Steve Jobs: Its in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. Its technology married with liberal arts and humanities.
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Apple’s Industrial design department
via http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002414.htm
It’s not a big cult — just a dozen people or so. But they operate at an extremely high level, both individually and as a group. Ive has said that many Apple products were dreamed up while eating pizza in the small kitchen at the team’s design studio.
It’s a team that has worked in idyllic comfort for many years. Some designers were at the company long before Ive arrived in 1992. The team, made up of thirty- and fortysomethings, has a definite international flair. Members include not only the British Ive but also New Zealander Danny Coster, Italian Daniele De Iuliis, and German Rico Zörkendörfer. “It’s good old-fashioned camaraderie — everyone with the same aim, no egos involved,” says British fashion designer Paul Smith, a friend since the late 1990s when Ive sent him a new iMac. “They have lots of dinners together, take lots of field trips.”
Most of Ive’s team live in San Francisco, and rumor has it that the starting salary for the group is around $200,000, some 50% above the industry average. They work together in a large open studio with little personal space but great privacy.
Why Bizweb?
A lot of folks ask me why we started Bizweb and how it is different from other products in the market. Although the website does a good job of explaining why Bizweb is a good fit for small and medium sized businesses, I though I’ll document the thought process behind Bizweb.
The Indian small business segment is huge (around 35 million) and is largely untapped (only 3 lakh businesses own a domain). Currently, if a business wants to go online (create a website, mobile website, interact with online customers etc), they have two choices -
1) Work with website development companies - The website development marketplace is dominated by development companies who’s entire business model is to get the businesses to come back to them for every minor change. The companies typically charge money upfront (15-30k), an annual maintenance fee and also charge the businesses every time the company wants to make a change to the site, or add trivial pages.
2) Website Builders - A business could use a website builder to create a website. We understand that some businesses need highly customized websites and can afford to pay huge amounts of money to get a website developed. But we believe that a vast majority of small and medium sized businesses will find the website builder model more appealing than working with website development companies. The website builder model is affordable to most businesses and the process of updating/maintaing the website is a lot easier than having to work with a development company for every minor modification.
Our research told us that very few website builder products catered to the unique needs of small/medium sized businesses. Most of them were generic and put the onus on the website creator (in this case, the business owner) to create a good looking website.We decided to employ a fresh approach to creating websites and created a dead-simple product that required no design input from the user and offered small business specific features. We also decided to build out features for specific verticals (hotels, restaurants, non-profits etc).Our goal at Bizweb is to radically simplify the website creation process and make it extremely easy for a business to update/maintain a website and interact with its customers online.
How are we different?
1) Create once, consume everywhere Once a business creates a website using Bizweb, it is accessible via most platforms. Users can access the website via a browser on their desktop/ laptop, on their smart phone or even on a basic feature phone. Bizweb tailors the UI based on the device accessing the website.
2) A new approach to creating a business website -Most website builders take the drag and drop approach to building a website ( You drag modules to your site and add content to your modules). Even though templates are available, the onus is on the user to design their own web pages. Most business users are not designers. The result is sites with poor usability and look and feel.Bizweb takes a different and a drastically simpler approach to building websites. The UI is form based (most business users are used to this form of data entry) and Bizweb adapts based on the kind and amount of data entered by the user.
3) Focus on businesses - Bizweb is the only website builder in the market focusing on businesses. Bizweb’s features are tailored towards small and medium sized businesses. For ex: Restaurants can easily add menus and coupons to their website.
4) Superior design and ease of use - We have spent months refining the product and believe that we have the most elegant, usable product in the market. Every feature has been designed with ease of use in mind.
5) Surprisingly affordable A Bizweb subscription starts at Rs. 2999/year, a price point affordable to most businesses in India. Getting a developer or a web development company to create a simple website will cost a business anywhere between Rs 15,000-Rs 35,000. Bizweb delivers a lot more value at a far lower cost.
