Wednesday 28 April 2004
 Pro:
Good looking management
co-founder
an immigrant, like the
Chief Yahoo
It's 'the people's IPO'
Con:
Past performance of once promising tech IPO's
12:54 AM | category: Finance |
Tuesday 27 April 2004
Microsoft's
director of platform evangelism (wild guess: a regular candidate for that beautiful American pedigree 'employee of the month') started Microsoft's corporate blog
Channel 9. An interesting marketing approach that not everybody can appreciate.
'Depending on whom you ask, Channel 9 is either the next big thing in corporate communications, an attempt by the company to circumvent traditional media or an effort to foster dialogue by building an online community' says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in an
interesting article.
Of course the corporate blog we're all waiting for is the one by Microsoft's legal department.
02:21 AM | category: Media |
Thursday 22 April 2004
 If only
this book would have been out when I needed it... The interesting thing about it is the way the information for the book was collected:
hundreds of college students were interviewed to collect a comprehensive overview of different strategies to get the most out of the freshman experience. Seems more appealing to me than the view of one so called expert who went to college before Woodstock.
12:22 AM | category: Media |
Thursday 8 April 2004
 '
Down Under Ingame Advertising (DUIA) is the first European ad agency that specializes in advertising opportunities in games. We believe that games are the new, global mass medium, offering huge and exciting advertising opportunities.' It'll be interesting to see their work for their first clients. The Down Under site points to the Italian jeans brand
Diesel working with
Capcom on
Devil May Cry, but it does not look like they were involved with that project. [Tip from
Zacht Ei - Dutch.]
04:18 PM | category: Media |
 Venture capitalist
Fred Wilson added Google AdSense to his blog a couple of weeks ago, as he is interested in contextual advertising. I am also experimenting with blogs, actually produce one of the
most popular commercial blogs in Holland, and I'd like to learn more about contextual advertising as well. Fred donates his AdSense proceeds to
The Grameen Foundation, that provides 'tiny loans, called "micro-credit" to poor women all over the developing world. The women use these loans to start businesses such as farming, making food, tailoring, etc.' Sounds like a great cause. (By the way, interesting to see that a vc picks a charity that gives out loans, not gifts or grants. I wonder about the term sheets ;-)
I will be donating all proceeds of this blog to
War Child, an organisation that for reasons unknown to me does not yet seem to have a presence in the United States. Here is some background on War Child:
Children are amongst the first casualties of any armed conflict, always the most vulnerable and innocent of victims. In the last decade alone 1.5 million children have died in wars. Four million have been disabled and a further 10 million traumatised. The severe psychological wounds that war inflicts on children can scar them for life, crippling the very generations that must one day rebuild their devastated countries. For the future peace of the world we must do everything in our power to help these war children.
The central theme behind War Child is that you can take a child out of war, but how do you take the war out of the child? Essentially, War Child helps kids that have lived through a war, become kids again. Through singing and dancing and playing games, children that have lost almost every sense of what it's like to be a child, learn to play and discover the joys of being a kid again. The transformation these kids go through is simply amazing.
A friend of mine, whose business acumen I deeply respect, sits on the board of War Child. He has thoroughly checked out the spending and efficiency of their organisation and it's about as mean and lean as it can be. For example, when Dutch pop star and War Child ambassador Marco Borsato
visits Afghanistan for War Child, he pays his own flight, stay and everything: there's no pampering. I find those kind of things vital when judging any charity, and most of them don't pass the test. But every dollar you send to War Child, is a dollar well spent. Here's how
you can help.
And of course, you can always start a blog and donate the proceeds to War Child.
03:41 AM | category: Culture |
 For about six months I have had
a blog about media and technology. In Dutch. While that may appear weird to those very rare individuals that have not yet mastered the language of love, I had a good reason to do so: I figured that since the Netherlands (that province of Denmark where we speak Dutch)
is running southern Iraq as part of the not-quite-so-global-coalition, we'd promote Dutch among the natives and essentially establish a new colony there. A young nation starving for knowledge, loaded with oil, gets on the internet, reads my blog and donates. (Hey, the donation model worked for
Glenn Reynolds.) The Dutch have had success with this strategy to promote our language around the world before: how did you think the word 'apartheid' became the only Dutch word everybody in the world knows? Because our great forefathers instilled those Boeren in South Africa with some wholesome, traditional Dutch values. It was passed on for generations. I'd go as far as to call it one of the first true forms of
viral marketing.
Anyway, it looks like our boys have hit
a little snag in Iraq. They'll be taking it a little bit slower with the cultural indoctrination program, I presume. So for the time being, I'll be blogging in English to maximize my audience. Next up: blogging in Arabic.
03:07 AM | category: Culture |
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