subscribeBanks in crisis!
Friday, September 14, 2007
Marc Andreessen, as usual, a great source of inspiration. With lots of posts lately about banks in crisis.
Just visit your favourite bank's website. Some laughs are almost guaranteed. Here is mine, EuroBank (www.eurobank.gr), one of the largest banks in Greece. Check out the funky welcome flash presentation. I couldn't resist messing around with it with the aid of pikistrips.com.
Just visit your favourite bank's website. Some laughs are almost guaranteed. Here is mine, EuroBank (www.eurobank.gr), one of the largest banks in Greece. Check out the funky welcome flash presentation. I couldn't resist messing around with it with the aid of pikistrips.com.
Europe finances the google killer search engine.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
LOL LOL LOL
Stefan Glaenzer the chairman of last.fm and one of smartest angel investors in Europe thinks that
I believe he is wrong. How about 10 years behind? That sounds better to me.
Theseus is a German based project that just got funded by the German government by $165 million. The project aims to build "the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet. Theseus was inspired by a perceived need by European countries to challenge American hegemony on the internet by Google".
How typical of Europe. We are so used to wasting government money or just sit on our butts and complain about no government support instead of building things, trying to hit existing markets, invent new ones, fail, or succeed.
But it gets even worse. France also wants to build the next google! France is discussing a similar subsidy plan with the European Commission that is aiming to give $112 million to a French Google competitor named Quaero.
If you look behind the irony of this post, there is very sad fact. There's no light at the end of the long tunnel. We live in our small world and refuse to face the facts. Here in Europe entrepreneurship is dealt with bureaucracy and is discouraged, +plus we refuse to understand why google or anyone else got so big while we try to fund innovation to be born!
Marc Andreessen has once again hit the nail right on the head:
True innovation will rize from tech povera startups. This is what history taught(?) us.
Stefan Glaenzer the chairman of last.fm and one of smartest angel investors in Europe thinks that
Europe is two and a half years behind the US
I believe he is wrong. How about 10 years behind? That sounds better to me.
Theseus is a German based project that just got funded by the German government by $165 million. The project aims to build "the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet. Theseus was inspired by a perceived need by European countries to challenge American hegemony on the internet by Google".
How typical of Europe. We are so used to wasting government money or just sit on our butts and complain about no government support instead of building things, trying to hit existing markets, invent new ones, fail, or succeed.
But it gets even worse. France also wants to build the next google! France is discussing a similar subsidy plan with the European Commission that is aiming to give $112 million to a French Google competitor named Quaero.
If you look behind the irony of this post, there is very sad fact. There's no light at the end of the long tunnel. We live in our small world and refuse to face the facts. Here in Europe entrepreneurship is dealt with bureaucracy and is discouraged, +plus we refuse to understand why google or anyone else got so big while we try to fund innovation to be born!
Marc Andreessen has once again hit the nail right on the head:
And way off in the distance, $165 million is tossed into an incinerator...
True innovation will rize from tech povera startups. This is what history taught(?) us.
The difference between A-List bloggers and the rest...
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
This is the second paragraph of one of Robert Scoble's blog posts (A new journalism tool? Twitter?):
Using my Nokia N95 cell phone, and TwitterGram. I have a phone number to call, hear a beep, and can record. Then I take a photo and upload that automatically to Flickr. Finally I get back to my computer, write a blog post, copy and paste some HTML, and we have a nice set of reviews.
No wonder why Robert is up there on the A-list.
Labels: blogging
Thoof is getting spammed big time
Thursday, June 28, 2007
I received an email today from thoof.com:
After only 12 days of beta testing and o few months of initial development personalized digg-like service thoof launched officially today. Michael Arrington reviewed thoof and argued with thoof founder about the usability and success of personalized news services.
I disagree with Mike about the usability of personalized services and I believe the main problem thoof has to face now is the digg-like way of submitting stories. This model is prone to spam attacks and digg has so far survived from it due to its large user base.
Logging in today with my beta account I was faced with this screen:
My thoof history only had an article about poverty in Africa and nothing else.
The site is obviously under heavy spam attack and this for me is one of the problems personalized services are supposed to solve. Unless they find some way to solve this problem now, it’s quite possible that the user base might never take off. In my opinion the digg model should be abandoned. An example of the same service but with predefined news sources is findory.com which handles spam quite successfully.
You can also read one of my older posts about why personalization can sometimes suck even with google’s and amazon’s services.
After 12 days in private invite-only testing, Thoof is now ready to
go public. Anyone can now go to http://thoof.com/ and use the site
without an invitation
After only 12 days of beta testing and o few months of initial development personalized digg-like service thoof launched officially today. Michael Arrington reviewed thoof and argued with thoof founder about the usability and success of personalized news services.
I disagree with Mike about the usability of personalized services and I believe the main problem thoof has to face now is the digg-like way of submitting stories. This model is prone to spam attacks and digg has so far survived from it due to its large user base.
