We had the chance to cross the path
of some fascinating people
that gave us some cool "marketing lessons".



The first one was Akio Morita from Japan.
Phone Book of the World
started as a little Sony Phone Boutique in Paris.

Akio Morita the founder of Sony
told us that nothing was more important
than an easy to remember brand name,
people from all different backgrounds
could instantly remember.

He had started his company as
"Tokio Tsushin Kogyo Co Ltd (Tokio Telecommunications Engineering Corporation)"
and did not meet succes
until he rebranded to
"Sony" (congestion of the Latin word Sonus for sound
and the english word Sunny)



1993 The Sony Phones and a jewel left by Coco Chanel
made it possible to add a next door
avant-garde internet cafe.
At that time Hotels in France had no Internet connection.
The only clients were American Tourists
travelling through Paris.

Our central Paris internet acces
connected us with many tech pioneers
like Jon Postel
the inventor of dot com domains.
Postel told us that
easy names followed by a dot com
would one day become extremely important.
Dot com, nothing else
and people will automatically come to you ...



Another person crossing our path
was a man that turned into a friend
as we had not realised who he was.
The astronaut from the first flight to the Moon.
came to Visit Paris every year.
His influence made us have a vision
that became less french and more global.

Steve Jobs came to the cafe in 1999.
He was unhappy to see that we used nothing
but Sony computer screens.
He tried to sell us a beautiful new iMac.
Without success as we were "Sony children"
and at the same time we had little money
as the cafe did not have enough customers.

Jobs returned two days later
suggesting to offer us the iMac
if we would find a nice spot in the cafe
for his little jewel ... as if he wanted Apple
become part of our long Tech Story.

Jobs left us an other cool present,
an avant-garde marketing lesson.
No hyphens in internet domains !!
Already having the future mobile iphone keyboard in his mind
Jobs knew that hyphenated domains,
still very popular in the early years 2000s
would soon make a website look obsolete
as they were soon going to be pushed off
the main screen keyboard.

In fact today
"a-websites-with-a-hyphen.com"
is less compatible
with an iPhone keaboard.
Today more and more Travel Lovers
use a smartphone with no hyphen button
to check out a location.

1995 The trend to use the visit prefix
in front of a geo domain
started in California
soon being adopted in
the most internet saavy countries.

While working on
our Phone Book of the World
we noticed that many Tourist Sites
use realy realy poor URLs.
Poor brand names with expressions
only people from a local languages can understand,
domains with hyphens
or the worst,
obscure TLDs that don't inspire confidence.

What would our fascinating teachers
have said when - before visiting a location -
the would see a website
with a poor domain name ?

Maybe they would have been amused
by the idea to create our
Global Visit List.
Its a Visit !