In No Particular Order

Just over a week ago I managed to spend a day in Amsterdam, having extended my stay at the inaugural European eCommerce Forum (of which, more anon). After what seemed like weeks of rain and hail the Saturday was a glorious, warm Spring day. Ian Worley had spoken at the conference - a really good session on ethnographic research aka watching your customers and responding to their needs - ...

A combination of carbon awareness, recessionary trends and a non-existent expenses budget have kept our Editor in Chief's focus firmly on Europe this month - just a well, since the rest of the world's focusing upon Europe too... The European bloc is the third most attractive global market - after the US and China - and, despite the differences in culture, language and infrastructure, this agglomeration of consumers is ...

Stumped for what to do with the kids on a bank holiday weekend I was saved by the not-your-grandfather's-exhibition offering from The Cans Festival - "a street party of stencil art". It was a case of SE1 channels Nelly Duff. The event was in a tunnel/underpass under Waterloo Station approach, Leake St. Many years ago I used to park the car there when I worked at Ernst & ...

I was invited by Agency.com to speak at one of their 'brownbag lunches' and managed to do so on 29 February, 2008. The format is a relaxed one: an external speaker, an 'open mic' in terms of topic (I spoke on rich internet applications, underlying data and the challenge of selling in a contracting market) and a group of people all clutching and munching their lunches and throwing in ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Daily caffeine 'protects brain'When I was younger, fitter and more devil-may-care I consumed inordinate amount of great coffee and ordinary wine. My long-suffering and healthy partner (now wife) would occasionally take me to task (as she witnessed the umpteenth ristretto of the day) and I would reply that it was part of my "balance of toxins" regime: the red wine and ...

Well well well - in a turnup for the books that Pyrrhus himself would have found difficult to swallow, Sanford has extracted an apology from non-Congressman Massa following the slanderous claims he made about Sanford's character and conduct. The original case is linked in Sanford's publication of their joint statment of toadying reconciliation, but - like cheap air freshener - this release simply disguises the one rank smell with ...

Ribbit - Silicon Valley's First Phone Company When I said that 2008 would be the year in which the promises of 'mobile' and telephony started to be delivered I didn't envisage so much excitement so soon. Hot on the heels of Rebtel we have Ribbit. Ribbit is Rebtel meets Skype meets Adobe Air/Flex, meeting Visual Voicemail meets Unified Messaging meets iPhone meets CTI meets social networking meets Salesforce. This gives me a ...

Proofing and subediting are tricky, demanding and under-rated skills. Still, the time to find and listen to those skills would be <thinks> before printing thousands of carrier bags</thinks>. Then again, maybe not. Let the presses roll. Oh, and see if we can find St Christpoher's Place on Google Maps... UPDATE: I've shown this to 8 people, none of whom found the typo without prompting.

This is a great idea. It's become axiomatic that there's a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills. Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there's not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to ...

Mike Butcher's recently covered the "Feta" (cheesey 'beta' pun - excellent) release of Forkd - a fun community/mashup offering for online foodies. The pun extends beyond the 'drop all vowels' approach of flickr, mosaiqr etc and builds on the interesting notion that an individual recipe may 'fork' (as in 'branch') as well as be approriated (the very visual 'forking' of something from another's plate). I particularly like the idea that ...

Cheap international mobile calls at Rebtel I was facing an hour-long conference call yesterday, dialling in to a US access point. I didn't feel like stiffing my client with a humungous phone bill and as usual I'd left the various headset/handset options for Skype somewhere in a dusty cupboard. Ordinarily, I just shout at the laptop from the privacy of my home office, but this wasn't an option in ...

InternetRetailing's Editor in Chief, Ian Jindal, has been shopping hard this month and his experience at the sharp end of retail (handing over cash, rather than writing strategies) has made him ponder how retailers should respond to anticipated 'percentage declines' in sales. Thanks to client engagements your Editor in Chief has had the opportunity to pound the malls, boutiques and ateliers of Hong Kong, London, New York and Manchester ...

I'm slowly catching up with posts after my MT install imploded - welcome Wordpress and at last a chance to post about a great experience: visiting Hong Kong to run a masterclass on 'publishing 2.0' for the British Council in January. I've been fortunate to work with the BC on a number of occasions but this was the first opportunity to see the work of the BC outside ...

It was a real privilege to be able to run three days of workshops and presentations for Euromoney/Institutional Investor in New York, with Craig Hanna of e-consultancy. Following a presentation to the Board in London, Craig and I spent 3 days with teams in publishing, newsletters and conferences, looking at a number of aspects of B2B publishing in the era of 'the working web' (as I'm referring to ...

I've been a user of the Vodafone 3G USB thingy for over a year - £45, all you can eat, high-speed internet that's worked largely without trouble across the UK, France and further afield. The recent purchase of a new MacBook Pro meant that I needed to reinitialise the modem: normally a really simple activity with the Vodafone Mobile Connect (VMC) application. It seems not to do much - ...

I've also recently seen a list of predictions for the year 2000 - made in 1900 in the Ladies Home Journal. Some of them are stunningly prescient, others are directionally correct (ie if you take them as analogies) while others are clearly increments of the current/emerging technology. It's interesting to reflect upon how our future visions are constrained by the technologies that seem to have a following wind at ...

I spoke in Manchester last night at the Digital Shorts event, organised by Manchester Digital and e-consultancy. I spoke at this event last January and this gave me the opportunity to review the predictions I'd made, compare this last Christmas with that of 2006 and consider the key areas of interest for 2008 (and how these have developed from those of 2007). There was a great Manchester welcome, a ...

24 years ago, eh? Most people know that I'm a bit of a mac fan (or victim - take your pick). Given that I spend so much of my working life at a keyboard it's a real testament to the OS+hardware combo that I still enjoy the very processes of _using_ the computer. Apart from the dull, awful year of the late OS9 phase (think 1997-2000, when Windows ...

View Event :: Manchester Digital I spoke in Manchester last night at the Digital Shorts event, organised by Manchester Digital and e-consultancy. I spoke at this event last January and this gave me the opportunity to review the predictions I'd made, compare this last Christmas with that of 2006 and consider the key areas of interest for 2008 (and how these have developed from those of 2007). There was a ...

Google has recently added a "UK Retail" resource to its iGoogle offering. This is more than a collection of retail-specific feeds from the existing Google database. Google has worked directly with key information providers to ensure that the feeds provided are relevant, correctly formatted, useful for retail 'watchers' and provide a good mass of information. From a publisher's perspective the new zone offers improved branding (over and above ...