Maounis Frangoulis

Ha, this is cool.

These are very useful tools for companies to use, when they come to a very difficult (rare) situation of their life cycle. Only some companies over the years have been using these kind of tools and this is because it is very difficult for one to be in a position like this. If your company needs these kind of tools, it actually means that

1. Your company is very successful
2. Your products are already everywhere (and every time)
3. You are in Forbes lists (in most cases)
4. You are a billionaire (of course)

But the worst part is that:

5. Your customers have been accidentally tought from you, to expect more and more great products in smaller period times. This leads mathematically to a marketing “boomerang style” collapse.

The cool part is that when these pr or marketing tools are used, no one can recognize them. We all just see some facts happening that for some people are even funny but for most of us are mostly disappointing.

Most people is disappointed because this is a process that you have to correct your mistake, and teach back all your customers to slow down their expectations on you. This seems dump but in fact it is saving your company and sometimes the whole industry.

So the next time Apple will stop an annual conference or announces Beatles new album instead of cloud iTunes or AppleTV app store, be aware that you are expecting too much from them, and they are a little bit of scared to death not to be able to serve you sometime in the future.

Just think about this (Especially you Filip!).

Happy New Year!!!

It is a happy new year comming (not economicaly for many people) but it’s really gonna be a new good one.

Trully there are five and a half billion people only a few years (maybe months) away from their first smartphone, which in most cases will also be their first computer (many countries actually), and their first Internet device (too many people). This will eventyally give them access to knowledge and bring them closer to real ideas and the freedom to choose (leaders, believes even breakfast).

Happy new year to all of us!

P.S. Quiz: Where are Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends?

Word Lens offers Real Time language translation (text), Google offers real time voice translation and when we put all these to Apple devices I feel we can do things 3 times faster, easier and with more confidence than ever.

Our word is really changing considering all these new funcy ideas that come out every day for free or with the cost of a Caramel Macchiato ($4.99)! No more prices with 5-6 digits for software that needs updates sooner that you think.

Are all these accessible to anyone? No. You have to own a “smart” device. But no worries. These devices will come down to a Caramel Macchiato soon, or we will get up there to them.

Take a look a Wold Lens video:

Why some companies don’t dare to touch their services? Are they afraid of collapsing? Let’s take twitter and the service that is now valued for about $ 1 Billion and only few people in the world can understand why. Why twitter is stacked to 140 characters per tweet? OK they did this at the beginning when they had the SMS in mind, but why they don’t extend this now (is this an Obama decision too)? I know why. Maybe they don’t want to take URL shortening services out of business?

Already many people are saying that Twitter is a new IRC and there is no future at all. Thousands of followers with no meaning. Is anybody out there watching each tweet? Of course no. Everybody wants others to do that.

But I am just thinking the results, if Twitter decides one day to make money from a product like this:

“Upgrade now to a premium Twitter account for just $5.99/month and enjoy tweets up to 150 characters!” WOW!

Are you sure this day is far away?

There is a major activity of online cloud services to Merge information that can easily extract the core info from a set of data. This is by far the most interesting result of the new economy by now.

You can see two of the most interesting examples here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ (It actually extracts knowledge from data on the web in real time.  Pretty cool.)

There must be a connection between agents and the recession.

Travel agents… gone.
Stock brokers… gone.
Real estate brokers… in trouble. Photographer’s agents, too.
Literary agents?

The problem with being a helpful, efficient but largely anonymous middleman is pretty obvious. Someone can come along who is cheaper, faster and more efficient. And that someone might be the customer aided by a computer.

The airlines don’t want to pay travel agents, because the travel agents were making more money on each flight than they were. Some house sellers hesitate to pay real estate brokers because they don’t believe the 6% payment is an opportunity, they see it as a tax. Investors abandoned full service stock brokers because trading stocks directly is faster and more accurate than using the phone.

Read the full article here (Seth Dodin’s Blog).

In the middle of an economic crisis everyone needs the work to be done for free (Germany is an exception in my point of view). At the bottom line this means that everyone would like the cheapest services for processes that he or she used to pay for in the past. You can call it “the result of the crisis”, I prefer to call it “the evolution of the future”.

This video (Greek one) is a part of eMTI 2008 event in Crete, Greece where some Marketeers and Google people tried to give hoteliers an idea of what a hotel could do to sell more rooms with the minimum cost, using Google AdWords or other online tools.

But are these services suggested from companies that are using revenues for their payrolls?

I have seen companies encouraging customers to buy services that they don’t need just because their “internet consultant” makes more revenue from the specific services (as a reseller) than from other ones. Someone can say this is the meaning of selling. I just can’t understand it.

The revenue implications is a fundamental issue for the new economy and the big key of success of companies that are making 20% or more on internet sales.

I am predicting that the right services are going to win “internet consultants” at the end. Hoteliers and other company owners will prefer the wining formula rather than keeping their horses out of the market.

Online success is not about complicated technology, but it’s about asking the right question. Of course you have to get the right answer as well.