I’m a huge fan of Steven Levitt, especially after reading “Freakonomics” as well as his fantastic blog . About a month ago we were discussing with my brother (who is leading the IT department of one of the largest hospitals in Bulgaria) why and how people get incented to better do their job. I shared my managerial experience on financial bonuses and the fact they aren’t working in several cases and suggested him to read Levitt’s vision, especially on why real estate agents aren’t your friends. And talking about the book, we found those nice videos on YouTube (after the break) Continue Reading »
With the cordial help of Rich and Forts, while answering their questions on the future of marketing and communications, we managed to collect some interesting thoughts - not only my answers, but also a growing list of marketing professionals. After the break, please find my answers as well as the link to the other interviews
According to Gizmodo blog, iPhone has been totally hacked:
According to the usual suspects, now you can 100%-unlock the iPhone using a Turbo SIM card, without depending on the version of your current carrier card. Testers say it will give you full calling, SMS and
GPRS data capabilities with any network and no extra hardware needed, since it only requires you to modify the $80 blank SIM using your own iPhone.
The hackers are claiming that this method doesn’t use card readers and it doesn’t depend on your previous card version either, so it doesn’t matter if it is a V1, V2 or V3. All of them will work fine.
While the Turbo SIM-based method is not software-only, it seems simple and cheap enough for anyone to follow.
However, to save you any potential pain we will test it here as soon as we get our Turbo SIM cards —which are about to arrive. We will give you a full report on our results as soon as we try it.
Well, I’m not sure how this breakthrough will affect Apple/AT&T relationship, but personally I enjoy the overall hacking effort that has been made - there’s no walled garden that can be protected for a long time. Too much emphasis on closing the content into a single network has never been a long-lasting strategy.
By an article in Read/Write Web I found an interesting idea on how to build custom applications with no or little understanding of coding. The service is called Iceberg and allows users to create custom applications based on business model diagrams only. Continue Reading »
As I have already posted previously, bloggers have become a key player in the battle of freedom of speech, both here in Europe as well as in the United States. A new bill has been passed in the House of Representatives in order to protect what is becoming the next 6th power - the citizen journalism. In fact, the bill that have been introduced by Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) aims on defining what is a reporter.
Apart the extremely alarming case of police harassment of bloggers, our media community is confronted with a curious case of interpretation of the liberty of expression and speech. During the interrogatory of the blogger summoned by the police was also warned that bloggers are more likely to be brought to justice than an ordinary offline media journalist, because journalists enjoy a higher grade of protection by the law.
Just take a look how the Chief Directorate “Combating Organized Crime” is successfully coping with its main task - Combating The Organized Crime… An Article from The Times. Probably, after their huge successes in this field they focused on the second largest threat to the State - the blogging community.
The Freedom of Speech is something that is never granted. You must earn the right to be free.
Freedom of Speech is under threat in Bulgaria. Even if the country is a new member of the European Union, the unreformed police is still applying methods that are more adequate to the deeply repressive communist regime Bulgaria was till 1989.
A prominent Bulgarian blogger - Michel Bozgounov- has been summoned by the by the Chief Directorate “Combating Organized Crime” because he shared information on his blog over flash mob protests against a very controversial decision of the Supreme Administrative Court to revoke the status of a National Park of territories in the Strandja Mountain. This decision generated a wide wave of protests across the country over a strong suspicion that it has been influenced (read: bribed) by real estate big investments’ interests.
According to Michel, the police has ‘files’ on several other blogs and intends to summon them too.
I have sent a letter of protest to the European Commissioner of Human Rights. If you have a way to ask your Government to question the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs or directly the Government of the Republic of Bulgaria on the matter, everyone here at the Bulgarian blogsphere and Internet community will be grateful.
Here’s my letter to the EU Commissioner:
Dear Mr. Hammarberg,
I would like to inform you of my profound indignation of a fact of police harassment over free speech in Bulgaria. A member of the blog community – Michel Bozgounov (www.optimiced.com), bound up in recent protests over the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court to revoke the status of a National Park of territories in the Strandja Mountain has been summoned by the Chief Directorate “Combating Organized Crime” and then warned by a police protocol to restrain himself of publishing links or quotes of sites which contain potential law infringement over illegal public gatherings. Bozgounov has also been warned that other blogs, supporting the totally peaceful protests will be “warned or punished” for publishing information on the protests schedules and places.
The so described “illegal gatherings” were widely covered by the Bulgarian media, such as the three national TV channels (BNT, bTV and Nova TV), several newspapers and large internet coverage.
As a member of the blog and internet publishing community, I find this fact profoundly threatening the Free Speech in Bulgaria. As a young professional that has nevertheless a clear reminiscence of the Communist Era in Bulgaria, I see an awful repeating pattern in this visibly repressive behavior. I’m also deeply impressed, that blogging in Bulgaria has been somehow declared an “organized crime” and then persecuted by a Chief Directorate “Combating Organized Crime” – an organization with very doubting successes in what it is supposed to be their core activity – combating mafia and organized crime in Bulgaria.
I would like to ask you to take all necessary measures in your competence for preventing the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior Affairs and The Bulgarian Government in stepping up to this extremely dangerous path on combating free speech.
An after-work discussion with friends and colleagues on social networking was the main reason for starting to write down this article. I realize that as someone who has never been deeply involved or tempted by the SN world, I’m not exactly the most appropriate person to discuss this matter. The only exception was my long-term involvement with LinkedIn as a valuable - for me - business tool. This is the reason I started a discussion on Q&A in LinkedIn with the idea of trying to understand both the business models and the marketing useful moves in this overcrowded and highly competitive environment of web-based social networking services.
In a emotional statement, the prominent blogger Robert Scoble shared his feelings on a preview of a ‘revolutionary Microsoft product’ yesterday: