Saturday, April 25, 2009

Your workspace login support

BusinessQuests makes a workspace available to better support collaborative efforts with you and your teams and to give you full and permanent access to all the deliverables that are part of the service agreement you signed with us. Below is a set of slides that will show you how to log into your area at the URL http:// [yourcompany].businessquests.com, where yourcompany is the name of your company (conveniently enough, don't you think?).





Thursday, April 16, 2009

Congrats to the winners of startup 2.0

BQShot-20090416-085533 So we now have the winners of startup2.0, a platform I particularly like because it shows the power and perhaps the relevance of crowd-sourcing when it comes to identifying new businesses with good potential. Perhaps something that should be considered by more institutional players who organize "business plan competitions", a concept that leaves me wondering about its actual value and relevance.

Anyway, congratulations to the top-3 of the 2009 vintage:

Haven't done any research on any of those, but with a family scattered around the globe from Ethiopia to New Jersey, US and from Greece to Beijing, China, I guess Genoom would make sense for me to try.



Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Yet another take on the future of marketing

Excellent piece that I got from Paul Isakson's awesome blog. Absolutely worth listening to warefully end to end. The ideas that people interact in specific contexts and that the whole purpose of marketing is to do useful stuff for people seem deceptively simple, yet they are all too often overlooked.

I really enjoyed the way the presenter John V. Willshire puts things back in perspective and shows how excess focus on doing fun stuff, trying to get the buzz-machine and rumour-mill rolling, cannot be an end in itself. We really need CMOs to take a more integral view of things, tying strategy to execution on a continuous basis (as opposed to discrete initiatives called "campaigns" - today you're in a campaign every single second) and crucially putting their customers and future customers right at the center of everything they do. Where things get complicated is that nobody should infer from the preceding statement that customers should always be treated as kings and allowed to do as they please without regard for anyone else: sometimes we need to provoke customers, displease them and even frustrate them, in particular when those paths are the best ways to build brand equity.





Tuesday, April 7, 2009

MIT economists' panel sees light at end of economic tunnel

This is not only a good panel discussion, but also one that has some good news. The time might be close when people can resume investing. Perhaps it's also time for Europe to realize that our economic situation is way better than the US for a number of reasons starting with the fact that we are nowhere near the level of debt that prevails in the US be it government or private debt. It's just so sad we don't have anyone to carry the torch of recovery on the political front. As someone told me recently, a recession can be a self-fulfilling prophecy whereas business & economic progress does not happen by mere wishful thinking.





10+ years of Google

Nice video of an amazing business, tech and talent story.





Thursday, April 2, 2009

Vopium: does it rock?

20090401_Vopium
I came across Vopium today and from what I read on their site and elsewhere online:


  1. what they promise rocks, period and it's particularly relevant at this point in time with buyers being weary of spending too much

  2. the offering stands to put even more pressure on mobile operators whose position is likely to be further undermined by VoIP plays like Skype (now running on some mobile phones) and Jajah. In fact, Jajah + Vopium spells the end of mobile operators' dominant position on the market of mobile connectivity;

  3. it would be interesting to consider how Vopium could be combined to open WiFi networks in a logic analogous to Fon as it would definitely have some major appeal for roamers, even though GSM incumbents might not enjoy this that much :)


Anyway, I downloaded the software on my E61i. More in a few days.