soulcreation

Last week I attended BetaGroup #11 and I was quite surprised. First of all by the amount of attendees. Second by the quality of the event and the participation of the audience and third by the start-ups presenting.

As an opener of the evening I saw a fantastic Dr. Patrick Georges. Dr. Patrick Georges being a brain surgeon came to talk about training and coaching managers of new businesses. Nothing boring but a fun speech on how to deal with human intelligence management. He gave some cool tips and tricks but at the end it all came down to a simple “Trust yourself, follow your guts and be natural”. (The presentation)

Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago I joined Nascom. What do we do? Great things. Watch the 2009 show reel and decide for yourself.

This is a re-post of Steven’s post “What are we doing at Nascom?” on minnorissues.be. Steven is a colleague that joined Nascom a little while before me.

Image by joelogon via Flickr

First. We Belgians adore coupons and loyalty cards. Almost every inhabitant in Belgium has at least 3 or more cards. Not even to mention the coupons we receive by daily mail, tens or hundreds.

So the other day when I had to visit several stores – stores or gas stations I very often frequent – I thought about taking my loyalty cards. Normally I keep them in the car or in my wallet but I left them at home on the cupboard. But it made me think while I was driving to get my things.

Why can’t we have just 1 card?
I agree when people say that 1 card can’t be brand related, do not have the corporate identity printed on it. But who cares? Once you collect your points, an text message can, for example be sent, thanking the person for his purchase. Or send an e-mail with an overview of the collected points (some already do). Or like most of the stores have a myStore section in which you can customize settings and get an overview of your recent purchases and collected points.

How is this technically possible?
RFID? Bar code?
Maybe it already exists but wouldn’t it be a great opportunity to have a solution like OpenID which has a solution for single sign-on purposes. Why can’t this idea be used? On ID per person to collect loyalty points and have the opportunity to send targeted coupons (coupons that will be used). This way users can easily connect to a store, a brand or service for which he wants to collect his valuable points. This shouldn’t be hard to accomplish, is it?

YOOSE
Via some stumbling and going from profile to profile on Twitter I came across YOOSE. YOOSE has a mobile solution to collect loyalty points and coupons. I think this is a great solution. Only will not every one be able to use this service unless MMS would become suddenly very popular I guess. Else a PDA with extra features such as an internet connection would be essential to get your lists from an online service (a service such as the great Evernote). Then again 3G is very expensive in Belgium. Surrounding countries are manageable. But in-store free WIFI can be made available at low cost to get your coupons, shopping lists and send and get your loyalty points.

Then again, I think this could work. Here I have my ‘1 loyalty card’ solution. All available on my mobile which I carry along at all times. YOOSE is still in under development and I even don’t know when and where they will launch.

In the off line world people give tips at various places. In restaurants, out on the street to beggars and musicians, in pubs and bars. Even in grocery stores you can find a tip jar. We all do it. Give away those small ‘almost’ worthless coins. If you a like a picture, an article, a design … so why not give someone a tip on line?

Tipjoy has the solution. Sign up, set the tip amount you’d like to receive and create a tip button. Visitors of your site, blog, flickr page, or anything else on line can give you a tip.

Plugins for most popular blogging platforms are available.

Thanks to Somewhat Frank for the tip.

The other day we had a representative of a permission based (direct e-mailing) service over at the office. The consultant did a great job in explaining their service. Target possibilities and features were very clear. Only there was something missing. Once I started asking more in dept questions about the service I found out they had short comings.

They have a permission based target list of over 200.000 registered customers but specific target groups are missing. For example they have a target group called automotive with basic segmentation features. The most import segmentation in Automotive would be to know the income (or at least a range) of the customers on the list. How else can you differentiate between people which you want to send a Ford mailing or a Jaguar mailing?

Isn’t this a waist of money? Or you should buy the option to send a mail to the entire list if you are aiming at the lower segmentation class. At the end more people can afford a Ford than a Jaguar.

But who starts a service like this? People aiming at earning quick and easy money?

Yesterday I attended the Plugg conference in Brussels. A conference with the main focus on raising global awareness for European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field. A first time ever event of this kind in Belgium. I wish to thank Robin Wauters for his great organizational skills and pulling this thing together.

I arrived late due to traffic in and around Brussels. I should have left home earlier. So I missed the first presentation but according to Miel (coolz0r) I didn’t miss much.

The second presentation though was quite interesting. Max Niederhorfer spoke about the Future of Online Games. Here are some things I remember which I found very interesting:

• The most popular game at this very moment is ‘poke’ on Facebook. Surprised? I am not. Just a click to get someone’s attention and to get a sheep thrown back at you.
• Also very surprisingly was that 57% of the people that play online are women (did I get that well?). Desperate housewives? I heard about these figures before.
• People who play online actually rather play with friends than strangers. Even it’s for 5 minutes.
• Silverlight goes 3D. If someone has more info on this, please send some.

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t posted a thing in a while. Reason is that am practically working double shifts. We, at Boulevart are urgently seeking new colleagues in the form of Project Managers (and other species). So, if you live in Belgium and are looking for a new opportunity, check out the details.

For the rest I don’t even have the time to read my feeds (accept a few), hardly run through my mail at work (running about 60 behind on daily base). Apologies to my dear customers.

But there is one thing I’d like to share with you. Today I discovered a cover of the Ramones performed by U2. Personally, I find this excellent.

Today, when I was riding with my bike trough the city center of Antwerp (Belgium), I passed by a newly opened office of Colruyt. It is called Colruyt Job market. Knowing that Colruyt is one of the 5 biggest supermarkets in Belgium, it was strange to see they opened an office with the only purpose to attract new employees. Not only for people that would like to work within the supermarket self but also marketeers, technicians, accountants, developers and so on.

I find it awkward to see that a discounter opens an office for the hiring purpose only. Is it because people don’t like to apply for a job at the supermarket itself? Is it because people don’t send their cv? If I look at the job boards, I can find several open vacancies within the Colruyt Group.

I haven’t seen any other initiative like this before in Belgium nor in the surrounding countries like Holland or France. Is it common in other countries that a discounter opens an office, separated from the supermarket and located in a city center, to attract new employees?

The guys at Draft FCB created a short movie about Second Life in Real Life at their office. Funny!

(via Web Jungle)

In Belgium Fnac is about to launch a new website for music downloads called Fnacmusic.be. They want a piece of the Belgian market that currently has been taken for about 90% by the popular iTunes. Fnacmusic will offer a catalog of over 1 million titles or about 90.000 Cd’s within 18 different styles of music. Ofcourse they’ll offer music available for all types of mp3 players.

One thing that bothers me is that they will handle the same rates per song or album as iTunes is doing: 0.99€ per song and 9.99€ per album. This way there will be some competition but I guess if they took of some cents it would make some difference. This way I guess, I personally am not going to change my attitude of buying music online: new registration on another other website while currently I buy my music directly from the program I use for listening to music: iTunes.

Fnac, please drop that price.