A recent article of the New York Times (free online registration) – Choice trumps price on Internet – points out that the real added value of Internet for the consumers is not only, as expected, a lower price (average of 6 to 16%), but more a question of selection. In this field, selection means a bigger amount of product choices. For example, Wal-mart offers online 6 times more products than its biggest “real” store (!).

This paper is based on a study from Erik Brynjolfsson of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is, among other things, Director of the MIT Center for eBusiness. I must say, I like very much the slogan of the Center for eBusiness: “eBusiness is Business”. One of the logo from the eCenter, the unit I’m responsible for by the Helvetia Patria Group, looks like this:

About the same vision :-)

I’m sorry but I have changed my blog “entry point”. From now, you can find my weblog under:

http://www.didierbeck.com

I’m blogging since about two months, without having any disclaimer, which is definitely not a good idea ;-) So please find below my disclaimer:

—————-

My name is Didier Beck and I am working for the Helvetia Patria Holding. The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. Everything here, though, is my personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.

—————-

A quite interesting article from FastCompany about companies’ blogging:

If you are interested in, some valuable comments ;-)

Holger released the internationalized version 1.7 of its blogkomm tool. I’m using it for my blog to be able to add comments to “normal” blogger posts. Very easy to use und fully flexible in the field of the GUI customization.

Great tool for all blogger users :-)

If you like all kind of good music (blues, jazz, rock, etc.), you perhaps have heard something about this so great Montreux Jazz Festival. You can find the program 2004 here (pdf).

A great experience!

I also like very much (as usual ;-) the new poster (pdf):

If you are interested in some discussions and assumptions about the infrastructure of Google and its massive grid cheap computers, let’s read the following article from the MIT Technology Review.

It seems that Google is hidding its real numbers concerning its incredible infrastructure and that the way Google is operating its infrastructure and the quite innovative approach concerning this grid computing are perhaps more relevant as THE competitive advantage of Google than the different search algorithms.

I managed to get in the beta program of Gmail of Google ;-)

A lot of (partly completely crazy) things were written about this. Anyway, I’m now trying this new email system quite a lot, to be able to really talk about Gmail. Stay tuned for more information.

My Gmail: didier DOT beck AT gmail DOT com

Skype released a new version of his so great P2P phone (VoIP) tool yesterday:

=> Skype v0.97.0.40

Thomas Claburn interviewed Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove and creator of Lotus Notes, for InformationWeek on April, 12. The discussion was about different items:

As usual with Ozzie, some very valuable comments!