This is getting old, but I am surprised that Boeing has not done anything as of right now online. Although Boeing traditionally does not offer a complete “take over” of the first page (as Airbus does) there should atleast be a little notice, indicating that they stand by to offer any support, and that they offer condolences.
Please, dear Boeing, take care of this now!
There are a lot of fun clothing stores online, but few if any come close to T-Shirt Hell. There you will without doubt find something that will make you laugh, and something that will make you mad. Some of the prints are so horribly vulgar that I am chocked to silence for minutes before I start laughing. Think of it as Monty Python on a t-shirt.
Now, the people behind the site have been through some exiting drama in the past; hatred in all its forms. That, together with the general downturn in spending, made me feel rather unsurprised when I got the first of a series of emails explaining that they were shutting down. They had made enough money, and they were tired of the hate. They even extended the deadline for a while. I imagine that few things create action in the shopping carts more effectively than a “you wont be able to shop ever again”.
Now I got another email. The shutting down was simply another spoof. They claim that this was there way to respond to the downturn, this was their “stimulus”. They fooled us all into spending money.
And I love it.
Expecting anything else, I now realize, was dumb. They were clever. And there is a lesson here for all in eCommerce. Urgency is powerful, create it you too!
Once upon a time, when I was all glad about generating ideas constantly, I was under the impression that generating ideas was all that was needed to gain success. I even called (and in some places still do) myself an “idea guy”. And I assume that this is a skill that would in some companies (Apple, Sony) could be a whole job.
But it is not a whole job when you run your own small show. And likely it is not a job with major corporations during a recession.
I sort of figured this out a couple of years ago, and started focusing more on moving the ideas from a piece of paper or document into some sort of reality. My first approach was to spend money. If I was financially invested in the idea, I thought, I could do nothing but move forward on it. So, I started buying domain names.
Not much else happened. I have lots of domain names, but very few services launched.
Then, I found RentACoder and TemplateMonster. I was under the impression that if I specified an idea technically, and provided a design, I would have a service ready to launch. This has worked, but only to a degree. As a result of this approach some of my ideas are actually live and running.
But there has always been something missing. The love and the dedication, and the long term attention by all aspects of a team (design, development, marketing). I have been stuck here a long time. At one point, I almost gave up.
Today, however, is a new day. And one of my great old ideas is on its way to real true reality. How, you ask? By people, and people with skills. In my office we will in 2 weeks be four people. Two developers, a designer and myself. We will focus on a relatively small project (10 week time budget) and hopefully launch a fully fledged piece of awesomeness when the time is up.
This one dude said to me once, “ideas are a dime a dozen, kid. It is the commitment that separates the men from the boys.”
And this time, I am committed. Together with a team of great people. I will keep you updated, right here.
We are just back from our skiing trip to northern Sweden, and the second leg of this trip was pure highway terror. Although the assigned speed limits are on average 90 km/h, I would guess that our average speed was around half that. We had been driving for but 5 minutes when the first relatively serious accident appeared: an 18 wheeler had rear ended a small family car. When I had stopped I saw in the rear view mirror a truck speeding against us, and he in the nick of time plowed out into the ditch to avoid hitting us.
He just made it.
After that, we had four eyes focused on the road ahead. The road that was visible, that is: each time a car passed in the opposite direction, there was five seconds of complete blindness. Some idiots were driving like crazy, putting all other lives on the road at risk. If I for but a split second let a tire leave the narrow semi plowed lanes between the snow piles, the car would wobble and pull toward the ditch or the oncoming traffic.
When we finally got home, our icy hill beckoned. I drove as fast as I dared, but we still did not make it. Ella and Kristina quickly got out of the car to avoid certain (slight exaggeration) death. After a while I got into my driving shoes to have full clutch control, to no avail. I slid backwards as soon as the foot was off the brake, and I started sliding backwards towards the cliff. I finally got the car to a standstill, after which I took my good time caressing her down to the bottom. Once there, I shook, scared to the core, for minutes.
Now I am regaining my composure. With some help from my favorite captain. His name is Morgan.
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