This year, I had the chance to visit CeBit 2010 for the very first time. It was an anticlimactic experience. Being raised with reports of CESs and Macworlds, you can’t help but hope to stumble on the next big thing, but what I was confronted with what had the air of a dusty town ripped [...]
Be it Automobile , Aviation or Heavy Metal Industries, everyone felt the heat of recession but regardless IT fared better than most. In spite of worst economic meltdowns in history, acquisitions among big vendors continued to reshape the market, operating-system wars extended to mobile battlefields, microblogging became a powerful source of real-time information, and the take-up [...]
I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible. Sarah Lacy writes [...]
On Starbuck’s new community initiative, on what is wrong with Starbucks, on third places.
How and why financial and legal services are stuck in the old world.
where I harras traditional media for the vagueness of their PR statements (and hence business strategy)
At the moment of writing, I’m on page XXII, what some of you may recognise as the introductory pages of the book. Not nearly enough to write a review. But I discovered the title in the FT weekend edition and reading a few pages it already feels alive with the buzz of making it big [...]
Depending on where you stand, this is going to a long boring blog post or an interesting one. While I didn’t write much about it, my last consulting project as a freelancer was to help get a startup into the European Space Agency Incubator (ESI)… successfully, I’m happy to say. I wanted to write a [...]
If you want to hear some interesting perspectives on the hardware and software business and/or starting businesses in general, check out the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leader lectures held
Just read the Face Value in the Economist from a few weeks ago, on Shai Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur and former SAP employee, who is developing an ‘electric infrastructure for cars’ business, called Better Place. The idea is that there will be hotspots across a region and for cars to be subsidised by the subscription [...]
This week a Dutch commission on the banking recession to came to an end. Their conclusion: banks should be more customer-focussed (translated article). Wow… If there’s anything this crisis has shown us is that during times of crises, creativity takes a dive out the window. Because I’m pretty sure that people were talking about more [...]
A lot more multi-part blog posts on Tech IT Easy; finally some continuity again, which is nice for both you and me! So, today was the ceremony for stage 1 of the New Venture business-plan competition, the submission of the idea, of which a prize of €500 was to be won by 10 contestants. As [...]
Like last time, I use Tech IT Easy as a note-taking tool for things I want to remember and which you might find interesting. I can’t say that I learned much that was profound yesterday, a the “Startersdag Rotterdam,” held by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (kvk.nl), but more of the nitty-gritty stuff: how to [...]
I spent today at an entrepreneurial seminar, hosted by Star here at the Rotterdam School of Management. A number of speakers gave lectures, including Bernard van Oranje (co-founder of Levi9), Marc Cornelissen (adventurer), Annemarie van Gaal (founder of AM Media & panel-member at the Dutch Dragon’s Den), Henk Keilman (founder of RIG Investments & also [...]
The matter of Rhine Capitalism vs. Anglo Saxon Capitalism, referring to the battle between the capitalist system that has long reigned in the US vs. the more socialist system that came forth from European countries, is one that is on the table right now. The question is this: should we let the market be free, [...]
