photo credit: Zoom Zoom

I came across an interesting website called CityMove, a website designed to bring together people looking to make a move to or from New York with New York Movers that can help them move their possessions around the country. I found it particularly interesting because it brings together a number of different concepts that just wouldn’t work in an offline world. There’s more on how the process works on my other blog, but here’s what struck me.

1. First of all, the site is a reverse auction site. You formulate your requirements and then let different suppliers bid to provide you with their services. In the old world, you would need to contact them all one by one. The Web brings these efficiencies to your fingertips.
2. Before you come to selecting your supplier, you can read reviews by other people who used the website. The “knowledge of the crowds” can be quite useful because it’s usually more accurate than a company’s advertising.
3. At the end of the transaction, you will be asked to leave a review and give details of the service you received. Crowdsourcing this information makes the site better for everyone and is one of the prime tenants the site is built on.

I found it quite interesting to look at the site, and even I know that if I was a New York mover, I would definitely want to be affiliated with them.

So, any other Web 2.0 attributes you can spot on the site?

Valves Suppliers UK is a company that specialises in industrial values, a pretty specialised market where customers number in the thousands rather than in the millions. They sell products like the Stainless Steel Dual Plate Wafer Check Valve that retails for around £500. You won’t be buying one of those every day, won’t you? Anyway, the Internet lets them get in touch with customers all around the globe, offering their products to any potential customers regardless of where they are in the world. They also have a selection of technical documents on the website and a user forum that helps them prove their authority in the field.

Any other niches you can find online?

Interesting article on the BBC website talking about how Bank are charging “sneaky fees”. It’s an interesting look into what’s happening to the bank overdraft market, where legislation has clamped down on unauthorised overdrafts. In return, the rate of authorised overdrafts has increased, with an average of around 19%. That’s an average, so while there are some that are lower, there are also others that are higher.

It can be quite awful to be hit by unexpected charges, so make sure you always know what’s going in and what’ going out. It’s the best way to be in control. So before you spend money on that xbox 360, just make sure you have enough cash in the bank.

Western Governors University is an online university that has a variety of courses ranging from teaching and health degrees, all the way to IT and business degrees. They are designed for people to participate remotely, at their own pace. They work on an interesting basis where you pay for a six-month term at a time, rather than for the credits you’re taking. They also offer scholarships and tuition aid if you require.

So if you want to do an online nursing degree or a business degree, check them out; they might work well for you.

Interesting post on Seth Godin‘s blog entitled Apparent Risk and Actual Risk which talks about how people can perceive situations as being more risky than they actually are, and sometimes end up choosing to go down more risky paths just because of this perception.

So, what drives this perception. I put it down to two different factors. First of all, it’s easy to overlook certain factors when performing your personal “risk evaluation”. Assumptions and ignorance are the worst two factors here and can lead to a shortfall in evaluation. The other problem is jumping on the bandwagon and accepting “common knowledge”. It’s amazing how many misconceptions make their way to the mainstream; one of my favourites is that celery is a natural fat burner because it consumes more calories to digest than it contains.

Anyway, morale of the story. Next time you think about a “risky” decision, look at if from a different angle and check whether it’s really risky.

It’s always good to be considerate of your partners, regardless of whether they’re a large computer manufacturer or a small company that makes the best best weight loss pill in the market. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with other people at the end of the phone, people with passion and ideas, people with families and bills to pay. So phoning them at 3:00am might just not be the best idea in the world!

Check out the World Time Zone website

I came across a post on a website or an Orange County tech support firm called Defining You, in which they talk about the importance of establishing your identity online. I think I want to take their article one step further though. They talk about the importance of getting a domain name that reflects who you are and your brand but nowadays that’s not enough.

The reason is the rise of social networks. It’s not just enough to get your domain name, but you also need to stake your claim on most of the well known social properties out there. Networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have thousands of people passing through every day and your name may ring a bell for them.

You also need to do this to avoid someone trying to take advantage of your name and leveraging your brand capital. Having a corproate account means you cannot take advantage of something like your driving license or social security disability details to prove who you are; your brand name says it all; and if someone has camped on it, it can be rather hard to pry them off.

So keep an eye on where people are hanging out and make sure you have a presence in those spaces. You never know when it may be important.

Take Stratavia for example, a company that provides a data center automation offering. Their website offers a cohesive message around what the company does and reinforces that by promoting different ideas to improve credibility; a list of awards they have achieved, different news and quotes from their customer. All this helps sustain the image they are trying to project and strengthens their online presence.

All you need to do is provide the member state the VAT number belongs to, the VAT number itself and the system returns the name and address the VAT number is registered to.

Useful thing to know isn’t it?

I was thinking about this while flicking through a Graduate Magazine on EuroGraduate. It’s a magazine and website that focuses on graduate careers and jobs listings but also has a whole boatload of advice around living abroad, working abroad and starting your career. The website itself is packed with information pertinent to most graduates, but I particularly enjoyed flicking through the magazine. You’ll notice I said flicking again, and that’s just what the website lets you do. It lets you read through the magazine, flick the pages, zoom into areas or interest and print of relevant articles. I was pretty impressed with how usable the interface was. As you would expect from a web-based medium, it also lets you click on anything and sends you directly to the website relating to that click. I found that pretty useful.

The website itself is divided into a number of sections but the main areas are a career database and an education database. The career database lets you search for jobs and opportunities all over Europe; jobs aimed at graduates of all kinds. The education database was particularly interesting to me, as it lets you search through a number of post graduate courses which are on offer around Europe.

Pretty cool website I thought. It does start to answer the question as to what to do once you do achieve your degree.