I’ve actually had the (dis)pleasure of driving in Russia and can attest to the reality of this video. The intersection depicted in the video is more the rule rather than the exception in Russian traffic design. I can still recall my astonishment at the lack of road signs, lane demarcations, and traffic signals. We tend to take these things for granted, while Russians prefer a more freewheeling, carefree approach to their road system. That may be an understatement. A more accurate description would be let the devil take the hindmost. Should you find yourself in the driver’s seat on a Moscovite road, just remember that traffic signals are only recommendations, which you can choose to obey at your own peril. Your fellow drivers are certainly thinking the same way.

The folks at Moo are building a business around decidedly old-fashioned things, like business cards and post cards. I already fell for their hip re-invention of the calling card and now I find myself placing an order for their latest product, NoteCards. Moo is clearly banking on a certain nostalgia factor to convince people that buying stamps and stopping by the postoffice should (once again) be part of their daily lives:

We miss mail! Not email, we get tons of that, but real mail. Delivered by a friendly postie, straight to your door. So we dreamed up NoteCards – square prints made from your own photos or designs. They have a magic flap on the side, to make them stand up proudly on your mantel, bookshelf or window sill, and are perfect for mailing to friends.

You don’t even need to wait for an occasion – sure you can send them as birthday cards or invitations, but why not send one just to say ‘hello’, or ‘I miss you!’ or ‘thanks for the cake’. Make someone feel special again.

(via Moo)

Of course, bringing the allure back into antiquitated things like postal mail requires a bit of modern ingenuity, which is why Moo has worked in Web 2.0 goodies like pictures imported from your Flickr collection and personalized messages on the card backsides. If you’re creative enough, Moo might even invite you to lease your images to their library for others to use. I have a feeling Moo has another commercial hit on its hands. What better way to satisify the inner human craving for the non-virtual, the physical, in an increasingly digital world? Amy Kealoha at Cool Hunting calls it “Hallmark 2.0“. I agree. Post mail is dead, long live post mail!

Seeking Alpha has published a fascinating interactive Q&A session with Katie Stanton, Product Manager for Google Finance. Google entered the crowded online financial data space fairly recently, so it had to bring something new to the table just to differentiate itself from the forerunners of online finance, such as Yahoo Finance, Bigcharts, and the TheStreet.com. Google’s answer is an improved search for financial information (as expected from a company built around a search engine) as well as closer integration with video, news, and blogs — content has been largely ignored by the established financial sites, but are considered both hip and relevant in the web2.0 culture. The Google Finance people have done a wonderful job bringing their website out of the starting gates, but, as newcomers, are still playing catch-up with more established competitors and struggling to implement certain basic features which have been standard on other sites for years. Fundamental information, such as the dividend yield, and securities screeners, such as an equity screener, are two notable examples of this lag with the rest of the market. I suppose they still look to Yahoo Finance for occassional inspiration.

The Seeking Alpha interview prompted me to take a peak around the internet and see what the financial websites are doing these days. In a former professional life, I spent oodles of time developing online financial applications and checking out the competition, so this was an opportunity to see what has changed over the years. To my surprise, innovation continues at a strong pace, even among the older websites which would seem long past their prime. I thought it would be a challenge to find recent examples of innovation equivalent to Smartmoney’s interactive market maps or Clearstation’s technical analysis back in the 1990s, but a glance at some of the new features in the market disproves this assumption.
Smartmoney’s latest portfolio analysis tools and Motley Fool’s thriving CAPS service are two examples which come to mind.

What has not changed is the old industry pecking order. Aside from the many casualties of the dotcom crash, most of the larger providers are still present and, interestingly, still dominating the segments they ruled in the early days of the internet. Motley Fool still champions the common investor with its educational content, Smartmoney still holds sway with its brilliant online tools, Morningstar rules the investment fund roost, BigCharts still dominates interactive charting, and Yahoo, the godfather of online finance, still rules the market with its lively (and sometimes extremely vulgar) discussion boards. The continued reign of these websites in their respective areas is a testament to the enduring power of first-mover status.

