Francesco's Space, a professional at your service
Archive for February, 2008
LinkedIn, Spock, Facebook, Naymz & Others …
After your feeling about the usefulness or not, starting to be part of a social network could be tricky and could be misleading for newcomers. A simple guide about which program to use follows:
- LinkedIn is a professional tool, used by professional to maintain their network of contact without any boundaries, Of course a lot of Head Hunter are present there and for this is a must be for a professional looking for his/hes next challenge. Few partecipation stuffs and more link with Job Seeking world. At the same concept we can include Viadeo and Neurona, the advantage of these two tools is the localization. People in Europe speak a lot of language, while in LinkedIn is almost impossible operate without English knowledge, these other two permit to interact in proper mother tongue. Viadeo is useful to organize events and facilitate social networking outside the Net.
- Spock represent in the Social Networking tools what Google made for the search engines, light and coincise with a possibility to tag each other and to implement ‘word of mouth’ in a on-line version. Also voting is most important, people can say or add or note something and others could demonstrate if they agree or disagree in a polling way.
- Facebook is your life on the Net, everything you can make you can add to your profile with a lot of applications (widget) you can add.
- Naymz is the reference tool, all the system is based on the reputation you have, you can gain and you can lose.
- Other tool are present and have some limits jointly with some plus, often they offer localized content and localized or vertical professional in them, between those: like Ryze, hi5, Ecademy, Doonstag, Ciwi, Xing, Konnect, SuccessBC, Zubka.
- For sure I can hint the presence on the four above in the title, … and don’t forget to link myself
Happy networking e don’t forget to enrich them with a concrete real life networking.
A mobile citypass carnet in our cities
Paris CityPass
When we go for business or leisure in a beautiful city sometime we buy a City Pass. The Pass normally contains some discounts about what we can do in a city and facilitate our moving within it.
Four types of City Pass:
- Entering in a city paying a toll (London, Oslo, Stockholm, Milan, …) and parking somewhere
- Take a taxi or public transports
- Assist or visit a permanent museum or attraction
- Join an extraordinary event, not known or not planned before
Always everything happen based on paper tickets or carnet we use as admission for entry.
Eliminating papers a mobile handset that deliver tailored information about the first 3 points and customize the 4th, case by case is extremely important to have with us; if we can also buy event participation or just prompt info on the fly, far from home or from the desk is for sure a definitive guide we must have.
Of course municipality need to move in that direction to define partnership in order to deliver info and to permit access through specific pass area using e-ticket received and purchased by phone.
NFC is starting to have its limelights …
but what about the phones ?
A lot of application of NFC technology are taking place also in Europe. Some experimentations also in Italy will take the place in the next months. A good sample in transportation world in Italy after New York tap’n go initiative and London Underground has been created in Trentothanks to Telecom Italia and TSF last December. In those scenarios a good handset manufacturer position made the difference.
The Telco operators (as well as MVNOs) that would like to open its SIM to new applications want to protect their investements and to valorize their asset in the customer hands, not the handset itself of course unlockable or unbrnaded, but the SIM. So they push handset manufacturers to put antenna and RFID chip capable to interact with SIM application; from the other hand instead handset manufacturer would like to valorize their asset without any engagements (or lock) with Telecom Operators.
Any scenario has its plus and minus, in one case NFC could be used as a retention tool to avoid high churn rate and the management of the application is for sure seamless, in another case I can increase customer loyalty and fidelity could increase using an independent Telco provider solution that i need to maintain.
Which approach will depend by whole ecosystem scenario that will arise.
It will be almost impossible implement a Mobile Payment solution without involving banks and all the major national MNOs present in a country. This means that any proprietary solution working only on a customer base will be hard to deploy in the near future … It is also true that the NFC handset price is still high (more than 500 Euro) and to develop an ecosystem it needs some subsidy, as happened for Video Terminal to develop Video Calls, this could be supported by Telco jointly with some banks in a geographically defined territory.
So a position so unopen related the SIM could be justified by handset manufacturer only if they start to produce millions of terminal under 300 Euro price. Meanwhile thanks to Telco Operators will deploy solution facilitating the NFC adoption, the ecosystem creation, the handset manufacturer requests and the downprice of NFC handset.