Remo’s Blog

Didn’t I tell you?

In Europa wird es vermutlich eine Weile dauern, bis man sich an XING gewöhnt hat. Auch wenn es in Europa (und insbesondere Deutschland) bestimmt die einen oder anderen Aufschreie geben wird, wage ich folgende Hypothese: In 12 Monaten wird “XING” nicht nur so normal sein wir “openBC”, sondern auch so normal wie Google, Yahoo oder eBay. Gerne bin ich bereit, in einem Jahr dieses Thema nochmals aufzugreifen.

Now it’s official: Bye bye OPEN Business Club AG, welcome XING AG

And to even more recapitulate:

Warum XING in meinen Augen besser ist als openBC:
1. Es ist ein Phantasiename, der sich beliebig neu assoziieren lässt
2. Er ist kürzer (glaubt mir, Ihr werdet die 4 Buchstaben lieben)
3. Er eröffnet neue Wachstumschancen in den USA und in Asien (wo “openBC” ja bekanntlich nicht so gut geeignet war)

In my brain, point one was done a couple of months ago. The new association (XING = business social network & address-book 2.0) is wired in my brain and the term "openBC" is deleted. Point two is awsome, I really love the shortness of the 4 letters. Point three seems to be on the way.

As I mentioned already, I love these Blendtec Videos. Recently an iPhone got blended:

Link: www.youtube.com

PS: The blended iPhone can be purchased at eBay

(via Basic Thinking & Superblog)

My friends at memberYou (see my first coverage) already have 1000 members – 48 days after the launch. Congratulations!

Last week I had lunch with co-founder Jonas Zeier.

My learnings from the lunch:
# The great majority of all members comes from Basel. That means that the regional strategy is very important for this leisure community
# Very soon, they will organize a soccer event with Marco Streller (Swiss national soccer team member) – this means that you can actually play soccer with Marco Streller. Isn’t that cool?
# Monetization of the platform will be tricky. The first goal is to attract as many members as possible
# It will be tricky to go from regional to national and from national to international. You need evangelists in every region. First goal has to be to build a strong home base in Basel

I heard this speach of Jyri the first time at Reboot9, and now I watched it a second time after Loic pointed me to it again:

Link: video.google.com

My Learnings:
# Social Networks that are just "Social Networks" will fail (= Butterfly effect)
# Every service needs social objects (Flickr = fotos; Amazon = books; MySpace = music; etc.)
# Define your verbs (eBay = buying & selling; MySpace = play; Dogster = add a dog)
# Make the objects sharable (have permalinks, widgets etc.)
# Turn invitations into gifts (PayPal: Free 10$ for your friends; YouTube: Free laugh; Skype: Two free headsets)
# Charge the publishers not the spectators (Habbo hotel: Buy virtual furnature) –> Freemium business model
# Next Big Thing in participatory media? Can anything disrupt blogs? Blogs seemed perfect. There is problem: Bloggers have the feeling that they don’t blog enough.
# Preconditions of a disruptive innovation: 1) Simpler or 2) Cheaper or 3) Free from need to go to inconvenient place
# Question 1: Can we imagine anything that can be simpler than a blog? Yes: Microblogging (see my Twitter-page)
# Question 2: Blogs are already free. How can you be less expensive than free? Microblogging can, because you can use almost every technology for input or output (web, mobile phone, rss, API, instant messanger, widgets etc.) which costs much less time and increases availability
# Question 3: Does microblogging frees you from going to an inconvenient place? Again, yes! You can only blog from your blog, and for this you have to be online and you need a computer. With microblogging, you can do it on your mobile phone.
# Mass-Starbuckization: Social objects "to go"
# The value of a microblogpost diminishes radically over time, much faster than the value of a blog post
# Blog posts: 1 per week; Photos: 1 per day; Jaiku/Twitter: 1 per hour
# In case of (natural) catastrophes phone networks are usually down; but SMS still goes through!

Thats exactly why i LOVE microblogging and thats exactly why I LOVE using twitter and why I believe that microblogging will not be a butterfly but will sustain for a long time.

Remember: If you visit my blog and find no new blog posts, don’t forget to check out my twitter widget to read my latest microposts.

PS: Mashable recently compared 9 microblogging services (link via Themenblog)

As Exsila announced recently, Beat Schillig (Managing Director of "Institut für Jungunternehmen") invested 200’000 CHF (according to SF Start-up) in the company. As a result, Exsila incorporated Exsila AG on 11th June 2007 (funny thing, Exsila AG is only one day older than trigami AG :-).

In the meantime, Exsila achieved some other major milestones:
# They now have over 10’000 members
# Their member-base grows 20% each month (i.e. 2000 members per month)
# They have over 70’000 dvds, cds, games and books in their system
# They started an attractive Affiliate program at Tradedoubler.ch

And, I have to admit that I am a HUGE fan and HEAVY user of Exsila (I have already 41 positive ratings :-). I love the style, I like the founders and I certainly like the free market system. Long live the trading idea!