Google Apps now has multi-domain support, allowing organizations with two or more domains to manage from a single control panel. Until now, Google Apps permitted one domain per account. That has become an issue, especially for larger organizations, migrating employees on multiple domains. Companies would either set up other domains as domain aliases or set up different Google Apps accounts for each domain. Sponsor According to the blog !escunid , this is how the process worked before: Source: !escunid Online Business Development The new multi-domain support is an admin control that allows people on different domains to keep their email addresses but see co-workers from other domains in the organization’s global address book. Multiple domain support is a standard of Microsoft Exchange. Multiple domain support is offered through its online services but there are limits on the number of domains available. Zoho also supports multiple domains. According to Raju Vegesna: “A typical business has multiple domains associated (imagine RWW having readwriteweb.com, rww.com, rrweb.com etc). Now you may want to create email addresses, subdomains etc for each of these domains. Supporting multiple domains lets you do things like create aliases that work with all domains. For example, you have alexw@readwriteweb.com, but you can easily create aliases so that alexw@rww.com and alexw@rrweb.com can point to your actual email address. There are several other advantages with supporting multiple domains. In our case, we have three divisions (Zoho, ManageEngine, WebNMS etc). For each of the divisions, we have separate email addresses with that domain name and then sub-domains, product names etc. Managing all these from a single console is a unified experience. That is how we internally use it. But we have several customers who use it in other ways.” Multiple domain support is available for Google Apps Premiere and Education edition users at no additional charge. Discuss

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Today’s roundtable was organized in collaboration with TiE Delhi, and had a special emphasis on the online education sector with three out of the five entrepreneurs presenting education businesses. Ankur Mehra and his associate Aditya started off by introducing GuruVantage . Ankur and Aditya have determined that training managers at various Indian companies need help with vetting the quality, methodology and infrastructures of various training institutes, training vendors and such. Sponsor Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy , and runs the 1M/1M initiative. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys , Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction , Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour , as well as Vision India 2020 , are all available from Amazon. In response to that, they are proposing a solution to do both pre-hiring and post-hiring. Prior to hiring, for example, training managers need to assess where candidates have been trained, and what is the quality of training that they provide. In addition, there are additional training needs post-hiring, which training managers address often by hiring training vendors. The key question that Guruvantage needs to answer is whether training managers are willing to pay for the solution or not. If the answer is yes, then the next question is how much are they willing to pay? What this leads us to is first, value proposition validation, then business model validation, followed by pricing model validation. Each stage of validation helps enhance the valuation of a company. And in 1M/1M, we always emphasize the best practice of building as much value, validation and valuation upfront. In addition, we had a specific discussion about segmentation alternatives – based on size of company, vertical, and geographical. Guruvantage has a large vision of doing this kind of training assessment for a wide variety of sectors ranging from engineering to business to the arts. All very well, but they have to pick a segment to enter through. As I told them, by trying to cater to everybody, you end up catering to nobody. You HAVE to go segment by segment. ARROW Devesh Verma was up next to present ARROW, a finishing school solution that helps college graduates become employable. Devesh addresses the issue that a large portion of Indian college grads are not employable because of a lack of essential skills, especially communication. Devesh has three colleges that have told him that they are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for training 30 students on ARROW. He expects to be able to deliver a 30-student session within Rs. 130,000. Not bad. Now I want to know whether Devesh can find 100 colleges – tier B and tier C colleges since the tier A colleges tend to have their own offerings – who are willing to pay Rs. 150,000 for ARROW. If he can, then there is a business worth building here. And pay attention to the segmentation of who is adopting vs. who isn’t; it will provide great cues to where the highest velocity entry points to the market are. Devesh asked me, “Is the Indian education sector ready for something like ARROW?” My answer is: “A sector’s readiness is a function of the customers’ readiness. So by answering the question – Will more colleges buy? – you will also be able to answer the broad question.” Global Experts Then Rahul Jain presented Global Experts , a community of business experts who will be tutoring, coaching and mentoring business students. Rahul has assembled a lot of content on business and management curriculums, and wants to use that to attract potential customers who will then pay to access more personal engagements with experts. In essence, he is proposing a freemium model whereby he uses content to draw in users, and then try to convert a percentage of them to paying customers in the U.S. Well, the paid content model in the U.S. has really imploded, so I have some skepticism about the viability. There are some competitors who seem to have validated the business model to a degree, like http://www.studentoffortune.com . So Rahul’s next step is to SEO-optimize the content he has put together and harness a group of users ti see if he can convert a percentage of them (average freemium conversion rate is usually 2%) to paying customers. If Rahul can get to about 5,000 paying customers, paying $250 a year, then he can get to the $1M mark. The question is, can he attract 250,000 students with his free content and then convert 2% of those to paying customers? For these three and other online education entrepreneurs, I would like to take a moment and point you to some online education case studies on my blog. Take a look at Apex Learning , Archipelago Learning , KC Distance Learning , Revolution Prep , and Global English . Intelligent Monitoring Next Vikas Hazrati and Narinder Kumar discussed Intelligent Monitoring. Vikas and Narinder have identified an interesting pain point that IT managers seem to have: a large volume of alerts from various IT monitoring systems without the ability to actionable correlation analysis. They have feedback from three to five IT managers, including one that is willing to pay them to build a solution. To them, my advice is to leverage as much of the “consulting” money that clients are willing to pay to solve the problem, and use that cash to bootstrap the business. I love this kind of customer intimacy through working closely with customers, and getting paid for it. If they can talk to 100 IT managers in the SME segment and get 10 to 15 to pay up, the entire product design and development process can be financed by customers! I referred them to the Bootstrapping To Billions case study in Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One . Simplogy Up last was Hasnain Zaheer for Simplogy , who wants to offer marketing strategy and execution services from Australia. My advice to him is to zero in on specific marketing processes that can be offered in a remote mode, which could be email marketing, or SEO, SEM, Web design – all those being highly competitive areas – but strategy consulting cannot really be sold online. I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million ( 1M/1M ). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures. In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our recently launched our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series . You can pitch to be featured on my blog following these instructions . The recording of this roundtable can be found here . Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here . You can register for the next roundtable here . Photo by Mary Gober . Discuss

