More often than not people use buzzwords without fully understanding what they actually mean. A pitch (exaggerated, of course) may look like this.

We are sort of playing around with the semantic web and we may be at the forefront of Web 3.0.  We are currently in closed alpha and will go into a private beta soon. Six months after that, we plan to go to public beta. During the private beta we will engage with some influentials (example A-listers) and our goal is to convert these influentials into evangelists.

We used agile method to build the product using the latest open source stack and some mashups with a few online services. You can say that we are sort of using cloud computing a bit. The goal is to fully leverage the power of Amazon EC2 kind of infrastructure to help with scaling when we start seeing an eyeball-explosion. We had offshored our development team but when we did a rightshoring exercise, we found that a dual-shore approach works better.

The user-interface and logo were crowdsourced and is XHTML 1.1 compliant and has been tested to ensure cross-browser compatibility.

We are excited about this new release. The product was conceived in one of those Barcamps where we were discussing Blue Ocean Strategy and suddenly one of them suggested that with a little bit of knowledge arbitrage from the trucking industry, we could enable a product that will take advantage of the “wisdom of the crowds” and also capitalize on the “long tail” phenomenon.

The product will be platform-agnostic as we mentioned and we think that we will “cross the chasm” because of the viral nature of the application. Apart from using PPC (pay-per-click) and CPE (cost-per-engagement) based advertisements to jump-start adoption,  we have engaged some experts to work on social media marketing. We decided to avoid CPM (cost-per-impression) based advertising as it is difficult to measure the ROI.  A Facebook App, Myspace Page and a YouTube channel will be up to start with and then soon after we will release an iPhone App and an Android App.Once we reach a critical mass of users, we will enable self-service support via moderated forums and/or a Ning-based social network for our users.

The taxonomy for our offering has been defined but we are thinking that what will happen eventually will be that folksonomies will take over our taxonomy. We will be closely monitoring the social graph for the feedback.

In our roadmap, we are thinking of supporting Google Gears too.

We will pursue a global channel strategy after we complete our I18N project. That will probably be the tipping point for us.

In the interim we might also look at piloting an Affiliate Marketing Strategy.

We built our product with full API support and we may “open source” a piece of it. The architecture is such that we could easily white-label our solution. Co-branding, of course is an out-of-the-box feature.

We just finished an SEO exercise on our website. Coupled with that our Usability engineers made some changes based on the feedback they received from “eye-gaze tracking” and hotspot analysis.

As far as the stage of the company, we are currently bootstrapped and we are thinking of either a seed round via convertible notes. Of course with the right partner and a healthy pre-money valuation, we will consider a series A investment with a combination of  Venture debt.

In terms of exit strategy, our goal is an IPO but at the right price and the right partner, we won’t exclude the acquisition option.

There is actually a simple cure for this Buzzword Bingo.

When you hear someone who showers you with these Buzzwords, just allow them to talk some more. Just say something like “That’s interesting. Tell me more..” and more often than not, they run out of gas in a couple of minutes.

All the best.

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If you have not already downloaded my book “Beyond Code” (foreword by Tom Peters), you can do that here
Rajesh Setty: Download full version of Beyond Code

And, you can get a sneak preview of my upcoming book “Upbeat: Cultivating the right attitude to thrive in tough times“. You can see what is being said about the book here.