Notes from the Nexus

Volvo Milestone

My trusty Volvo 850 hit a milestone last night, just had to share it:

(Click on the image for a larger image.)

And of course, the car is 11 years old!

How to treat customers

A good read on how to treat customers was recently posted on Bankstocks.com, a website with "independent insights on the financial industry."  This post, by David M Martin, Chief Training Consultant, NCBS goes well beyond financial services - it's applicable to all businesses.  All of his examples, in fact, are from the airline industry. 

I like one of David's final remarks:  "Customers have a tendency to become like the kind of customers you treat them."  Treat them well, they'll be good customers.  Treat them poorly

Thanks to Scott Loftesness for pointing out this post!

New new media

There is a bubbling of new new media.  Blogs, tags, moblogs, podcasts...  Once again, not being driven at all by the "old media."

A friend and fellow blogger, John Furrier, has launched a great new website: Podtech.  He's posting a series of interviews as podcasts.  So far he's posted interviews with Dean Drako and Zach Levow, the cofounders of Barracuda Networks, and with Amr Awadallah, the founder of VivaSmart/Aptivia (acquired by Yahoo! in 2000 - where Amr is now a Senior Engineer in addition to being a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford).

John has more fantastic interviewees lined up, looking forward to hearing these upcoming podcasts.

Part of the new new media?  Stay tuned...

Entrepreneurial Environment

Intriguing article in yesterday's Wall St. Journal (subscription required) on the barriers to entrepreneurship in many countries. What we take for granted as straightforward tasks here in the US are difficult and costly in other locales.  An example cited (below) is that in the Philippines it takes 11 days to go through the 50 procedures to legally start a business, at a cost equal to 19.5% of the average annual income.  Here in California it takes less than a day, and that includes dealing with both the Secretary of State and the Federal tax authorities.

The concept of the article is reminiscent of Hernando de Soto's great book:  The Mystery of Capital, where he explains in great detail the difficulty in most of the world (outside of Western Europe and the US) in creating a legal status for ownership of capital.

Makes one realize how lucky we are to be residents of a society with a deep network of laws supporting capital and easy processes to being an entrepreneur.