The other day, I had a look at my blog, checking the articles that resonated with you most in 2023.

Today, I'd like to do the same for my YouTube channel, CRMKonvos. Shameless plug - any new subscriber is cordially welcomed - it means a lot to us. "Us" means my colleagues Ralf Korb and Marshall Lager, and I. We run this channel as a joint endeavor.

CRMKonvos are all about fun and friendly one hour conversations with one or more live expert guest about a topic in the wider area of - you guessed correctly - CRM. Of course, this includes related topics, e.g., it is virtually impossible to talk CRM or CX without touching AI. They are streamed to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X. In addition, we actively encourage our audience to engage with our guest and us. Again, any new subscriber is more than appreciated. If I am not totally off, you can subscribe by just clicking this link.

But now, what are the CRMKonvos that resonated most with you? Which ones received the most views? 

Of course, we do not want to get the beans spilled immediately, so let's start with the fifth place.

Culture is the most enduring form of capital.

This is a conversation I had with Zoho's Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram about why a great corporate culture makes all the difference, how it contributes to success and why and how Zoho's culture is different from that of most other companies.

The fourth place is taken by an ISP's journey with Zoho One.

This is an interview with Amit Rai, Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber. Amit has overseen the implementation of Zoho One at Tata Fiber right from its beginning. He relates the interesting journey the company had and also relays obstacles that he needed to overcome. Moving up the leaderboard, we reach the bronze medalist.

Ulaa, Zoho's new privacy oriented browser is about why a privacy oriented browser is important, especially for businesses.

Tejas Gadhia of Zoho tells us about Ulaa and what sets this browser apart from the pack and gives us an idea of what lies ahead. Ulaa itself is a Chromium based browser that Zoho "de-Googled". If you want to venture a guess how long it took to remove all ET-like behavior ("calling home") from the Chromium engine, add a comment.

Moving on to the runner up. This video is different from the first three in two respects. First, it is a 2021 video. Second, it does not involve Zoho. We asked "What is customer journey orchestration"? Ray Gerber gave us a succinct answer.

This is an important question and who is in a better position to answer it than Ray Gerber, the mastermind behind Thunderhead (n.b., Thunderhead got acquired by Medallia in early 2022 and Ray moved on to Qualtrics).

Which leaves us with the CRMKonvo that caught your interest most in 2023. It is an atypical one. Atypical in the sense that it is not directly about business but about how and why a business set up a school in a very rural area in southern India. We spoke with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam about why doing good is good for business.

Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam is a school established by Zoho in a rural area near Tenkasi. Due to its wild success, it also serves Zoho as a template for further education centers.

This was a fascinating conversation with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam, diving into the school's origin, mission, future, and how it benefits the community as well as Zoho.

To close, let's briefly give a honorable mention to our videos that came up place six to ten:

Adi Mula, CEO of Foodhub relays his journey with Zoho  during ZohoDay 2022. Yes, another video from an earlier year makes it into the top ten.

Prashanth V K talks about how Zoho steadily moves upmarket from the SMB- into the enterprise market and what their strategy is.

You think that AI companies are only founded in the USA (and India and China)? AI made in Germany, winning hedgehog style tells how a German company leverages AI to create a real-time predictive customer view.

In the state of SaaS adoption in the current economy, we discuss how SaaS companies can and do thrive in a post Covid economy that is also plagued by inflation with two SaaS executives.

Last but not least, we assembled a panel of AR pros to discuss how great analyst relations should look like. And by pros, I mean PROs. With Sarita Kincaid, Sandy Lo, Trish Harman and Ludovic Leforestier we got some of the best talking out of the book.

All in all, you guys seem to have a healthy interest in Zoho.

Thanks again for viewing our videos and let me know via the comments if there are other CRM/CX related topics that you would like us to cover.

All the best for 2024.

During Zoho’s signature event Zoholics in Austin, the company announced the availability of Ulaa, the new Zoho web browser. Of course, Ulaa does have a meaning. It is a Tamil word that means journey or path. Tamil is the language spoken in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, where Zoho’s HQ is situated.

Similar to Safari or Internet Explorer it signifies that the web is about discovery. Ulaa is a privacy orientated webbrowser that is based on Google’s Chromium engine. It has been built specifically to help users protect their online privacy by offering capabilities to block tracking and website surveillance. According to a study by YouGov, this  is something that two thirds of consumers want, as they feel that tech companies have too much control over their personal data. The 2022 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report Special Release – Online Creeping even found that globally, 85 percent of internet users want to do more to protect their privacy, while 80 percent say that they are concerned about data privacy. Almost 70 percent say that they are more alarmed than ever.