I leave my tour of the online financial web with a sense of wonder at the continued innovation, but also a feeling of bewilderment as I realize one of the greatest problems from the 1990s remains unresolved. Despite the global nature of the financial markets, financial websites are anything but global. An an example: try to get a simple quote on the well-known Swiss watch company Swatch and, more often than not, you will be disappointed with the results. Tracking a diversified portfolio with international holdings or non-equity asset classes is an impossibilty with the current crop of financial websites. A number of websites simply act as if the non-US markets do not exist, an unforgiveable oversight in this age of global finance. Others have ventured beyond the US domestic markets, but seem confused about what to do with all that additional data. I am baffled at this myopic view of the financial markets, this strange case of provincialism on the net. Yahoo, with its breadth of international market data, currently comes closest to addressing the issue, but has done little in recent years to develop this area. The online finance space may be crowded, but it seems like there is still an enormous untapped opportunity for a globally-minded startup.

When it comes to managing websites, I like to apply a fairly cut-throat approach to site optimization. Content and links which fail to perform are ruthlessly swept away in favor of those parts of the website which have performed or show potential. I like to think of this process of culling and promoting links as online natural selection or a Darwinian survival of the fittest. With today’s web analytics tools it is possible track and analyze practically every aspect of site usage, so revising a website based on behavorial data is often only a matter of taking the time to look at the data. A website subjected to this continual fine-tuning should evolve into a website which is more in line with customer needs, especially since the customers have essentially voted for the content and links which appear most prominently. I also have to admit that there is an inner sense of glee when sending non-performing links into extinction.

Unfortunately, this theory of website evolution has some strident opponents. It may sound like common sense or straight-forward logic to you and me (at least, it does to me), but there is a large and vocal community of people who do not subscribe to this line of thought at all. I am speaking about the advocates of intelligent website design, or course. These people can be found at levels of an organization, including highly experienced professionals in positions of significant decision-making capacity, as well as (gasp) e-marketing specialists in major marketing and advertising agencies. In fact, I’ve never been on a job or project which hasn’t featured a prominent respresentation of this faction. You will know when these people are in your midst, when your web analytics data is summarily dismissed and replaced by piles of indisputable market research, white papers, focus group results, and branding guidelines explaining exactly what should go where on the website. In my experience, arguing with these people usually proves an exercise in futility. Unless you are an experienced evangelist, your best chance lies with finding like-minded managers and building a base of support for your analytical approach. Or, you could try the good old “act now and ask for forgiveness later” ploy.

The point is this battle is too important to lose. Website real estate, despite widely-held beliefs to the contrary, is as precious as offline real estate. Visitors to websites are not constrained by physical distance to the competition and can leave your virtual real estate with a single mouse click. A website must engage the visitor within the first seconds and then work to help the visitor find what they seek. I don’t mean to dismiss strategic thinking out of hand. A compelling vision and well-conceived strategy are essential pre-requisites for success and should be based on solid market research, however, site optimization should not be driven by white papers and marketing egos. At that point, its best to put aside any delusions of intelligent website design and start competing on analytics. A lot of companies are already running their business on web analytics, and some are probably even using some form of natural selection when developing websites. Google has built an advertising empire based on a similar process for its AdWords. Are we soon to see websites which are programmed to evolve by themselves?

My indifference towards photo sharing networks and Flickr in particular probably could have continued forever, if it weren’t for my serendipitous discovery of Moo and subsequent order of personalized Moo Minicards using the convenient upload tool from Flickr. As fortunate would have it, I arrived on Flickr in time to learn about a relatively new feature which should really appeal to anyone with a passion for product marketing. Flickr has added a new “Camera Finder” service, ostensibly aimed at helping Flickr users find the most popular camera brands of fellow photography enthusiasts. Flickr collects the data from the meta data (EXIF data) on uploaded pictures, which usually reveals the make and model of the camera used to take the pictures. Why publish this information? The answer is self-evident from the convenient links to Yahoo! shopping (Yahoo! purchased Flickr in 2005).

For a product marketer, this information is a rare and fascinating glimpse into the lifecycle of consumer electronics. Products at all phases of the lifecycles are clearly visible on Flickr’s charts. Here we have Nikon cameras in the last 12 months. The venerable D50 shows clear uptake through most the year, but has probably reached maturity, while the D70 is showing its age and a steady decline. Meanwhile, a new entrant, the D80, is achieving market share, but is still in an early launch phase.

