"Obsess over customer"

Quick Links May 11 2009

Congratulations to Anthony Williams/ChemSpider being acquired by RSC; Endeca and Mashery are part of Guardian Open platfom where application developers are mashing up Guardian content with other APIs; Jeff Bezos and Kindle are today's Gutenberg; Turkey is leading in time spent eating per day ( I bet all the coffees and teas that we drink are included in the 160minutes plus)

Mashing up Science Amazon Way

Deepak announced Amazon's Amazon Public Data Sets program. This is another good initiative for "open data" and for scientists

Lessons from Amazon

If you can acquire why try to build it? Could not they build a social networking site for book lovers? Yes, but they rightfully and logically choose to buy Shelfari.

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

Customer focus, customer centric: lessons from Amazon

Once you put customer centricity as your main mission success is closer to reach:

"There's another situation, too, where I think being customer focused is better, and thats when you are a leader. If you're competitor focused, you tend to slack off when your benchmarks say that you're best. But if your focus is on customers, you keep improving"

"Years from now, when people look at back at Amazon, I want them to say that we uplifted customer-centricity across the entire business world"

Jeff Bezos, at HBR October 2007, "The Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos.

OpenURL and Digital Archiving

John Udell (now with Microsoft) interviews Dan Chudnov (Yale University) and Tony Hammond (Nature) on OpenURL, DOIs and related issues.

"I think that the issues that libraries and academic publishers are wrestling with — persistent long-term storage, permanent URLs, reliable citation indexing and analysis — are ones that will matter to many businesses and individuals." via John Udell

Is there a hint here that Microsoft can be moving to digital archiving similar to Amazon?