antti.vilpponen.net

Seth Godin has a good blog post on how monks sell their beer in Belgium. The monks sell this beer that has no branding nor any labels on the bottles. And this is when it gets interesting.

There are two interesting aspects to how they create demand and increase their brand value without any logos or names. First, they strongly limit supply - you can only buy the beer through appointments with a monk. Second, there is a very secret, religious process behind the brewing of the beer. These combined have given them quite a cult following in many parts of the world.

Read more at the Church of the Customer Blog.

(via TechCrunch)

I decided to do a quick videocast with my digital camera. Not too bad, but not too great either. Mind you, I hadn’t tested the video recording before so it turned out quite ok.

Just getting through a cold, I did my third videocast. I also realised I need to do these earlier on in the day, or then it’s just the Finnish darkness and weather that wears me down. Anyhow, as always - comments are welcome :)

I’ve looking through some laptop bags tonight and found several good websites that review them. The best definitely has been Squidoo’s lens on laptop bags. There I came across Waterfield’s RacerX, with which I fell in love with instantly. It’s a little bit business and a little bit rock n’ roll, not falling into the traditional way of doing stuff, just the way I like it.

Now, has anybody ever seen or heard anything about these bags? They praise the bags on their website (with customer reviews), but it never hurts to ask a third opinion. And no, this is not a paid advertisement :)

Update:: So I went ahead and ordered a blue, 15″, mountain bike grip - RacerX. thanks to everyone for the comments! :)

Yet another excellent presentation by Larry. This one’s from TED.

When I signed up to Dopplr a while back I thought, now here’s a cool service. A bit like WAYN, and Plazes, but with a more specific positioning towards business travellers. Although I can’t consider myself one just yet, I was a bit suspicious how it’d pick up. However, when I signed up, I sent out a few invites and talked to people about the service and to my surprise I see people taking it into their everyday lives (on top of all these other networks). Today I signed in to see who else is in Savonlinna as I’m here for Father’s day, I noticed a friend was in town and another friend who I thought would be here was actually in Espoo. So a small sign of usefullness there :)

Here’s a list of my blurry friends travelling places.

It’s extremely important how you position your service in the customers’ minds, if you wish to succeed. LinkedIn has succeeded as it has stuck to the business use and not go ahead and compete with more casual services. I’m sure they’ve had a few talks about expanding the core audience to grow the user base. However, sticking to the success factor that got you to the point might not be that bad after all - positioning yourself correctly inside the visitors’ minds is equally important in the online world as it is in the offline world.

Our Pekka and Janne are jaikuing from Berlin’s Web 2.0 Expo to our Jaiku channel. Check out their growing commentary from the conference over here.