Caterina Fake of Flickr has a blog post entitled BizDev 2.0 where she writes
Several companies -- probably more than a dozen -- have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal -- and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that's customer service, and BizDev 2.0.Traditional business development meant spending a lot of money on dry cleaning, animating your powerpoint, drinking stale coffee in windowless conference rooms and scouring the thesaurus looking for synonyms for "synergy". Not to mention trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. Much, much better this way!
Several companies -- probably more than a dozen -- have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal -- and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that's customer service, and BizDev 2.0.
Traditional business development meant spending a lot of money on dry cleaning, animating your powerpoint, drinking stale coffee in windowless conference rooms and scouring the thesaurus looking for synonyms for "synergy". Not to mention trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. Much, much better this way!
I know exactly where Catrina is coming from. Given that I work on the platform that powers Windows Live Spaces which has over 100 million users and 5.2 billion photos with over 6 million being uploaded daily, I've been on the receiving end of similar conversations about business partnerships revolving around integrating with the blogs, photo albums, lists and user profiles in our service. All of these partnerships have sounded obsolete to me in the age of open APIs. It seems to me to be much better to support de-facto industry standards like the MetaWeblog API that enables any tool or website to integrate with our service than have proprietary APIs that can only be accessed by people who we've made exclusive business deals with us. That seems better for our service and better for our users to me.
This definitely changes the game with regards to how our business development folks approach certain types of business partnerships. I probably wouldn't have called it BizDev 2.0 though. ;)