The Wireless Challenge

"Since the days of Alexander Graham Bell, Finland's national phone company has provided service for customers from the shores of the Baltic Sea to the upper reaches of Lapland. But last summer the Helsinki-based telco, now part of $9 billion Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera, did something remarkable: It ran radio and newspaper ads urging its own customers to drop fixed-line voice service and switch to wireless. Huh? A phone company asking its customers to cut the cord?"

The Internet Generation

"The reason you can’t stop file-trading has nothing to do with the law or ethics. When you live on the network, you use one device to buy music, get music, store music, and hear music. You’re not driving to get a one-hour CD, packing its jewel case in a stack somewhere, then reloading every hour. The experience must be more organic than that."

The Blogger Revolt!

"The bottom line as I see it is the original blogging community represents
the early-adopters of a movement that will eventually radicalize the entire
media industry. Some time off in the future, if major media brands do not
open up their content to more participation, readers will just not trust
them, and they will go elsewhere."

Jeff Bezos: Fixated on the Customer

On webservices:


Q (Business Week): Amazon.com now runs sites and online operations for retailers such as Target and Toys 'R' Us. What's the future for that services business?

A: It's a rapidly growing part of our business. And that goes from [large] companies that are customers of that all the way down to individuals using our Web services to tap into the fundamental platform that is Amazon.com. They can build their own applications very effectively. It's almost closer to an ecosystem.


Q: So Amazon is becoming a kind of software platform a bit like Microsoft?

A: People are building stuff that surprises us. That's what's so interesting about this. We've built this big base of technology to serve ourselves, and now we're opening it up and letting people access it. They're taking these fundamental pieces and building completely new things that not only would we have never gotten around to but in some cases maybe never even have thought of. There are thousands of developers who are building applications using Amazon Web services. The sky's the limit on their creativity.

The New Marketing Order: How to be Chosen

"Call it the new marketing order. It's a philosophical shift in the marketplace that has everything to do with intrusive techniques like spam and telemarketing. It's fueled by the rise of a marketing-saturated (and -savvy) generation, and is underpinned by the technology revolution that raises consumers' expectations of how companies can interact with them. While customer acquisition techniques are under the heaviest fire, the new order also demands changes in how companies conduct relationships with existing customers."

Small Spending, Big Branding

"I remember hearing information technologists would never be fired for choosing IBM. I suppose you could once could have said the same of marketers who combined the traditional media channels in their plans. But things are changing. The IT guys probably still won't be fired for recommending IBM, but marketers with plans based on traditional channels and old school thinking shouldn't get too comfortable."

Joint Service From Reuters and Microsoft

"The Reuters Group, the information services company, said yesterday that it would announce today a deal with Microsoft to connect the companies' instant messaging systems as an offering for financial services companies."