Inside Azerbaijan: an Eye-Witness Account of a Teaching and Cultural Experience
Hopefully some readers and followers of my blog have already started to miss my posts over the past days, and even if they did not suffer from withdrawal symptoms they might have wondered what has happened to me.Well, I was on a lecturing mission to Baku, Azerbaijan, for one week and unfortunately did not find enough time to blog, because I was too busy with lecturing and absorbing the life and culture there as much as possible. I taught the “Introduction to eTourism” course at the Azerbaijan Tourism Institute (ATI) in Baku and I must say that was an inte

Google Invests in Mobile Adsing and VoIP and Says, “That’s Good for All of Us”
No doubt, mobile Internet usage is a fast growing market which has been boosted especially by the new generation of smart phones such as the iPhone or Google phone. Hand in hand with this trend goes the search for additional revenues through mobile advertising.Despite or maybe because of Google’s corporate motto “Don’t be evil” the Google strategists know that attack is the best form of defence and therefore Google announced only yesterday that they bought a mobile display ad technology provider called

Say it with a Song: Customer Complaints in the Age of Social Media
It has become kind of state-of-the art that tourists share their travel experiences on holiday review platforms and post comments on the perceived quality ond service of hotels, destinations, sights, transportation means etc. Platforms such as www.holidaycheck.com or www.tripadvisor.com are gaining in popularity among visitors who make their booking decision dependent on what other customers have to say about the service they received. And very often the comments turn out to be relentlessly honest

How to Generate Revenue with Social Media Platforms
The visitor numbers on social media platforms have been growing exponentially in the year 2009 and this growth will certainly continue in the next couple of years. However, even the bigger social networking platforms still struggle to find viable business models in order to generate revenue. The majority of the social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter are (still) free to the users. Other networking websites such as Xing or LinkedIn charge their users for certain content and services.Although Web 2.0 has changed the way

Forty Years of Internet – Some Thoughts on today's World-wide Internet Day
Forty years ago from today, on the 29th October 1969 the Internet was launched. The term “Internet” was already coined in 1962, but on the 29th October 1969 four computer systems located in the USA were connected via a telephone line which was considered as the start of the Internet. Since then millions of computer systems around the world have been connected and this global network has seen extraordinary growth rates since the mid 1990s and has revolutionised the business models and processes as well as the marketing strategies of companies.In fact, the Internet has influenced and changed the communication and inter