ourselves frequently and I think the answer is not a simple one. As someone who has given this a tremendous amount of thought and was Director of Merchandise Planning & Analysis for many years, I’ve outlined my assessment below:

Failure to adequately address the internet sales channel and the subsequent ebook market. Specifically, the decision to outsource Borders.com to Amazon.com. To be fair, Borders.com was costing the company millions of dollars in losses each year ($20m I think when they decided to outsource) and one could argue that the outsourcing solution was a case of letting the most efficient etailing organization (Amazon.com) handle the job and turn a big negative into a profitable business. In the short-term, this saved a lot of money. In the long run, the internet is too important to outsource in this manner and Borders’ branding, multi-channel strategy, and customer base suffered. They also dropped the ball on ebooks, but by the time this became an issue they were just trying to figure out how to keep the whole house from burning down around them, so I find it more understandable.

Poor real estate strategy. Borders leased space that was too large, the storefronts did not compare well to B&N, and they were complacent in picking and relocating existing stores to the best locations. Some of this is subjective as I don’t have great data to back this up — just my own educated assessment based on observation.

Over-investment in music. While this was a big plus for this in the early to mid 90′s, this was a disaster in the long run. This is basically why the stores were too big once the music business cratered. So, stores were sized and modeled to provide a large music CD business which largely disappeared. In addition, infrastructure was sized to support this, including a dedicated warehouse distribution facility. This last part has been addressed over time, but soaked up money, time, and energy. Note that music was also part of what made Borders a destination for many customers, so when music sales tanked, other product categories’ sales suffered as well.

Over-reliance on assortment size to compete as opposed to efficient operations. Borders was renowned for its wide and quality assortment of titles. The very large assortment size was an advantage early on before Amazon. However, by its very nature the internet was better at quickly and efficiently connecting customers with obscure titles and bringing the “long tail’ to market. Thus, Borders suffered disproportionately as the “long tail” customers abandoned them. Thus, competing on assortment size was especially vulnerable to internet retailing.

Failure to build efficient systems and processes. While Borders legendary “expert system” was considered cutting edge and an advantage early on, the company failed to successfully build upon this foundation and create new, better assortment, replenishment, and supply chain systems and processes to keep pace with the changing state of technology and efficient retail operations. B&N invested considerable time/energy/money through the 90′s in systems and processes. To provide one example, a lower ranked title that sells out in a B&N will be replenished from a central warehouse within 2-3 days. The same process could take up to 16 weeks for Borders. Borders sought to upgrade systems with two large efforts in the 00′s: first one was a home grown effort called Common Systems. Second was a “buy and integrate” project to implement Retek and E3. Both failed spectacularly. The Retek effort dramatically hurt the Walden chain, the only business unit that was managed by the system. With both of these efforts, large sums of money and, perhaps more importantly, human resources and time were squandered.

Branding failure. In addition to the Borders.com problem, Borders never reached the mindshare that Barnes & Noble did for a variety of reasons. Also, Barnes & Noble secured the exclusive U.S. Starbucks partnership, a major branding and traffic-driving win for them.

The Chinese have a centuries-old tradition of wealthy men taking on second wives — or er nai — and this has important marketing ramifications:

If he takes on a mistress, for most unwealthy people, this is a fundamental threat to the marriage. But if a husband is a man of means, and has a significant income, then he can take on a second wife without violating his obligation to his first wife. So there is a whole way of maintaining the system without it resulting in divorce.

I wouldn’t say er nai are socially accepted, they’re just not scandalous.

When I ask people how much it costs to maintain a second wife — a trophy concubine — the average I’m told is 50,000RMB [$7,600]. This isn’t just a girlfriend, this is someone who is kept. And she is displayed as somebody that’s a result of this guy’s power and influence, and access to funds.

In China, half of all luxury purchases are gifts:

Male consumption is the largest source, with much of it coming from man to man gifting for business purposes — you could call it trust facilitation. That’s one of the things that makes the luxury market in China absolutely unique; men buy a lot more luxury products than women do, and this is largely to smooth business transactions.

Sometimes those payouts are ill-gotten, and a way of siphoning profit into non-measurable ways, and sometimes it’s just a way of currying favour. Women self-purchasing is also a critical segment, as is gifting between man and wife and boyfriend and girlfriend.

That said, in my casual but extended observation, gifting to the second wife is significant. And those brands tend to be much more flashy.

Second Wives [like flashy brands] because they have to display that their man is dedicated to them. They lead very insecure lives. They are not independent and need to advertise the fact they have a sponsor.

Any city that has a middle class is going to have Second Wives:

I asked people what percentage of upper middle class guys [had mistresses] — and this might not be accurate but it gives you an idea of how widespread the perception is — and was told 85-95%. It’s certainly become accepted as a perk of power. Even a former president had a very high profile mistress. And it’s not a scandal.

However, the reason the government has policy for officials not to have mistresses is not about morals, it’s about corruption. The mistress is often thought to be sustained based on ill-gotten gains and it’s a trigger for corruption accusations, because the actual salary of an official is not high enough to support a mistress.

