All posts by ajacota

A social life and good looks – what could you want more?


This is a message to all women and men out there who appreciate beauty, confidence, friendship, happiness and … large breasts. Uhm, what I mean is grace, spirit, joy and … curvy appearances. No, sorry, let’s try again: I’m referring to elegance, communities, wellbeing and … a generous bust. OK, OK, I know you’re impatient so I’ll tell you what the message I’m trying to send is:
– if you’re a woman and you feel that nature has been unfair with you by giving you ‘small’ assets, you are ambitious and hard working (but yet still broke) and you want to make friends; or
– if you’re a man and you love delicacy, allure and style, you have some dimes to spare and you maybe feel a bit lonely and want to network
then you have to visit the ultimate social networking/crowdfunding website MyFreeImplants.com! Sounds fancy, right?

Well, on a more serious note, MyFreeImplants.com is a platform designed to facilitate the relationship between ‘ladies’ – women that want to have breast augmentation surgery, ‘contributors’  – people (mostly men) that donate money to help the ladies realize their dream and ‘surgeons’ – plastic surgery surgeons that take on the challenge to help the ladies. The site works in mysterious ways but mostly like this: women set up a small profile with their name, birthday and several pictures and choose their goal (i.e. their budget and surgeon). Continue reading A social life and good looks – what could you want more?

How many hours does this cost?


Traditionally, a bank is a financial institution that deals with lending and depositing money and exchanging currency. But that is overrated. A relatively newer concept is that of a time bank, where people exchange time. Some might say time is priceless, but it seems a new type of economy is appearing where time has been assigned a value.

800px-LaborNoteAlthough the digital world made time banks popular, the concept is actually quite old. Its history can be traced back to the 1820s, when an American anarchist created the Cincinnati Time Store. There, time spent during a specific activity could be translated into material goods, usually corn, meat or gold [1]. Nowadays, time banking works a bit differently: time is exchanged directly between people doing different types of activities. Thus, digital platforms where people auction (sell and buy) time have developed all over the world, Romania included. Continue reading How many hours does this cost?

Mass Customization: Just Upsides?


Mass customization is becoming more and more trendy. An increasing number of companies turn their products into customizable ones to attract customers that seek uniqueness, but are they all successful? Also, are there only advantages to this? Nike, Ikea and Dell did it; but when and where do companies stop? These are all questions we try to answer in our mini-case.

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First, why is mass customization such a sought feature? Well, if handled correctly, it’s a win-win concept for both customers and companies. Thus, the customer receives a product which fits better his/her needs, while the company gets great insight into what its customers want. Aside from choosing a suited market and/or product, handling mass customization correctly means following 5 principles:
deciding whether the customization process focuses on needs or parameters, providing the starting point, offering the possibility for incremental refinements, creating prototypes to be tested by consumers in order to avoid surprises and teaching the consumer about the product [1].

Continue reading Mass Customization: Just Upsides?

Selfies are good for business


We take pictures of everything and anything. Since the photo camera has been replaced with our mobile phone, we constantly take pictures of our feet and the shoes we’re wearing, the beer we’re drinking while out in a bar, a new gadget we bought and many other products or events. Sometimes we take these photos as memories, but most of the times we do it because we want to share them for the whole world to see – on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. Could anything useful come out of this new hobby of ours, except building our self-esteem?

Well, Olapic found a way to leverage this: marketing. They realized all these images contain important product information related to how products are used, how they actually look in real life and even who uses them. And, they made collecting our photos their business, hence, crowdsourcing.fp1

Continue reading Selfies are good for business