woensdag 18 december 2002

Wired

Google vs. Evil


The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business. Life used to be so much easier for Sergey Brin. In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet.

zaterdag 23 november 2002

Business 2.0

Google's Next Runaway Success


AdWords Select kicks in a network effect for online advertising. Sorry, they told me, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was not talking to the press. Google's PR people want to play it cool, just the way the dotcoms didn't. But, lucky me, there was Schmidt in the doorway between meetings, and it was clear that even this veteran Silicon Valley CEO could not button up his excitement about an eight-month-old advertising program called AdWords Select.

vrijdag 8 november 2002

Business 2.0

Who Needs a Pretty Website Anyway?


Knight Ridder Digital CEO Hilary Schneider inherited a business that critics hate and bean counters love. Along with the perks of the job Hilary Schneider accepted in April came one rather dubious distinction. As president and CEO of Knight Ridder Digital, the Internet unit of the second-largest newspaper chain in the country, she was now the boss of 28 of the least admired websites this side of pornography.

donderdag 7 november 2002

Business 2.0

How to Think With Your Gut


How the geniuses behind the Osbournes, the Mini, Federal Express, and Starbucks followed their instincts and reached success. "One day I was home with strep throat, and I saw a rerun of MTV's Cribs that featured the Osbournes' house. They were such a dynamic family. I thought, "They would make great TV.' So I set up a dinner with Sharon Osbourne, the kids, and two MTV executives. We just wanted to watch them interact. Sharon was saying things like 'Remember when Dad was in rehab?' and Kelly and Jack were just so colorful and sarcastic. All of it hit in the gut so strongly. We never tested the show. We just knew it would make great TV." -- Rod Aissa, vice president for talent development and casting at MTV and for MTV's The Osbournes.

vrijdag 18 oktober 2002

What is an RSS feed?

A non-technical way of explaining RSS is that it's a way of making frequently updated content, such as weblog posts, available to other people, in an easy to understand and use format. The nice thing about RSS feeds is that anyone can use them - even people that don't have websites of their own. For instance, let's say you have a favorite weblog that you read on a regular basis. Rather than bookmarking this site and constantly checking it for updates, you can use an application called a news aggregator that will collect RSS feeds from around the web and check them for you on a regular basis. When the site gets updated, your aggregator will let you know and you can then launch the site in your web browser. As more and more sites syndicate their content with RSS, aggregators really change how you use the web.

zondag 22 september 2002

Business 2.0

Just Do It. Again.


Dan Wieden created Nike's famous slogan, and he's been pushing the limits ever since. Now he's blending advertising and entertainment into a new art form -- "branded content. "Most advertising agencies line the walls of their offices with samples of their own pithy sales pitches. But at the pristine, airy headquarters of Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., there are few ads in sight, and the featured attraction on any given day might be a poetry reading or a modern dance recital, performed by local artists-in-residence and staged in an amphitheater at the center of the building. "You never know what you'll see. Could be a guy jumping through a plate of glass," says Dan Wieden, the agency's iconoclastic 57-year-old co-founder and president. "I like having that uncertainty here."
Business 2.0

Are You Overpaying for Content Management?


Companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software to manage their websites and other documents -- and getting dubious returns. There's got to be a better way. The numbers aren't pretty. According to a Jupiter survey of chief information officers at companies with more than $50 million in revenue, 53 percent will have deployed new content-management systems by the end of this year. Given the expense involved -- a high-end CMS like Vignette can cost upwards of $100,000 for the software alone, plus another multiple of that in installation costs -- you'd think these companies would be choosing wisely and getting exactly what they need. Unfortunately, that's not always the case.

woensdag 21 augustus 2002

3G

The Harsh reality of 3G


We all know that mobile operators were forced into paying far too much for their European 3G licenses. But are they actually worth anything at all - or would the best business move be to hand them back and walk away? Datamonitor's John Band and Nick Greenway take a look at the 3G house of shareholder horrors... Telefonica and Sonera axed their German joint venture, Quam, writing off over E8 billion in the process. Sweden is lobbying the government to ease off on license requirements. And several first- and second- tier operators look increasingly likely to delay 3G service launches.

dinsdag 20 augustus 2002

The Economist

Instant messaging joins the firm


With the immediacy of the telephone and the written record of e-mail, instant messaging is no longer just a handy way of chatting online. It is fast becoming a secure and flexible tool for business.
Red Herring

Talk to me


The real boom in voice-activated services will be in the wireless industry. Telecom companies are sobering up to market realities and getting back to the basics. They're balancing the books and selling traditional voice and data services. They're also more grounded, less deluded with the belief that a killer application will rescue them any time soon.
Business 2.0

