Category: English (Page 7 of 14)

Amazon launches Kindle Fire

September 29, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

Everyone has been talking about the tablet market. Especially about the prices of tablets. Ever since HP decided to pull out of the market and dumped its discontinued tablet with its discontinued OS, it became clear that price is a much bigger hurdle for buyers than most expected. Enter Jeff Bezos and the new Amazon Kindle Fire. A $199 tablet that could be the biggest change to the tablet market since the introduction of the iPad.

The Kindle Fire has been based on the hardware of the RIM Playbook, but with Amazon’s own Android based operating system that seems more than enough to offer a good user experience. Obviously I have not had my hands on one the people who have, seem to be pleased with it. A good reason might be that Amazon firmly believes that everything you use on the tablet you should be able to use from the cloud. And that makes the 8Gb storage limit much more believable and practical.

Lets be honest, the biggest thing in the Kindle Fire launch is the new Silk browser. the Silk browser is a new angle that Amazon is taking with their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). They already offered the power and storage of their servers to startups and anyone who wanted to take an advantage of their speed. But now they are offering it to everyone through the Silk browser.

The Silk browser helps you access webpages smoother and quicker than other tablets. Why? Well, basically because you do not browse the web yourself, but Amazon’s EC2 does it for you. You send out the request and EC2 gets the page and repackages it into something a lot simpler and easier to load for your Kindle Fire. And as you will be browsing pages that others browse as well, those pages can be served faster than you would get them from a conventional browser.

However, there is a downside to Silk. And that is called EC2. That is, if you value your privacy. There is a reason why Amazon offers the Kindle Fire at $199. It is called sponsorship. Because Amazon is going to learn endlessly more from your tablet than any kind of customer research can teach them. They will go with you on your surfing trips, your trips to find the best deals, your trips to relate to your social networks and everywhere else. And it will do it in the nicest way possible. So, Google, where does your chromebook stand now?

In all honesty, the Kindle Fire is a nice tablet. It looks nice, seems to be fast enough and with Amazon’s appstore for Android you have all the possibilities you get on tablets twice the price. The Kindle Fire is going to have a pretty big impact on the tablet market. Here’s for hoping there will be EC2 privacy settings.

How Facebook killed the “like” button and introduces a new marketing challenge

September 28, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

The like button has only been around for about a year. Just a year. And look what it has done. It has brought over us a storm of people asking us to click that button for their sake. It has brought us services that have included their own version of the like button like G+, +K etc. It has brought us endless buttons that are published for the sole reason of sharing a story somewhere on a timeline in your social universe. And now Facebook has come and taken it all away again. And that is a good thing.

To be honest, if you are a marketeer and your metrics consist of measuring your Twitter followers and your Facebook likes, you might as well use the weather report to assess your business success on social media. Though this might sound a bit strong, that is the truth. Neither of these figures tell you anything about your position in social media. The trouble is that neither of these figures shows whether there is a relationship. You can have a million followers on twitter and nobody who is actively engaged with you. The same goes for your Facebook likes. They might not have anything to do with the engagement of your customers. One of the reasons people would have to like you, would be to be able to post to your wall. Facebook has announced that this will change and that non-fans will be able to post to your wall soon.

Recent surveys show that people only “like” about 10 brands on Facebook. This means that not even all of your fans will be liking your page. As a matter of fact, I own and use a number of Apple products but I have never liked Apple on Facebook. And I bet you can look around your house and say the same thing about a lot of brands you use daily. On the other hand, liking has never been and never will be the basis of conversion. Your competitor with less than 1% of your likes might have built a very engaged community which might quadruple his conversion rate over yours.

The new social graph approach with frictionless sharing (automatic sharing of your ativities) and a redesigned timeline will make sure that your community will not be seeing as much of you as you might have wanted. And their network might not come across you at all. With the recent addition of the ticker for less important and quicker news, we see that most branded content ends up in the ticker and scrolls off the screen within seconds for more active users. There goes your like-button strategy.

Marketeers, just like anyone else on social networks, need to go back to the basics. What is the best way to engage with my audience? How can I connect to them on a personal and relevant level. How can I make sure that I help my target audience reach their goals. And how and when can I communicate with them on a personal level, so I do not interfere with, but add to their experience. If you are a marketeer for a company, whether you are small business or working for a multinational corporation, you need to let go of everything that you have learned about mass communication. You need to look at your target audience and just ask yourself one simple question; How can I relate to all these people in the most personal and relevant manner? If you can answer that question right, you are on your way to social media success. Especially on the new Facebook.