So, there is clearly a case for privacy-oriented browsers, also one more browser, as there are already some existing ones, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, even Safari.

We had the chance to talk to Tejas Gadhia, Zoho evangelist in charge of Ulaa about the rationale behind Zoho developing a web browser and what the future will bring. You can watch the full interview here.

Why did Zoho build a browser? According to Tejas, there hasn’t been much innovation in the browser market lately. Some browsers came, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, and went (TOR, anybody?), but they seem to be more of wrappers around existing engines with a bit of customization. All of them have their own focus. There are the mainstream ones, like Edge, Google Chrome, and Safari; and then there are the more privacy orientated ones. The companies behind even these browsers make money by ads. They have less intrusive business models than the big surveillance companies but still, they make money by selling ads. And when one wants to create more revenue, privacy and ads are at odds. It needs detailed user data to serve targeted ads, which are the ones that bring most revenue. This doesn’t seem to be a problem now but down the line it very well may become one. 

Additionally, there is some scope for a “proper” business-focused browser. While there are some options already now, this means a lot of extensions. 

For Zoho, Tejas says “it's a little bit different because we're not trying to make money in the browser. We make money from our business apps. This is just a side thing that is an added service that we offer. Anyone that knows Zoho knows that we're all about value. We offer a bunch of different products at a very affordable price, compared to others in the market. And this is just another tool that we offer that is meant to increase people's productivity and also kind of protect their privacy as well.” So, there is no business model behind Ulaa. It is free and available for everyone.

Technology-wise, Ulaa is built out of Chromium, Google’s open-source browser engine. The browser has been in the making for more than 4 years from inception to delivery.

Why that long, you might ask, as it is built on top of an existing world class engine? 

The reason is that there is “there's an insane amount of tracking that happens , from DNS fetching and sharing that back to Google, to fingerprinting, to idle times, to device identifier, you know; by default, ads pop up; a lot of different attributes that are there. So, we basically had to de-Google what should have been a de-Googled version of Chromium in the first place. But they are obviously very smart people, and they hide and incorporate a lot of things in Chromium that you have to go into.” Tejas continues “There's just so much hidden stuff because it is in their business model to hide as much, you know, Telemetry and tracking that they can do inside the open-source version and so it takes a lot of effort. That's why there are not too many other competitors. If it was so easy to build on top of Chrome and make something good, you would see 100 browsers in the market right now. We see maybe 5 to 6 legitimate ones.”

Given that there have been so many changes to the engine, and also given that Ulaa is probably the first browser that got built after GDPR came into effect, what about the user experience?

This has two aspects to it, performance, and modes, as Tejas explains. 

One reason for the original success of Chrome was that it offered far better performance than the then dominant Internet Explorer. When running Ulaa and Chrome instances side-by-side “we generally either fare equal or better in almost every case in terms of performance and battery life.”

Modes are about choice about privacy levels. Zoho is all about privacy. Yet, not all people are. “Some people want privacy, some people don't want privacy, or some people just don't care. And so, for us, we go to the approach of everything should be an option, which can give the consent let people choose should they want to be tracked or not.” Ulaa offers five modes that are isolated from each other. For example, by default, the work mode doesn’t allow social media sites to track work activity, while the private mode doesn’t allow work sites track social media activity. Tejas assures that “ tell them exactly what we're blocking, how we're blocking it, why it's important that it's being blocked for you, and should you want to enable it?” Yet, if people want to change these defaults, they can actively give their consent and change the defaults.

Back to the business part, Zoho has the vision of building a business orientated browser. Ulaa is a young product. What can be expected to come?

According to Tejas, browsers are not really bound into organizational controls. Yes, it is possible to enable management policies, but this is usual quite “enterpris’ey”, i.e., bulky and not readily accessible for SMBs. Consequently, Zoho is looking into management consoles and policies around Ulaa, grouping of tabs around projects or other optimizations around work in general. Another example would be further sandboxing of different modes. There is a lot of room for real innovation for a business-focused browser in terms of management and productivity. Privacy is then “just the icing on the cake.”

Interesting times lie ahead of us.