logo_carrefourexpress.pngAnother new retail format under development is the Carrefour Express, a chain of stores ranging from 800 to 2,000 sq m and employing from 20 to 40. These are located in areas with a relatively small number of large retail outlets and a population of 10,000 to 15,000. The project involves building a positive image for Carrefour and converting its Champion and Globi supermarkets into the new Carrefour Express chain. About 35 Champion stores will be rebranded in the first phase of the project, scheduled to last until the end of 2007.

On 1st December 2006, Carrefour, through its wholly owned Polish subsidiary, Carrefour Polska entered into a Preliminary Share Purchase Agreement with Ahold Polska B.V. and Koninklijke Ahold N.V. to acquire 100 % of the share capital of Ahold Polska.
Ahold Polska operates 171 Albert supermarkets, 15 Hypernova hypermarkets and 4 petrol stations.

The acquisition by Carrefour of Ahold Polska aims at reinforcing its position in Poland to face the high competitive pressure of the leading international and national retailers.

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Overstock, the secondary market retail website, has been blocked by Wikipedia.

Due to the spammy nature of Overstock on the user-generated encyclopedia, the company’s IP range has been blocked, meaning edits and entries can no longer be made to Wikipedia from this range of IP addresses. Also noted as undesirable behavior from the folks at Overstock are attempts to intimidate administrators that have tried to curb their spam. A Wikipedia individual initiated the block, and has left a message for all other users encouraging them to keep the block against Overstock.

I will be in Warsaw, Poland for the coming few days, I hope to bring you some cool postings from here. I might be visiting some other cities too.

Funny weather, I came from Beirut where it’s 30 degrees but Warsaw is 15 with rain!

I am staying here, cool hotel, Le Regina

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murdoch.jpgNews Corp., under CEO Rupert Murdoch, already has developed a reputation for stealing websites, when a Fox television show or advertiser covets a desirable URL on the MySpace social network. But Murdoch’s website-snatching ways extend further than that. On Wednesday, News Corp. and NBC Universal announced that their online-video joint venture finally had a name, “Hulu”. But before Hulu.com fell into Murdoch’s hands, the website featured no videos at all — just innocent pictures of a couple’s 7-year-old daughter.

Copies of the Hulu.com website cached by the Internet Archive indicate that Posen and Lucy Hung previously owned the four-letter domain name, rare and valuable because of its brevity. (A person named Posen Hung works for Symbol Technologies in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn.) One hopes the Hungs were handsomely rewarded for giving up their family photo album. Or was this deal, too, a steal for Murdoch & Co.?

Source: Valleywag.com

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While Europe is celebrating its 2.5 millions .eu domain registrations, some countries have the smallest number of domain name registered, some French overseas territories:

181 in Réunion,
75 in Guadeloupe
49 in Martinique

Among EU countries, the countries with the greatest number of .eu domains are Germany (815,000), the United Kingdom (354,000), and the Netherlands (340,000).

Facebook has added a useful feature to all profiles. Beneath your user photo you can see icons for all the action links and application you have on your profile. When you click on one of these icons, you will be directed to the part of your profile page where that application is sitting.

These icons are viewable for your friends’ profiles as well, so now it is easier to see at a glance what applications have been added to their profile pages, and it makes it a little easier to get to the various applications as well.

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_1211841_mark_andreessen150.jpg Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, United States) is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

I have found on his blog, the “Pmarca Guide To Startups”, very interesting to read.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7