Olivier Travers

Octopus.com Board of Directors I hadn’t noticed Loudcloud’s Marc Andreessen was on Octopus’ board. Did you know Jakob Nielsen seats on Athoc’s Board of Advisors? 05/03/01 update: both links were broken due to redesigns. I’d expect web startups to use redirects when they change their directory structures. A nice 404 is good, but the onus [...]

Clickmarks Another pertal (personal portal) site

More on web site personalization based on location Yesterday I wrote I didn’t like web sites that use your browser settings to change how a page appears. To be even more explicit, let’s look at different practices by some international web sites. If your browser is French, Lycos will pull you automatically from www.lycos.com to [...]

alerts.com – Connecting with customers, intelligently: email alerts, change detection & notification services "Alerts.com’s personalized alerting service gives you the power to communicate with your customers on their terms. We can help you seamlessly deliver the information they need – where, when and how they want it." That’s a step in the right direction, though [...]

What Akamai acquired CallTheShots for? CallTheShots was apparently an Octopus/OnePage wannabe. Akamai bought them to enhance their Edge services. I infer they want to mix geographic-based personalization with blocks of content requested by the user. Is this a way to getting 100Mbp/sec Broadband to your home PC available today?

Are web tours bad? Though I don’t feel like I need them for myself, I’ll stick to supporting them.

You don’t need "news" when you already know what comes next One reason we still rely on the traditional news channels (company publishes a press release, press agency packages it into a news item, broadcasters spread it), is because we don’t know something is going to happen until it already has. Yet, many "news" are [...]

Yahoo! Launches Yahoo! Buzz Index for Brand Marketers Many sites want to market their aggregate data, based on how people profile themselves and declare their interests. Yahoo! instead sells usage and interest data based on what people actually do with their site, as shown at Yahoo!Buzz, now part of their huge Fusion Marketing offering. 12/18/01 [...]

Salon Reaches Out to Freelancers: Here’s Your Piece of the Pie More often than not, missing to communicate with partners before you come up with a contract will backfire. Salon’s terms might not be evil in themselves (though they take a hefty percentage just for distribution), but some prior consultation might have helped. Since everyone [...]

The Debriefing: John Seely Brown "Lurking is a prosocial activity? Absolutely. Lurk is the cognitive apprenticeship term for legitimate peripheral participation. The culture of the Internet allows you to link, lurk, and learn. Once you lurk you can pick up the genre of that community, and you can move from the periphery to the center [...]