New books: Hedonist’s travel guides, 37signals and Entrepreneurs

Two different book orders have arrived today on the (snail) mail.

For us, we ordered two travel guides. A Hedonist’s Guide to Madrid and A Hedonist’s Guide to Lisbon. We decided to buy these new guides after having a good feeling about the A Hedonist’s Guide to Stockholm. The Lisbon guide is particularly intersting because it gives us a different perspective from the city we live in. The tourist description on some of the places we regularly visit can have quite an impact on the way we look at them.

$A Hedonist\'s Guide to Lisbon$ $A Hedonist\'s Guide to Madrid$
For me, we also ordered Defensive Design for the Web by the 37signals guys and How I Made It: 40 Successful Entrepreneurs Reveal All.

The first is a very practical book I have been wanting to buy for a while. As for the second I’ve been reading excerpts of it regularly on sundays on The Sunday Times business section. Now I have the complete version. Nice to read the story behind my favourite travel guides, the Rough Guides.

May 31, 2005 | | 5 Comments

Skype’s Afillitate Program

Its nice to see that old methods still apply. In it’s early days, Amazon’s Affiliate Program was an innovation that helped the company spread it’s brand online.

Following that example, Skype is launching an affiliate program in order to increase the speed of its user base growth. This will allow Skype to gain a vast number of new customers ahead of the launch of VoIP services from telecommunications and cable companies.

The same rule applies to other startups. Has an analyst commented: “The more customers these startups can acquire [...] the better chance they have of withstanding the competition to come”.

There are other types of viral schemes for companies that pretend to quickly increase its costumer base. A few years ago PayPal offered $5 to any member just for signing-up. Many users used PayPal on eBay and this offer allowed them to buy something below $5 for free. The program had a big impact for PayPal allowing them to achieve critical mass. Since then this type of offer has been used on many other type of businesses like, for example, mobile phones.

May 28, 2005 | Tags: e-business | Leave a Comment

(By now) RSS is probably the best term

I have to agree with Marc Hedlung that by now it’s too late to change the term RSS into anything more understandable (like Alerts which I suggested).

By now, some big players are already moving into RSS. BBC has a selection of RSS feeds, CNN too, Amazon has a syndicated content page and even eBay (through RSS Auction).

The best thing to do is help turning the most popular feed format (RSS) into an even more popular term. There are other types of feeds like Atom (which blogger uses) which might even be technologically better. But by now the user is already tunned in into RSS and big sites are already marketing RSS feeds and RSS icons . This will surely help spread the adoption of feeds in general.

Let’s not keep the user confused.

May 25, 2005 | Tags: rss | 3 Comments

Why you can’t use PayPal on Amazon.com

I have a few euros on a PayPal account and was planning on buying a few books. But Amazon.com (Earth’s Biggest Bookstore, they say) doesn’t accept them. I though that there should be a good reason for that. And there is.

Apparently, Amazon.com is thinking of developing their own payments service. PayPal, works very well and has millions of users worldwide but it belongs to a long time competitor. According to Amazon.com’s head of operations:

using PayPal itself is not part of Amazon.com’s plans.

From Amazon’s shareholders point of view I can understand that using a competitors system may seem like a very bad idea. But from users (who pay) point of view this has proved to be a very big mistake. Amazon.com auctions are failing and eBay is fostering. Among other reasons there’s is the fact that 74% of eBay auction payments are made using PayPal.

PayPal has helped eBay put Amazon’s auctions in second place. Will it help another big bookstore compete with Amazon.

If I was an online bookstore, this was the time I would be running to PayPal’s website to register myself as a merchant. These are the little competitive advantages that allow smaller businesses to compete and strive.

May 25, 2005 | Tags: e-commerce | 89 Comments

Reboot (pre-conference) podcasts

From yesterday, 2 pre-conference podcasts are available. This will allow speaking participants to introduce themselves and talk about what they’ll be presenting. For the listener is a great way of being prepared for who and what you’re going to hear. You can set you mind on the subject and prepare questions on advance.

On the first podcast you can hear (mp3 38 min, 22 MB)
Thomas talking about Reboot, size of the venue + programm, possible recordings in video and audio, what you should bring to reboot.

