Archive for the ‘SME’ Category

Unsolicited Email is Evil and a Checkbox doesn’t Equal Solicitation

For a week now, give or take, I’ve been getting daily email updates from XYDO.com. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a site that many people tweeted and blogged was the successor of Digg.com. It may be, but I actually think Twitter and Facebook are and we are leaving the era of one [...]

The Missing Stat

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 [...]

The Great Divide

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 [...]

An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur. One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more [...]

The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

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 [...]

Political & Commercial World Powers and the Dynamics of Education

As is usual when I take a long break from writing, my blog posts end up becoming insanely long. Take it as you will, but I’ve tried to make it as coherent a post as possible. P.S. this is a post written under de cover of my “leave of absence,” which means I still write, [...]

The Dynamics of Blogging and the Dynamics of Doing Business

where I write about how the process blogging and that of business are incompatible.

Recap: My favourite Tech IT Easy posts for June 2009

It’s around that time again. First of all, I’d again like to note that I am, for the moment, the producer of 99% of the junk, eh, I mean Gold that appears before your eyes on Tech IT Easy. So, for the moment, these are favourite posts that I wrote. If you are interested in [...]

Blogging’s not dead, but it’s pretty damn unrewarding

In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What [...]

The Right Mix between Idea and Execution

If I ever succumb to the temptation to blog like I did last night, feel free to shoot me. Now, back to our regular programming… Last week, I wrote about having heroes in your craft and how I found it noteworthy that some examples are more effective than others in everyone’s path to self-improvement. I [...]

The "captain's chair" phenomenon

The “Captain’s Chair” is what I call the chair of the entrepreneur which always has to be filled and which sits prominently in the middle of the office and all the business being conducted within. It comes out of the simple evolution from running a 1-man show, and then hiring on more people to do [...]

My theory of the firm

Inspired by the Grasshopper podcast on Venture Voice. Har har, Vincent Like Unlike

What I dislike about business plans [addendum]

First, what I love about business plans. I contains four elements very close to my heart: Writing, talking to people, innovation, and entrepreneurship. That is not to say that writing business plans is a fun activity that should be taken lightly. The crux of writing a business plan is that it needs to be executed [...]

Why you should invest your time & money into space technolology

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 [...]

The "how to furnish your startup" conundrum, revisited

About 6 months ago, or longer, Jason Calacanis wrote an essay about what he viewed as the optimal setup, furniture-wise, for the productivity centre that is a startup. Jeremy wrote a response here, as well. I’m sure, things have changed, with the recession and all, but my mantra about that is… don’t dispair, just work [...]