chapter four – my 30s
Earlier this year, I set myself some objectives and gave my year a theme. 2009 was to be the year of “Learning to do”. I spent previous years, thinking, pontificating, learning but not really doing much. So, I told myself that by LeWeb in 2009 I wanted to have done some stuff and go to [...]
There’s an interesting post on Techcrunch EU today, where they’ve quoted a prominent European VC at the Noah event in London this week saying: “Whenever we want to grow we are too reliant on US companies and too reliant again when we want to sell.” A lot of comments on the post, most of them [...]
Duane over at Kashflow wrote a great blog post about SEO as a marketing strategy over at the Kashflow blog. I couldn’t agree more. His main point is summed up nicely in this bit: “Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – [...]
There’s lots of news around Newscorp and getting Google to pay for the content on Newscorp newspapers. I don’t like is companies using Google as a scapegoat. Newscorp feels that Google should be paying for access. MSFT is talking about paying Newscorp for their content. The rationale being that perhaps this will make Google follow [...]
I came across this interesting interview on business week today (hat tip to Matt), with a guy talking about Steve Job’s presentation style. There were some tips, including one that I’ve been toying with for some time, having a villain. According to the article: “In every classic story, the hero fights the villain. In 1984, [...]
I’m really digging this campaign by VW – thefuntheory.com – if you’re not familiar with it VW’s doing a bunch of “stunts” to see if making things more fun will get more people to do things. My favourite – and the one that seems the most popular – is the experiment where they painted stairs [...]
Two articles today got me thinking about giving stuff away to make money. First a survey on the Independent shows that on average people who admit to illegally downloading music actually spend more on music than those who claim that they never down music dishonestly. I totally buy this. People who download music illegally are [...]
Okay, I get it, we’re in a downturn. A recession or whatever you want to call it. Fine. The question is what do you do to ensure long term success during a down turn? Our office had an interesting professor from IMD visit us and talk to us about macroeconomic trends and behaviour, basically addressing [...]
Something came up at work that made me wonder where or not people need to be users of a product or service in order to effectively sell or market that product or service. I tweeted: Would you hire someone who didn’t eat cereal to sell cereal? It was a throwaway tweet, I really wasn’t expecting [...]
While watching the Apple special event from last night I was really touched when Steve Jobs thanked the 20 something year old who had donated his organs and whose Liver he was the recipient for. He encouraged everyone to be an organ donor, something I would encourage everyone to do as well. I wonder if [...]