I need to buy a 2nd hand car. Conundrum: I aslo need to have — at least — a tiny bit of trust in the person to whom I’ll hand over 5 figures.

I’ve seen 9 cars, so far ALL salesmen have lied. From the “small” lie (“mixing up” the car level of finitions) to the big lie: “oopss turns out that ‘french’ car is actually registered in Italy… But it’s the same riiight?” Si prego, why don’t you remove ALL kilometres from the ODO while you’re at it? And dare I mention the mandatory “I’ve never heard of any…

What is most likely to be the seed for a successful web business?

Most would probably say an idea or a great team. Vijay Anand thinks not and argues that what really matters is to start by finding noticeable pain points that a sizeable audience would pay to see removed.

Here is what it looks like when Vijay puts it down into steps:
Step 1: Identify your audience
Step 2. Identify their value system
Step 3. Listen, observe and note pain points
Step 4: Understand the business economics of your customers to know viability
Step 5: Find out if there is more than one customer that you can target. Bonus point if there are more such clusters.
Step 6: There comes the idea…

If this resonates with you you should go on and read Vijay’s full argumentation.

Sometime ago Thomas Pastro, Tom Rothwell and I were debating if and how the Facebook reign could come to an end.

Could Facebook rapidly and completely disappear from our lifes, very much like the search giant Altavista did in the late 90s?

Monetisation
Can Facebook monetise its gigantic social data set? There seems to be plenty of options for Zuck to make a buck, here are a few:

– The Graph Search could make most dating sites obsolete. No need to (embarrassingly) sign up on a dating site, all you need is already available on your Facebook account. Be prepared…

I’m obsessed with problems. When I hear someone complain about something I can’t help but to think about a solution, a “better way”. Needless to say that our recent move to France provided a whole new level of exposure to “problems” since complaining about everything and nothing is a French favourite pass-time.

I recently got intrigued by the processes (or rather lake of) of our local driving schools (“auto-écoles“). I had to book some lessons for Rachel so that she could get a good handle of driving manual on the right (right!) …