April 2012
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Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through... →
A simple distinction across 10 leading social tools, from the viewpoint of a burger joint:
David Ciancino, Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through Burgers
Twitter – I am eating a burger
Facebook – I like burgers
FourSquare – This is where I eat burgers
Instagram – Here’s a vintage photo of me eating a burger in a blizzard
Youtube – Here I am eating a burger
LinkedIn – My skills...
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“Design is moving centre-stage in the eternal human quest to make beauty out of...”
– Paola Antonelli, The World in 2036: Design takes over, says Paola Antonelli via The Economist
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How To Make Panels Not Suck
Panel session at conferences are very uneven, and often they suck. Why? The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the moderators, who often don’t do enough to make the panels great. Charlie O’Donnell offers details in a great post:
Charlie O’Donnell, Why do panels suck and how can we make them better?
I spoke on a SXSW panel in 2011 that didn’t suck. I know it...
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Social Networks Will Kill Email?
Skimming a Forbes Insights report, and this popped out:
The @Work State Of Mind Project via Forbes Insights (download here):
Social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But business- related networks...
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“Any company that isn’t primarily delivering its service via mobile five years...”
– Keith Teare, cited by Hamish McKenzie in Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile via PandoDaily
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You Belong To Us
Google Drive is making people think about privacy and ownership all over again: ownership is not onlyship, folks.
John Herrman, You Don’t Own Anything Anymore
In a world where sharing a photo is strictly a matter of getting another copy made and mailing it, or getting it published, copyrights are pretty easy to keep track of and these laws hold up pretty well. Sending a physical photo to...
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“When they look back at this era, Internet historians will mark Facebook’s...”
– Hamish McKenzie, Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile (via courtenaybird)
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david (via fred-wilson)
Considering taking the Phone app off my home screen.
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“We will hit the point, likely soon, when the cost of starting a business is...”
– Is it a Tech Bubble?…NO…Just too many Wantrepreneurs - