Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Am I in the UK at the right time or not? I just arrived in Milton Hill House near Oxford for three days of talking finacial management as part of the OUBS Finance course for the MBA and was already happy that the hotel has a business center with free internet access. This is nice. But then, I saw a nice flyer at the reception saying that BT Openyone is hosting a wireless broadband week from january 26th until February 1st, meaning that you can surf at the BT Openzone Wifi hotspots for free, and there are 2000 of them in the UK.

Ah well I thought, that’s nice, not that there will be a BT hotspot out here in nowhere land but I figured I’d ask. And you know what? There is a BT Openzone hotspot right here at the bar area, all free, all powerful and there for the taking for the entire time of my stay, which is until February 1st. My luck.

I just posted some pics of the trip via the mobile phone to the Moblog but now I will be able to just sync them over to the laptop and post them like that, making it a lot cheaper. Free Wifi rocks!

Andy Rasking just bought a new computer, a G4 Powerbook from Apple to be exact, and he posted about it on the Business 2.0 blog. I’d like to quote a few lines here as I totally agree. Unexplainable, but true:

First, I typed the lead sentence of my nextBusiness 2.0 story in a Word document on a Vaio running XP. Then I typed the same sentence in a Word document on a PowerBook running OS X. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the genius of Steve Jobs: The sentence looked cooler, weightier, hipper, more worth paying attention to — on the PowerBook. Writers and other creative artists know that this cannot be explained rationally. It just is, and it’s worth money.

So there you have it, I am weird. On a side note, I tried out Wordpress, a blogging tool which Russel Beattie posted about, yesterday and it does feel nice. Really. If you are looking for a blogging tool, check it out.

Loic le Meur was kind enough to put up the videos of the blogging panel at Davos right here. Some great examples of what blogging can do and where it might be heading and why. Thanks Loic!

Yep, SERME in short. I just found it via John Battelle’s Searchblog and I can only shake my head in amazement. The company having announced this is Converseon (what a name). As John, I’ll simply quote part of the press release:

“SERMA(C)” Combines Innovative Content Management Techniques Together with Sophisticated Optimization Skills To Help Companies Better Manage Their Reputations and Brand Online

“Search engines have become the primary resource for journalists and other constituents to gather information on a specific company,” says Robert Key, President & CEO of Converseon. “Yet, while many companies may pay close attention to how the traditional media portrays them, most companies are completely unaware of what information is appearing when search engine users type in a company’s name.” He points to examples like McDonald’s and Nike, where users typing in the companies’ names on Google are exposed to highly negative information, including McSpotlight.org, a “protest site,” and the “Boycott Nike Homepage.”

In general, they are monitoring search engines. I’d suggest Google Alert.

… let’s see how long it holds.