On the second podcast you can hear (mp3 28 MB / 48:17 min) Ben Hammersley talking about The restriction of not blogging in your native language or why Real social networks can be stronger than some real life friendships, and we care about one another.

If you never heard of Podcasting, find out what is podcasting on Wikipedia.

update: just finished hearing both podcasts. It was nice to hear Thomas with a open spirit on organizing Reboot 7. Ben Hammersley podcast is 48-minute funny conversation. Really good energy like Thomas asked for. Ben certainly has it. Can’t wait to meet them personally.

May 24, 2005 | | 2 Comments

Football, The Championship and Benfica

Benfica is 2005 Champion. After a rather disappoint championship from all teams, Benfica has been crowned only at the last game of the season. They needed a draw and they got a draw. The country is celebrating and also some places around the world like Paris and Maputo (Mozambique).

(almost live photos by João Pedro)

Everyone is going crazy on the streets. It’s almost 1 am and the Benfica Stadium is full of people (65.000) waiting for the team to arrive from Porto. People on the street are screaming and jumping like there’s no tomorrow. I like to see people enjoying the moment but I just wished they would give has much to many other things has they do to football.

We had Euro2004 in Portugal last summer. It was named the best Euro championship ever in terms of organization. It was a great moment for Portugal’s image. But the fact is that we’re still strugling to solve many other basic problems like healthcare and educational infrastructures. And that is not even some agendas.

Football has a few good things. It has the power to unite a country around a common goal as we saw on the Euro2004 (what a moment that was!). It has the socializing power to join people around weekly events (games) and it drives econnomy (Telepizza receives around 15.000 calls in the last 15 minute before a big football game!).

But, unfortunately, is lacks many other things. Fooball is the mirror of a materialistc society that pays players astronomic salaries (think 10.000 € = 28 x minimum salary) while allowing some of them to be tax free! (They can earn whatever they want, but Tax Free?!?!). Why the protection?

In my opinion football is still a bad example for society and has too many badly used power.

I know that this a time to celebrate. But this are also the times where we can look at the way things work and prepare the future.

May 23, 2005 | Tags: day to day | 1 Comment

Why is Google following a portal’s strategy?

Google personalized homepage is having a wow! effect on the comunity. Not because it is something new on the Internet, but because for Google it is an completely different approach.

A few years ago people talked about how personalization was the key to Web success (think Amazon). Despite the fact that Yahoo or MSN were following that strategy Google kept refusing this approach. Google focused on having the (almost) same simple homepage for all the millions of users.

This is a good thing when most of your users are new users. After a few years of existence google still could not process all the individual information on each user and so it couln’t also deliver a personalized user experience. At that is still a very good competitive advantage of Googles competitors. So Google is chasing it. And to do that it has follow some of the same steps. Jeremy claims this is Google’s approach to Yahoo’s FUSE (find, use, share, and expand) ideas (for more read John Battelles thoughts). So be it.

In doing personalization later in the product stage Google is following their overall strategy of analysing their users needs. Now it’s the time people are using so many Google services (Gmail, Google News) that it would be good to have a centralized access to all of them. And has Charlene Li’s (Forrester Research) puts it

there is such trust in Google, that most people will feel comfortable with the idea of Google increasingly encroaching into our private lives.

So primarily Google personalized homepage is Google’s answer to it’s users needs not to it’s sales department.

May 20, 2005 | Tags: e-business | Leave a Comment

Lunch at the London Borough Market

This post from the del.icio.us guys reminded me how I wish I could eat at the Borough Market everyday. Fresh meat, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, all taken from the stand and cooked directly. And what a garden for a middle of the day lunch break!

The London photos remind me of those great days all over again.

May 20, 2005 | Tags: lifestyle | 2 Comments

Rough Guide to Copenhagen

Rough Guides are my favourite travel guides. For every city or country visited I have a Rough Guide.

Since we’ll be in Copenhagen soon she ordered The Rought Guide to Copenhagen on Amazon. Yesterday it arrived.

It’s really one of the most informative guides. Unlike other more famous ones, it has lot’s of practical information for the independent traveler. From accomodation to restaurants, from budget to expensive.

Aditionally it includes some special places the regular turist wouldn’t bother to see but that, fortunately, the author decided to write about.