Mauricio had just posted about the ads for Nokia N95 , now compare those ads for the iPhone. Which one is going to be more effective ???

Apparently, there are only 12 types of commercials.(iPhone is a “Demo” and the N95 is a “parody”.) Who knew ?!?

Seth Godin has just posted about an article on Customer Behaviour on eBay.

Key findings:

• More than 43% of people bid more than the “Buy Now” price.
• Buyers are attracted to lower start prices. (Even when shipping is extra.)
• Bidding strategy is mixed, timing is key to get final bids for an auction.

I would like to add some basic observations from my previous auction experiences:

• Looking for bargains, search for “mis-spelled” items. Sometimes you’ll get get a bargain as people can’t find it.
• Do some research on your sellers. High ratings doesn’t necessarily mean good service.
• If a seller is using western union as a payment then its a scam.
• If you’re unsure about the seller, use safe trader or paypal.

Just discovered the Venture Hacks blog on venture capital, from a response to Paul Graham’s essay on “The Equity Equation”.

It has some great advice on

• Vesting
• Terms Sheets
• Options

Business

• Facebook Monetization: Lessons from Google
• 10 Questions with Scott Berkun - Myths of Innovation
• Why startups often beat the big boys
• Techcrunch - How raise money from VC’s
• Why raising money is unproductive
• Paul Graham on the Equity equation  UPDATE Thoughts on Equity Equation (Must read for every startup)
• Seth Godin Lens on tips for email whitelists - (As some who had to email 2M customers every week, using whitelists is crictical to getting email to your users.

Tech / Design

• You tube scalability
• Emerging Web 2.0 design trends
• Rails’ Ridiculous Restrictions, a Rant
• Outstanding start pages
• 70 CSS tips

Stuff

• Eight ways to boost your inspiration
• 80 hour myth
• Get yourself a morning ritual

Here’s a good article from e-week about Web 2.0 and SOA. It illustrates how “Web 2.0″ principles are being used to reshape how companies are looking at the design of internal applications and services.

From the article, it talks about how H&R Block are re-designing a number of applications as web services.

Dan Cahoon was looking for a way to streamline staffing operations at tax company H&R Block, the nation’s largest seasonal employer. Rather than use traditional desktop-based software for the job, the senior systems architect at H&R Block was able to deliver SOA-connected AJAX portlets to more than 12,000 branch offices for temporary work spaces to meet the company’s staffing needs.

Cahoon’s example illustrates the growing trend of merging Web 2.0 technologies with SOA (service-oriented architecture) to address issues normally handled through PC-based software, resulting in faster, cheaper and more flexible solutions….

And the business people can start to build useful applications from other data feeds, ala popfly / yahoo pipes.

….This trend touches on RIAs (rich Internet applications), mashups, AJAX, RSS, REST (Representational State Transfer) and other Web 2.0 areas. Now being referred to as Enterprise 2.0, the Web 2.0 technologies are helping to create rich interactive front ends to SOA back-end systems. In addition, line-of-business users who typically are nondevelopers can take services and build mashups without IT involvement—a potential boon for productivity but also a possible problem without proper governance.

This also raises some important questions about SOA, webservices and a like. We’re going to need to figure out ways to evaluate the capabilities of the different services. As SOA are evolving very quickly, it will be really hard to pick the right services and frameworks to achieve the objectives.

Food for thought.

The ZoomIn Mapping System in Australia has been shutdown as of this morning (16/07/07).

We’ve shutdown the API, as its not viable for us to continue to run the API when there’s no level playfield for map data licensing.

We’d like to thank our customers for their business over the last 12 months.

If you’re looking for an alternative mapping system, please refer to either:

• Terrapages
• Google Maps