Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO Ben Verwaayen at Davos:
The culprit in today’s version of capitalism isn’t greedy corporations, he said. It’s decision-makers (or rather, non-decision-makers) in government. Western governments have waffled on solving their debt problems and put forth long lists of competing regulations to rein in corporations, which only serve to confuse and disable the economy’s job creators.
It’s funny that business leaders, largely driving, responsible for and benefitting from capitalism blame government for the failures of the past decade.
If you don’t take control of the issues yourself and blame someone else, they will find a solution to fix the problem and it might not be what you want to see. What are you going to do then? Lobby more?
Be good at putting family first.
Here is a question I’ve been tossing around since last week. Someone, and I don’t remember who, talked about the upcoming iPad3 release and how Apple will have to offer some software improvement to justify the hardware changes i.E. higher res. screen.
But, here is what I want, and think Apple needs to tackle in the near future. Apple has their online store, which is currently just for physical products. The Mac App Store for apps on the Mac. The iTunes store for media and apps on the iPad/iPhone. This is starting to get quite confusing. Yes, no need to change anything just you look at the last quarter’s numbers, but I am getting confused on where to find what and one point of entry would make this all very seamless… perhaps?
MG Siegler on Techcrunch:
Apple’s revenues, while massive, are nothing compared to a company like Walmart, which reported $109.5 billion in revenue last quarter. BUT that $109.5 billion only turned into $3.3 billion of actual income for the quarter. In other words, Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart. That’s remarkable.
This is what I am talking about, when I say that Apple’s success is changing the way people will approach business from now on in the future. Apple is changing not just computing, technology or communication. Apple is changing capitalism in itself. How you can be successful in business. This is fascinating at it’s core.
I’m back with another glorious episode of ‘Don’t Watch This’. In it I talk about power outages and powerful people in Davos. Sponsored by the delicious Eastside Big Tom.
In case someone wants to nominate me. This is the link to the nomination for “Young Global Leaders”. Thank you in advance!
PandoDaily has an insider on the ground… must keep my eye out for his articles over the coming week. Bonus, he has good insider tips on how to get a ticket to Davos.
MG Siegler makes a good point in his latest post on PandoDaily:
Google’s real problem with Search+ isn’t actually evilness nor greed nor antitrust — it’s something much bigger: relevancy.
Even before Google started manually inserting G+ content into search results I found myself logging out of my account when searching in Google, or using the Incognito window, because I wanted to find the most relevant link in my search results period. Not just the most reverent based on what Google thought I was looking for, based on my location, my search history or whatever else they started collecting over the years and ranking my results based on the assumption they “knew me”.
If I search for something and Hans across the room searches for the same thing, relevancy means that we both find the same results.
Which somehow challenges the notion of Google and demands more static content, rather then the fluidity of whatever Google was going for. If I want fluidity I choose Facebook or Twitter. Constant changing content, answers and responses.
For the entire week of the “Winter Storm 2012″ I have not once turned on the local TV station or listened to the radio. Ha, well, that was a joke. I don’t even know what a radio is anymore.
What’s fascinating is that being plugged in to the social world of Facebook and Twitter can give you a great sense of what is happening right now in your neighborhood and city. Further it gives you a great sense of community. You have a chance of connecting with your neighbors that are going through the same experience, which is one big factor in why people love watching local news during big weather events and other big newsworthy issues.
How did you stay up-to-date during the big storm last week?
Worldcrunch.com translates news articles from all over the world, written in all sorts of languages into English… wow.
Here in the Pacific Northwest we don’t often get a snowy winter, and when we do it’s either a light dusting or doesn’t last more than a day or two. But this time we got well over a foot, and to top things off an ice storm and the Governor declaring a state of emergency.
Lots of people in my town, Olympia, a state capitol are very involved in politics. Not a bad thing, and here is some encouragement from someone young, who is making it happen:
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s newly installed treasurer, John Campbell is a 23-year-old college student.
This is for you, Rob Richards.
Ballard residents eat themselves through every restaurants in Ballard. Great blog.
Beautiful.
Asymco has one. Future Insights is happening in Vegas.
I want one too…
How to tackle the future:
“Create collaborative efforts”.
Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum on Charlie Rose in 2002.
Finally finished!
This week the weather delayed me, but it’s been years in the making and since the launch of About.Me I felt it was high time that I would actually do something about it. Mathias Eichler Dot Com is live. Yes, it’s yet another website for myself, how many of those do I have? But this one is different. It will serve as an electronic business card, a sort of front door and first connection point for all my online portals and everyday doings. Personal and business.
In detail, the site is built on the powerful and open-source WordPress engine, and although this seems somewhat of an overkill, as WordPress is meant to be a blogging platform, it has increasingly become a very popular content management system for businesses and personal projects alike.
Here was the challenge.
Business websites increasingly demand a lot of bells and whistles. Every professional, who wants to be online in any sort of way but doesn’t have a business website, or doesn’t want to link to the business website for whatever reason, finds him/herself stuck between linking to a social media site like LinkedIn or Facebook, which is often not very customizable, or linking to a blog, which requires constant updating to appear fresh.
There’s a missing piece.
About.Me tried to address this, but failed on many levels. Yes, it was free. But it required a really great picture to make the interplay between photo and text work. It doesn’t allow for much customization and you can’t link directly from your personal domain.
So, here is my solution.
Anyone can setup a WordPress site on their personal domain. This is pretty much required knowledge for the professional in 2012. You want to host your own website and not link to a third-party service, no matter how professional the site is. You want to be able to update it with simple data as often as you like. You want it to be low-cost and fully under your control.
Enter: The new business card wordpress theme by Einmaleins.
Currently free in public beta, you can email me and I will send you a link to the zip file with the theme. Later the theme will be available to purchase for $25.
Why manufacturing jobs won’t come back to the US and more insights from the tech leader meeting with President Obama.
S is for Schwab Klaus Schwab has been Mr Davos since founding the WEF in 1971 with the motto “committed to improving the state of the world”. Schwab, who was born in Germany in 1938, said last week that capitalism, in its current form, “no longer fits the world around us”.
Must read for me, since I want to go there pretty soon… Who’s inviting?
Paul Carr and Sara Lacy are talking about their startups NSFW Corp. and PandoDaily.
Funny how the word startup used to be reserved for tech startups. Now startups increasingly can be everything… like journalism. Journalism, talking about technology in their case….