Posted: February 12th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: BRIC, Food for thoughts, Fun | Tags: Fun, Google, Internet, Links | 2 Comments »
Today is a special day for Google’s Doodle team. It had to create and publish three different doodles. Except in Brazil and China, Google is showing the Winter Olympics doodle. In Brazil, Google is showing a Carnaval doodle and in China, it is showing the Chinese new year doodle.
Although not as popular and well known as the summer Olympics, the winter Olympics is being held in the beautiful city of Vancouver. Canadians are very excited for this big event.
I was curious to know that there are some athletes representing Brazil in the winter Olympics. We do not have snow in 99% of the Brazilian territory and the winter is not as harsh as in Canada. It is quite hard to develop a strong winter sport team in Brazil due to the climate. It would be very expensive to maintain artificial winter conditions in such a hot country.
I guess the Brazilian athletes train in Canada.
The Brazilian Carnaval happens once a year and it usually starts on a Friday and it goes until the mid-day of Wednesday. Carnaval dates change according to lunar calendar, which is the same one used for the Chinese new year.
Chinese new year happens according the the lunar calendar. The new year can happen at the end of January or the end of March depending on the lunar cycle.
The Google China website is slightly different from the traditional minimalist look of Google. I think that the minimalist concept is very challenging for the Chinese aesthetic point of view. Take a look at one of the most popular website in China. If you compare Google’s homepage and Sina.com.cn’s website, you can see that Google may give an impression that something is missing in the eyes of a Chinese.
However, nothing beats the cuteness and fluffiness of a typical Japanese website (http://lolipop.jp).
Happy new year (year of tiger), Carnaval and Winter Olympics!
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Posted: February 7th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts, Fun, Startups | Tags: Business, Business plan, Education, Entrepreneurs, Fun, Interesting, Internet, Money, Social Network, Startups | No Comments »
Kwedit is a strange name for a payment company. This is a startup that offers a new form of payment to social and interactive games that allows people to buy virtual goods. The strange thing is that it allows people to “promise” to pay for a virtual good and the user can pay the promise later with a bar code in a 7eleven store.
Even though this seems to be a great innovation, the idea of printing a bar code and pay it in a retail store is nothing new to date. The strong differentiator of Kwedit is the idea of promising to pay later. I wonder what would happen if everybody promises to pay but none of the actually pays anything. I believe that the CFO of the company would be scare of the increase in the account payable of the balance sheet.
This type of payment for virtual goods reminded me of Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a Finnish company that started its virtual goods operations before the internet boom. It is probably the first company to have a business model based on selling virtual goodies to users. Interesting enough, Habbo targeted in a very narrow market segment. Its targets on teenagers that love to chat in pixel-lated environment.
Habbo and its many forms of payments.
Habbo offers 7eleven payments too. OK, they sell pre-paid cards and Kwedit doesn’t.
In my humble opinion, Sulake could have grown much more if it had focused on the virtual good market as a whole market instead of just that niche teenager segment. It could have created a strategic plan of reaching all types of games and services based on virtual goods. Well, other companies grew upon this model and they are newer than Habbo. C’est tant pis.
Posted: January 6th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Education, Food for thoughts | Tags: Canada, Food for thoughts, Guide, Interesting, Internet, Sweden | No Comments »
I found out a quality of life index of over 100 countries. Canada is positioned at 11th together with other 8 countries.
Quality of Life Index 2009
Read more here.
Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Food for thoughts, Tools, Web 2.0 | Tags: Business, Entrepreneurs, Food for thoughts, Google, Interesting, Internet, Web | No Comments »
The smartphone industry is moving to follow the same path of the personal computer (PC). Both industries have a lot of manufacturers. For example, Dell for computers and Motorola for smartphone. PC and smartphones have operating systems. For PC, the major OS is Windows and for smartphone, there are more than one major operating system. There are iPhone OS, Blackberry and Android (Google). It seems that there is a platform war among the manufacturers and Google. Imagine that a company can implement a system that is used by most of the cellphone manufacturers. This company will be able to control the smartphone industry, just as Microsoft controls the PC industry.
Nexus One Homepage
Google launched its official cellphone with Android operating system today. It is entering the smartphone market by providing a free OS to cellphone and aligning with manufacturer to provide a better user experience through better applications and superior hardware.
Google may reach a dominance in the smartphone market if it can have more manufacturers using its OS. However, manufacturers are not going to rely 100% in one software company. At the same time, most industry players do not have core competency in software development, thus they may rely on Google Android this time.
Meanwhile, iPhone is growing and Blackberry is responding to the new threats in the market. Nokia and other cellphones company are losing ground. It is an interesting time for this fast changing industry.
My 2 cents.
Posted: January 2nd, 2010 | Author: Chim | Filed under: Food for thoughts, Framework | Tags: Food for thoughts, Fun, Interesting, Internet | No Comments »
Very very interesting way to see history, politics and graphics.
These guys are great in doing info visual stuff.
http://www.blog.biggerpicture.dk/our-history-visualized/
