The concept of democratic pricing is a topic i’ve revisited a couple of times.
In the industrial mode it was “big is beautiful”. The larger your purchasing power, the better prices you would get. You needed to get big to be competitive.
For a couple of years i’ve been trying to spread the meme of doing it the other way around. Especially in the digital field with no inherent costs pricing is much more dynamic. A great web app is more valuable to a large organization than a small. (and no i’m …

The next two weeks i’ll be speaking at two very interesting and different conferences. Hubert Burda Media’s Digital Lifestyle 06 conference participating in a panel about “Europe’s Catch-up”. (your insights and ideas from a startup perspective much appreciated).
The following week i’ll speak at reboot’s new brother in the south “Lift” about “Understanding Contexts: A unified theory of why it feels like it’s all happening now”. (whatever it means i’ll try and document some of the research for that one here.

Innovation is an amazing big buzzword/hype these days. Some of it is definitely valid since it focuses organizations towards change and development in a world of chaos – some of it is really bad since people keep creating industrial ways of doing innovation – of which most of them have no empirical evidence of working in the real world – but all the consultants needs to have them. (Don’t get me started on how the lack of creation stories distorts our view on how things start/happen). So my cheap shot …

The not so long tail
It appears that the long tail of Amazonisn’t as long as first estimated. Only 25-30% of the revenue comes from books not available in physical stores – and not the 57% mentioned in Chris Anderson’s first wired article.
That is one of the first interesting post on his new weblog following the long tail from article to book – and eventually into a massive hype meme (the picture of the long tail is so strong and simple – it reasonates with people on a deep level). So …

The future:
One of the largest corporations in the world launches a new product (in this instance Microsoft launching a blogging service) and one if it’s most highly visible employees openly critizes the product

To link or not!
The bizarre danish story about a mentioning of The Grey Album continues. Story in short.
A danish weblogger Keld Bach posts about the The Grey Album (see his post in english here). Within days he receives a cease and decist letter from the danish organisation “The Anti Pirate Group” run by the Johan Schlüter lawfirm representing basically all danish music rights holders.
They have been known to threaten teenagers and their parents with very strongly worded cease and decist letters to get them to settle out of court for …

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail
The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are

The needs disconnect
A simple observation i made some weeks ago in a meeting with some pretty oldschool “business people” (people that aren’t people anymore, but have turned into “business people”)…
Customer needs versus the corporations’ needs:
Corporations today spend 80% of their time/attention obsessed with their own needs (grow revenue, competitors, customerservice optimization, corporate strategies, shareholder value, etc.) and 20% on the actual needs of their customers (share my pictures, online access, easy travel from a to b, healthy food, etc).
What would happen if they instead spend 80% of their time on …

Decentralization/Selforganization works! (if anyone needed proof)
A/S Storebælt – the organisation running the bridge between Sjælland and Fyn in Denmark introduced a decentral model for the employees work time planning in january 2003 based on self-organization. They went from over 10% sickleave to 0,54% sickleave in february 2004.

Grey Tuesday.