Microsoft releasing WP7.5 Mango now, plus the web market

September 27, 2011 / Arne / 1 Comment

Earlier tonight Microsoft has started to release the new Mango version of Windows Phone to its customers. If you are running a Windows Phone, it is probable that you will need to be patient as they hope to be releasing Mango to 10% of its customer base today. They will be taking weeks to update all of the handsets and carriers that are currently offering phones running WP7.

If you are wondering where your update is, you can check for yourself here.

The good thing about the slow release is that Microsoft is trying to fix possible bugs as the software is released, updating as they go. Smart move. Read more on the Microsoft blog.

Just a little while ago, Ben Rudolph also posted a run through the features of Mango and included the Web Market. An interesting step. Almost a year ago, I spent some time with Robert Scoble talking about how an app market for Windows Phone would be useless as the target audience for Windows Phone would not buy apps for their phone. Now, with what I have seen of Mango, that might be about to change.

I am looking forward to reading the first reports of updated phones. Got one? Let me know.

How Facebook changed the playing field

September 27, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

Last Thursday, Facebook showed a number of new features to the development community. If you read tech blogs, you might have already read about most of the changes Facebook will be making in the coming weeks. But in all honesty, it is not just about the changes in itself. Facebook has started to move in a direction that we have all been expecting, but that we set in a far away future.

Facebook really is moving away from their social network status. They have turned around to the old saying that content is king and are building their own contextual and personality engines. They are working to share with me what I want to see. Serendipity goes out the door and is automated by their contextual engines ‘accidentally’ showing me exactly those things that I am looking for. It enhances my relationships with my friends on Facebook as Facebook emphasizes the ways in which we are similar and slowly takes out the bits that are less interesting.

And then there is frictionless sharing. Lets face it, this is something that we have been waiting for for years. You might not think so, but none of us really likes to spend time updating our social networks. In a lot of ways updating your network is time that could be spent on friends. Facebook is now offering you the option of updating your social network by itself, leaving you the extra time to spend on your friends.

There has been a lot of shouting about privacy and logging out of Facebook and using browsers in incognito mode. The funny thing is that most of us have Google accounts as well. They don’t log out either. In fact, they have not been logging out for far longer than Facebook has been tracking our web behavior. Does that make it alright? Of course not, but it means that we do need to make clear choices on what we share with whom. Not everything should be for everyone. That goes for the new Timeline feature (pic), but also for frictionless sharing. And that is no different than it was last week. We still need to choose who we allow to see into our lives. Like we choose who we let into our living room.

Personally, I think Facebook has done a great job. Yes, I am enthusiastic and I expect many others will be as well. Mainly because it takes the work out of sharing what you are up to and it allows you to work on your relationships instead of your sharing apps. And that changes the playing field completely. Lets face it, will I consider another network that will not allow me to share with similar ease? Facebook has been a standard for social networking for some time. This will ensure that they will be for a long time to come and that if you want your network to be successful, you need to stay close to Facebook.

What could we have done to keep you as a customer

Can you tell us why you are leaving?

September 19, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to say goodbye to Vodafone and switch to Dutch mobile provider Telfort. And with good reason. Or at least, that is my opinion. This week I got a questionnaire from Vodafone asking me why I was leaving them.

In essence that is a great move. Someone leaves you as a customer and you want to know why, so you ask them. However, what is my trigger to fill out the questionnaire? In this case, the only thing mentioned in the email announcing the questionnaire, was that all the answers will be kept confidential. As if that is of any concern to me. In fact, I am telling everyone who wants to know that I am leaving Vodafone and why. And the interesting part of this is that it is not even about the price. It is about my customer experience.

So, yes, my new Telfort subscription is cheaper and has the same network quality. But what triggered me to change providers is the way Vodafone treated me over the past months. In the past I have had my trouble with Vodafone, but usually their customer service solved the problems. Until now. A couple of months ago the Dutch providers have jumped the data train. Whatever was possible before isn’t anymore. Unlimited internet subscriptions are turned into limited versions while prices are multiplied. And if it remains unlimited, the speed drops down after a set amount of traffic. Annoying to say the least. So, I approached Vodafone Special Services (yes, a couple of years ago they told me I was a valued customer) to ask them whether they could give me my average data usage over the past couple of months. And then it went silent. I asked again and it stayed silent. I the end, I got an offer from another party to switch to their network. So, I called regular customer service and during our conversation on the length of my subscription, they told me that they could just give me the figure for the last three months. Apparently Special Services no longer thought I was a valued customer as nobody responded even though every customer service employee can see the answer to my question with a single click.

