bootstrapping.net

Stanford Business School: The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship

I love it
When corporations so obviously bent the truth and try to manipulate the public as Coop does in this press release
Commenting on their new subscription service for fruit and vegetables - obviously inspired by Aarstiderne’s success in Denmark and a deeply calculated strategic move they state:

“The idea for the project came from several comments from customers who had moved out of city areas to places that doesn’t offer as many organic products. They have that offer now”.

Aarstiderne at least have the courage to give credit to what international projects inspired them with the concept of subscription boxes packaged according to season - and Aarstiderne’s innovation has been to make it accessible and understandable to the public in a way no subscription service in the world ever has done before.

One should send a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto to Coop!

Little known fact: TeleDanmark 118 directory service does Google!
If you’re based in Denmark you can call TeleDanmark directory service on 118 and get them to do google queries for you. So now you can avoid harassing your friends in front of computers and pay your monopolistic telco $2 instead.
Great! (and pretty innovative that they are doing it - not that it’s new - but for a large telco i believe it is a first).

Commoditization!
Hardware is commoditized (intel x86 $1000), the operating system is commoditized (linux and others), applications servers are commoditized (jboss, zope, openacs and loads of others), most basic applications are commoditized (productivity apps open office, mozilla/IE, cms platforms, etc).
Even human labour is commoditized somewhat (manual labour, manual processing, etc.)
Where can you add value? Through real innovation? From capitalizing on the commidization existing vendors doesn’t understand? Through creating new paradigms? Turning products into services and vice versa? Using the commoditization on one level as an enabler to innovation on a level above?

Ideas?

Kaospilots: The future of the creativity of Denmark
Conference the 8th of December with loads of good people speaking and attending. Free signup at their site.

The next great divide?
What will happen when double-digit millions of people in the west loose their well paid office work?
Mostly office/service work that is production oriented but increasingly also more creative work like software development and analysts.
Big burden on the economies of the west if this happens - like it has happened in the industrial sector the last 30 years.

HAAS Berkeley: 14 million service jobs in the United States vulnerable.

Dansk Folkeparti vs. Kaospiloterne
Politiken: Dødsstød til Kaospiloter [danish].
The most progressive danish education is targeted by the ultra right wing monoculture party “Dansk Folkeparti”.
This is what happens when your country suddenly is governed by populistic people with values that aligns more with the 1950’s than today - an example of the great divide we have in our society.

Catching the big fish

The big fish’s of the tech boom are finally getting nailed.Adam Lashinsky, CNN: “So long, Frank” Background on “Friends of Frank, etc.: “Fortune: The Trouble With Frank”

Businessweek: Mega Europe. Soon, 10 states and millions of people in the old Soviet bloc will join the EU to form a new super-Europe. The question now: Is bigger better?
Businessweek special report on the new europe of 454 million people.

Nick Denton on ínvestment bankers