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 [...]
There’s a really, really interesting blog post that talks about robots a little bit. It’s by Paul Miller on IEEE Spectrum and draws a parallel between how the personal computing industry got started and the state of robot development today. Specifically, it talks about hardware hackers. If you want to dig even deeper, there’s another [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation ! Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a [...]
I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair. OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up. Global package delivery, [...]
I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My [...]
Dear everyone, I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and [...]
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 [...]
It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I [...]
Background: This is an advice that I am giving to someone, who is a traditional artist. She paints and tries to sell her paintings. By writing this down for you, the public, I don’t think I am revealing critical information, in that it is a common sense approach to building a sustainable business. It does [...]
If you think about how the iPhone was launched so many months ago, or rather at what stage the iPods were at, you know that apps were always on the horizon. The iPod G5 introduced a wider range of games that you could buy through the iTunes store, which already introduced us to the idea [...]
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 [...]
Recently, the city of Rotterdam introduced a mandatory way of paying for public transport, using RFID-cards, called OV-chipkaart. This system will eventually be deployed across the Netherlands. This blog post describes my experience with it. First you have to be aware that, much like in any city, public transport is an umbrella-term that describes busses, [...]
The coming weeks, I’ll be pretty busy with a business development project in the technology sector. As usual, I cannot discuss it in depth (ok, it’s Fight Club, we bash each other half to death every week and can’t talk about it), but I want to discuss some stumbling blocks that we’re sure to be [...]
