Fire Meg

Posted by bordalix Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:18:00 GMT

Isn't capitalism, democracy and freedom of speech great? A eBay user (and minor stockholder), unhappy with the performance of the company, has issued an online petition for the removal of Meg Whitman as eBay CEO.

The 3 main reasons for this petition are:

  1. the lack of focus: eBay is more concerned in merging technologies (like Skype) than to bet on evolving the online auction sector;
  2. eBay and Paypal refuse to address fraud issues and the concerns of the user base;
  3. the existence of several technical issues that result in slow and erroneous searches, portions of the site not functioning properly, etc.

Is this a good idea? Will it result in anything? I sincerely don't know, but I like it, is a form of active citizenship, and we all should be active citizens. After all, that's why we live in a democracy, right?

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2005 2.0

Posted by bordalix Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:06:00 GMT

Everybody is trying to make a list of important things for 2005. Well, I was to, but decided to simply label it the "2.0 year". New business models are building from the peer-to-peer social model found in the net, and from the ability to explore the long tail of the market. In the first, digg became bigger then Slashdot, del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo, and wikipedia and folksonomy became part of our lexical.

On the second, iTunes Music Store proved to be a huge business success, eBay paid several billions to have Skype, and everyone is trying to take a piece of the AdSense pie. Maybe the best presentation summarizing all this, was made by Brandon Schauer, check is sources (in the PDF) for further reading.

But this year was also the year of Ajax, JavaScript frameworks and mashups. The web is now easier to use, easier to develop, and the API business model is growing rapidly, as stated by the growth of the mashup matrix. For an excellent example of a mashup, take a look at BlockRocker (GoogleMaps + Amazon + Craigslist).

Well, 2005 was a good year, hope 2006 be even better to everyone.

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