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A report yesterday from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that online ad revenue is on the verge of surpassing print ads – an inspiring milestone for new media and convergence. However, the PwC survey was based on combined figures across all online media outlets; are individual news outlets having success detaching themselves from the traditional print ad revenue addiction? The Financial Times , London’s version of the Wall Street Journal , says it has leveraged its niche market and will see print ad revenues dip below direct payments made to the paper this year, according to the Los Angeles Times . Sponsor So what does “direct payment” mean in this case? For the Financial Times, it means subscriptions to its print circulation – which costs readers roughly £235 ($348 U.S.) for a year’s subscription – and for access to the paper’s content online at a price of around £125 ($186 U.S.). But the newspaper has created alternative sources of revenue as well, including iPhone and iPad applications and a series of glitzy events and conferences drawing luminaries from various industries. Earlier this month, we mentioned that the Financial Times had reached 130,000 downloads of its free iPad application in its first two weeks. The app is being downloaded nearly ten times faster than its iPhone companion, which launched last year but required an online subscription to use. All this just from the U.S. launch of the app; the U.K. version has yet to be released into the AppStore. The faster pace of downloads is likely due to the fact that the app is free, and provides access to the Financial Times content that is normally behind subscriptions. The newspaper is running a two-month sponsorship to fund the app and grow its popularity, and will likely switch to a monthly subscription model soon. One reason why a digital subscription via the iPad is likely to succeed for the Financial Times is because much of the readership of the paper (like that of the Wall Street Journal) is mainly wealthy financiers and business executives – just the type of audience that’s likely to subscribe and more likely to own the expensive iPad. According to the Los Angeles Times story , the paper estimates that by 2012 a full third of its revenue will come from its digital efforts. As with the report regarding online ad revenues from yesterday, this news from the Financial Times is very encouraging for the online media industry. But the Financial Times is leveraging its upper-class audience in other ways as well. According to the Los Angeles Times, the paper hosts events and conferences aimed at these high-rollers. At the forefront of these events is the Business of Luxury Summit, which has become a strong source of profit for the paper thanks to high-end sponsorships and expensive registration prices, with executives from companies like Estee Lauder, Calvin Klein and Jimmy Choo drawing in the wealthy attendees. The ability of traditional news outlets to break their dependence on print ad revenues is certainly a welcome change and a good sign that the industry can in fact survive at a healthy level online. The Financial Times, however, may be a poor example since they have a significantly different audience – one that may be more willing to pay for an online subscription. Discuss

