Mixing related conversations about exclusivity and collaboration, with images from a day’s solo journey from Bucharest to Brasov, “probably the best city in the world”…

As a note to Jim Goldstein’s image of the moon over Geary Blvd in San Francisco:

Serendipity is the reward for the observant, the active and the prepared. (Twitter)

Onward, Bucharest, Romania

Referencing Paul Melcher’s post about how photographers need to adapt, Mike Masnick, Being Unique Is Not The Same As Exclusive (Or Scarce):

… there’s some good points mixed in there with some really odd conclusions. The writer does a decent job explaining how the market has shifted — with the ease of digital production and distribution, the old exclusivities have gone away. But, from there, gets confused about what to do with it, focusing on trying to build up artificial scarcities or suggesting that photographers try to ignore basic economics. That’s not going to work.

The key point is that the writer seems to think that the key scarcity is uniqueness, as if there’s some exclusivity to it. Uniqueness is a good thing, but it’s not the same thing as exclusivity… Uniqueness is what gets you noticed (promotion) and what makes your real scarcities (time, access, experience, etc.) worth more. But the writer of the post seems to think that uniqueness can only be developed by shunning others, learning from no one, and trying to hide all of your ideas.

Obviously, I agree.

Continued, near Brasov, Romania

Jan Chipchase, Real + Fake Market Mindshare:

There are many ways for companies to measure their performance from market share to profit share, brand preference to whether consumers recommend the brand to their peers. Recognising that market share is only one metric (and certainly not the most important one in most instances) it would be interesting to measure market mindshare based on real + fake products shipped.

More from Jan on The Rise of the Super Fakes:

As with the rest of the industry the ‘fake’ corner of the mobile phone market is about to undergo its own seismic disruption. Mainstream consumers will increasingly expect the benefits of owning a mobile phone to include, say, showing a friend a location on a map. The products they copy are becoming more integrated into online services – increasingly including location awareness, email, shopping, to dating – as consumers use and appreciation of these services grow the manufacturers of fake products need to step up and offer connected services of their own.

Ever more connected services will squeeze many of the low-tier fake manufacturers into an evolutionary dead-end.

Worth a complete read…

Completed, Brasov, Romania

Via Noah Brier, Kevin Kelly, Maximize the opportunities of others:

In every aspect of your business (and personal life) try to allow others to build their success around your own success. … Rather than viewing their dependency on your success as a form of parasitism, or worse, as a rip-off, understand this tight coupling as sustenance. You want to entice others to create services centered around the customer attention you have won, or to supply add-ons to your product, or even, if it is a new-fangled idea, to create legal imitations. This is a counter-intuitive stance at first, but it plays right into the logic of the net. A small piece of an expanding pie is the biggest piece of all.

It should be obvious by now that I agree wholeheartedly.

Highly related: Me, Don’t create a company, create an ecosystem:

Finding the right employees and partners is a core competence for any viable, sustainable business: and at the same time, finding the right people to work with is a core competence for any successful person.

Thinking of this as a platform play is one interpretation; but it’s actually far more than that: think markets, networks and communities.