Archive for April, 2009

Of course it is no wonder that swine flu is on everyone’s mind and everywhere in the news now - it has even managed to somehow force the recession out of our attention. But as if the disease itself was not enough, in Japan there is now a new problem: people concerned with swine flu [...]

If you are a blogger, you must know a very simple principle of blogging when you do it for eyeballs (and ad impressions obviously): whatever your actual topic is, whenever there is something huge (positive or negative - does not matter) happening in the world that everyone wants more and more information about, think hard [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the paradoxes in how some companies approach going global and investing into such globalization. Usually every startup and even some established internet companies I talk to about why they don’t translate their applications to other languages quote the costs involved in translation as the main reason for why [...]

Today Nielsen Online, the web measuring service, has reported some good things for one particular segment of online publishers - websites of traditional newspapers. While we’ve been talking for quite a while about how bad the situation for newspapers is with less advertising dollars in traditional print industry, it looks like things have been very [...]

Now that companies are getting ready to the Earth Day tomorrow, Skype has published some interesting info on the company’s blog about how we could help our planet by reducing the number of business trips and replacing part of them with video calls.
Basically if businesses choose video calls over only 20% of their air trips, [...]

Today Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has visited Moscow and made some interesting announcements here. The most important of all the things he has said (at least for the Russian market) is that Microsoft is going to invest as much as $300 million to the Russian market within the next 3 years.
The goal for the money to [...]

Lately I’ve been noticing a pretty disturbing trend on social networks - people are losing their names and are somehow renamed after their businesses and products they sell online. So instead of real people on Twitter I am followed by all the types of real estate everywhere in the US but have no idea if [...]

Have you ever participated in a multi-level marketing pyramid? I personally have not but many of my friends have as MLM has been extremely popular here in Russia in the last decade or so. The industry where it enjoys the most success is cosmetics as women tend to enjoy talking about their beauty and giving [...]

Facebook has been the social network of the year with its rapid growth everywhere. And while for Facebook (and for many other ad-supported web services) the US market is what rules the world in terms of where they make money, Europe now looks like it has been the place where Facebook enjoyed totally incredible growth [...]