Logging in today with my beta account I was faced with this screen:
My thoof history only had an article about poverty in Africa and nothing else.
The site is obviously under heavy spam attack and this for me is one of the problems personalized services are supposed to solve. Unless they find some way to solve this problem now, it’s quite possible that the user base might never take off. In my opinion the digg model should be abandoned. An example of the same service but with predefined news sources is findory.com which handles spam quite successfully.
You can also read one of my older posts about why personalization can sometimes suck even with google’s and amazon’s services.
Labels: personalization
Rumors about new German laws. One more step behind for Europe.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
A bit of lazy blogging today. Some sad news I just read. Techcrunch reports that "Google may shut German users out of Gmail in response to new laws passed by the German Government that would force Google to maintain personally identifiable records for every German Gmail account".
How sad... Europe constantly taking one step forward, ten steps back.
How sad... Europe constantly taking one step forward, ten steps back.
Labels: Tech Povera
Doodling in meetings! (an ancient but widely un-recognized art)
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
People of the world!
Come out and show us the artist inside you. I attended a VERY long meeting today at work and I was doodling all the way. Every single person I know (especially geeks) does that. There must be millions of lost masterpieces out there. So I will take the first step.
I scanned two pages that clearly depict my state of mind as the meeting progressed.
The beginning of the meeting. I was relatively in a good condition. I had just seen a video from blaugh. "How to draw a cat":
As the meeting progressed, I started to get worse...
The meeting got worse and worse...
No light at the end of the long tunnel. The end is near... My End. (I doodled this in 3 seconds; I couldn't even doodle any longer)
Heart shaped cat... expressing what I felt at the moment...
A tribute to gaping void. The poor guy is in a meeting, and shouts "I can't stand it any longer!"
This is my last living sign. I managed to draw these talking figures. Everybody knows it. It's over for me. Hundreds of thousand of brain tissue went bad during this meeting.
Everyone should upload your "doodling in meetings" art for everyone to see. If you know other "doodling in meetings" artists, please say so in the comments. Arte Povera in Tech Povera.
Come out and show us the artist inside you. I attended a VERY long meeting today at work and I was doodling all the way. Every single person I know (especially geeks) does that. There must be millions of lost masterpieces out there. So I will take the first step.
I scanned two pages that clearly depict my state of mind as the meeting progressed.
 |  |
The beginning of the meeting. I was relatively in a good condition. I had just seen a video from blaugh. "How to draw a cat":
As the meeting progressed, I started to get worse...
The meeting got worse and worse...
No light at the end of the long tunnel. The end is near... My End. (I doodled this in 3 seconds; I couldn't even doodle any longer)
Heart shaped cat... expressing what I felt at the moment...
A tribute to gaping void. The poor guy is in a meeting, and shouts "I can't stand it any longer!"
This is my last living sign. I managed to draw these talking figures. Everybody knows it. It's over for me. Hundreds of thousand of brain tissue went bad during this meeting.
Everyone should upload your "doodling in meetings" art for everyone to see. If you know other "doodling in meetings" artists, please say so in the comments. Arte Povera in Tech Povera.
Labels: arte povera, Doodling in meetings
Angel investors in Europe. Where are they ?
Friday, June 15, 2007
I just found on techmeme.com a story about Stefan Glaenzer, a name I had never heard before, about the sale of last.fm to CBS. Last.fm is based in London and Stefan is German. He is now very rich and is probably going to become very famous for being the first one to invest on last.fm, as an angel investor.
Total profit for Stefan was around 22 million pounds (around $43m (US) if I’m not mistaken) after investing “a few hundred thousand” pounds in 2004 in last.fm.
I’m not familiar with the exact numbers but we don’t see many angel investors here in Europe. Risk taking is dealt so very conservatively in Europe that Stefan stands out as an amazingly brilliant investor. He invested some of his money in a start-up he liked! Really liked, because of his past as a DJ in the 70’s!
What's really funny is the way he became the chairman of last.fm. He emailed the guys who were building it! Then got to know each other... Then one thing lead to another:
Mr Glaenzer found Last.fm via a German blogging site that he had created and, with a love of music – “I’d been a DJ at university in Hamburg” – he signed up, and soon after sent the founders, a London-based German, Austrian and Brit, an e-mail.
...
Having German roots helped him to win confidence, and Mr Glaenzer became chairman of Last.fm in 2004,
I just have to quote some of Stefan’s words that depict so well the tech povera state of web entrepreneurship in Europe:
There was an approach about once a month for the last 12 months. All of them were US companies; it reflects the fact that Europe is two and a half years behind the US.
People like Mr Glaenzer is exactly what Europe needs. People with money should take the risks, and invest in internet start-ups. Mainly for things that they love (like music for Stefan) or even not! They just have to believe in it. It's all business in the end. And the potentials are huge.
Labels: angel investors