Mike Hofman of Inc lists 5 things you should never say while negotiating:

1. The word “between.”
2. “I think we’re close.”
3. “Why don’t you throw out a number?”
4. “I’m the final decision-maker.”
5. “F— you.”

It’s easier to sell something when you list the faults, Judd Weiss explains:

I did this all the time when I sold commercial buildings, like an apartment complex. “The pipes are crap in these units, they need to be replaced. Over here there’s some f—ing pigs in this unit, their carpet smells like cat piss, and I think they literally have someone sleeping in the walk in closet. But f— all that, the building cashflows very well as it is, rents are way under market so you’re looking at much better future cashflow income as tenants turn over. And most important, that big retail development around the corner is nice and will attract better quality tenants to the area and even better retail, which will attract even better quality tenants, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, because this building was so poorly managed by the previous owner, there’s a lot of work to do and you’ll have to deal with the scum of society living here for the time being. But that’s why it’s such a good deal in this area, and besides, your management company will deal with the riff raff while you turn the property around and reap the rewards in an improving location.”

Guys, that’s how you get someone to move $3 million out of his bank account and leave a big f—ing smile on his face about it. There’s a lot going on here (boldness, clarity, leadership) but notice how important honesty is to the equation. Sane people just don’t make moves with that kind of money until they feel like they’ve got a good evaluation of the situation. Pretending that there are no problems with the property won’t make your client feel more comfortable. Your honesty is so appreciated because it is so scarce.

Leigh Buchanan explains how great entrepreneurs think, based on the research by Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business:

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies.

By contrast, corporate executives — those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field — use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

Early indications suggest the rookie company founders are spread all across the effectual-to-causal scale. But those who grew up around family businesses will more likely swing effectual, while those with M.B.A.’s display a causal bent. Not surprisingly, angels and seasoned VCs think much more like expert entrepreneurs than do novice investors.

The American craft beer scene is going global, but there are some hurdles:

Pease says the limited shelf life of most craft beers is the primary overseas shipping hurdle. “Most craft beers are not pasteurized like commercial beers, which makes them basically the same as an unpasteurized food product and causes all sorts of export problems. But there are some styles of craft beers that fare better because they contain natural preservatives.”

One of those natural preservatives is hops, the bitter herb that enabled the Dutch brewers to ship beer to Britain as early as the 15th century (many of the earliest beers made without hops had a shelf life of less than a week). Pease says craft beers that are heavy on hops and have a high alcohol content, which also acts as a preservative, fare best when being shipped long distances.

Still, navigating the logistics of shipping to multiple countries can be difficult. “It took us two years just to figure out how things work in Italy because the system is somewhat archaic,” says Eric Wallace, the 49-year-old co-founder of Left Hand Brewing in Longmont, Colo. The former Air Force communications officer lived in Italy and Germany during the 1980s and opened Left Hand Brewing shortly after returning home to Colorado in 1993.

In 2004, the Brewers Assn. launched its Export Development Program with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help American craft breweries meet the increasing demand for their products in international markets. According to the Brewers Assn., since 2003 total U.S. craft beer exports have tripled to more than 1.3 million gallons. (Sweden is the largest importer of American craft beer, followed by Canada, Japan and Denmark.)

Sweden imports more American craft beer than Canada?

Jeff Yang explains how Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:

CES is the home of the mainstream, the chorus, the echo chamber; by not attending, Apple maintains its identity as the maverick, the soloist, the think-different visionary — even though its massive success has now made it the world’s eighth-largest consumer technology company by revenue.

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” (Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker’s promotion to the top spot: “You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.”)

Other companies fail to do things because they’ve overlooked potential openings or are cutting corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious, measured statement. It’s why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not including industry-standard components — for instance, the iMac’s lack of a floppy drive — just aren’t getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they’re missing as much as by what they contain.

To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa — whom he designated as the official “spiritual advisor” for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple’s CEO in 1986, and who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.

While Jobs has never invoked the term in public — one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible — ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs’ single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan’s technology titans — most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.

Jobs has long been fascinated with Sony and its co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, who gave the new company its mission statement:

“Sony will be the company that is most known for transforming the global image of Japanese goods as being of poor quality.” It defined Sony by what it would not do — make bad products — making it something of an omission statement, if you will.

By way of example, Deutschman tells the story of how Sony entered the color TV marketplace, noting that in the Sixties, when color TV was going from 3% to 25% of the market, Sony was one of the few electronics companies that didn’t sell a color model. “People were telling Ibuka, ‘You have to come in to this market, everyone will take your market share,’” says Deutschman. “And Ibuka refused, saying, ‘No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods. We will only do breakthrough technology.’”

As a result, the company found itself in a precarious financial situation, losing out to its primary rivals — until it came upon the aperture-grille technology that Sony unveiled in 1966 as the core of the Trinitron TV. A full 25% brighter than its rivals, Trinitron became the best-selling color TV for the next quarter century.

