Entries Written By Alistair Vince
The importance of global
We’ve heard that before. But it’s going to be even more important in the next decade, according to Niklas Zennstrom (co-founder Skype, recently sold for $3.1bn), in the most recent edition of Wired magazine. Zennstrom (who invests in almost 30 other start ups through his London based Atomico fund (which by the way recently raised …
Cultivate relationships, not transactions
Over at the complete innovator, a fantastic site where they consistently come up with high quality editorial, they recently published a piece on secrets to corporate authenticity. It gives a real insight into how companies should operate. For a business in its infancy (as watchmethink is) this is a ‘must read’ piece. For us here …
Brand communities
Over at we are social, Nathan McDonald has been allowed to reproduce a piece he wrote on Brand Communities for Contagious Magazine. He says that ideas from these brand communities ‘can contribute to the evolution and innovation of products or simply be a way to test new features, flavours or functionality’. It’s an interesting area …
Crowdsourcing Brian
Brian Blessed. Legend. Brian Blessed. Loud. Brian Blessed. Now a voice on TomTom thanks to the power of the crowd (or Facebook depending on how you look at it). 25,000 members was the target which was achieved (albeit after 3 years of effort) and then TomTom true to their word delivered on their promise. Now …
The web is dead, long live the web
Reading what has to be one of the best sites ever, flowingdata.com, we saw a great graphic pushing the point that the web is dead. Whilst that is probably a huge overstatement and not taking into account certain factors – like bandwidth – it’s important (or just good for us) to note the increase in …
One new actionable idea every day
Seth talked recently about making sure that you find inspiration instead of it finding you. He proposes a simple idea ‘start a blog and post once a day on how your favorite company can improve its products or its service. Do it every day for a month, one new, actionable idea each and every day. …
OpenIDEO – problem solving tribes
Under the headline ‘solving problems together for the collective good‘ the folks over at Contagious chat with Tom Hulme, Design Director at Ideo, about OpenIDEO (introduced via video by Jamie Oliver here), a platform harnessing the power of crowds, which they hope will provide solutions posed by brands, charities and individuals. Tom says some interesting …
Sausages Simon
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFEIMPFEglA] We saw this on Youtube. It’s something that we liked. Someone passing on their opinion on a product. It’s great. Interesting – portionable sausages. Like it. Wonder if any sausage manufacturers have seen this?
Make customers your number 1 priority
We’re always interested in seeing what people are saying about how companies should interact with consumers. Over at Blogging Innovation a recent piece on Reinventing Customer Relationships highlights Making Customers your number 1 priority. They go on to describe what companies should be looking at when running their business. These include How would we go …
Don’t assume the obvious
Over at future lab they recently wrote about neuroscience and it picking up the ‘what’s important’ elements of the yogurt consumption experience. It focused on assumption.. ‘it’s an important lesson for all product marketers. Don’t assume that the obvious product characteristics are the only important ones’ More importantly for us they go on to say …