Most products have a steady and lengthly uptake and downtake, but certain cameras such as the Kodak EasyShare C330 Zoom, appear to have run through their entire lifecycle within the course of a year. Its possible that this model has not met consumer expectations or is running into strong competition from other models positioned in the same segment.

A marketer or photographer can easily spend a couple hours examining the Flickr camera data and, one would suspect, industry analysts and camera manufacturers are probably dissecting this data and cross-checking with their own market research at this very moment.

Even if you are not enthralled by electronic product lifecycles, this information is a wonderful demonstration of the hidden value of data in a business. Data, when linked to a business vision, can become information and knowledge. Its unlikely that the founders of Flickr expected to one day use photo meta data for marketing purposes, but somebody at Yahoo realized there was potential for this data and managed to create an amazing service.

Rinerhorn mountain near Davos, Switzerland. Perfect conditions. A light dusting of powder. Sun with occassional passing clouds. Not a soul on the mountain, save one. I am in ski nirvana.

For those considering a ski trip to the Swiss alps, there is no better time to come than at the tail end of the season. If the ski god is generous with the powder, January can also be a wonderful month, but you may have to contend with bitter cold. Consider the virtues of spring skiing instead. Around mid-March, the rest of the world conveniently forgets about skiing, as winter vacations come to an end and the novelty of powdery slopes fades. Did I mention that I had the Rinerhorn pretty much to myself for the first hour or so? It was enough to make me forget about the endless t-bar lifts this side Davos.

It was only a matter of time before laptops became something more than a portable computer. The ASUS Sideshow Notebook brings the standard lightweight laptop into realms once reserved for PDAs, Smartphones, and MP3 players. The laptop itself is nothing new, but the separately-powered secondary display on the outside lid of the laptop is a stroke of genius, as any harried business traveler will confirm. How many times have you wished for a way to retrieve that one important email or look up that certain street address, but not had the time/space/patience to open and boot up your laptop? Sideshow has a limited set of functionalities at this time, but the laptop paradigm has been altered and the gates to all sorts of future applications opened. Let’s take a moment to drool over this development and then watch what the market brings in the coming months. I’m no technology reviewer, just a casual market observer. Its far better that we let someone with a good eye for the technical specifications do the dirty work.

Regardless of what you think about the quality of the talent, Eurovision does have a certain degree of pure entertainment value. The voting, in particular, is quirky and confusing to the first-time viewer. A some point you being to wonder if you are watching the same show as the voters, as ratings seemingly have very little to do with song just performed. What is actually happening is classical European politics: Scandinavians voting for Scandinavians, former East Bloc for former East Bloc (as if the wall never came down), Slavs for Slavs, Iberians for Iberians, Cypriots for Greeks, and so on. It all quite amusing, until you realize these same rules apply to just about all aspects of European civilization, from the diplomatic workings of the European Union to the management policies of European corporations. Its all quite predictable, once you know the playbook. A couple of Oxford academics have even researched the subject and identified the voting blocks, in case you still wondering what those hidden voting patterns are.

In recent years, performers have started competing with each other to find the lowest common denominator in song quality, perhaps in realization that real talent is purely optional. This year, DJ Bobo will be representing Switzerland with a suitably bizarre song “Vampires are alive” and should have a good chance at claiming the top prize.

Tracking performance on this blog should prove enlightening. Aside from writing passable prose, submitting a sitemap to the search engines, and doing a fair amount of linking to internal posts and other blogs with related content, I don’t intend to do much in the way of so-called search engine optimization. In other words, the blog will have to stand on its own, without the advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) of submissions to blog aggregators, link lists to related sites, comment postings linked to this blog, pings notifications across the blogosphere, analyses of keywords, and whatever else is in vogue with my fellow bloggers. I have an instinctive feeling — completely unsubstantiated by any form of real research — that these measures are of limited usefulness with search engine positioning anyway. Having said that, I reserve the right to change my opinion should someone manage to convince me that doing such things can actually have a reasonable return on investment.

In the meantime, it appears that I have a budding fan club in the Far East. I’m not sure what compelled residents of Karatsu and neighboring cities in Japan to visit my posting on ski pistes and sunshine, however, they do appear to be the only inhabitants on Earth who are currently interested in my writings.