My friend Vincent van Wylick just left Barcelona. Vincent is from nowhere: he speaks Dutch with a German accent and German with a Dutch accent…Born in Germany with parents from Yougoslavia & the Netherlands, a Dutch citizen, Vincent has studied in Manchester before working for Sony during 3.5 years in various countries & assignments related to marketing & innovation. He then went for Graduate studies in Rotterdam and is planning to start a financial auditing career in Luxemburg.

Vincent came to visit me for 5 days. Although I was most of the time working, we managed to find some time to to exchange on matters such as innovation, entrepreneurial economics, high tech, Apple, software, the Internet, & girls..which didn´t prevent us from drinking too much, eating interesting food, meeting nice people and listening to some really good live jazz music. I had met Vincent during my time, as an international exchange student within the Master of Entrepreneurship & New Business Venturing at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus Universiteit.

We had teamed up to write a research paper about the best possible entrepreneurial teams. Vincent & I had come up with the conclusion that Asterix (mental agility) & Obelix (strength) was a good founding pair, and we defined the perfect profile: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is both a geek (Amazon rests on its customer-centric information systems) and a Wall-Street insider (helpful during fundraising times). Those who actually feel like reading the paper may write an e-mail to me and I´ll be glad to send it (.pdf).

The main reason why I´ve decided to write such a post is that Vincent underwent quite an interesting, although sad, adventure. As he was polishing his thesis, he landed a consulting job within one of the European Space Agency incubator´ start-ups. Founded by an Israeli / Belgian / American team, the start-up was devising virtual space tourism systems when its founder suddenly died in his early thirties. So did the project, obviously. It´s pretty difficult to comment on such a story, but I wanted to share it with you all.

This being said, Vincent is already thinking of executing one of his business ideas – a sort of Web 2.0 publishing company. Well, I´m afraid I can´t say much more, but you may expect Vincent, a very heavy reader, to come up with disruptive innovation (he was trained at Sony) in this ageing business.

Adendum 1: I have actually shot a video interview of Vincent. It´s pretty big (500 MB), and I´d like to start videocasting on this very blog. Would anyone be kind enough to suggest me a videocasting hosting service as well as a compression standard enabling me to plug the video (.avi)? I was thinking of YouTube and vpod.tv…Many thanks in advance.

Adendum 2: for your information, Vincent´s favourite websites both cast video. These are the great & utmostly famous Venture Voice & a Stanford University lectures broadcasting service I don´t know yet. Vince, could you please provide IT Addict´s readership with the exact address in the comments section?

The domain name Wikustomerservice.com is still available and I don´t understand why.

Well I guess you get from the very name of the website what it´s all about – good, that means the name´s well chosen. I’ve been thinking about such a service since I discovered Wikipedia, quite a while ago. It might already exist, but I haven´t seen such a thing so far. Still don´t get the picture?

Wikustomerservice.com is an Internet wiki platform empowering users of all products of all brands to build their own customer service. Basically, the venture would need to convince potential clients, namely key accounts, to ‘outsource’ their customer service to their..customers! Employees specializing in certain business areas would be moderators in their fields, and companies would save millions in documentation and customer support service fees (such key accounts should keep their traditional customer service on the phone though; but why not also through being allowed to Skype the relevant moderator?). The wiki platform should be devised to enable a congregation of as many companies as possible, as well as brands, products, versions into a single graphic chart customable at the client´ convenience. The classifications & categorization may be inspired from, for instance, Wikipedia.

There you go. I’m not elaborating more on this business idea to let our creativity work a little bit. Wikustomerservice.com would´ve been helpful when Dell laptops burst, when Apple laptops burnt, when Smart cars & Class A Mercedes flipped over. Customers are more often than we think more reactive than product manufacturers themselves – a rather logical stance since customers are the ones that actually use the products.