Muddle

Service Culture in Japan & Uniqlo coming to America

jkottke:

For the most recent issue of Fast Company, Jeff Chu profiled Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Uniqlo, one of the hottest retail companies in the world. The piece is full of interesting business & design wisdom throughout.

Yanai, though, cannot resist the American market. Around the corner from his…

That’s how the do everything in Japan (the two handed receipt/card return). And, you don’t have to tip anyone. But, the customer service thing, yeah, it becomes very fake very fast, and most Japanese folks will tell you this. (See page 17 of this Economist article.) On the flip side of this cultural nuance, many people love French stuff here (because it’s a symbol of prosperity and happiness [bread, wine, cafe lifestyle]), but have pretty serious culture shock when they actually visit France partly for related reasons. (see “trigger 2” of this Wikipedia article on the subject.) I love Uniqlo, though.

youmightfindyourself:

Back in the early days of Apple, Inc., long before he began sporadically responding to emails from customers, the inimitable Steve Jobs could sometimes be found signing computer chips, attaching them to sheets of Apple stationery, and then replying to fans of his company. (via Letters of Note)

Dope. Micro-chip signature.

Jonathan Mak.

The Obama’s Taxes

Much less than last year, but then (as Monica noted), he didn’t have a new best-selling book out.

The Art Of Pitch-Perfect Emails

Until recently, Mr. Tone said, informality was simply a benefit of working at start-ups. “Now it’s like one of the mandatory steps along the way,” he said. “Like you can’t get VC funding if people aren’t wearing sweat pants,” referring to venture capital.

Which would merely be funny if it weren’t also proving true on occasion. Ms Zidel said she recently attended a competition to win start-up investment for her site, SittingAround.com. “My four competitors all showed up in suits,” she said. “I wore jeans and wound up winning. Not only did the audience look past my outfit, I actually think it helped convey the confidence I had in my company.”

The Full Article.

Why Women Rule The Internet

Oo Nwoye, founder of OnePage, asks if anyone can think of any major internet startup company with a black founder. Failing off the top of his head, he scours the internet:

Where I have checked for black founders

• I have read thousands, yes thousands of articles from the biggest Technology blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWrteWeb, GigaOm) covering Internet companies and I am yet to come across one article covering a startup with a black founder. (Please note that there might have been some published on a day I did not read.)
• I have followed TechCrunch50’s and a 40, LeWeb, DEMO and other competitions startups, yet to see a single one there too. (There might be one or two among the hundreds but I am yet to come across them.)
• I have seen the stars come out from incubators like YCombinator, Techstars and SeedCamp and I am yet to see a black founder among the renowned ones (except Justin.TV so far.)
• I have read books (e.g. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, The Stories of Facebook, YouTube and myspace by Sarah Lacy, The Google Story, etc) that document the stories of scores of startups featuring  hundreds of characters but I cannot recollect a black character in any of the stories
• I have gone through the interview archive (I’d guess over a hundred interviews) of Mixergy, the awesome site that interviews lots of startups founders but have not crossed an interview of a successful black Internet startup founder.
• Myself. Like I said earlier, I use lots of internet apps and I do not use one by a black founder.

He quickly stipulates this, though:

Why I rule out discrimination.

Although it is reported that In 2008, blacks constituted only 1.5% the Valley’s tech population, I would rule out discrimination. This is not a white/black issue, it is a Black-everybody else issue. The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar  is Persian, That of Admob, Omar Hamoui is Syrian. The founder of SlideShare is both a woman and an Indian so she is a minority (in US) on both counts. There are several other women and minorities (at least in US) that have been able to create world class startups too. Secondly, based on my experience in the UK, the ground is as level (racially) as can be.

Fascinating article. He said he wrote and deleted it many times. I can related to that. Whenever you want to write about something even slightly controversial it’s hard to adequately communicate that controversy without getting sucked into it and forgetting that you had something new to say about it. You can tell by looking at the comments it gets pretty dicey.

Square - Credit Card Reader for the Iphone4

Whichever company can upload the most floorplans before everyone else will, presumably, have quite an economic advantage. So how could you protect your proprietary map sets? What if you’re the only company in the world with access to maps of a certain convention center or sports stadium or new airport terminal—how could you keep a rival firm from simply jacking your cartography?

Introduce false information, perhaps: trap halls, trap stairs, trap attics, trap rooms. Nothing sinister—you don’t want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn’t exist in the event of a real-life fire—but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you’re standing in?

Awesome. More at BLDBLG

via Patrick