Month: April 2006

Customers with a clue

you have no idea how refreshing it is to work with customers with a clue. on tuesday, our second yellow pages project went live: local.ch, covering all of switzerland. local.ch was very gracious to let us have a geeky field day with nice urls, hcard support (view source), geo-aggregated blog posts per city (via geourl), for a start. given that local.ch is the answer of a staid media company to the competitive pressures of the internet, i find it quite refreshing to see their CEO blog (on a blog hosted by my former startup KAYWA, no less :), or post pictures of their ground troops (ie, sales) after a slam dunk on flickr.

meanwhile today, we spent all day in a very productive exchange with the goyellow team to talk about new features (more about those when we deliver on them..). their willingness to listen to my crazy ideas for 8 hours straight surprised even me 😉 they quickly took up blogging as a way to communicate with the german blogosphere, with good results.

and finally, we also launched housing search and hotel locator sites for homegate and hotelplan, respectively. quite the busy week 🙂

Analog tax

spending time with my parents affords me an opportunity to see what they use their computer for, and some of it is not pretty: take this whole world of “mail merge”, no matter whether in microsoft office or it’s retarded cousin openoffice, is a world of pain. the user interface is unspeakably bad, quite in tune with a process that is about as fun as a visit to the dentist in the first place. bringing this bloated world onto the web with the recent craze of ajax word processors is fundamentally misguided: why deal with label printing when there is email? similarly, when you are faced with the task to protect 2.5B in revenues per quarter, why screw around with new toolbars when your products don’t help squat to solve the real problem: outdated assumptions about a paper-based world.