Tech O2 Blog

Copycat Story Part 1

Sreeni Jakka — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:16:42 +0000

Last week, online game company Zynga sued Vostu for total infringement of their games. The report can be found at several places including http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/war-zynga-sues-the-hell-out-of-brazilian-clone-vostu/. Of course Vostu had something to say about it whether it makes sense or not… but interestingly both these companies are well funded (though the funding is not comparable). Anyways, we are not going to discuss who is right and who is wrong etc., The verdict is already out there in the street (web) and this story will be interesting to watch. But, we had our own story to tell that took place in the same week.
While we were doing due diligence of a prospective client, we ran into a competitor’s website. When I checked out their website and started browsing the pages, we’re like, ‘did someone iFrame into our site?’ The content was on their homepage was so familiar. Then I looked at their navigation and IA schematics… they were also exactly like ours. At that point, it can’t be a coincidence… as our IA of top level breakdown of sections was completely unique and original and no one had it. We categorized all our content into 4 basic groups in IA. What, How, Why, and Who; the questions a client may ask when working with a company like ours that doesn’t enjoy big branding in the marketplace. We knew that it was very original, and we are convinced that no one else had it.
I go and look at the footer of each page of this offending website and it had their copyright on it… wait a minute, my content, my images, my IA schematics, (and there’s more… we’ll walk you through some of that further!) and then you put your copyright on it! Will someone tell these guys copyright doesn’t mean “your right to copy” but instead it means that “exclusive rights are granted to the original author of original work, and you cannot copy it without permission from the original author… let alone putting your own copyright disclaimer on it”?

Here is a screenshot of the offending website’s homepage which I pretty much circled every pixel of it as there is nothing original there.

They even took some of our original focus area such as Idea Incubation. We don’t claim that we have copyright on the word “Idea Incubation”, but honestly how many software development companies talk about and are interested in incubating a startups’ idea? We’re one of the few… and apparently so are these guys! LOL. There’s also the same content word for word… are these guys our long lost twins or something?!

In our “Why” section, we candidly talk about why our clients should choose us. And, it’s the same +C and +V on the offending website, though I have to give it to them that they did a good job of replacing our company name with theirs.

They say “they are different”… wait, we said that and they repeated! Yep, they are right. They are different… they are so creative that they copy other’s content and even their key strengths word for word and claim it their own. I wonder where they steal the code for their client’s solutions!

Now here is the kicker… check out our Vision and you can see they magically share the same vision word for word. At that point, I was getting goose bumps!

At this point, my vision was getting blurred… and I had to check our “Top 10 Reasons Why a Client Should Choose Us”.

Hmm… it looks like they didn’t like the top 10 format, so they just removed the numbering and changed the sequence from 1 to 10. Wow… you could really do that?!

And, the screenshot below just tells you how much respect they have for their clients that they didn’t even bother changing the list of companies/clients our associates are associated with.

I also noticed that these guys might be little busy because they haven’t caught up with our site updates in the last six months or so. So, they are little behind the skill set below… but I’m sure they will catch up very shortly as they are “different”.

At the end, I wasn’t sure if I should be happy that I found another company with great minds behind it that matches our vision and philosophy or should I get disappointed that there are companies and people out there that think that the marketplace and customers are idiots?!

All clients should think twice about doing business with these sorts of companies. Do you really think that the clients are so naïve and you can really lie your way into a client relationship? If a company or its founders can’t afford to have an original vision, values and culture, what are they going to offer to their clients and the community?

Anyways, we sent a C&D Letter (Cease and Desist) to them and alerted them to take their website down immediately while they remedy the situation. We had our lawyers draft the C&D and ready to react if this company doesn’t comply with the C&D notice. Fortunately for them, they took their site down and responded back to us that they will not indulge in this activity in the future.

But, we do have to share this story with our clients, our competitors, and in general anyone active on the web world as copyright infringement is much more frequent than you think. Though not all copyright infringements stoop to this level of copycat nature, just know that there are people out there. Your first line of defense is to document the infringement, send C&D letter (preferably drafted by your attorney), and if they don’t comply proceed with legal action.

I hope we’re able to share this story with a little entertainment, offer a glimpse into the world of the copycats, and a quick way of how to handle those situations. Now here is a teaser for you… If you noticed, we haven’t explicitly specified the offending company name and the people involved that we interacted with, and the interactions itself. I saved that for another blog post as it’s as exciting as the part 1; I promise you that! Now stay tuned…

Is your business Social enough?

