HOTorNOT Reinvention

James Hong, one of the founders of HOTorNOT has a series of interesting posts about how they are reinventing HOTorNOT to be about more than just dating, and completely scrapping their subscription business model in favour of CPM ads.

In the first post, there’s a sub-heading which reads: “Stop Clinging to the Past and Jump into the Future”. This reminded me of the story from Intel, when it decided to get out the memory game and focus on processors. Apparently Andy Grove and Gordon Moore framed the decision in terms of what a newly appointed management team coming in would do.

One thing I found interesting is that while HOTorNOT is obviously a social networking site (particularly with the Hotlists product), they’re building it so that it works with Facebook without the end user needing to worry about it. A pretty clever tactic, and one that should ensure that the growth of Hotlists won’t stall.

Anyway, here are the links to James’ posts:

• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I
• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part II
• Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part III

Entrepreneurs Interested In More Than Money

A story in today’s Scotsman points to an entrepreneurship study from Shell Livewire and the London School of Economics. The report author, one Don Slater of LSE, says:

I find some of these findings jaw-dropping. Who would have thought that creating fun environments is more important to entrepreneurs than making money.

I don’t find that to be particularly “jaw-dropping”. Indeed, all the companies I’ve worked in or been involved with have tried to create work environments that suit the company owners and the employees. It’s sort of a misleading quote as well, because what the report actually says is that 50% of entrepreneurs rank designing their work environment is more important than making money—that’s not to say that they don’t care about making money.

I do agree with the overall point, however, in that there’s a greater realisation from entrepreneurs that it’s possible to generate money in ways other than just going after the cheapest, nastiest pound. Many people (such as Jon Spoelstra) and companies have written and worked with this idea of “take care of your employees and the money will follow”. Given the availability of literature such Mavericks at Work, Maverick! and Let My People Go Surfing, I find it even less of a surprise that modern entrepreneurs are being influenced in this direction.

Annoying Journalism

Wolfson struggle to reach next level

When you actually read the article, however what you find is that Wolfson are expected to predict a sales increase in the second half of the year in their annual results due on Wednesday.

There’s also a quote from an analyst saying that Wolfson need to focus on the big customers in order to “pass the 3% market threshold towards 5% in 2007”. That’s all — it doesn’t say that Wolfson will struggle to do that, it only says that’s what they need to do to maintain the respect of that particular analyst. (I can only assume that Wolfson has been on 3% market share for some time or something like that.)

So how does the word “struggle” make it into a headline for a company which is expected to announced sales increases and for which an analyst provides the startling recommendation that they sell more stuff this year?

Tags: business, scotland

Ghost in the Machine

My landline phone just rang. Here’s the how the “conversation” went:

Me: Hello? ... silence … Automated Female Voice: Hello. This is BT. Unfortunately, we’re not able to talk to you right now…

The voice said something else after that, but to be honest I was just so bemused that I couldn’t listen properly. Thanks for letting me know you couldn’t talk to me, BT. I’ll sleep much better for knowing that.

Yahoo Finance Columns

With the relaunch of Yahoo! Finance earlier this week, I discovered that they have several regular columnists now, all written by well-known authors and writers. These didn’t seem to get as much of a mention as the interactive stock chart, but are arguably more useful to people. Each has an RSS feed of course, so I’ve subscribed to a few of them. Here’s the full list with links to their feeds:

• The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach – RSS
• What Every Company Should Know by Ram Charan – RSS
• Leadership by Example by Jim Citrin – RSS
• Reinventing Retirement by Ken Dychtwald – RSS
• Why the Rich get Richer by Robert Kiyosaki – RSS
• The Best of Today’s Business by Harold Maass – RSS
• Money Matters by Suze Orman – RSS
• The Trend Desk by Daniel Pink – RSS
• Money & Happiness by Laura Rowley – RSS
• The Future for Investors by Jeremy Siegel – RSS
• How Not to Ruin Your Life by Ben Stein – RSS
• The Naked Economist by Charles Wheelan – RSS

Tags: business, yahoo

Selling Out Your Future

There was a story in the Scotland on Sunday yesterday regarding Glasgow University (possibly) selling it’s technology portfolio to a commercialisation company. This doesn’t just cover the current lot, but anything that they generate from within the university for the next 25 years. The price? A measly £5 million (no mention of any royalties).

