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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.

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.

Some guys from back home are coming out with a free full feature film on 15th of October. Here’s a trailer that has been filmed around Punkaharju.

More on the Biisonimafia website.

Guardian has a nice article on an interview with Rob Small, the CEO of Miniclip. Miniclip has 34 million users and has been profitable for the last five years. Rob enlightens readers with his ideas and views on the casual gaming industry. Looks interesting, especially when we’re sort of competing from the same users.

However, I’d like to point out that even though their growth has been viral and word of mouth, they mainly target and “acquire” 10 to 24-year olds. This is quite young, especially when you look at recent studies of the casual gamer demographics. It’s also notable that the older the targeted users, the more dispensible money they have – which naturally makes the older bunch a lot more attractive.

Check this out – a very innovative and viral press release.