Born on the Web

Since I’ve started working I have the great habit of regularly buying books to add to my personal library. I have to say my bookshelf is starting to look good…

This month I’ve ordered Outliers the new book of Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve read all of his books and they really are terrific.

Thanks for the tip, Bart.

I was just wondering where do you guys order your books? I’m using bol.com which is fast (delivery 2 – 4 days) and relatively cheap. They also have a good collection of English books. 

I’m an avid public transportation user: train, bus, tube, … The only thing I hate is waiting too long for a train to come, or missing a train because you were seconds late.

This could be solved by a simple location based service. (I’m not completely sure, but I think both Mobistar and Proximus are already providing these kind of services, correct?) When you come close to a train station, say like in a range of 200m / 600m (you should be able to adjust this yourself). The service detects you are nearing a train station and simply sends you a message with the schedule for trains going to your home station. So a 100% push medium, which is triggered by your location. I wouldn’t mind paying like 50 cents per message, because it adds value. It let’s me know if I need to start running or can go grab a bite before catching my train.

But since the nmbs (belgium railway company) doesn’t even provide a mobile site. I’m guessing it’s going to take a while before seeing this kind of services …

I talked about this before, but if the NMBS would open up it’s train schedule database, a whole new range of services can exist:

• more services for the people who travel with the train, you make their lifes easier
• an extra business model if you charge for commercial use of the web service
• build an ecosystem around the brand NMBS

Really, somebody should wake them up … we live in the year 2008, not 1998. Damnit !!

Scoble has a very nice blogpost on Zooomr its recent problems, I don't know if you followed the story. But after releasing its next big update to the site it went down for 2 weeks. Be sure to read to the end and see the embedded youtube... inspiring.

http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/04/zooomr-next-big-inch/