One of the best definitions of twitter I heard so far comes from Mike Butcher, the British voice of Techcrunch. IM can’t do what Twitter does. You can’t instant message into “the cloud”. With Twitter you can. You can shout or whisper whatever you want to say out into the ether and anyone online can hear you.
The Search Party continues
What started with search ended (?) in advertising. Two boyish nerds grow older, marry and become wiser and end up (?) as some corporate (jets and stuff) bigfish. At the end they will tell their grandchildren that it was one of the best parties they attended. Or, as Eric says: But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes
January 9, 2008
The Truth in Horoscopes
There definitely is a truth in horoscopes: They contain what people want to hear. Anyone interested in his personal horoscope cast by me?
Facebook and Google join dataportability.org
Hehe — didn’t expect them reacting that fast to my call for an openID for Social Networks.… but dataportability.org today announced that Google and Facebook joined their ranks. Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Marshall has more… Unfortunately we in the EU do have some
January 8, 2008
Italian-style Starbucks
One very offline business idea came into my mind: You all know Starbucks. Starbucks entered a overcrowded market (you got your coffee nearly everywhere) with a commodity product (coffee). The result: they are extremely successful and are running 13.000+ stores worldwide. In Europe, especially in Germany, Italian food is ubiquitous — here in Munich we have hundreds of little pizza restaurants and Italian coffee bars. I think it’s time for an Italian-style Starbucks: restaurants-cum-takeaways
January 7, 2008
Difficult customers trigger service quality
Returning from a relaxing wellness-weekend in Austria I am still wondering about the complaints of the hotel owner (aged about 40) this morning during breakfast: “In earlier days our guests were a lot more easy going. No complaints about dinners, the kind of music played at ceremonial occasions, etc. Nowadays most of them dislike this and that, want to change the menues and do not return for holidays if they objected to the
January 4, 2008