Fortune

Just saw at Martin Varsavsky blog a curious link on Fortune 25 most powerful business people.

Very insightful. 1 women and a lot of technological people.

internet

During last BBW class Martin explained us two main concepts of internet information tracking. Since the terms were new for me, I decided toput a note on this.

There are two main concepts of information tracking - pinging and crawling.

Crawling is what Google does - indexation the change in Internet. To provide personalized advertizing, forexample, Google datacenter machines register the changes made evey second. If you ned thoroughness, you take this method, which has two main disadvantages: expensive (computer consumes a lot of energy) and perception issue (they are spying).

Pinging idea was used by David Sifry for Technocraty - blog searching engine. The source of change reports to a server automatically if he made a change and want it to appear in search results of the server's engine. You go for it if you need speed.

BBW last class

Just went from one of my favourite classes (I even dedicated a separate blog to this topic. I have a bunch of insights from this class also, but will revise and post them later.

What I have to say.

First, we were talking about Martin´s current business Fon a lot. I even used 15 minutes of free Fon access to send the results of 2nd round of investments. And Martin brought a Fonera to each of his student as a gift. Well, I can ensure that they will have the first fonera in Russia, cause the first thig I'm going to do is to connect my father's appartment to ADSL and guess which router I will use? Quite a good reason to get into several countries at least to get first early adopters.

And second. Recently Martin has written about ASUS Eee PC - open-office linux-based portative PC with 4Gb flash memory. It is really nice, taking into account that in China it is sold at the equivalent of 180 eur (around 350 usd at Amazon in the US). What I have to say about it? User-friendly, fast, compact (a bit heavy - almost as heavy as Sony Vaio i've revcently borrowed from my friend to use). But the biggest discover for me is Linux, which is quite friendly (as my friend told me - until you open the console:). I feel like they were cheating on me about the only possibility for user - MS!

Well, hoping to get my Acer back as soon as possible (it is like renting an appartment forme when you use someone's laptop). And come back with results of last class soon.

hate full stops in the heading (full stop here!)

My proofreader's past poisons my life - I can't read cheap books and newspapers cause I pay too much attention to details of layout and formatting; that distracts me from the content. And more important - while making ppt's of presentations I usually kill my group by paying the attention to "unsufficient details". Like full stops in headings - I hate this and I have this hate in my proofreader's DNA.

Seth Godin just posted the list of eye tracking rules. Now I'm going to use them during my next arguments. Unfortunately, this doesn't solve the full-stop issue, but allows to avoid other discussions (as logo positioning and picture backgrounds).

Here is the list (in alphabetical order):

* Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.
* Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
* Bigger images get more attention.
* Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
* Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.
* Formatting can draw attention.
* Headings draw the eye.
* Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.
* Large blocks of text are avoided.
* Lists hold reader attention longer.
* Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
* One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
* People generally scan lower portions of the page.
* Readers ignore banners.
* Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones.
* Show numbers as numerals.
* Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested.
* Text attracts attention before graphics.
* Type size influences viewing behavior.
* Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.
* Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them.
* Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus.
* White space is good.

Source:
Seth Godin shortlist.
Visual hosting blog explanation.
My russian post and translation.

story of success

Today is one-year anniversary of Russian regional (meaning it is not from Moscow) company "Sila uma" (Force of mind). Their weblog must read for russian speaking entrepreneurs as a success story and a resultof thoughtful markting.

education

It's very important for people to have their first education at home.
Bibi Russell, the founder of Bibi Production (Bangladesh) during 2nd Social Responibility Forum at IE.

little triumph

Our Venture Lab project has just qualified for semi-finals in IOP day (investment oriented project). In a week we're going to present the business to comission.

I'm really happy cause the work done is great.

tools vs aims

People sometimes get lost between understanding the aim itself and the tool. The tool is just something that can get you to the aim, not the tool defines the aim, but vice versa.

Recently I subscribed to a rss from making presentation community in russian. I can see the trend of copying those fancy styles from western presentatios - pictures with a shortslogan on the slide. To be hones, I still prefer to have presentation only forthe sake of illustration of my words. Or sometimes when I don't have a time to get ready or don't have passion to tell people - this is the case when I put some schemes in PPT.

What I can also see, that some of consulting companies just buy techniques and then copy-paste slides from other presentation. Because nobody is going to pay you for several drops of essence, they need oceans of information, spreadsheets, fancy tools.

I really want to find a place where I can distill and deliver - I really love this formula from my entrepreneurship professor Julio de Castro. Cause the tools is not that really matters, it is how good you can use them. Or even the result of using them.

Anyway, while people buy tools but not the results, this marketwill exist. And of course it is easier to just copy and paste. Forget about reputation, they only tend to speak about it.

can't stop, really)

Since I have a break with my entrepreneurship project, one more thing to be posted.

The theories often come to my mind during my MBA studies are:

1. Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
2. Sunk cost theory.
3. Customer oriented behavior.

Will develop the idea later.

English

Studying in multinational environment has its advantages and disadvantages. Main advantage is diversity. But sacrifice is the level of English.

You need to express yourself. You care about letting people know your idea. You talk to the guys from 37 different nationalities. And different levels of English, of course.

Well, I've got fluency and freedom of expression, but grammar went down obviously. And since the speed of thoughts now is incredible - I'm fixing everything I need, there is no time for revision.

Put the grammar note on todolist and sighed when was looking at her grammar book.