Banana e Forces, a creative agency in Dubai, has just produced B2B Connect, an online business book. Deepak Dhiman, the company's director, speaks about why the company created it - and what it hopes to achieve with it.
Tell us about your e-book.
This e-book is all about sharing information with people who are entrepreneurs and businesspeople. What we have done is to connect with people who are on the internet most of the time. The idea came up [to see] how we could help people who are focusing on the UAE market and need cost-effective solutions.
What kind of advice does it give?
There is a lot of stuff on "how to" in social media, how to do your webcast.
People think doing a webcast is about getting a professional videographer, and shell out a huge amount of money.
We have suggested that all you need is a webcam … to speak for a few minutes and make a presentation of yourself, put it on YouTube or your website and keep changing it every week. Similarly, how to go about doing Twitter for example.
What other features does it have?
There is lots of information. The articles are much more than just about social media. There's a beautiful article on how to make fantastic newsletters, how to do an email marketing campaign, which software people should buy and download.
How much does it cost?
We are giving it for free.
Why?
We are giving it to spread the word. Secondly, to come up with something different. We get branding automatically. We are trying to create a niche as an innovative company. And we want to go global because we are promoting it through the internet. The idea is not to make money from day one.
So how do you intend to make money out of it?
Out of the advertisements. They won't be like Yellow Pages or a directory. It will be very elegant: only full-page ads with the links to their websites with keywords which are searchable, this kind of stuff.
How many times has it been downloaded so far?
At the moment we probably have close to 1,500 downloads but we are working very aggressively.
What is the point of it all?
What happens is if you go and search on the internet, you end up finding millions of links and you don't know which one to follow. What we have done is made the lives simpler of people who are always on the go.