Sreeni Jakka — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:30:18 +0000

Social Media is no longer a fad. Twitter enjoyed its billionth tweet summer of 2010, Facebook has exceeded 500 million users, and you have employees that are LinkedIn lions with 1000+ contacts in their network. Market leaders such as Best Buy, Starbucks, Nestle, Old Spice, Dunkin Donuts leverage social media in a variety of ways; from marketing, ecommerce to customer service. We also see almost every business is on Facebook now. Businesses understand that social media is a medium that they need to participate and engage in. Itâ??s like the early 90s where Web was the new thing for several businesses, and every business rushed to have a website. By late 90s every business had a website, of course it’s questionable what they do on the web; for most businesses it serves as another billboard. Social media is experiencing the same situation currently with small to medium business.

Almost every business is on at least one of the social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, it just stops there; ‘we are on Facebook’. What exactly you are doing on Facebook for your business? Social media provides a way for ‘??engaging your customers and prospects’?. Just being on Facebook doesn’t mean much?; you might have a fan page, but it will be one of the nearly 500 million fan pages. Presence doesn’??t count for participation and engaging in social media.

The issue is not entirely ignorance, but lack of tools and economic campaign models for small business to actively participate in social media.
Analysts predict that Social media will become (has already become in some views) the â??new Internetâ?. Platforms like Facebook have orchestrated plans and methods to capture audience and make all business interactions within their ecosystem. Large corporations have created a new role in their employee roaster called ‘??Social Media Managers’, whose job is to engage their customers and prospects using an array of Social Media platforms. Social Media managers have several tools such as Social Flow, Tweet Deck, CoTweet, etc to participate in multiple social networks and interact with their clients. They also have the time and energy to carry on different social media campaigns from marketing to promotional activities.

Small businesses obviously neither have the budget nor the time and expertise to effectively engage in social media campaigns. The problem for small business is two-folds: lack of expertise for social strategy and lack of economic tool set to implement strategy. Strategy requires time and understanding of the opportunities, outside-the-box thought process in leveraging the new social paradigms. Lack of economic tool set makes their efforts expensive and contributes to loss of interest. There are small businesses that just work within Facebook ecosystem catering to Facebook users exclusively and very profitable.

TechO2 has been actively participating in Social Media Ecosystem space, especially with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We have the expertise in social media and also understand the opportunities for our clientsâ?? bottom line in social media space. TechO2 is specializing in developing economic tool sets for our clients social media needs. TechO2 has exclusive products as well as joint venture projects in the social media space. To find out more about how your business can benefit from leveraging social media, call us at 866.266.0286 or visit us at www.TechO2.com.

Should the SMB Market Consider Custom Built IT Applications? Or Buy Off the Shelf?

Harry — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:19:47 +0000

The answer to buy or build could be yes to both, according to Matt Holtle, vice president of The Gartner Group. If you can find off-the-shelf functionality that meets 80-100 percent of your business needs then the answer is easy: buy it. If you need a lot of customization for the application to meet your business needs, then you are probably better off going custom. Factor in the cost for customization and the annual licensing fees, and it could be cost prohibitive to buy off the shelf.

The good news is that some of your applications—the ones that automate commodity business processes—can be bought off the shelf, and the ones that are dealing with the core processes that differentiate your company can be custom.

With the growing software market and the global economy, there are many choices when it comes to custom-built software. Overseas development and open source frameworks made the process much more affordable, but you still need the right technology partner.

Here are some of the top things to consider when looking for a custom software developer:

Make sure they understand your business requirements and objectives
Take time with the design and planning stages. This is extremely important and should have the appropriate time allotted for the task
Make sure you completely understand the scope of the project before starting development
Be involved with the entire development process and all iterations, and make sure your partner uses the latest development methods (Agile)
Make sure you have local support and Project Management (most projects fail because of poor project management)
Find out how Quality Assurance is handled and what portion of development is allocated for QA
Set reasonable expectations and timelines for deliverables
Discuss how cross-functional departments may be affected by the new application and make sure they are involved in the process.

Follow these steps and you will be off to a good start. Custom application disasters can normally be traced back to three areas: poor design and scope, poor project management and lack of stakeholder’s involvement in the process.

Sreeni Jakka of TechO2 puts it best when he says “projects evolve, not change.” It is a guarantee that projects will have many changes throughout the development process, so if we are aware of this and anticipate them, it is evolution, not change.