One well known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The work of Yunus and Grameen echoes a theme among modern day social entrepreneurs that emphasizes the enormous synergies and benefits when business principles are unified with social ventures.

In some countries - including Bangladesh and to a lesser extent the USA - social entrepreneurs have filled the spaces left by a relatively small state. In other countries - particularly in Europe and South America - they have tended to work more closely with public organizations at both the national and local level. Agency management software helps business to work at differnt level.

The George Foundation’s Women’s Empowerment program empowers women by providing education, cooperative farming, vocational training, savings plan, and business development. In 2006 the cooperative farming program, Baldev Farms, was the second largest banana grower in South India with 250 acres under cultivation. Profits from the farm are used for improving the economic status of the workers and for running the other charitable activities of the foundation.

ref: wikipedia, Insurance Software, NGO

Networking is regarded as one of the most basic type of customer service strategy. Face-to-face and/or real-time contact to potential and existing customers is proved effective for any type of businesses and industries. Building networks or customer communities is considered as a standard modern day marketing and CRM strategy. Here are some tips for better business networking.

• Reach out: Your first aim must be finding new markets, new niches and new peoples.
• Tell every one about you: Remember it is you who has to start a conversation and it is your need to make the other thoroughly understand you.
• Be casual and polite: Never make your (possible) customer feel that they are pressured to listen you or they are pressured to buy any thing from you.
• Listen to what they are saying: Every prospect has doubts and difficulties, clear doubts and win their hearts.
• Don’t stay if there is no opportunity. You have to use your resources carefully and intelligently. Never stay in a network, where peoples don’t hear you.
• Utilize your network to cut down costs, finding better resources and raw materials and for servicing your customers more freely.
• Keep the relationships warm.
• Widen your network, add more persons to it, provide more services and products, offer better benefits.

Very interesting post on Techmeme about Google investing in subsea cable:

Google is working with a consortium of carriers planning to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system. The new cable, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), would link Unity’s landing station in Japan to Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. The cable is still in the planning stage, and the consortium has yet to announce a supply contract. ‘Given the current flurry of undersea cables under construction, the SJC cable will probably not be ready for service until 2011 at the earliest,’ said TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin

This follows huge investment in quite a number of other distribution plays, including wireless spectrum. So why do this? Now part of this requirement is clearly to move traffic between datacentres, but to say the least, its unusual for a media aggregator and Ad server to want to be a major global Telco.

So, a thought experiment - Google’s business model initially was to allow users to find content they want on the internet, and to pay for this it monitors their behaviour in order to optimise adverts it serves to them. Over time the model has more become about selling advertising by capturing various strands of user data, of which search is now just one component. Strategically, Google “pwns” the content market by making it easy to find it. Its market dominance allows it to “pwn” the consumer market in many ways. However, the one area it dows not “pwn” is the distribution function. But that traffic travels over the assets of some of the few companies in the world who are both rich enough and smart enough to give them a run for their money. Google gets a “free ride” right now as operators are (i) charging users for pipe and (ii) subsidizing it to grow traffic, so that their fixed costs are amortised over more people (and they get more subscription). But what if the Telcos thought the upstream players should also help pay for the next upgrades, especially those pumping out the video that is filling their pipes?

Our hypothesis is thus that Google’s greatest strategic Achilles heel is in internet distribution. This is the one area where it faces a major competitive threat, as the distribution companies (mainly Telcos and ISPs) can control Google’s traffic, and extract value from that. AT&T made this point very clearly when it showed that it too can monitor internet behaviour. And when it comes to who has the whip hand, its the Telcos in the final analysis. They own the means of distribution.

Hence a content aggregation and search company is making such a play in becoming a pipe owner.

Google is in the NYT for managing its cost base via cutting subsidies for child care facilities and evening canteen services, and this apparently implies it is losing its Mojo (via Slashdot):

Actually, we noted the first sign of MoJo loss was when it bought YouTube, which we believe was its “Netscape Moment”, for 3 main reasons:

- It was clear Google could no longer innovate and build their own service in this major new space, ie we could see their strategic and technical limits (just as Microsoft’s limits were exposed when they had to crash Netscape)

- It was a defensive acquisition, to prevent a major competitor from gaining an advantage.

- The price paid was thus not what a smart acquirer with market power on its side would pay.

At the time (18 months ago) we reflected that from now on a number of other behaviours are predictable, such as:

(i) Increasing reliance on acquisitions for making up revenue growth, and paying increasing premiums for them…;

(ii)….but these then often being strangled by internal politics, which usually becomes both more vicious and petty

(iii) Increasing difficulty in attracting and retaining “the best”

Another classic sign of the “End of the S Curve” and the move to utility is cost management by perks removal. This usually implies two things are going on in the business:

(i) It is unable / unwilling yet to confront where the real main cost wastage is, so “easy” targets (ie no Baron owns them) are hit first - aka reshuffling or removing “Deckchairs on the Titanic”

(ii) Decisions are probably no longer being made by line operatives or by involved top management, but by management admin / staff types (aka “Suits with MBA’s” rather than “Shirts with MSc’s”).

For those who have been around the corporate block, this sort of behaviour is very predictable owing simply to the amount of times its been seen before in the last 50 years or so (at least). These are classic signs of slowdown of margins, even if revenue is still growing. That’s due to the flattening of the growth curve as the business moves into its Utility phase. Other signs are typically a shift in reliance from technological innovation to economic (acquisition, price crashing) and legal means to gain competitive advantage.

This is not good or bad per se*, merely a stage in the growth of any major enterprise. Google is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is now the new IBM. IBM is the new GE….

So who is the new Google?

*The daycare ploy here is a little bit more cynical than most, however, as by reducing subsidy it raises annual daycare prices to $50k+ per annum, thus limiting it to more senior (ie powerful) employees:

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn’t matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to “scale” day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

In other words, the net effect is that junior new mums are taking the brunt (and maybe being managed out the business, as they are both expendable and no longer able to sleep under their desks on all nighters?). Maybe not Evil, but definitely not a nice way of doing things.

A few weeks ago we noted that this cycle of Cloud Computing aka Grid aka…..(etc) was probably going to be kindly put to bed after a host of high profile woes, and wondered what it:

will be resurrected as next time. Our money is on a biological analogy.

El Reg has stepped up to the breach and noted that there will of course be a Grab for Green (props to RedCatCo for link):

The next time around, it will be pitched as a “green” technology. Why ruin the environment with your data center? You can run a social media website and still love the earth.

Energy-efficient computers powered by sunshine. This will be an instant hit. There will be greenhouse gas output dashboards with neat little Ajax widgets. You’ll have calculators to figure out how much to pay for carbon offsets each month. Don’t believe me? Follow the money. “Green” technology is the most efficient, modern way to capitalize on liberal guilt. You also get to pass it off as altruism. Combine that with a web development community that runs on self-satisfaction and you’ve got a recipe for profit. Best of all, you can squeeze money out of an investor for this by making him feel ashamed to be a person of means.

What started as a noble cause has finally finished its devolution into a racket.

No matter what the name, you, the developer, will still be dealing reliability and accountability. Using someone else’s infrastructure for your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency.

Al Gore even said so.

Dang, we should have seen that one coming. Patrick’s Law* makes this the most likely correct scenario. It’s not true of course - massively concentrated datacentres are as ungreen as you can get, but it is definitely a wonderful straw to clutch on to.

*Patrick’s Law states that, for most human endeavours where greed, fear or power is involved, the most cynical explanation is usually the correct one

(Update - any worries I had that I was overly skeptical about the head-in-the clouds set is dispelled by the comments over here on Crunchbase)