Category Archives: business

The cost of knowledge View Comments

There has been lots written about knowledge in recent times. How the interenet has made knowledge ‘open’ and how social media is enabling enterprises and individuals to share information cost effectively, reducing the trasncation cost of communicating and socialising to really low levels. And we’ve had the eLearning industry come and (nearly, hopefully, go) and [...]

Shiny View Comments

A shiny new rattle in a less shiny new office. The site ain’t right yet but it’s getting there [thanks Paul].  And the offices are super good.  Come visit!

Mail order View Comments

mail order, originally uploaded by JamesB. My uncle has been selling cloth by mail order catalogue now for over thirty years.  the operation is a might slimmer now that it was all that time ago, as is he. He’s retiring soon.   For those thirty plus years though he’s managed to sell cloth by text alone.  [...]

eyeballs and widgets and winners View Comments

I find it quite staggering how much dotcom M&A activity going on right now.  IPOs seem to be coming through daily in a race between the big four Google, Yahoo!, News Corp and Microsoft not to lose out.    All seem to be spending over revenue growth in activity not seen since the boom/bust days [...]

Free View Comments

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } the new office…, originally uploaded by JamesB. So I’ve been freelance now for 2 weeks, trying to cohere some sort of business which I’ve called Rattle.    The business is there to provide planning, [...]

Ebay: Designing for convenience View Comments

John Sanbourne has just talked through ebay express [which was news to me] at the [otherwise pretty disappointing] BTWEEN forum in Bradford.    His slides should be on the BTWEEN site later.  The development of express has been prompted by the market for ‘convenience’ purchases, instant gratification, rather than an auction, this is "buy now" [...]

<75 years of metaBBC> View Comments

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } spies, originally uploaded by JamesB. The BBC has opened up its catalogue going back to 1937. Well Done MattB and Tom. It’s a wonderful thing. I worked in TV as a researcher/AP for the [...]

Big supermarkets are bad for your health – official View Comments

Sainsburys is to open GPs [doctors] surgeries in its stores.  Are supermarkets taking their responsibility for creating a nation of lard-arses really seriously?  This hasn’t been picked up much and I’m quite surprised it hasn’t.  The move to incorporate Doctor’s surgery’s in store is obviously part of Sainsburys desperate attempt to make its stores competitive [...]

Get Crafty View Comments

Link: Los Angeles Times: ( the handmade life ). Interesting article in the LA Times [reg req'd - find here] around the craft movement which kinda supplements what I wrote earlier about Etsy.  The article is useful because it brings out some of the social and psychological drivers underpinning the new craft movement:  Around midnight, [...]

Mechanical Turk: Paying for a customer centric brand? View Comments

Ben just alerted me to this new service from Amazon [but now I see it's gone meme mental..]. When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. [...]