Was I unhappy with Vodafone in general? No. Over the past seven years I have been very happy about their services. However, if I spend around €1200 with you every year, I would at least expect the courtesy of answering a simple question. In the questionnaire they also asked me whether I was approached personally with an offer and whether that would have changed my choice. That is hardly a question. Of course it would have helped if someone would have contacted me and talked with me about my personal needs in mobile communications and how they could match that. And a good offer could have kept me with Vodafone. That call would at least have shown me that my relationship with Vodafone was a two way street. Now the feeling remained that my relationship with Vodafone depended on me. My money, my effort, my enthusiasm.

If a client leaves you, it is great to ask them why they are leaving. You can learn from it. However, it is much better to keep your customer from leaving you. Talk to them before they leave. Answer their questions. Show them that you value the relationship with them as well. That is not hard to do. Most people are quite happy with a call or a personal message. If you run a subscription service, make sure you contact your customers in time, to see whether there are better solutions you can offer. Your relationship with your customer is much more important to them than the actual price of the subscription. Because the perceived value is different.

Got a startup? Be on stage at LeWeb’11!

September 8, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

Yes, LeWeb will have a startup competition again. This year LeWeb is looking for the three best startups for the Social/Local/Mobile (SoLoMo – yes, the theme) marketplace. Is that you? Well, it might be if you have got anything to do with any of these. And the best way to find out is to enter the competition.

Something that I personally love in the approach to the competition this year is that they will be including a video element in their competition. And they have already said that creativity and originality will be the key to success. So, bring out the video equipment, the pizza, drinks and snacks and do an all night brainstorm with your crew how you are going to storm this competition. Read more on the LeWeb’11 agenda.

Btw. why do I love that video element that much? Because I know it will be fun to do, but also because I know it can pull your team together more. Hanging out and trying to get the weirdest ideas going to present your startup will get the most out of your team and bring you closer together after the stress of regular business. How do I know? In 2008 I ran a video competition with Erwin Blom and Lucien Burm. Soocial did a great movie that took the complete Next Web conference by storm. (They were not actually in the end results for the competition as they also won The Next Web’s own startup competition.) Take a look at it below and then get to work!

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

Customer happiness is in your attitude

September 7, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

How often do you check the satisfaction of your customers? Do you dare to offer them the guarantee that whatever their problem is, you will solve it? You should. And this is why.

The other day I ordered an arm strap for my Nexus S from eBay.com so I can take it along when running. As a European, ordering from an American site to take delivery from something from Hongkong might seem to be a potential nightmare for both seller as well as buyer. But then my strap included a message from my eBay seller. My seller requested that I would give him five stars. You might think that is a bit too much. But the lines after that were what made the message so important. Regardless of what my problems were, my seller promised me that he would solve any problems I would have with the item he had shipped to me. His attitude to get a five star rating was that he did not want my user experience to be anything but those five stars.

So, when was the last time you asked your customer whether they were satisfied with the product you provided them with? Make it a point of your business to ask that question. Make sure you ask that question to anyone and everyone. Because their feedback will make sure you achieve no less than five star experiences for every single client you have. Will there be problems to solve? Of course, but the right solution will win you ambassadors instead of clients. And they bring in new clients to become ambassadors.

Facebook Messenger for Android now available in Europe

August 26, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

Right before heading off to bed to leave for a conference early tomorrow morning, I decided to check the Android Market. I was sure Facebook was not going to be releasing its Messenger app so quickly in Europe, but I was proven wrong. I already had the iPhone app through my American iTunes account, but now the Android app is available for Europe in the Android market as well. A great step for what might just replace most of my other messaging apps.

Download Facebook Messenger from the Android Market.

Jux, the future of blogging?

