Archive for Business
A message to United Airlines
April 3rd, 2008 • Business, Life
You can usually tell when a company has wandered off the path. It’s the atmosphere in the reception, a shared look on the face of the staff, or maybe an indiscrete comment from one of the juniors on the team.
I’ve just arrived in Las Vegas from London, having flown via San Francisco with United Airlines. I chose United because of the price: it was lower than any rival fare. After booking the flight and hotel through Expedia, a little research revealed that I could upgrade my United seat through their Economy Plus Access scheme - $349 would buy more legroom for myself and one other passenger. I’m 6ft 4in tall and my son’s a good 6ft, so we paid.
I arrived at Heathrow to see the longest damn queue I’ve ever witnessed - hundreds and hundreds of United passengers weaving through Terminal 3. Read more »
Classic Mac ad: the way it should have been
April 2nd, 2008 • Advertising, Life
Woopra: the live stats addicition starts here
March 31st, 2008 • Business, Internet
Tags: Business, Web
GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.
Now this I want. I’ve long been a fan of Google Analytics - it’s simple enough to scan-read in seconds, yet clever enough to provide the kind of insights that change the way you work.
But Woopra takes the whole game to a strange new level by going… live. That’s right - unlike Google, Woopra presents a real-time dashboard, showing numbers of users, even incoming search terms from Google.
For a self-confessed stat addict such as myself, Woopra’s as good as handing a vampire an all-night pass to the blood bank. I’m putting the order in for the bank of screens tomorrow morning, one for each site in our portfolio.
The thing’s in private beta right now, but grab your camp bed and join the orderly queue.
Last year, social. This year, knowledge
January 6th, 2008 • Business, Internet
Tags: Google, ibm, Social
Ex-IBM boss Irving Wladawsky-Berger reckons an IT-based knowledge economy will be the most significant trend of 2008, grabbing the cool baton from social networking.
I confess to struggling with the concept at first. IWB points to a recent Business Week piece on ‘cloud computing’ - basically, server networks that can number in the hundreds of thousands that hold invaluable services and wells of know-how. Read more »
New Live.com: fighting relevance battles
September 27th, 2007 • Business, Search
Tags: Google, live, Search
So today, we have a new Live.com, with Microsoft attempting to steal some Google turf by primarily focusing on relevancy of search returns.
Sensible enough: apparently, many billions of hours of analysis by people with large foreheads revealed that most people want to find things.
Being a person, I thought I’d give it a totally unreasonable test - one search query - and compare the big G with the big, er, L. As you’ll plainly see, Google is the infinitely better thing: Stuff.tv is clearly the right thing to return when you search for ’stuff’. Live, on the other hand, has decided that you want some kind of English course. Blagh. Anyway, in total fairness to Microsoft, many millions of queries from humans around this fair planet of ours will settle the debate. Let battle commence.
Facebook: a fall is predicted
September 26th, 2007 • Business
Tags: facebook, Social
Marketing Shift has a principal analyst at Ovum foretelling rough times ahead for Facebook. He bases his argument on background legal action by the founder, the potential for identity theft and a possible crack-down on the use of the site in offices.I can see the latter beginning to cut in soon. Facebook profile pages are a common sight on screens as you wander offices these days - usually at lunchtime, admittedly, but you have to wonder how many bosses are running checks on total usage during the working day.Facebook Could Burst Web 2.0 Bubble
Microsoft: is there a lesson in there for everyone?
September 22nd, 2007 • Business, Internet
Tags: blogging, microsoft
A long rant by Robert Scoble delves into the lack of fizz from today’s Microsoft.He’s in a position to know: Scoble made his name as Microsoft’s chief blogger, in the process opening up parts of the company that would otherwise have remained secret (and arguably given it an even darker image than it has today).So when he says…
It’s been more than a year now since I left Microsoft. I really expected Ray Ozzie to come out and do lots of cool stuff for the Internet. But what did we get? A new design on live.com? Please.
Why doesn’t Microsoft get the love? « Scobleizer…it’s probably worth taking heed. In particular, he suggests that the senior team at Redmond could do worse than study Bungie, the development team behind the Halo franchise.By the time I’d reached the end of the post, my mind had switched to analysing our own successes - what were the ingredients that made things fly? First stab:
- Clarity: a single sheet that captures a market and need in under three paragraphs
- Chemistry: a group of people that compensate for each others’ failings, and in doing so form a greater whole
- Freedom: the space for that team to push it as far as it will go
- Confidence: managerial structures and support that exude faith
There are probably a thousand and one other factors, but every winner I’ve been lucky enough to have stood next to has ticked all three of those boxes.
AOL has “stemmed the tide”
September 20th, 2007 • Business, Internet
Tags: aol, web
Some months ago now, AOL stepped out from behind its walled garden - the once subscriber-only service realised that there was a big bad world out there, which just happened to have more money than the garden in which they sat.Has it worked? According to AOL’s CEO in an update to Wall St. today, the answer is yes - ish. The headline quote from Ron Grant says it all: ‘We have stemmed the tide of people leaving us.”He also pointed to the company spending $650m in the next year on ‘internal developments’, and a spend of over $500m on acquisitions. He also says that AOL ‘gets the new web’ (pointing to the fact that you can now get your AOL email through an iGoogle page). I hope so: I’d like AOL to succeed - not least because the major players are, in reality, few in number.But the New York Times has its doubts over AOL’s future as a portal…
In a world of search, social networks and other forms of browsing, portals don’t serve the same function they once did. (See this quick take on Google’s approach to portals.) If you look at the breakdown of the traffic on Yahoo or AOL, you’ll see that by far the largest number of page views is on their e-mail services. The various content sections, news, movies and so on, are still huge but they are losing share of mind to smaller sites.
Business widsom without the jabber
September 5th, 2007 • Business, Life
Tags: Business, management
I hate business books. Most fill 250 pages with soft-edged puff, remaining sufficiently vague to ensure that the author cannot be held to account. Either that, or they become religiously specific.Imagine the delight, then, in stumbling across this [PDF]. You can read the 16 pages in your tea break, and much of the wisdom is, er, wise. Try this for heft:
a Must Read Manifesto: “Winning companies recognize it is better to distribute leadership and to employ a bottom-up strategic planning process that drives the business forward than it is for functional senior managers to collaborate on decision making and push new strategies, processes, and plans out to the organization.”
Via Brand Autopsy.
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