The 2007 Brandz Rankings, based on survey conducted by Millward Brown, presents a different story http://www.brandz.com/z3_top_51.html . Methodologies are different, but for the average person, which list makes more sense? Here's the top 10:
1. Google 2. GE (General Electric) 3. Microsoft 4. Coca Cola 5. China Mobile 6. Marlboro 7. Wal-Mart 8. Citi 9. IBM 10. Toyota
Any decent business plan will try to cash in on social practices rather than change them. Habits are hard to change.
I would suppose their first/second/third thought about it was "Sure, with our wireless connectivity, we can certainly introduce an e-book marketplace for the customers in version 2.0 of Kindle." Borrowing and lending e-books seem like easy features to add on (e.g., only one kindle can read it at a time). Re-selling is part of Amazon's bread-and-butter, only the economics for the case of e-books needs to be figured out.
Honestly, swapping sounds a bit cheesy to me, that's again trivial to implement.
There are many ways to decide on "importance" of a person in your life through the use of your e-mail behavior. No sensible developer will base on the "Number of messages" really. That's too simplistic. Importance can be determined in many different ways:
The bi-directional communication strength - how frequently do you and X respond to each other's mails? (typically kills spammers)
The delay in your response - how quickly do you respond to the person from the time you saw the message in your inbox? (shows your eagerness)
The length of your responses - how much effort do you put in to the replies? (polite responses "out of courtesy" may be factored out this way)
There are, of course, different interpretations of "importance" based on context - family, work, social circle. These above factors and more (domain name of the person X) can help determine classes of importance and re-order your emails accordingly. There is ample scope for innovation. People here are arguing about privacy and over-loading of services, but others (non-Slashdotters??) might find these value-additions attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
The 2007 Brandz Rankings, based on survey conducted by Millward Brown, presents a different story http://www.brandz.com/z3_top_51.html . Methodologies are different, but for the average person, which list makes more sense? Here's the top 10:
1. Google
2. GE (General Electric)
3. Microsoft
4. Coca Cola
5. China Mobile
6. Marlboro
7. Wal-Mart
8. Citi
9. IBM
10. Toyota
Any decent business plan will try to cash in on social practices rather than change them. Habits are hard to change.
I would suppose their first/second/third thought about it was "Sure, with our wireless connectivity, we can certainly introduce an e-book marketplace for the customers in version 2.0 of Kindle." Borrowing and lending e-books seem like easy features to add on (e.g., only one kindle can read it at a time). Re-selling is part of Amazon's bread-and-butter, only the economics for the case of e-books needs to be figured out.
Honestly, swapping sounds a bit cheesy to me, that's again trivial to implement.
-
The bi-directional communication strength - how frequently do you and X respond to each other's mails? (typically kills spammers)
-
The delay in your response - how quickly do you respond to the person from the time you saw the message in your inbox? (shows your eagerness)
-
The length of your responses - how much effort do you put in to the replies? (polite responses "out of courtesy" may be factored out this way)
There are, of course, different interpretations of "importance" based on context - family, work, social circle. These above factors and more (domain name of the person X) can help determine classes of importance and re-order your emails accordingly. There is ample scope for innovation. People here are arguing about privacy and over-loading of services, but others (non-Slashdotters??) might find these value-additions attractive.