Modu is the example of the now ubiquitous mobile phone (well, the smallest in the world, they say) dressed up in a multitude of jackets/extensions that make it a truly universal device that allows you to talk to your friends, listen to music, monitor your running sessions, view pictures or movies on a bigger screen or almost anything you can think about inside or outside of a digital home.

By the same token, the USB stick si the example of an already mainstream technology having the potential to revolutionize the entertainment industry by taking on a different approach in an already established (and conservative, I would say) business.

Can you think of any other mainstream technologies that could be employed like this and be able to revolutionize traditional industries?

Let me know what you think about it.

My personal opinion is that the netbooks are the prime candidates for Chrome OS, since their portability and connectivity provide the best platform for Google’s new operating system. Although Microsoft has an edge in operating system shipments, I am sure that Google can dent this domination and provide a pretty good alternative with Chrome OS, especially on the small portable notebooks.

If you want to find out more about Chrome OS, see the video above.

Via Mashable.

A holistic perception of Romanian business and career issues

“Recently discussing visible changes in Romania with a friend, he made the following comment concerning the country’s development in the course of the last twenty years.  His observation was that during these two decades, there has been in fact very little evolution in most of the country’s infrastructures.  Since 1990, a large number of very local improvements have been made but they are still disconnected from each other, as well as from the larger national, international or global environment.  And no matter their number, if local improvements are not connected to each other, they do not add up to the perception of real collective development.

The common example that most people have experienced directly or through acquaintances concerns the number of private homes and public developments that have sprouted right and left and that are patiently waiting to be connected to the electrical, sewage, water and road system.  These homes and developments are often beautiful and have been sold, but they can neither be accessed nor inhabited for lack of connection to decent infrastructure.”

Source: Alain Cardon/Metasysteme.fr. Read more here.

Via Mihai Stanescu.

• Process first, ideas second
• Who decides?
• Courtship, negotiation and marriage
• Buyer and seller
• Enthusiasm is underrated
• Close the open door
• Call the lawyers later
• Cast a wider net
• Talk to the receptionist
• Hire better
• Structure deals with the expectation of success
• End well

Source: Seth Godin (if you find the ideas above too cryptic, read his full blog post here).

With this acquisition, Adobe strengthens its position in the online arena, to better compete with the two giants: Google & Microsoft. Basically, Adobe is trying to shield its Flash technology from the threat of Microsoft Silverlight’s aggressive push, as well as provide alternative tools for measuring Flash animations performance in an area where Google isn’t well established into.

Looking at the trends in mergers and acquisitions in the past couple of years, we can see that the top players are looking at consolidating a lot of online technologies into their core business, in order to better compete against Google. On the other hand, Google itself is not sitting laid back, but pushes forward as well, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot of movement in this area in the months to come.

Via Mashable.

Via Mihai Stanescu.

Despite the dangers and mishaps of the global economic flow, some of the swimmers have managed to find the way to ride the black tide in their advantage. One of the industry that seems to thrive these days is the entertainment industry and more specifically the video games market.

I don’t really have numbers from the players in the industry, but I’ve read recently that Activision Blizzard has reported revenues up to 300 percent in the first half of 2009, up to 1.49 mil Euro. Their EBITDA is also riding high waves with an increase of 360 percent, up to 373 mil Euro for the same time period (source: Reuters).

In Romania, since the entertainment industry is not so well developed (people usually entertain themselves in front of the TV and the local media is squirming in a dark water cyclone), motorcyle sales and gambling have recorded growth in the first half of 2009 instead, as reported by the National Institute of Statistics and the Association of Automotive Producers and Importers (source: Money.ro).

Of course, these are not all the industries that managed to harness the power of the black waters of the economic crisis, but are quite an interesting sample as terms of comparison. If the western world makes money out of entertaining people, Romania is making money out of gambling people. Talk about a atypical market, right?

If content oriented categories, such as Entertainment (including YouTube & iPlayer), Computers & Internet (including Facebook, Twitter, etc) or News & Media (BBC, ITV, Sky, etc) have increased their share of online visits, the more transaction oriented categories (Shopping & Classifieds, Business & Finance and Travel) have slowly declined in web traffic.

Content vs Transactional Web Sites

If the above web site categories were grouped into content vs. transactions, the trend becomes much more clear. If around 2006 content and transactional websites were driving similar amounts of web visits, the gap between the two categories grow more and more with content oriented web sites  driving almost double the amount of web traffic as compared to transactional web sites.

What this tells us is that people spend more time online browsing for information, networking with other people or having fun rather than buying things, a trend probably also augmented by the global economic crisis and the decrease in consumer spending in the past year.

While we can say that Internet usage has not significantly changed in terms of volume, the paradigms of how people use the Internet appear to be changing continuously. One of the testimonials to support this is a recent BBC article (based also on Hitwise UK data) that shows that social networks have overthrown the porn web sites domination in terms of consumer time spent online.

Social Networks vs. Adult Websites (source: BBC)

Although the information above depicts trends and data related to the UK market, these trends do picture how the things look or will look like in the near future for other markets, such as Central and Eastern Europe ones. Of course, working in these respective markets, one has to account for all the peculiarities of the countries in discussion, since almost all of them are, in a way or another, “atypical.”