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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
IIR's Mobile CRM, Bupadest, Dec 2008
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
Linkblog
Photos
Stale
Operators (all three of them) have started selling the iPhone 3G in the Czech Republic on Aug 22. Sold thousands of them. Apparently, the cool kids have gotten them earlier via under-the-counter distribution channels - saw several higher-up managers with the toy in June and July.
Rather then becoming the leading cultural icon of the year (as it did abroad), it’s just another piece of the rich handset mosaic here.
Which is a good thing in my view - diversity breeds competition breeds better value / cost proposition. I have to admin, though, that I’d like to experience that frenzy at least once.
But we Czechs are not easy to get excited en-masse - last time it happened was late 1940’s when the communists took over while the nation clapped, then in 1968 when the local communists tried to play it nice until the Soviet tanks rolled in. Takes a couple of these to get a critical worldview I think.
It’s quiet here. So quite it makes you think nothing is happening out there. Just the big wheels of business-as-usual grinding.
Pity.
Got Twitter
I just got Twitter. I got it on my cell phone. Suddenly it makes sense.
On my computer, I can always get more information via e-mail, instant messenger, blogs. I don’t need tweets to learn about Iowa floods; I get it from Drudge. I don’t need conference twitterblogging when there’s liveblogging and, yes, live video streaming. Twitter can’t compete on detail nor depth of these channels.
On mobile screen, though, the experience couldn’t be different.
I am not a masochist to fire up Internet Explorer and try to scroll right, left, top, and down on AJAXed web pages where half of the stuff doesn’t work because of missing plug-ins, flash, etc., all that on miserable EDGE speeds. If I can have a status update, though, a teeeny bit that I can get back to later, a tweet can do that.
Hmmm.
I wonder about the adoption rates of desktop vs web vs mobile clients. Is the mobile community growing any faster, by any chance? Too late to find out right now, but I’ll get back to you later.
Not exactly an early adopter, am I.
Study: customers “impossible to please”
Yes, and the study is mine; I am conducting it this week and have collected mountains of data:
That’s my younger son Ri-chan, scolding me for not serving him his lunch quickly enough.
I’m home at his command between 6AM - 8PM while my wife is attending a workshop in another town, all week long. Not only he is impossible to please, he’s also making sure I don’t get to think, blog, or otherwise act on my stuff.
Talk to you next week.
The things we take for granted…
If there is one thing blogging pundits have in common, it’s that we love to look in the face of the future and guess what expression it will make. However wonderful the 2.0 world might be, though, it’s easy to forget there are people out there who don’t even live in the 1.0 world yet. Sad but true: some places are slow to move on from 0.0:
President Raul Castro announced today that the Cuban government will allow unrestricted use of mobile telephones by all Cubans for the first time. Cuba currently has the lowest rate of cellular telephone use in Latin America.
A few Cubans have mobile phone service through foreigners or in their work places. Now the masses will be able to place a phone in their individual names’. According to the Communist Party newspaper Granma, the Cuban telecommunications monopoly ETECSA will begin mobile service for the general public in the next few days. “ - via MobileCrunch
Ponder that for a moment. And consider yourself lucky if you can see the irony of that press release.
Global cooling in Amsterdam
Going to Amsterdam tomorrow, checked the weather forecast via checkmytrip.com, and look what I got:
Leaving on Wednesday, not sure if I can make it though… 
Ironic
Today, I’ve given up on Nokia - I had owned several, the last one being N6288, and although they all worked reliably, I’ve just grown tired of its mainstream-ness. So, it’s a funny coincidence that hours after having sold my N6288, I read that Nokia is buying Trolltech, the makers of Qt, which is the underlying GUI library of KDE, my Linux desktop of choice (that was a mouthful).
Is Nokia going to put out a Linux phone, forcing me to re-consider? I wish Trolltech all the best now that they’ve sold out but I am afraid they’ll become a footnote, not the driving force that will put Nokia on the technological edge again. The high-end, the leadership goes to HTC, and Nokia’s 40% market share isn’t changing it one bit.
Happy 2008!
All the best into 2008 to all my readers!
While I don’t play the predictions game all that often, I’llnot make an exception today and instead just say I wish for some of the following to materialize:
- the social-everything frenzy to cool off a little; just get a life, everybody
- consumerish web (insert version number here) tools getting traction in the enterprise and sexifying the IT ecosystem; there’s no reason we shouldn’t demand the same attention to usability and design as employees
- the offline following the online in enabling user-driven consumer experiences preferably in sectors that are still deeply rooted in the 20th (or, in same cases, the 19th) century; end of the smallprint slavery
This blog is going to a bit more crm-ish and a little less about software as I am moving that stuff to a soon-to-be-launched site. I’ll keep you posted. For now, have a great year, everybody!
Downtime
[Filed under Service Announcements] Apologies for the unexpected downtime, apparently my hosting company, A2hosting.com, accidentally suspended my account during a scheduled migration this weekend.
Usually, I would be considering an immediate switch to another provider, just becauses I am angry and because I can, but this time, I won’t. I submitted a ticket with them 2 hours ago, and just got a reply with an apology and explanation - all systems running now. Good to see working customer service.
Actually, I should even be grateful for the blackout since it reminded me that my domain needs a yearly renewal. Shame to you, ev1servers.net (my domain provider), for not notifying me in advance - I shouldn’t have to remember this kind of stuff!
To Quit or Not?
Seth Godin has a gift, a very American one I might add, of storytelling that makes holding his books and turning the pages a joy. Such is The Dip, a brief etude on when to quit (and when not to): a literary dessert.
It has 80-something pages but could easily be condensed to just one:
- Be #1 at whatever you are doing.
- To get there, you will, after the initial outburst of energy, get to a point where you will need to sacrifice your whole self to cross the line that separates masters from has-beens
- You have to know if you’ve got what it takes; if not, quit, and don’t be ashamed of it.
Anybody could tell you that, yet it’s one thing to absorb a bulleted list and another to give it 2 hours of reading and pondering. I suppose this is what separates true writers from people who have an opinion and can write; I, for one, can’t get myself to spend any more time on an idea I have already covered here, which could explain both the scarcity of content lately and the lack of continuity… but I digress.
The Dip is a motivational book, and I recommend reading it whenever you feel like giving up and going with the flow, not sticking your head high, taking the easy way. Time is the scarcest of resources, and it doesn’t make sense wasting it on being just 60% good, 40% happy, or 55% motivated.
The Bill and Steve Show
FINALLY HAVING WATCHED the Gates/Jobs debate at AllThingsDigital, I cannot convey my disappointment. What a waste of time! Half an hour into the show when I managed to discount the natural awe coming from seeing those guys, stepping down from magazine covers and actually alive, breathing, speaking, I realized that if you want to know what’s going on inside Apple or Microsoft, you really shouldn’t be paying too much attention to their respective icons. It was all PC, all warm and Uncle Fluffy-like. To tune in and expect a sign of conflict, or even simple competition, would have been a gross miscalculation.
On the positive note, it was a useful reminder that the software industry hasn’t begun with Google. Indeed, it’s been around for a couple dozen years now, and seeing those two had me thinking, maybe the industry has matured already and became slow and steady and, yes, boring. It’s easy to say that Flickrs and Tumblrs and Fkkers are the new paradigm-breakers, the new Microsofts and Apples, if you are 18; those two surviving proofs of evolution suggest that not all revolutions succeed in uprooting the old order. They are here to stay.
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