August 25, 2011 / Arne / 1 Comment

Yesterday Jux has launched something new. An addition to blogging? An alternative for blogging? I am not sure. I think that for now, I will call it a great tool for sharing. Because for me, that is what blogging and social networks are all about. Sharing with friends and meeting new people through the content that I share. For you? That might be different. For your business? Again. But for me, it is about sharing what I see, what I think about, sharing my thoughts and inspiring others.

So, Jux you said? Yes. Unlike current blogging systems (like this WordPress blog), Jux is not focusing on sharing text and then beautifying it with images. Jux aims for the experience. Images, video and text can all be mixed together to create more of an experience page than a blog in the traditional sense of the word. Do I like that? Yes. A picture says more than a thousand words, and I am a bit of a talker. But I like the way Jux presents the content I can create. I like what I write to be an experience. And Jux allows me to create that. More than WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous does.

Is there a downside? Obviously. You have to have that visual content. And not everyone always has visual content that supports the point they are trying to get across. There also is a distinct lack of lenght. I wouldn’t know how I could share the post on recommending your favorite bloggers for LeWeb’11 in Jux. And that makes it less of a real blogging platform to me.

Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. There is no way to save a post as a draft. Or at least not that I could find. Then there is no way to connect it to your personal URL, which is incredibly important if it is your personal expression space. By my standards anyway. And I would like to have more freedom in moving text blocks around and playing with more fonts and styling elements. But I am sure that will grow in the future. So, Juxers, if you are reading this, this is my wish list:

Saving a post as a draft
Scheduling a post
A creative all text format that I can use to post text only posts
Keeping me signed in with Facebook and Twitter
Moving text blocks around and resizing them to fit text and images
More fonts
More styling elements
Allow me to change the color of my JUX title
Running it on a personal domain or a personal subdomain

But in general, I am going to play with this for a while. Check out my playground.

Send your favorite blogger to LeWeb11 in December

August 24, 2011 / Arne / 1 Comment

This year, I will be part of the team that is overseeing blogger accreditations for LeWeb. Together with Stephanie Booth and Frédéric de Villamil we will be making a selection of the best international bloggers (and podcasters) who will be invited to be official LeWeb’11 bloggers. However, we need your help to find the best bloggers for the job.

This year LeWeb’11 will be a three day conference. That is an extra day over last year, which means there will be 33% more great content. That alone is a reason to be there. The theme this year is SOLOMO, social-local-mobile. If you are not eligible for a blogger accreditation, you can get a ticket at €800 off until September 30th! If you are a student, freelance developer or a startup, there are different offers for you which you can find at the bottom of the registration page.

Right now, you can help a blogger go for free and be an official LeWeb’11 blogger. How? Just by filling out a simple form. Just tell us which bloggers you like and why you think they should be invited to LeWeb’11.

What do we expect of official bloggers? We are looking for people that:
Have a passion for content and reporting;
Commit to attending and covering the conference (it’s in English) on their blog;
Have significant reach and influence inside their community.
And naturally, they have to have a proper, publicly accessible and established blog or postcast. And by the way, having huge numbers of followers on whatever social network does not make you a blogger. Blogging does.
(An official blogger will receive tickets to LeWeb’11 for free. Every blogger will need to cover their own expenses for visiting the conference.)

We will be going over all submissions as they come in. This takes time. Please allow us to take that time. Each blogger we select to become an official LeWeb’11 blogger, will be contacted by us personally and directly.

Please keep in mind that being recommended is not part of a popularity contest. There have been some people that had that thought last year. Every blogger will be looked at and selected based on our own criteria. The number of recommendations that they have had is of no importance to us.

The main reason for us to work with recommendations, is that we want to discover important bloggers and podcasters that we might not have known of. And to make sure that we do not miss anybody we absolutely should be inviting.

So, here is the form. We are looking forward to your recommendations.

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Where do I want to go? – About individual transportation

August 18, 2011 / Arne / 0 Comments

This morning, I am typing this on a bench at a train station while I am waiting for my connection. I have a place where I want to go, but there are no straight trains to get there, nor has getting there been fundamentally changed over the past fifty years. Or even longer. Let’s face it, the last great boost in technology for public transport came when we traded steam for electricity or diesel for areas where they couldn’t be bothered to put the wiring in. And in the meantime, we are sitting in traffic jams with all their negative side effects. Something is wrong here.

