Today was the first time that I was watching one of the many RedBull videos that get uploaded everyday on YouTube and I saw relevant ads.

Really its the first time that I was watching a video about snowboarding and I saw ads about snowboarding gear and a greek ecommerce site with relevant content.

It can't be that hard to avoid showing whatever comes first?! Its all about relevance and at YouTube they don't seem to get my preferences and my patterns. Its been quite some time I subscribed to RedBull's YouTube channel and it took them about 100 videos to figure out that I definitely do not like that weird ads they serve in front of my screen...!

They keep showing me ads for things I will never want to click on, or even less buy them. Telecom ads especially are hitting on my nerves really and they keep poping up again and again...I finally start to hate these companies and Google, for not considering this!

 

I started writing down words that symbolize Greece. Then I asked some friends to do the same and we came up with this:

Created using wordle

Few days ago I was watching euronews, which is a channel dedicated to general international news i.e. economy, politics, finance etc. It is available across Europe. For sports there is another one which is called eurosport. Same concept.

And I realized that this type of media that loop all day long the same information exist in other forms of media aswell apart from TV. There are radio stations which loop news information all day long and obviously print & web are by default a more static sort of media where you can find all day the same information until new information comes in or gets printed. Its a weird example I know but you understand what I mean.

Now let's take a niche case study: the Tourism industry

It is one of the leading industries worldwide. It generates nearly 10% of the global GDP. And yet the only news-related media that a professional who works in the travel trade can find, are travel news websites with texts, images and videos and few (very few) print media which strugle to stay alive. Probably by now there also the related mobile apps from these websites to get this information while on the move.

And it striked me: Why do we (tourism professionals) have to constantly read the information about our industry? Is it that hard to create a radio station streaming only online (also via mobile) that will deliver all day long a news loop for travel trade news. And yes it should probably allow us to personalize what we want to hear.

So imagine you wake up in the morning or at whatever time you wake up, you do whatever you do jogging / breakfast ..etc. and while you are commuting to work (by public transport, by foot, by car, by bike...) you listen from your mobile to the latest travel trade news which include some super targeted advertising related only to you and your profile.

In less than 10 minutes you have a super complete overview of that day's travel trade news. If you wish to go deeper in a subject that interest you more, you can always do so by going online on your mobile or at your desktop. 

If such a service existed, I would unsubscribe automatically the next day from the loads of tourism newsletters I am forced to read everyday to know what is happening.

Really! I am tired with reading all that information every morning, plus most of them have overlapping information but do have some differences so you can not avoid reading and reading and reading and your mailbox getting full all the time. Plus they send you irrelevant advertisements which fill your mailbox even more! Its a helpless situation...

I would be glad to hear comments on this.

 

It was really great to watch all these videos on Youtube from LeWeb this year. I wasn't there but I think I got quite a good feeling of the vibe, the ideas & various trends that were being discussed across the 3 days.

A couple of things that did strike me:

• Why do we still talk in Europe about the role of governments in the start up ecosystem? Its obvious that creative people are everywhere and some of them will make the step and reach out to investors wherever these are for setting up a company. The location where you set up your company and the taxation is really another issue. But trying to create a cocoon for attracting innovative minds that will create high growth companies through legal and tax reforms is really not going to work for young entrepreneurs I think.
• Why do we still speak in English? I don't have the stats in front of me now, but we have seen that English is not any more THE language of the web and mobile. There must be multilingual support and they must invite people who do not speak English or do not want to speak English to present their amazing companies and start ups. Really some of us will never get the right accent or adequate vocabulary so why exclude for example Brazilian, Japanese, Russian or other entrepreneurs who are not advanced English speakers? Language was and is a barrier to such events and it should not be any more.