The Cyborg Known as You


Chips under the skin. Wireless sensors in the brain. It's not science fiction. It's your destiny. Recently, a Florida family agreed to have tiny, scannable ID chips implanted under their skin. Containing a radio frequency identification tag, each implant stores a number that can be cross-referenced with a database containing a person's name and medical history. The unveiling of the "first cyborg family" was staged as a publicity stunt by a struggling tech startup called Applied Digital Solutions (ADSXE), which touted the chips' ability to make monitoring patients as easy as tracking cans of soup.

dinsdag 13 augustus 2002

Strategy + Business

The Internet as Integrator � Fast Brand Building in Slow-Growth Markets


Today, as most industries confront overcapacity and weakening demand in the face of an uncertain economic environment, the need for cost-effective brand building has never been greater. There are two ways to improve the ROI of brand marketing: Create more brand-building programs that are so differentiated and efficient that they boost awareness, purchase intent, and ultimately sales and market share; or increase the synergies and impact among the firm�s individual brand-building programs so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

woensdag 7 augustus 2002

Business 2.0

The Sorcerer of Sony


The hottest properties in cyberspace are virtual worlds. Meet the man who's making magic -- and millions of dollars each month -- by developing the Net's newest boomtowns.

woensdag 31 juli 2002

The Economist

Watch this airspace


Wireless telecoms: Four disruptive technologies are emerging that promise to render not only the next wave of so-called 3G wireless networks irrelevant, but possibly even their 4G successors

vrijdag 19 juli 2002

Business 2.0

A Brave Bluetooth World In which gadgets talk a blue streak to each other wirelessly.

By Chris Taylor, July 2002 Issue


Why name a 20th-century wireless technology after a 10th-century Viking king? It's not as strange as you might think: Just as Harald Bluetooth unified Denmark, Bluetooth chips -- first developed by Ericsson (ERICY) in 1994 -- promise to unite everything electronic. In a Bluetooth world, your computer, cell phone, printer, camera, PDA, TV, stereo, and even your fridge will be able to chat happily with one another at a range of about 30 feet without a single cable in sight.

maandag 15 juli 2002

First Monday

When Internet Companies Morph: Understanding Organizational Strategy Changes in the 'New' New Economy by Robert J. Kauffman, Tim Miller, and Bin Wang


The rapid ascent of the Internet economy funneled almost $US90 billion of venture capital money into Internet startups over a period of four years that roughly ended in mid-2000. An equally rapid bust in the cycle that year abruptly shut off funding and thrust remaining Internet companies into an unprecedented frenzy of adaptive strategic and organizational re-focusing behavior. In this article, we relate the findings of our study of this period of hyper-evolution and give a snapshot of the publicly reported "morphing" activities of 125 Internet companies, based on which we propose a profitability-driven typology of Internet firm repositioning behavior. The study provides academic researchers with an overview of industry strategic mutation patterns and provides executives with a process analysis for identifying and evaluating their own strategies in a way that is essential for success in the highly volatile Internet economy. We also offer our predictions on these strategies' efficacy in light of the current emphasis on business profitability and return on investment (ROI).
Business Week

Chewing the Sashimi with Jeff Bezos

"We're still at the very beginning," says Amazon.com's founder in a wide-ranging interview over lunch. "There's so much more to come"

At the height of the dot-com revolution, Amazon.com founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos was named Time magazine's 1999 person of the year -- at about the same point his company's stock hit a split-adjusted record high of $113 a share. For Bezos and Netrepreneurs everywhere, it seemed like the sky was the limit.
Business Week
Where 3G Is First-Rate
Consumer acceptance of this high-speed wireless service is slow -- except in South Korea, where KT Freetel looks like a winner
In most of the world, the huge financial problems faced by slumping telecommunications companies threaten to delay the rollout of new mobile telecom technology. But in one oasis, things seem to be progressing apace: South Korea.

vrijdag 12 juli 2002

Business 2.0

The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.


Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. It's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before.
3G.co.uk

Pricing key to success within wireless MMS


Following the unexpected success of SMS the expectations facing its successor MMS are enormous. Crucial to the future success of MMS is the ability of operators to set the "optimal" price - logical and affordable for the customer as well as profitable for the operator. This is the conclusion of "MMS Pricing Challenge", a new report from Northstream, leading wireless advisor.
Business Week

Meet Microsoft, Home Networker


The Colossus of Redmond's next bold move is into routers that'll let consumers connect their digital devices together and to the Net Microsoft Corp., whose software as come to dominate the workplace, now wants to take over your living room. Last October, the Redmond (Wash.) software giant launched Windows XP, the new operating system that makes it a snap to organize music files and gather digital photos. Microsoft then jumped into the video gaming market, with its Xbox game console. And on July 11, it plans yet another bold foray, this time into home networking.