I know I am probably not the first one to say this, but where are the personal transportation pods? The Netherlands is reasonably covered in rails. Trains go to most of the country, and there are many well situated stations. But very often our train journey takes us along the route of the majority rather than suiting our personal needs. A transportation pod could solve a problem here. Today I am traveling from my home to a city about an hour and fifteen minutes away by car. The journey will take two hours by train. Most of that extra time is taken up by waiting to change trains. So what if we would change all of that?

Imagine I wake up in the morning and I decide where I need to go. The new train system allows me new choices. I choose to travel to my destination in a standard transportation pod. It is a small unit that can hold four people and their luggage that can be pre-reserved or taken from a station based on availability. The fare you pay depends on the way you book your pod. If you pre-reserve, you get immediate availability in a timeframe of 15 minutes around your chosen departure time. And you get a small discount on your trip. You also pay a pod price, that can be shared with your passengers by swiping a card or NFC enabled device within the pod. That way it will become cheaper and easier to provide group transportation for companies or for a day out with the family. The pod then runs along the rails of the train network at high speeds, being constantly guided by a local and central computer system. This takes you to your destination in almost the time as it takes to take your car. A good start.

Now look at it from a business perspective. It offers traditional train travellers the experience they are used to, but without the smelly neighbour. It also offers drivers the individual transport that they claim is their main reason to stand in traffic jams. You can offer multiple sized pods with four seats being the standard and other sizes designed to suit needs. A two seater pod for romantic outings or a twelve seater pod with alternative seating arrangements for meetings on the road. Hooligan pods that have nothing destructable in them, or festival pods that offer a place to pre-party with groups. And all these pods can be priced differently based on the needs of the client, subscriptions, time of day, distance and many other factors. And you can even decide on running very large pods, just like a current train, on busy routes at busy times offering travellers a significant discount for traveling in a group.

Are there no challenges? Yes, there are. Pod availability at stations will be a problem. However, travellers often wait fifteen minutes to get on their train now. Central storage locations at a maximum of fifteen minutes from a station could solve the availability problem for travellers that did not register a pod. However, special pods can only be reserved beforehand. A technical problem is the issue of passing at stations. At smaller stations there might only be two rails available allowing two way traffic. Another ‘parking rail’ ought to be installed so that passengers can easily get in and out of pods without stopping other traffic. And then there is the issue of level crossings. Personal transportation pods might be keeping the booms of the level crossing closed all the time due to their number and irregular schedules. From a business point of view, the biggest trouble lies in the investment. Individual transportation pods need to be built, old trains need to be scrapped and contracts to build new trains need to be cancelled. But the transition does not need to take much time. You can even allow for a bathroom or coffee break button in a pod, allowing new business at stations. And you could think of a million things you can do with a pod on the road when connected to wifi and social networks.

I honestly believe the individual transportation pod on rails has a future. But it’s main advantage is it’s main disadvantage. It is new and disrupts a business model public transportation firms have been using for decades. And obviously there will be problems I haven’t even considered. But I am sure there are ways to solve them without breaking the bank.

Love your customers, pro-actively

August 9, 2011 / Arne / 1 Comment

You can run a good business and offer great customer service. That will make your customers love you. However, they are basing their love for you on how you solved a negative situation. There is no argument about whether this works. Because it does. People enjoy a good solution and they will share it with their friends.

There still is an issue though. Every story will start with where it went wrong and they had to ask you for a solution. You can not rule out problems altogether. After all, we are all human, so we make mistakes. But try to be ahead of your customer. Be pro active about it. Talk to them as soon as you notice the problem, even though they haven’t said anything about it. Tell them what went wrong, how much you regret it and offer them a solution.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend at a great restaurant near the beach. My friend ordered the fish salad. After all, we were looking at the sea. During our lunch she noticed a piece of plastic in the salad. She didn’t make a fuss about it, moved it to the side and finished the salad. Some time after, we asked for the bill and when it was brought, the waiter told us that he was sorry to see that we had the piece of plastic in the salad. He told us that he had ordered the cook to throw out the rest of that batch of fish and as an extra he gave us a ten percent discount on the bill. As you can imagine, we left the place more than satisfied and happy to eat there again. And over time, what will remain will be the gesture of the business, not the plastic. Because we never thought that was much of a problem anyway.

Be pro active. When something happens that you would consider to be a problem, solve it. Solve it before your customer makes a problem out of it. That will make you a winner with that customer. And with every friend he will tell it to.