Given all the talk from the big universities regarding their commercialisation programmes, I’m frankly amazed that this is happening. Not only are they removing any potential economic benefit to Scotland by doing this, but I believe this will put off prospective post-graduate students who were considering going to Glasgow. Why? Simple: if they have entrepreneurial aspirations, they’ll be unable to follow them if they do their work at Glasgow and will be more likely to go to another university.

Tags: business, scotland

Date Based Marketing

Yesterday, I saw an advert on a bus which said that the movie The Omen would be released on 6.6.06.

Later, travelling on a different bus, I saw a billboard that said Delta would begin flying to Atlanta from Edinburgh on 6th June.

I wonder if Delta spotted the date’s connotations and deliberately wrote the date longhand, or if they’re now looking at The Omen’s promotional copy and hoping that people aren’t too superstitious. Or perhaps I’m the only one who notices things like this.

Tags: business, marketing

Start-up Technology

I had an interesting chat on Thursday with my friends Julie and Martin where amongst other things, we talked about using blogs and wikis within small and virtual companies.

At The Games Kitchen, we used a home-grown blogging tool to try and keep everyone up to date with what was going on. At Slam, we use Trac, which is a wiki geared towards task management purposes (I do wish it had a better administration interface though). In my work with Dynamo, I encouraged them to use a blog internally to capture knowledge, and it seems to work well for them.

Martin’s take was that these technologies come into their own in virtual or distributed companies, where people can’t be kept up to date with daily meetings or chats. I think he’s right, and it will be interesting to see how it all works out in practice for him (it’s always good to watch from the sidelines!). I can see a couple of gaps for products which could fit in amongst the mix, but I’ll keep them under my hat for now.

Later in the day, Scott Johnson (ex-Feedster) had made a podcast about “internal podcasts”, where he uses podcasts both as instructional and information communication tools with contractors and staff. Of course, this is just the 2006 version of voicemail communications, as used by retailers, airlines and many other companies to disseminate information on a daily and weekly basis. The advantage of podcasts is that they aren’t tied to one device, and Scott points out that your staff can now be listening to your message when they are jogging, walking the dog, or driving.

I’m curious to know if anyone else has used these technologies successfully or otherwise in their workplace?

Technorati Tags: business, startups

Southwest Route Bidding

For some reason, I’m addicted to finding out about and reading about airlines and they way they work. I’m not really sure why, although I think the addiction started when I first started travelling frequently for business. I certainly don’t harbour any ambitions to start or run an airline! Anyway, I’m now subscribed to the Southwest Airlines Blog.

Yesterday, there was a post about how the flight attendants actually have some say in which routes they fly each month:

On the same day each month, a schedule of trips for the following month is posted on our crew website. We bid on the trips we would like to fly and are awarded our choice based on seniority – meaning date of hire, not date of birth! We might have the same trip each week or they may be different each week. Each month is like Christmas – we pick the “gift” we want and then anxiously wait to see what’s inside the package we receive! If we are disappointed, we have the option of trading our trips IF a trade is available. If it isn’t, we can put our trips on a give away list where someone else can choose to fly our trip. We can then look for another trip to pick up or stay home. How cool is that?!

I’d say that’s very cool! Everyone will have different preferences and priorities for what routes they want to take, with some preferring overnight stays all over the country and with some preferring to fly the same route. Allowing staff in any business a degree of freedom in exactly how, when and where they work can be a powerful magnet for attracting staff, so it’s interesting to see how companies in other sectors play the “flexi-working” card.

Tags: staffing, southwest

CRM is Dead - Long Live Self-Service!

Seth Godin reports:

Disney Destinations Marketing has a new department:

Customer Managed Relationships

Here’s the quote from them that Tim shared with me, “CMR is our version of CRM - just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them.”

CMR sounds a lot like the self-service vision I first wrote about two years ago:

How could [mobile phone operators] improve their customer service? My suggestion is via self-service, whereby I can connect into the operator via the phone’s browser, and select an option I want to enable. That’s it; no phone calls or real human contact involved.

I guess I need to work harder at generating acronymic puns, but at least the concepts behind the ideas are catching on at businesses of all sizes.

Tags: business, cmr, selfservice