antti.vilpponen.net

The image above is a great example how to communicate to your customers when you have to ask the customer to do something that’s not in their interest. You position the message so that it’s actually a compliment instead of apologising for the task. Don’t concentrate on yourself and what you’re doing - focus on the customer, they’re giving you their attention. Give something back to them.

The message is from twitter, when they were going through my Gmail contacts whether any of them had an account with twitter.

My friend and partner, Hannu Ripatti, has been writing a blog for sometime now, called Garbage is an analog concept. He has a lot of good entries there already, but I especially like the “Dinner in the cave“.

He writes about his blog (which I agree with 100%):

I believe that the ongoing digital revolution is going to be one of the landmark moments in history. It will not only change the way we do business and communicate. It will change every aspect of society from education to privacy and beyond. There will be many challenges, both technical and intellectual, but in the end I truly believe that we will all benefit from the revolution.

I’ve been writing a blog with a friend, Miikka Kukkosuo, for a while now called Arctic Startup. We review Finnish startups and blog about various events and issues around them. To my suprise, I realised alarm:clock euro had done a nice review on our site. Just to let you know; we do have some cards up the sleeve for next year! :) We’ll definitely have a lot more blog posts coming up, a new design to some degree and possibly even video to spice things up a bit.

Thanks for the review!

Evan Williams has done a great post that all entrepreneurs should read. He has come up with several attributes to analyse ideas by:

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

More in Ev’s blog post.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams - two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of - I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.

I’ve had a very interesting evening here in Paris tonight, meeting lots of different people. First I hooked up with the developer team of Seesmic in a small cafe. Interesting people definitely. From there we took a metro with StuffMC of Pomcast to OpenCoffeeClub meeting and met a bunch of interesting people there. For example, I got to hear some interesting future development plans regarding our very own Blogilista.fi. I decided to come back early though, to get a good night’s sleep and be in good condition tomorrow for the conference.

The thing that pretty much spawned from everyone I met today is the funky business atmosphere and attitude people have in this industry, even at the executive level. I mean take a look at Martin Varsavsky, CEO of FON and a very influential man, explaining his meeting with Steve Jobs, love the accent and attitude.

I was just testing out Seesmic and simply put, it’s pretty damn cool :) The whole community is so warming and welcoming after I posted my first video. Thanks to melissah, Christian and Mike who were the first to reply. There’s definitely a lot of potential in the service. One of the things that makes the whole user interface so easy and intuitive to use is the use of these ajaxy type of transitions from a feature to feature.

However, the biggest difference I see with the service is that it’s totally built from bottom up - meaning that the community gets to help in building the product and thus make it useful for the people from day one. If you haven’t seen them yet, have a look at Loïc’s interview on the Financial Times where he shares his ideas on this sort of company building.

I’m in Paris at the moment, taking it easy in my hotel room near Porte de la Chapelle metro station. The weather in Paris is equally drastic as it is in Finland and therefore it isn’t very tempting. Nevertheless, I managed to do quite a bit of walking without an umbrella :) (and mind you, it rained non-stop the whole day).

After finding my hotel, (which by the way is still unbuilt in Google Maps images) I recharged my batteries for a while and decided to take the metro to the central to have a look around the city. Managed to grab a few photos, but since I didn’t want to risk breaking my camera in the rain I decided to leave the photoshoots for tomorrow.

I’m in Paris for some R&R as well as business. LeWeb3 is starting Tuesday and I’m participating from Gyllene Skor. It’s going to be exciting to meet lots of interesting people and listen to interesting presentations. I’ll try and Jaiku the conference to our channel on Jaiku - let’s see how Loïc has managed to get the Wifi working ;-)

We’ve met with quite a lot of companies in the last two months and it always amazes me when companies tell us that “Oh, we’ve had that feature/option available for a long time, but we haven’t found it very useful”. The feature in this case can be replaced with almost any sort of marketing activity, user feature or anything of that sort.

The problem with internet is that it doesn’t usually count how well you have hogged all possible marketing activities or features available to mankind, but how well they work together and how they are given to the user. Half of good planning is well thought out execution. Many executives still fail to see the difference in the way things are executed or shown to the user.

However, it still makes us smile when we’re told in a client meeting, “but we already have that!”.

(via TechCrunch)