Honey, my sweet and sticky moonshine business

My sweet summer activity is organizing my bees in perfect order. Imagine getting 50000 bees to march on your order? That is quite a challenge ...

Handling bees is actually a very interesting activity. The main tasks include:

• Expansion during spring to prepare and scale each bee-hive for all flowers blossoming during early summer.
• Making sure they have enough space to store all honey.
• Counter all attempts to swarm.
• Remove honey to stimulate further collection
• Extracting the honey
• Tapping it on jars
• Preparing for the winter
• Rest

Seeing the small insects flying all day collecting honey, working for your wellbeing, is a true pleasure. As most of the work is done during the summer enables you to more carefully study nature and its changes. Will it be sunshine today, when will the raspberry blossom and most importantly: will my customers like my honey?

To help with all of these tasks me and a friend have started a project to automate as much as possible of the tasks and at least create a good foundation to make decisions on when to visit the bees to collect honey. We will create a system for weighing the bee-hive and tracking the weather. Thus we will be able to see when it is time to collect the honey and what the weather is like (can I open the hive today?). We will of course make all design available on the web.

Pilgrimage as the next big thing?

Pilgrimage has in history been a source for seeking redemption, healing or status. There was even a children pilgrimage to Jerusalem which never reached its goal, everyone died ... One can just wonder why they went on the journey. It was clearly not the children who had decided that they should embark on the trip.

Today many Moslem's go to Makkah, Christians to Santiago de Compostela and elsewhere. It has gained some attention and status having went on such a pilgrimage.

Why would anyone go on a pilgrimage today with our access to information, knowledge, and shortage of time? What can we learn from doing a pilgrimage? Knowledge, experience, insight, and most importantly of all freedom being in the step, here and now, are some of the things that could potentially be gained through a pilgrimage.

Yesterday I tried it out on a one day pilgrimage to S:t Ibbs Church on Ven. A beautifully situated church on a high cliff with a magnificent view on the northern Öresund strait between Denmark and Sweden. I volunteered partly because I wanted to get closer to myself, God and the nature. Did I get what I expected?

First of all we walked in silence, quite a different experience for a a guy that can speak words like a waterfall throws water across the cliff. Secondly the priest who walked first set the pace, also a challenge for a man used to control his own steps. Most importantly was the change in mental state that came after a short while. By focusing on here and now and on each step all thoughts just disappeared into the mental /dev/null. I could enjoy the undisturbed scent of roses, details of houses I've never seen before, and I could focus on what is most important to me. In a calm and relaxed mental environment I made decisions for days to come.

Finally I noted during the walk a fantastic garden, very much like paradise, with a beautiful gate. The next gate was very worn down by weather, rust and non-existent maintenance. The third gate was equally fantastic as the first one, but with signs everywhere saying: "Private".

I noticed all these gates, but did not make the connection that our Priest did. She said as a summary: Do you want to be an open and available garden like the first one, or worn down, empty non-refilled spirit like the second garden, or a beautiful but closed person? I still have some way to go ...

So why did I write this entry? I believe that people including myself are looking for ways to develop themselves. Pilgrimage is therefore the next big thing for people who have everything!

Will access to all your web traces lead to the marketeers wet dream, increase long tail or just create privacy problems?

One of the most important aspects of the future is to build a relation ship with each customer and thus build a loyalty based on always exceeding expectations and deepened relationship through permissions.
One such interesting initiative is AttenTV that collects the click-stream of people and sells it to marketeers. The purpose is to get an even closer look to the inner being and what they prefer.

This idea is good but could be improved with some small adjustments. First of all just selling the combined click-streams adds little value to the advertiser. First of all it is impossible to build a personally relationship, it just alienates the customer and creates a feeling of safety at the company. The feeling of safety is just imaginary since you will just be looking in the past, not what will happen in the future.

It also misses the notion of the long tail. Analyzing all the click-streams it would be possible to find patterns and based on my own historical click-streams it should be possible to find the strange and not expected conjunctions between different people. Creating such a long-tail of knowledge will enable both the advertiser and the distributor to offer better alternatives and keeping the storage of most popular lower. The biggest value however comes if you are using the click-stream to start building a long-lasting relationship. As additional value you can start advising of alternative services depending on the click-stream.

The biggest value from AttenTV comes from the ability to build long lasting relationships, offer a more complete offering since the long-tail will tell us what customer wants here and now. Finally this will preserve privacy since only companies that you have an established relationship will be able to make use of your click-stream. I would also suppose there will be some kind of reward for participating in this exercise.

An interesting idea with some potential if it is modified a bit.

The boomerang effect

There are several services we all buy that can be easily doubled if the company providing the service dare ask for the return. Stefan Engeseth points it out very clearly in his June issue newsletter. For example if you are going by taxi from A to B it would be smart by the taxi company to ask for the return trip directly. The same applies to restaurants which could offer a discount if the next similar meal is bought directly when the first is bought.

When leaving McDonalds I should be asked if I wanted the same meal the next time and when this time is. Using telecom services like location and SMS it would be easy to help retail to add the boomerang effect to their business. The good thing is that it also helps the company becoming more agile and closer to their customers, almost what Stefan would call ONE.

