Archive for the ‘USA’ Category

Thoughts on Intellectual Property and dealing with *everything else that is out there*

We’ve talked to a number of investor these last months and I can classify their questions into three categories: Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) Revenues and Operations Revenues is a straightforward concept and reflects market potential, market share, and business-model. Operations can also mean business-model as that clearly affects your operations, it also concerns the team, [...]

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, [...]

Summary of visit to Silicon Valley

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there. UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies. Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the [...]

Theory: Why No One Cares about Video on the Internet

Online video suffers from a lack of success-stories, being too bandwidth-intensive, being too expensive and time-consuming to work with, too immersive, intrusive, and non-indexable by search-engines

The Future of Television, Facebook it isn’t.

where I discuss the idea of mashing up television + media and how that doesn’t quite work, mostly because TV is unchanged.

Thoughts about Tech IT Easy, inspired by my time in Paris

First of all, Paris was great! For three days, Jeremy (Fain, founder of Tech IT Easy & Verteego.com) drove me crazy in a good way, by mapping out every single minute of my life. Similarly to how we met up in Barcelona, it was a great way to get to know the city and at [...]

iPhone's app strategy and its implications for other smart phones

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 [...]

An interview of a web marketing strategist: Michelle Greer

An interview of Michelle Greer, web marketing specialist in Austin, Texas, on blog Tech IT Easy, by Jeremy Fain

Hitchcock / Truffaut and experimentation

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 Study Trip to California, full of Finns this time

Since last September, I’ve been taking a Ph.D. level course on the future of internet, IT and related fields called Bit Bang at Helsinki University of Technology’s Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy. The students are all Ph.D. students from either TKK (HUT), University of Art and Design Helsinki or my own Helsinki School of Economics. [...]

When analogies don't work

Just one post this week, it is again the busy period in Vince’s house. This last week, I’ve read two predictions, both, by coincidence, based on the role-model of Apple. The first was David Carr’s, who asked for an iTunes for news in the New York Times. The second was Ian Betteridge’s, who predicted an [...]

LeWeb '08 Conference sucked big time

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should refund participants for providing such a low standard service.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ’08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

Leaps in Logic — a post about blue and red oceans

Thinking a lot about blue and red oceans these days, which was a topic of a New Venture seminar last week (summary post about that coming up). Still not having completed Blue Ocean Strategy, the book (someone told me, reading the summary would suffice. See slides below), I’m still not entirely sure how to get [...]

How to Research Innovation

Where does most radical innovation come from? Where, as an individual, can you expect to get plenty of access to that type of information? If your answer isn’t universities, please let me know! As promised, I’ll be focussing more on innovation on Tech IT Easy these coming months, and you can be sure that my [...]