Just booked a ticket via KLM. The picture says enough. The guy that designed the system must have worked for IT, not for Sales. Although honesty is a more powerful marketing weapon, than many think.
Took me a while before I found the “No” button. And by the way, in this case I hate to be “someone else”.
Kingston DataTraveler G3 - Get more than you were promised
I recently bought a 32 GB USB drive. Not for small files of course (it would be a bit big for small files), but for carrying with me some large Virtual Machine images. (For an explanation on what virtual machines are, see wikipedia, but it’s not important for the story.) I did not want to spend too much money, but I did want a reasonably fast one, since I would be copying huge files (around 10 GB each) onto it. The shop had really fast ones (with speeds specified to be 20 MB/s), that were also really expensive. In the end I decided to go for the cheaper, mid range, Kingston DataTraveler G3. As you can see on the picture of the packaging, it should be able to write with 5 MB/s, and read with 10 MB/s. Not that fast, but fast enough for what I wanted to spend. I took into account that “they all lie” about this kind of specs. Those speeds are the ones you only achieve under the most optimal circumstances, etc.
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the speeds reported by Windows when I was copying my large files » Read more…
They are not that different
I recently read an article, which stated that RIM was becoming the new Palm. That might be a fairly good observation: RIM (the maker of BlackBerry phones) isn’t doing well at all after all. However, there are more and perhaps more likely candidates for this title.
Palm was once a high tech company with revolutionary and business changing products. It’s handheld computers, ‘palmtops’ or ‘personal assistants’ seamlessly (this is an evolving term) integrated with business tools like Outlook for email, tasks and calendar. Palm launched the first successful app shop, where you could buy thousands of apps to extend your Palm’s functionality with both productivity tools and games. Although the Palm platform was strong » Read more…
I bought my first mobile quite late, at the end of the 90′s. It was a Siemens C35. It was quite popular at that time and one of the reasons was that it was small (it was also remarkably easy to use). People that bought their phones just one or two years before were now frowned upon for walking around with a so called ‘fridge‘. That’s what we called the huge phones made just a few years earlier.
In the following years phones continuously became smaller and thinner. There were exceptions » Read more…
In the brand value ranking maintained by BrandZ, Apple has now succeeded Google as the most valuable brand with a value estimated at $153 billion. That’s a 859% increase since 2006, the year before Apple introduced one of it’s biggest hits until now, the Iphone (announced in January 2007). In the BrandZ ranking IBM remains third.
It’s interesting to remark that in another ranking by InterBrand, Apple scored only 17th in last year September’s assessment with a value of only $21.143 billion. That’s almost 8 times less. This should all have to do with the methodology differences in measuring the brand value. » Read more…
Apps vs Web
Previously I wrote about the battle between Apps and the Web, how the battle drove an upward spiral where both are getting better and better and how Apps and Web will inevitably grow together. Mozilla (the developer of Firefox) and Microsoft (Internet Exporer) are now both taking their own steps towards that.
Today Internet Exporer 9 has been launched. It offers lots of improvements and it would go too far to describe them all here, but one of the interesting things related to Apps and the Web is that a website now easily (virtually) becomes an App, by ‘pinning’ a website to the taskbar, like you could already make a shortcut to any other application on your Windows 7 taskbar. » Read more…
Sleep deprivation makes flipping coin for profit look like good odds
Entrepreneurship is about taking risks. Calculated risks. Top managers take big decisions every day. They have busy schedules and some only sleep a few hours a day. Research now shows that sleep-deprivation makes decision making easier. Not better though. Ever seen a CEO that always presents optimistic plans? It might be because of his lack of sleep.
According to an article in the Journal of Neuroscience described on physorg.com, sleep-deprived individuals in a study “tended to make choices that emphasized monetary gain, and were less likely to make choices that reduced loss”. The study is the first that shows that lack of sleep impacts the way the brain assesses economic value, increasing sensitivity to positive consequences and decreasing sensitivity to possible negative consequences of decisions. » Read more…
A first experience should WOW you!
In the last few days I had my first experiences with Tiger Airways, a low budget airline operating from Singapore. And the experience was good. The ticket to Singapore was quite cheap, considering that we bought it one day before. The process of buying a ticket was not that excellent, but still OK. Like other cheap airlines they add extra cost for about everything that is optional: for bringing (any) luggage, for choosing a seat in advance and for an option to do online checking later. In the plane all catering is optional and therefore has a price. However, if there is anything annoying about buying cheap tickets, it’s the disappointment at the end of the process when they add the fuel and airport tax » Read more…
Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner shows how statistics can be used to explain a wide range of phenomena or maybe even EVERYTHING that people do in the world. Levitt and Dubner base their analysis of the world on three basic flavors of incentive: Economic, social and moral incentives. A combination of these incentives explains all human behavior, according to the authors. And they use numbers to prove it. Most importantly, they manage to do that in an easy to understand way. This way, they explain for example what schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common, and why drug dealers still live with their moms. » Read more…