[via Pierre Carion – in French]

You REALLY have to see this website, it’s so funny. It’s about demotivating people :-) The company’s name is “Despair, Inc.”. So great! Some examples:

[via vowe and lowercase tee]

Kids are willing to give some advice, difficult to resist :-)

Are you also confronted with this never-ending-story concerning all these audio & video codecs? I personaly got this problem till I installed the incredible package from K-Lite. Really a must-have if you do not want to install Quicktime and/or RealPlayer (both remain quite intrusive to my mind) and if you do not want to waste time by searching the new version of hundreds of codecs (I’m exagerating a bit ;-).

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play 99% of all the movies that you download from the internet.

The K-Lite Codec Pack has a couple of major advantages compared to other codec packs:

* It it always up-to-date with the latest versions of the codecs.

* It is very user-friendly and the installation is fully customizable, meaning that you can install only those components that you really want.

* It has been very well tested, so that the package doesn’t contain any conflicting codecs.

* It is a very complete package, containing everything you need to play your movies.

Mega Codec Pack includes everything needed to play online and offline computer media. This pack is from the makers of the K-lite codec pack. This version includes the Full K-lite codec pack as well as Quicktime and Realplayer codecs, and BS Player. This Pack includes codecs for the most popular compressions like Divx and Xvid as well as some of the less popular but still necesary codecs. This is your one stop codec resource.

[via @rgumente]

Tom Peters has his own blog!

Good and fresh inputs for innovation, renewal, rethinking. You can also find a lot of the Powerpoint presentations of Tom Peters. I find them…honestly awful from a visual point of view. I know, I know, that’s not the most important dimension, but anyway, this…. On the other side, I haven’t studied all the material but I already extracted some interesting refreshing thoughts:

Everything You Need to Know about “Strategy”

1. Do you have awesome Talent … everywhere? Do you push that Talent to pursue Audacious Quests?

2. Is your Talent Pool loaded with wonderfully peculiar people who others would call “problems”? And what about your Extended Community of customers, vendors et al?

3. Is your Board of Directors as exciting as your product offerings and does it have 50 percent (or at least one-third) Women Members?

4. Long-term, it’s a “Top-line World”: Is creating a “culture” that cherishes above all things Innovation and Entrepreneurship your primary aim? Remember: Innovation … not Imitation!

5. Are the Ultimate Rewards heaped upon those who exhibit an unswerving “Bias for Action”, to quote the co-authors of In Search of Excellence?

6. Do you routinely use hot, aspirational words-terms like Excellence and B.H.A.G. (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, per Jim Collins) and “Let’s make a dent in the Universe” (the Word according to Steve Jobs)? Is “Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes” your de facto or de jure motto?

7. Do you subscribe to Jerry Garcia’s dictum: “We do not merely want to be the best of the best, we want to be the only ones who do what we do”?

8. Do you elaborate on and enhance Jerry G’s dictum by adding, “We subscribe to ‘Best Sourcing’ and only want to associate with the ‘best of the best’”

9. Do you embrace the new technologies with child-like enthusiasm and a revolutionary’s zeal?

10. Do you “serve” and “satisfy” customers … or “go berserk” attempting to provide every customer with an “awesome experience” that does nothing less than transform the way she or he sees the world?

11. Do you understand … to your very marrow … that the two biggest under-served markets are Women and Boomers-Geezers? And that to “take advantage” of these two Monster “Trends” (FACTS OF LIFE) requires fundamental re-alignment of the enterprise?

12. Are your leaders accessible? Do they wear their passion on their sleeves? Does integrity ooze out of every pore of the enterprise? Is “We care” your implicit motto?

13. Do you understand Business Mantra #1 of the ’00s: DON’T TRY TO COMPETE WITH WAL*MART ON PRICE OR CHINA ON COST? (And if you get this last idea, then see the 12 above!)

The rest in the coming days!

Mercedes just launched the third release of its Mixed Tape compilation. I’ve already posted about it in August. Extract from the Mercedes-Benz Mixed Tape Newsletter:

Mixed Tape 03 is now online – brand new tracks from around the world!

Mixed Tape, the free music compilation by Mercedes-Benz, returns with its third instalment: until November 23rd 04 you can discover, download and enjoy 15 exceptional new tracks by international artists at http://www.mercedes-benz.com/mixedtape

This time, we are especially proud to present cult star Mocky who opens the compilation with his inspired “How Will I Know“.

In addition, we have tracked down many exciting new discoveries between Budapest, Los Angeles and Malmö: whether glamorous lounge sound (4 To The Bar), dynamic hip-hop (Sol Uprising), dreamy pop (Adria) or cool downbeat (The Tape) – once more Mixed Tape 03 assembles intelligent, cosmopolitan tracks from around the world.

After some days of “testing”, I’ve added a new great feed to my blogroll, the one of Dragos Novac, a Romanian entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Krogos Software – a software development and offshoring services company located in Bucharest, Romania – and the blogger of @rgumente.

About While presently there are several Romanian internet discussion groups about themes comprehending business issues under diverse forms, @rgumente is the first blog from Romania about business and strategy. It is yet another voice in the space about what is happening in Romania, the way I see it.

Why business and strategy? Because every day I am observing or being involved in the business world both from Romania and from outside and I tend to have a strong opinion about what is going on. People I usually hang out with don’t really discuss about this stuff so here I am with @rgumente.

Why Romania? Because this is the place where I was born, where I always came back from my life journeys and where I am presently trying to make a living. Finally, because the business environment from this corner of the world presents several different perspectives quite interesting or scary, depending on the mood of the observer.

Dragos’ blog was just reviewed in the weekly Power Blog reviews from Small Business Trends. Great work and definitely another perspective!

We had a strategy session with some of my colleagues in an quite uncommon restaurant near Zürich – the Seerose restaurant. Uncommon because you can have a aperitif on a lake-pontoon (definitely too cold today…) and you are really eating “on the lake”, with a marvelous view. We saw the first snow on the Swiss alps.

I found some figures about the last Montreux Jazz Festival – quite impressive:

Some months ago, I had a very interesting discussion with two American friends, both moderated, one Republican and one Democrat, who both know very well a big part of the World, including some Arabian countries and Europe. Both very well educated (Harvard), and both speaking perfectly four languages. So, not really some “average” guys ;-) We discussed the link between the religion and the State in America during quite a long time . Both agreed that G. Bush is making a religion war against the Muslims in Irak and Pakistan, and that the other “normal well-known” arguments which are always mentionned (petrol, geopolitics) exist but aren’t so relevant. That was completely new for myself, I was a bit sceptic, as a *lot* of European friends I met the last time.

This was for me a kind of new light concerning the war in Irak.

With some distance, I must say their analysis is definitely interesting. In this field, I read a post of Pierre Carion about the pledge of Allegiance. If I understand well, this is a school flag-raising ceremony which takes place each week. Foxnews published an history of the Pledge of Allegiance and its different versions. The Pledge currently reads:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I find this idea of Pledge, as an integration “instrument”, ok. On the other side, as a French guy, I am surprised that the Pledge is containing such an explicit mention of *God*. What happens to all the Americans who are atheistic or who don’t care about religion? I have thought that, as in France, there is strong and clear separation between religion and the State. Questionable, no?

Pierre quoted also an extract from an interview between Robert Sherman, a reporter, and George Bush (the father ;-) in 1987:

RS: “What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “I guess I’m pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is important to me.”

RS: “Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists?”

GB: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

RS: “Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation of state and church?”

GB: “Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I’m just not very high on atheists.”

I found this input interesting with the light of my two American friends…