Use discounts to get the next order (at Arlanda Express you get 50% discount on the return ticket if you buy both at the same time). Use telecom services to confirm, collect permissions, and use telecom services to remind the user when it is getting closer. You can also start collecting information on who is buying what and what products they buy at retail stores. From the permissions and what they actually buy it is possible to create a big tail and good predictions for the future.

Let's through some boomerang!

Security, for whom?

I've always been curious on why things are what they are. One such area is security. We get more and more cameras, guards and safe doors around us. Gated communities are a growing fact even in Sweden where people used to lock the door and leave the key on a nail above it. But is security everything? Are we have happy if we feel secure?

I don't think so. I see it as a trend towards more of the same. One guard makes you want a another guard in another place. And so on until you have cameras and guards everywhere. Will it make you secure and safe?

Let me take an example. When I visited Israel last week there were armed guards everywhere and at all shopping malls they searched your car and asked what you should do here. Did they expect the terrorist to say "I'm going to blow this place up"? And the search was so bad it made me feel even more insecure. If I want to bomb the place it is easy to hide a bomb and get it in the building. On the other hand I got lost when walking in Tel Aviv and suddenly I was in the middle of a park with no lights at all. That made me feel really scared especially since there were men standing in the shrubbery watching me. So you have armed guards everywhere and no lights for everyday safety, it does not make sense to me.

Another thing that does not make sense is the new airport rules and the increased security everywhere. When leaving Copenhagen or Stockholm you have to wait for 30 min up to 1.5 hour to get through security. And then you are not allowed to carry any liquids of any kind unless it is less than 100ml and fits into a one liter plastic bag. The procedures in Copenhagen and most of Europe are from OK to very good with a few exceptions. They are Spain, Portugal and Madeira.

The worst so far is Madeira where they didn't even bother to look through me when the metal detector went off. In Spain they are quite ignorant and sloppy in their search. In Barcelona I went to the wrong luggage terminal and have to go through security once more to get back into the right terminal and go to luggage pick-up. Without showing anything else than my passport. That's an excellent way for terrorists getting in a lot of liquid bombs!

This was before leaving Israel. After having to go through their security procedures, there is no way in hell to get anything past their checks. This is what I call security and it made me feel real safe.

So the feeling this gives me is that security done wrong increases insecurity, both real and experienced, done right is expensive to all parties. There are no easy ways of doing this, but just having a lot of armed guys out there does not increase it, rather the opposite. It can make some people feel secure and then they don't have to take responsibility for their own actions. The lesson from the non-lit up park is that let people see for themselves and then they can make a judgment. Hiding in the dark is only going to increase insecurity.

Finally I strongly believe that people who feel hope and that there is a future are less probable to make any actions. The most important area is to create hope through education in our time. Learning and education is the key here I think. Instead of investing all resources into security measures, spend resources on education and improvement in learning techniques.

The ultimate ONE company - MyFootballClub

You could read about the newest football club in the latest issue of the Economist (Here comes's Fanchester United. This club is unique in the way it is managed and controlled. Each shareholder can vote for which players should play in the next game and which should be sold and bought.

The concept is absolutely fantastic. You will create a club with real fan involvement and engagement. They have to visit the homepage often, have to keep updated with the results and they really care who's playing. Furthermore the players really feel they need to deserve the respect of the fans, not just the manager. Since there are so many fans, no one will get selected because they have the manager's eyes.

I would call this the first true ONE company ever. For the first time the fans and customers are invited to participate in the everyday life of the club. I will of course become a member and we'll see how it goes.

Other favorites when it comes to customer involvement in John Fluevog who let customers design their own shows or accessories and then they are shared as Open Source to the public. You can read more about John and his shoes on Fluevog Shoes. Besides this he has wonderful shoes as well :-D

If you are interested in more about ONE I can recommend Stefan Engeseth (Detective Marketing).

Missionaries in Change

"Everything changes" is a well used saying. We believe that it is only today that everything changes and that the speed has increased. Looking back in history one can see that there has been no period of time when nothing changed and everything stood still. Roman empire was changing all the time, from internal initiated change and from external pressure. I think that the reason we talk and experience so much change today is that the media and information is much more available today. Thus we get to hear about new and different things all the time. This creates a pressure for change just because we hear so much about how others have done it. The other influencing factor for faster change is competitive pressure. Since competition is much more fierce today people, organizations and countries have to change to stay ahead of competition.

Why am I writing this? Because today I read an ad from the Swedish IT and Management consultancy company Connecta who claimed to be Missionaries in Change. Interesting that organizations see themselves as missionaries in general and in change specifically. Since everything has changed all the time in history, why do we need missionaries in change? Do I sound like an old fashioned uncle now? Of course we need to change, we have always done it and it is an integral part of human mindset. Why then missionaries in change?

The picture they used to illustrate their change mission was with a consultant holding a bee-frame where bees were flying around in the air. And then saying "When it seems impossible". I think they want you to get the picture of it being impossible to handle a lot of bees flying around. But for a trained bee keeper it is an everyday task you do without much thought. So why is it impossible? Doesn't it depend on the persons mindset, expectation and experience?

My take on this is that change is inevitable, it has always happened, goes faster today because media is reporting it, and it depends on your mindset, expectation and experience.