Maounis Frangoulis

This has been a major impact for many bloggers and marketing departments and it seems that is a really powerful tool for spreading the word of each new product, post or news. It is a fundamental tool for a company to reach it’s supporters via services like Twitter.

But the big power of such services is in my point of view the ability to mashup the world or the world that a user cares of. This means that each one has the freedom to choose who wants to twit and you can twit him/her. It’s not like Facebook or Myspace that you can end up with 1,000 friends but still not even know half of them. With such services you can choose information channel and Social Impact transparently. Ok this could event work with RSS, but it’s not really user generated and for sure it’s not personal. At least not all the time.

I strongly believe that “personal” user generated information about social “real” information is what the future of information will be. Something tells me that there will be more services that could mashup more targeted info to the right person at the right time.

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It seems that more revenue is very close to clients than it is to clicks. Conversion rates are noticeable only if clicks are from the right group of people. Of course this makes sense. It would have been wrong if it was the other way around.

So it is more important to stay focused on revenue than web page statistics. Statistics has to do with internet strategy and a web consultant would do a great job on this. I would rather go for a few visits with a good result than many daily visits with no sales.

Targeting is much more difficult than it seems.  That’s why not every web site is a successful one.

Don’t you think?

It’s a fact that not everyone is in trouble with the upcoming recession. How can this happen? Good question…

Not all services and products are so bad under this situation. Specifically in the tourist industry hoteliers must find solutions to spend less money and have more reservations. The answer is the INTERNET. And by this I do not mean just cooperating with online travel agents, but also publish your business to as much as many sources you can. And what is the best choice at this time? Of course Priceline and its company Booking.com with a great success in the industry for the last years. With almost 10% down cheaper commissions against Expedia, Booking.com is one of the few companies that shows growth in Q4 2008 and this is not just luck.

These kind of services have motivated hoteliers to take action and finally understand that can gain more reservations with just a few hours of personal work.

This of course impacted the profit of Priceline itself.

As a web consultant in the industry, I hear every day many different opinions about the future of the industry for the next months or even years. Most of the people I speak with are pessimistic by nature and this is the most common mistake someone can make reports from.

It is a fact that the biggest industry in Greece is Tourism and for the most Greek regions the industry “operation” usually starts after April. It is also obvious that we have not seen yet the “protectionism” of our industry as the World Economic Forum analyzed it this year. I am pretty much convinced that we have not seen the real impact of protectionism in Greece, and I expect it after the Q3, even if the industry goes better than last year. And this will be motivated not only of the tourist’s behavior, but also of the acts of the hotel and other tourist company owners.

Company owners and travelers will manage their income and expanses with a different way, and even though it is going to be a much wiser way, it will mash up the market for good. I don’t have to add that the only way for both consumers and company owners to compete is the internet.

Mind the duck if you want to register your .com, .eu or any other domain names that you need. Ok I really support the domain company here as you can see in my blog links, but it is hard to find web sites that you can buy a domain name and get a 50 euro Google AdWords coupon for free!

In my point of view it is a fundamental issue to have the ability to try such a service for free. Despite Google’s ambition to grow revenue it is obvious that they loose money in case that you don’t follow up with the 50 euro coupon. But this is really a chance to try out AdWords and see if it’s good for you and your business with no money at all. Of course it’s not so easy and be sure that you custom campaign won’t make you a fortune! On the other hand this coupon will bring your web site closer to the ad business and will show you the strengths and weaknesses of online marketing.

You can register you domains and get your free Google coupons at Papaki.gr website.

In case that you need a web consultant to handle your campaign you can try UsableWeb Ltd.

Here is the first Microsoft iPhone application inside App Store! The application name is SeaDragon, a large image and image collection viewer.

I’m not surprised because we already saw IE and Microsoft Office for MasOS based operating systems but this really was a good start to the app cloud computing although this is not published by Microsoft itself but Microsoft Live Labs. Go figure!

Most venture capitalists will tell you that a good idea isn’t worth much - the value is in execution, which is very hard. That’s true! Many ideas came to my attention every day but truly the key here is the person you can run it!

While Steve Ballmer never associated Android with anything nasty nor did he suggest that killing puppies could look dignified next to building Android, he did say that creating a mobile OS was “financially unsound” for Google and that Google was already far behind the competition.

“They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense.”

He also questioned their financial strategy (source Techcrunch), claiming that Android has no revenue model and that carriers will take android and then charge Google big bucks to carry their search on the standard Android deck or UI. “Google doesn’t exactly bubble to the top of the list of the top competitors we’ve got going in mobile. They might someday. But right now..”

I really think Mr Ballmer should be more carefull on mobile industry considering fundemendal issues. Hey Steve that was Google’s key of success at the first place don’t you remember? What makes you think it’s going to be different know? You have to understand it. Google’s financial strategy is: free!