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16.01.13
Posted in Blogroll, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts at 2:40 pm by Liv 
It won’t come as a surprise to those of you who know me that I am terrible in the morning — however, for those of you who don’t, it’s worth stating this upfront, so you can gather the context this idea came to me better. I am definitely terrible in the morning, whether it’s because of my tendency to stay up late or because my biological clock is still set for Europe. Or maybe because I am not a morning person — which is I guess a nice way of saying I’m lazy in the morning 
That means that typically in the morning I’m not in a chatty mood, I’m in a rush and pretty much expect that any service that I decide to employ to be rather fast too. And invariably every morning I need my coffee — so I find myself invariably in a Starbucks queue waiting to order my coffee and get the hell out of there as soon as I can so I can drink it and (attempt to) wake up. And this is where the problem starts!
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15.01.13
Posted in Blogroll, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts, Romania at 2:38 pm by Liv
This one is for you, Visa (though MasterCard and Amex listen up too!). Here’s the deal: I have Visa debit and credit cards for both UK and USA. I have bank accounts in UK and USA so I can transfer money when needed from one to another. With all of that in mind, you’d think that would be easy right to say buy some flowers for my sister, who is in Romania? Or order some presents for my friends in Germany? D’oh, no can do!
It turns out that most online shops take cards issued in the country they operate in — mainly for fraud prevention reasons and the fact that their bank doesn’t protect against fraud if they accept foreign cards. As such, regardless of the card I’m using, since I can’t produce a billing address in the same country as the florist for the example mentioned above, I’m stuck!
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09.01.13
Posted in Blogroll, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts at 1:05 pm by Liv
Here’s another idea that came to me last night when I was doing my online banking: being a British expat in USA, and still having a couple of UK credit cards and a bank account, I use their online facilities a lot (for transferring money around, paying my credit cards etc.). I have a UK account with Barclays, and as such I use their PINsentry device every time I log into my online bank.
(As a side note, as far as I know other UK — in fact, European too — banks use a similar system too. HSBC have their own system which doubles into a key ring, NatWest has something similar and I don’t know for sure, but I bet that Lloyds TSB uses the same. In fact I’d be surprise if any other reputable bank in the UK doesn’t use a similar system!)
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08.01.13
Posted in Blogroll, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts, Tech at 5:13 pm by Liv
Time for another idea for you — and I guess more to the point for the guys at ShareThis. (If you don’t know who they are, they are the company behind the sharing buttons at the end of each of my blog posts, which allows my visitors to share this onto major social / professional networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on.) As a side note they also have a pretty nice Firefox extension (sorry, Google, this is still the browser of my choice!) which you can install from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ShareThis/.
Without advertising their solution too much, what I like about it is that it allows a publisher to gather all the sharing buttons in one single plugin and configure which ones to be available — allowing you to concentrate on the networks you are interested in sharing your contents on. (Also love their “share by email” feature, which allows you to import contacts / email addresses from your gmail for instance and use them, rather than typing them by hand!)
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07.01.13
Posted in Blogroll, News, Product Ideas, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:39 pm by Liv
I just had this thought just now and I thought I have to start writing down these “product ideas” — which are just random ideas of small improvements for various products that come to my mind every now and then — as otherwise nothing will happen. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect that simply writing these ideas down will trigger a whole revolution in the products and companies I’m talking about, but if these reach the eyes and the ears of some people who thought of the same improvement to a product, then perhaps we can build some critical mass and get these add-ons to the products we love — or would like to love. After all, people pay good money to get the pulse on how their products and ideas perform “out there”, so why not take the initiative and give it to them, when we feel they could do with a bit of help?
With that in mind, I’ve started this new Category on my blog labelled Product Ideas — where I will be throwing anything from ideas of products (listen up all you Silicon Valley entrepreneurs wannabe who are still searching for that breakthrough idea! 
) to (what I perceive to be) useful addendums to existing products. Feel free to (re)tweet these, facebook them, or forward them to the people in charge of these products (if you know them) — or just discard them right away as madness; my theory still stands about if you don’t voice these you will never get heard…
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