In my height of blogging, I often started a topic for a blog post with a tweet. For this topic, it reads: “There’s a downside to efficiency of communication when customers have a history with you and expect the opposite.” This sounds a little cryptic, so let me elaborate. There’s a few variables that are [...]
I don’t know what to write about yet, perhaps the co-relation between blogging and ideas. I attempted a similar post last week, and restricted it mostly to differing learning styles. In short, some people (me) learn as they write, some as they hear, some as they see, some as they speak. As a human being, [...]
Positioning is a marketing concept that is expressed through verbal, numerical, and visual cues. As such, it is easily identifiable, if you know what to look for. But the fun is less so, if you try to do it yourself. Let me give an example of what positioning is. Last night, I’m waiting for a [...]
For the record, I include Twitter, Facebook, and certain other Internet activity into my categorization of blogging, because they all share the characteristic that I wish to write about today. It should come as no one’s surprise that I spend a fair amount online, whether it’s this bog, Twitter, or Facebook. All-together, I’d say I [...]
This post started with the wrong premise, that Facebook wasn’t providing enough stats to page administrators. Last night I received a mail from Facebook that outlined some brief stats from a page that I administer. It looked like this. At first I thought, nice thanks. Then I thought that what I was really missing were [...]
“What is Twitter?” People still keep asking me this, 5 years after Twitter was founded (I joined mid-2009). This “guide” will be my answer from now on. Just read this if you want my understanding of what Twitter is. So what is Twitter? Is it… …a celebrity medium? Charlie Sheen is the latest addition to [...]
I sent off my V-moda headphone for repair. The address was somewhere in Los Angeles, California, and I live in the Netherlands. They checked it and sent me a replacement with no questions asked. The only problem? I sent them off on the 23rd of February and got them back yesterday, 15 days later. Even [...]
At this moment, I haven’t read a single positive thing about this new feature on the free iPhone Twitter app. The only tweet that is mildly realistic, is Anyl Dash’s: “Geeks complaining about trends bar on Twittter’s iPhone app seem to think their Twitter use case is the most common one. I suspect it’s not.” [...]
Cecil Dijoux has been writing a lot on what he calls the networked enterprise on this and his site. He’s a big believer in it and I respect that even though I disagree on a great many points with him. This post is the beginning of a response to him—I would have to summarise many [...]
This is not a post about the macro-economic climate. I tend to think that we all make our own fate, though certainly financial conditions affected the way I perceived certain things. It’s more a post about a guy who’s never been an entrepreneur, but who watched, interacted, and tried to learn a lot about entrepreneurship [...]
How many times do you open your mailbox and see something like this? For me, it’s probably every day of the week. I’m pretty sure it’s because I sign up to at least one new service everyday, but I also know that I don’t sign up for a newsletter everyday. That’s mostly the price you [...]
In his MBA-series (that I don’t read enough, but I may not be the target audience), Fred Wilson writes about the role of sunk costs in making future decisions. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly concerned with the cost of decisions, so I was kind of happy to find out (though I do vaguely remember [...]
The door slid open slowly, all that was visible from inside the store was a wide beam of light that slowly expanded into the shape of a door. The automatic triggers kicked in and the other security-panels in front of the windows slide open also, illuminating the last retail store left in the world 2020. [...]
Starting a business, just like anything else, really is defined through personal contexts. For instance, I’m a first-time entrepreneur and my partner is a 4-5-6th (hard to keep count) entrepreneur—for him, he views starting a business very differently than me. There are other differences as well, such as age, type of education, culture, marital status, [...]
I am not someone that typically applies for a sales job, yet I consider it a vital function of the job of an entrepreneur and hence my job. Running a business is all about convincing people, both on the inside and out, and the best way to describe it is Sales. One of the most [...]