“At the time, Sony was committed to not releasing a crappy product just because the market was there; they waited until they had a truly revolutionary innovation, combined it with great design and then profited from it for long, long time,” says Deutschman. “For decades, Sony was a perfect place for engineers to fully use their creativity, because it was focused on bringing real meaning and benefit to society by making great products. Sadly, in the last couple of decades, Sony has lost its way.”

When I was in Japan a few years ago, I visited Tokyo’s high-tech district, Akihabara, to see the hot new things coming out of that famously gadget-obsessed country — and the hot new things on display were all Apple products:

Meanwhile, as Douglas Krone, CEO of Dynamism and Gizmine — sister companies that sell otherwise-unavailable Japanese gadgets to American early adopters — notes, the home of Sony has become the land of Apple.

“I was at a party last night in central Tokyo that happened to have a bunch of twentysomething guests,” he says. “Every time I saw something glowing, it was an iPhone. It was a chilling display of dominance — five years ago, you would have seen 99.9 percent Japanese handsets and 0.1 percent Nokias and MotoRAZRs. Softbank’s flagship stores look almost comical now, with rows and rows of iPhones broken only by the occasional row of iPads, in a space that used to have a wide array of handsets.”

MIT’s AgeLab has produced the Age Gain Now Empathy System, or Agnes, to help product designers and marketers better understand older adults and create innovative products for them:

At first glance, it may look like a mere souped-up jumpsuit. A helmet, attached by cords to a pelvic harness, cramps my neck and spine. Yellow-paned goggles muddy my vision. Plastic bands, running from the harness to each arm, clip my wingspan. Compression knee bands discourage bending. Plastic shoes, with uneven Styrofoam pads for soles, throw off my center of gravity. Layers of surgical gloves make me all thumbs.

I didn’t know the story of how Threadless got started:

Nickell had no such vision as he put the finishing touches on a T-shirt design in late 2000. It was for the New Media Underground festival, an informal gathering of Web designers in London. He had no intention of attending the event, but he cared about it deeply. At the time, Nickell was 20 years old, living in a tiny Chicago apartment. He spent his days on the sales floor at CompUSA; at night, he was a talented if unenthusiastic part-time student at the Illinois Institute of Art. Though his girlfriend visited him each weekend, he had few close friends.

When he wasn’t working or studying, Nickell was tinkering with Web design, a hobby he indulged in on Dreamless.org, an Internet forum for illustrators and programmers. He would spend hours at a time cruising the forum, talking with his online friends and engaging in a pastime called Photoshop tennis. In it, designers pass digital photographs back and forth and challenge one another to manipulate the images in the most outrageous way possible.

Nickell’s design for the New Media Underground festival — three lines of gray text that mimicked the layout of the Dreamless website — was an entry for a contest that the festival’s organizers were holding online. The design was simple and not quite pretty. But it was strikingly clever — a physical representation of their digital community. The Dreamless members agreed. Nickell won the contest.

In concrete terms, this accomplishment meant exactly nothing: He got no money or even a copy of his winning shirt. But the experience was exhilarating. Dreamless members spent a lot of time batting ideas back and forth, but their creations rarely made it out of the digital realm. Suddenly, Nickell had an idea: What if the best designs were printed on T-shirts and sold in the real world? He suggested as much to Jacob DeHart, one of a handful of friends he had met on Dreamless. DeHart, a student at Purdue University, loved the idea, and each pitched in $500 — enough to pay a lawyer to set up the business and print the first round of shirts.

Nickell and DeHart held their first contest in November 2000. They asked the designers on Dreamless to submit their best work and to pick their favorites. The grand prize: two free shirts and the promise that any proceeds would be reinvested in future contests. They called the competition Threadless, a play on thread — either a clothing item or a discussion topic on an online forum. In all, they printed two dozen copies of five shirts out of slightly fewer than 100 submissions with in-joke titles like “Evil Mother F—ing Web Design” and “Dead Sexy Designer.” The shirts went on sale in January 2001 for $12 each and sold out quickly. In the months that followed, Nickell and DeHart ran regular competitions using an automated rating system that allowed users to score designs on a scale from 1 to 5, but it never occurred to them that they had a real company. “It was just a hobby, a way for people to get their artwork out,” Nickell says. By 2002, the hobby had surpassed $100,000 worth of T-shirts and attracted more than 10,000 community members, mostly artists in their teens and 20s. Even so, Nickell, DeHart, and Kalmikoff — who joined the company that year — spent much of their time doing freelance Web design to pay the bills.

Shortly after founding the company, Nickell and DeHart began awarding small cash prizes to the artists whose T-shirts were selected. Initially the prizes were $100 per winning design, but they gradually climbed to $2,500, plus reprint fees. But the appeal of Threadless to artists has never had much to do with getting paid. “It wasn’t so much the money,” says artist Glenn Jones, who won $150 in a contest in 2004, at age 29. “It was how cool it was to get your shirts printed.”