ZeLab

Google / Myspace deal

Business Week mentions today the deal between Google & Myspace. Google will pay about $900M. to be the search engine of MySpace. The interest for Google is obvious and well explained by BW, but doesn't it seem strange that they pay such an amount to provide the search service of MySpace, while Murdoch paid only $580M to actually buy MySpace one year ago ?
It says much about the value gained by this service - which is, unless I am mistaken, almost exclusively used in the US so far....

Nouvelle Vague vol. 2

J'avais bien aimé le premier volet, je n'ai pas été déçu par le second, avec notamment une très bonne version du Fade to Grey de Visage.
Nouvelle Vague c'est le projet musical de 2 français qui reprennent des tubes New Wave des années 80 dans des versions bossa-nova / electro-pop-rock...
Apparemment ils rencontrent un relatif succès, à mon avis aidés aussi par la mode du vintage (à ce propos, voir le blog du vintage) et la nostalgie des actuels cadres sup qui avaient entre 10 et 18 ans dans les années 80... Un bon coup marketing donc ?

Do you speak Français ?

I have decided from now on to post in French as well as English.
First, because French is my mother tongue and it is much easier for me to express my thoughts in French.
Second, because I "instinctively" browse the blogosphere in French mainly : the sites I know and use are most of the time French ones - and I think it makes more sense to try promoting this blog with my compatriots.
So do not take this as a reactionary gesture to defend la langue française - I am only starting with this blog, and I am just being flexible !

Hong Kong : one picture a day

A very cool blog about Hong Kong, where you can witness for instance the last typhoon that hit the city last week.

What makes a click

Interesting stuff on BW about advertising fraud online, and how Google, Yahoo and MSN team up to fight it.
Being an advertiser on these 3 chanels, I can certainly agree that the clicks results are sometimes a little bit "blurry" - and unless you want to spend time in assieging their Support Centers, you have often no choice but to trust them when they tell you "oh, yesterday you got XX clicks which will cost you YY $"...
I once went through the chapter of "fraudulous clicks" in Google Adwords FAQs... just to find out that they were fighting against it, using mysterious methods they could not reveal for commercial reason...

A pretty cool story about Customer Service...

Found on Tedlee blog (unfortunately direct link does not work ?): how his complain for late delivery of an Apple laptop was finally handled by... Steve Jobs himself !

Tells you something about the information flow within Apple, and how to turn a potential client dissatisfaction into a great display of customer management and corporate implication...

India again...

I was talking yesterday about how upscale the BPO companies in India were growing... well an article in today's French paper Le Monde is telling how pressure on costs have lead to a serious leak and security breach within one of these Indian call centers working for HSBC...

We could easily conclude that Asian companies have still a long way to go to reach European or western standards in terms of quality and reliability; however, this story also reminds me of another one I heard on French news last week, about how employees at Roissy CDG airport (Paris) were stealing from passengers' luggage... and their company was not Indian or Chinese...

Des fraudes écornent la crédibilité des centres d'appels indiens
LE MONDE | 01.08.06
   

©

IE 7 or Firefox 1.5 ?

I tried IE 7 browser lately. On their website, Microsoft almost yells at you "we heard you, you wanted it easier and more secure". I don't know about the security since I am not a code expert, but in terms of user-firendliness, it is clearly much better than the previous IE versions.

They had the great idea of implementing a nicely designed tab-based navigation (rings a bell?), a direct Feeds menu... let's state it clearly, they took all the good ideas from Mozilla. The result is actually quite good (for the simple end-user that I am, maybe developers or technicians will have another point of view).

The bad points are that it seems very slow to launch and execute, and it sometimes crashes, but I suppose it was to be expected from a Beta version.

Now Microsoft is facing a "sales" issue : first, how to stop IE users fleeing away to Firefox, then , how to get them back... On asiainspection.com, the trend of Firefox users keeps increasing (from about 0% in Jan. 05 to 10% in July 06, a global increase of 70% between 2006 and same period 2005...).

Client is king ?

An interesting article from Business Week about the call centers outsourcing in India, and how Indian companies are getting more and more upmarket, turning down basic price-cutting requests from US companies, to focus on value-added deals including global services outsourcing.

It makes me think of the China trend as well : we Western countries once believed that Chinese or Indian suppliers would fight to get our orders; well the relationship is now much more balanced - and factories / suppliers in Asia are now turning down easily deals from western companies - sometimes even after originally accepting the order - if they finally find out that other deals could be more interesting. This is almost a Darwin-like evolution scheme : in how many years will we deal with China the same way we now deal with our local suppliers ? Not so long I reckon...

Another test using Performancing add-on for Firefox

Looks great and more user-friedly than Qumana I used before... Heard about it here;