Bison: Marketing and Generating Money

While on vacation last week, I worked on trying to understand how we could get ILP as a software business to work. I looked at it from
these standpoints: marketing, scenarios on how Bison will generate
money, SWOT. This is the first of a few postings which will show how
Bison will continue to evolve into a version 3, called BCNN; I just
want you to understand how I got to version 3.

Here is an overview of some of my thoughts of Bison v2.

Marketing

What market needs does Bison meet?
- multi-level information sharing with stakeholders

What market condition will Bison exploit?
- Convergence of information makes it hard to control the message that stakeholders receive; the combinations of information sources,
distribution channels, and different stakeholders makes for
information distribution to be inefficient.

What market segment will Bison target?
- Bison will start with bloggers.

What makes Bison unique?
- Bison's ILP is the first engine to allow each person to control
their own message.

What advantage does Bison have?
- Bison's ILP can be integrated into many different communication
workflows: email, blogs, office documents, web documents.

Who are Bison's direct competitors?
- none found so far

Who are Bison's indirect competitors?
- software firms that
-- develop security related software for different classification
levels
-- develop versioning systems, ie) source code and documents
-- develop requirements management systems

How will Bison reach the market?
- We intend to "get the word out" by offering a free blogging service
with ILP. This will allow consumers to get a feel for ILP and create
buzz for the blog service, which will lead to more interest in ILP.

What future circumstances can "create" the market for Bison?
- More consumer security breaches and scares will make ILP more
inviting.
- More accidental information leaks, whether thru press releases,
blogs, etc...

What is the purpose of the business?
- (Then, as I continued, I got stuck on what exactly is Bison's
purpose.) To be the leader in information partitioning. Our focus is
to control the message behind the news. We are not an information
security company.

What business are you in?
- Software development for ??? (got stuck on this)

Scenarios on how to generate money
A) Bison as a web site destination for blogging
- user creates free blog at Bison
- Bison sells advertising
- as more ppl read the blogs, Bison generates more money

B) Bison as a web service providing ILP to other websites
- I started to step through this scenario using three entities: the
user, their website, and Bison
- I had difficulty understanding how the ILP service will be able to
provide the user with the list of groups tagged for sharing the
content. Where will this database of groups reside -- at their website
or on Bison?

C) Bison as a software server to be purchased and installed by other
companies.
- Bison will be a "commercial off the shelf" offering with licensing.

D) Bison as a monetized, social blogging network
- aggregate blogging content
- sell advertising
- share revenue with bloggers
- allow tagging of their own content and other people's content

(to be continued later, got to get ready for work)

-john