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Affichage des articles du avril, 2013

Puma InCycle: biodegradable, recyclable, cradle-to-cradle. Respect...

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PUMA is taking on the challenge of launching an entire line that is either biodegradable or recyclable and 100% Cradle-to-Cradle Basic certifiedCM. The PUMA InCycle collection includes among numerous others the lifestyle sneaker Basket (biodegradable), the legendary PUMA Track Jacket (recyclable), shirts (biodegradable) and a backpack (recyclable). Good to see that crisis do not completely frozen courageous initiatives to... Build a better world.

Let's invent the "tasteful guarantee" label and revolution food industry

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You buy food, or you wife do. It's "fair trade", "gluten free", "organic", "from local farmers", "low footprint", "low carb", "diet", "sugar free", "halal", "casher", "vegetarian", made in France", AOC (France), "recyclable", "no OGM", "Dukan diet compliant", "costs 100 weight watchers points"... What about taste? Nothing rate it, classify it, analyze it... Isn't it the most important? The most important to protect? to care of? ...but also to boost sales and differentiate and build stories on? The one who create a great rating scale for taste and associated labels will be a billionaire... And revolution food industry. But is it possible to rate taste!? Com on! we can go to the moon, trigger rain, decode genome and make self driving cars so I'm sure it's possible. Edit 7/12/13: The College de France recen

Do you know Bundle "Real People, Real Money, Real Ratings" ?

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"Real People, Real Money, Real Ratings We've crunched the numbers on how people are spending their money to show you your city in a whole new light." http://www.bundle.com/ I really like their pitch! Let's digg into the concept: "We believe this method of rating (combined with people's subjective opinions) allows us to make smarter decisions in the following ways: Bundle ratings remove bias and false reviews because they're based on actual spending information. In essence, people are voting with their wallets.  Bundle cuts through the noise and save you time. You will not have to sift through 55 reviews to see if a place is any good.  Bundle strongly believes that you should have total price transparency, and we show you how much other people have spent at a business on average.  Bundle recognizes that a particular business, no matter its ranking, may not be for everyone. For example, even though the overall rating of a restaurant may be 3 s

I believed in Deezer & Spotify. Now I believe in MP3 in the cloud

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Image via CrunchBase I love music. I believed that steaming was a good thing. It was cool: infinite discovery. unlimited listening, social sharing, collaborative playlists, high quality, easy to find and organize, music available everywhere, impossibility to lose it, etc. I have changed my mind. One big reason: I'm fed up of "loosing" the right to listen to songs because Spotify or Deezer have lost the right to stream it. It's just terrible when your favorite song is unavailable suddenly. Examples: The Live in London concert in Birdy. Deezer do not allow me to stream it.  Some Kavinsky songs. Queens of the Stoneage last album. You realize that these streamed songs are not yours, that you can lose it tomorrow. You realize that your 10 dollars monthly subscription is the the right to use a platform to listen to songs, without any warranty on the available songs tomorrow, in a month or a year: Take it or leave it. I prefer less songs and be sure

Google failed to monetize Google Reader so they closed it. Come on!

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Image via CrunchBase Google explained that they decided to kill Google Reader because the solution did not became mainstream, failed to find its audience, do not get a real traction. I don't believe it. Google is made of smart guys. Google business model is focused on ads. Monetizing a media reader is easy. Flipboard do it very well with ads and sponsored feeds. Twitter do it very well with ads and sponsored trends, accounts, tweets. Facebook do it very well with ads, sponsored stories, promoted posts and co. So what? I don't know. Perhaps the RSS format is too difficult to track, is too "open", too difficult to control ( Iranians regret it ). Feedburner , another Google product focused on RSS is in danger . What I don't understand: Google Reader was a way to have great knowledge about what each and every Google Reader user like to read. Was it too unstructured to be used by Google algorithm?  I don't know. What I h

Winners of the machine era: highly-educated workers & capital owners

The result is that, with the aid of machines, productivity increases—the overall economic pie gets bigger—but that’s small consolation if all but a few workers are getting a smaller slice. “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor  told American Public Media’s Marketplace . The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital . Only about half of Americans own stock at all, and as more companies are taken private or never go public, more and more of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. As  Paul Krugman wrote , “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.” How Internet made us poor? My take: The article forget one thing: machines rely on energy and energy price raise can change the deal