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the UK post office's new model comes quite close to ecologisca's
Matter is a box full of nice things delivered to you on a Saturday morning. Inside the box is a selection of items from different companies-which might be useful, entertaining or just fun.
The Royal Mail is sending out a box of free stuff which it called "Matter". Last time it contained DVDs, candybars, a SIM card CDs and a few other goodies, of which first batch was sent out in December to about 30,000 people.
They are describing it as "a new approach to direct mail" where you try the free goodies, maybe give some to your friends and eventually stay as a loyal customer. No brainer.
Ecologisca's proposal of eradicating advertisers' blanketing the largest market audience possible with a given campaign follows a similar business model. Its concept of democratizing its consumers for the benefit of being able to ultimately sell anything at no charge would rather draw upon the "customers implicit and explicit connections for efficient ad targeting augmentation and relevancy."
In effect, it would even be more efficient than the Royal Mail's customers' task of having to intentionally sign up for "Matter."
euro startups are still pitching
via TechCrunch by Mike Butcher on 10/27/08
The European startup scene appears to be relatively unfazed by the downturn so far. But then, they are, even now, still getting used to the mere idea of pitching their idea. O’Reilly’s Web 2 Expo Europe event in Berlin last week featured a bunch of startups all trying to get some exposure to a swathe of European VCs at a “Pitchcamp”. But luckily it featured a crop of some of Europe’s most interesting companies to date…
our firm's underlying ultimate proposal to advertisers
Rather than the usual banner ad or Adsense words that are so currently beloved and where the employment of contextual targeting is falsely deemed to be the best method of attracting consumers to a given ad, our firm would concentrate on and realize the industry's long desire and overdue for the implementation and localization of conducting direct and personal marketing campaigns towards the end consumer, drawing rather upon our customers implicit and explicit connections for efficient ad targeting augmentation and relevancy.
Where as in the past, the most efficient way to deliver a message was to blanket the largest market audience possible. This ingenuity, brought about by the theory of the Long Tail and the growing importance of niche advertising, has the affect of allowing advertisers to have an increased ability to reach their preferred specific audiences and execute relevant ad messages.
How? Through our concept of the Democratization of Distribution.
well we didn't make this time...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Feedback Seedcamp
Date: Tue, Aug 31, 2008 at 12:16 AM
Subject: Your Seedcamp 2008 application
To: Feedback Seedcamp
Thank you so much for taking the time to apply to Seedcamp 2008. We really appreciate the time, energy and initiative you have shown in putting together your submission and developing your idea. Unfortunately, your team hasn't made the shortlist this year. The competition has been extremely tough and we've had over 100 entries more than last year from around the world. Our panel of judges from some of Europe's top VC funds put a lot of thought into the process and did not find making their selections easy. We want to help support you by creating a more vibrant entrepreneurial community to help you develop your ideas and building better businesses. We also really do want to stay in touch with you - so there are a few things which you can immediately take advantage of: * please stay active on the Seedcamp forums
(http://forum.seedcamp.com) and blog (http://blog.seedcamp.com)
* join Seedcamp's Facebook
(http://facebook.com/group.php?gid=2454599453) and YouNoodle groups
(http://younoodle.com/groups/seedcamp)
* please go along to and help us develop your local Opencoffee Club -
you can get great support locally (http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/) If you have any suggestions on our online application process, how we can get the word out better, the timing of our process, or anything else let us know. Your feedback helps us support you in the next year to develop an even better application for Seedcamp 2009. Thanks again and best of luck going forward,
Seedcamp Team
2008 application zeitgeist Seedcamp
Q10: How will you make money?
Q16: What tools will you use?
experimenting and innovating in a new online society
The allowed possibilities of cheap communication tools and Google are ever more becoming an inconceivable paradigm shift to how we express ourselves and conduct businesses – at least for me.
It is horrifying however to imagine that some CEOs of large corporations and head of governments do not posses the slightness notion of this metastasis. Creativity has gain new meanings. It is an age of talent abundance. One may experience this with just one video of Youtube, a platform where every minute 10 hours of video are uploaded. Yet it seems the people who make important decisions that affect us all are afraid to experiment. To quote leading innovation author Scott Berkun of HBS:
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
The problem is that most business managers hate experiments. They want guaranteed returns. Predictable profits. Introducing uncertainty works against what they're trying to do. The comedy is that whatever profits they're talking about protecting originated from the founders of the company doing a huge experiment: starting a new company.
Experimenting leads to the risk of not knowing what the outcome will be. It is a learning process that ushers creativity and innovation and which displaces us from the norm.
I believe creativity has always been part of us. We now have however a public audience and we can be assured that our work will be made permanent. Despite other’s reluctance to embrace innovation democratization, I remain steadfastly with the belief that the future society will be govern by rules which ourselves have no control over. Jeff Carvis explains:
…a new society… [with] the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
Mecanbe - goal sharing social site
Mecanbe, the goal-oriented progress site that helps you track your milestones, has launched its private beta today. You can use Mecanbe’s tracking tools for personal or team goals. While not as quantitative and explicitly team-directed as services like LiquidPlanner, there are a number of features that aid in the goal-tracking process, including self-assessments, task outlines, and support groups.
Similar to Goalmigo, a core concept of Mecanbe’s overall service is accountability, which you’ll be responsible for. This is measured through the reports you complete, but there are other aspects to Mecanbe which sound far less serious and are quite practical in presenting you with an outlet for self-expression regarding your goals, while helping to inspire others and spread the wealth of information garnered through this sharing of personal experience.
Accomplished through blogs, social media-sharing integration (i.e. Flickr imports), and HTML comments that let others submit things like inspiring song playlists to help the overall community stay on track, the blogging and reporting functions on Mecanbe can be quite helpful.
When thinking of such services, I often cringe because I have a terrible time with self-motivation (especially in the morning) and typically find that sites like Mecanbe only require more self-motivation in order to just maintain a single task. But the ability to hone in on tasks as they relate to each goal makes Mecanbe a useful service that automates enough of the process that the value received from participating in this type of progress-tracking site outweighs the downsides.
For instance, if your goal is to lose 25 pounds by Christmas, then you can orient your tasks around different aspects of the weight-loss process–one task could be directed towards your diet while another could be directed towards your daily workout. This gives you a more comprehensive look at your actions and how they interrelate to your overall progress, meaning you can see whether or not your diet needs to be tweaked instead of your workout plan. Such automated research and output is quite useful, and as mentioned previously on Mashable, such a service can eventually be optimized for corporate use and other forms of team-building.
a sea of homogeneity
any day that I surf Silicon Valley news, it's always the same old companies and start-ups trying to make a buck on the latest craze; Web 2.0.
"...Tim O'Reilly recently opened the Web 2.0 conference by asking entrepreneurs to solve bigger problems.
What's really going on here? I think the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree - but I'm vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today's crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries. There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape.
Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm. It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can. But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing.
They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads. That is, when they're not too busy partying..
