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Internet Story: 30 Mar 1999
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Wired Europe According to Forbes Magazine the UK is Europe's Internet Champion. Although we're economically behind Germany and our telecoms infrastructure has been mangled by BT in comparison to Scandinavia's "ultra-wired" society our saving graces are that there are so many of us packed into this small island and that we send more emails than anyone else in Europe. The biggest pluses for the UK are:
- Tony Blair has committed to some very ambitious e-commerce targets in the next few years (though if Laurence Godfrey has his way this will be a short lived dream!).
- UK residents have more credit & debit cards than anywhere else in Europe - essential for purchasing items via the Net at the moment.
- We speak English in the UK, which Forbes Magazine writers seem to think is sufficiently similar to American to be of benefit :-)
Check out the other countries by clicking on them on the map above.
Check out the Forbes latest feature article, "Technology - Europe".
Silly Laws It's not just the UK that has some silly laws. Go and see what other countries are up to on the Dumb Laws site. I especially like the Californian law stating that, "Community leaders passed an ordinance that makes it illegal for anyone to try and stop a child from playfully jumping over puddles of water." Maybe it's about time we obeyed the interesting bylaw in Chester :-)
How to run a company Pearls of wisdom abound on this site - "the cluetrain manifesto". It's all about creating a customer centric company, something that most large corporations in the UK will find impossible to do. 95 "clues" are listed but, as the site says, "if you have to remember one... we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp, deal with it". There's some scary stuff in there for our corporate control freaks :-) Here's one of my long time favorites, "! Retire the fashion police. Cancel dress-down Friday. Instead declare Uncomfortable Monday, Pretentious Tuesday, Phony Wednesday, and Tight Shoes Thursday."
Andrew Stringer, © Pendle.Net Ltd, 1999
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