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We are all aware of the floundering print industry that has seen a steady decline in revenues over the last several years. Newspapers that once thrived on the cash-cows that were classifieds and print advertising have had their lunch eaten by the disruptive forces of Craigslist and online advertising, which have slowly chipped away at print ad sales. Soon, however, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising revenues will surpass those of print advertising to become the second largest segment of advertising in the U.S. behind television. Sponsor “Over the next five years digital technologies will progressively increase their impact across all segments of entertainment and media … It is clear that the consumer is firmly in the driving seat of these changes.” – PricewaterhouseCoopers Report As reported by the Wall Street Journal , The PwC report found that in 2009, online ad revenues continued to climb to $24.2 billion, while print ads fell 28.6% to $24.8 billion. Online ads are expected to rake in $34.4 billion by 2014, which means print ads should dip below their online counterparts in a matter of months. PwC’s figures for online revenues don’t include mobile advertisements, which they believe will nearly quadruple in the next four years from $414 million to $1.6 billion. “Over the next five years digital technologies will progressively increase their impact across all segments of entertainment and media (E&M) as digital transformation continues to expand and escalate,” a press release from PwC said Tuesday. “The uncertain economic background has done nothing to slow the pace of change, which has been far quicker than predicted 12 months ago. It is clear that the consumer is firmly in the driving seat of these changes.” According to the report, increased access to broadband has played a large role in helping boost online ad revenues. The Wall Street Journal reports that broadband penetration in the U.S. nearly doubled from 34% in 2005 to 64% in 2010 thanks partly to $7.2 billion in federal stimulus money put towards expanding broadband access. Additionally, PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that global consumer spending on Internet access will increase from $228 billion 2009 to $351 billion in 2014. It was only a matter of time until online ad sales outpaced those of print, and once they do, they will only continue to gain momentum. Legacy media are driven by numbers and are slow to change their ways, and thus have not thrown their entire weight behind online initiatives. When the scales tip over to online advertising in the next year, those that have been reluctant to embrace new and online media will be forced to allocate additional resources to the winning market. The ultimate demise of print media is still many years away, but it is pretty clear that ad revenues are slowly dropping away. It will take one of the predominant newspapers ceasing to print physical copies to set off the domino effect that will likely follow, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon. While newspaper ad revenues have been falling, they’ve been leveling out, and a balance between print and online is likely to exist for several years before print entirely fades away. Discuss

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The Guggenheim Museum is teaming up with YouTube in partnership with HP to discover the art of YouTube videos. Tasked with uncovering the “most creative video in the world,” the companies have launched an international search by way of YouTube Play, a specially branded YouTube channel that will feature the entries in this new competition. Sponsor About YouTube Play Anyone is invited to submit a video to YouTube Play , even video creators themselves, and the submission deadline is July 31st. The videos may consist of animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and even “entirely new art forms” that challenge the perception of what’s possible to do with video, explains the YouTube blog post about this unique collaboration project. Afterwards, 200 of the leading videos will be selected for further attention by an international jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film and video. Twenty of those initial 200 videos will then be presented at the Guggenheim. Yes, that’s right – at the Guggenheim itself. The YouTube videos will actually appear in the Guggenheim network of museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin on October 21st and will be made available for the world to see on the youtube.com/play channel. This isn’t a contest per se, as the winning videos don’t receive a cash prize or other sort of physical reward. But having a video dubbed “art” and being showcased internationally in one of the world’s most famous art museums, is a reward in and of itself, most would agree. This isn’t the first time YouTube has proven itself the medium of choice for artists worldwide. Last year, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra , an online experiment in music, sought out musicians to participate in the world’s first collaborative online orchestra where the endgame was a performance at Carnegie Hall . YouTube: Internet Leads to Instant Success? What’s most interesting about this current art competition as well as the Online Orchestra is the way that it is able to surface undiscovered talents and allow them to achieve fame without all the requisite toiling and tolling for years in “starving artist” mode, as was once par for the course for those wanting to break into the art world. Instead, with YouTube, a handful of videos can lead to a lifetime of success. Just ask Justin Bieber. Or Soulja Boy . Or Esmee Denters . Or Journey’s new singer Arenl Pineda , discovered a few years ago. Or FRED , the annoyingly overactive boy whose high-pitched voice befuddles parents but whose videos and associated kid-friendly merchandise have made the teen rich beyond belief. But while the above are certainly high-profiled examples, let’s be clear about one thing: when it comes to art and music, YouTube hasn’t yet surfaced the next Leonardo or Monet, the next Beatles or Stones, the next Janis Joplin or Jimmy Hendrix. To date, the folks who have made their way up through YouTube are not necessarily, forgive me Bieber fans, going to make their mark in the annals of history as being among “the best of the best.” In some cases they may be great…but are they the greatest? Really? However, with this contest, that may change. For next-gen video artists, there’s surely no better place than YouTube to flex your artistic muscles. It should be interesting to see what video creation wins this latest attempt to elevate YouTube to art form. The end result will likely be just that: art. Discuss

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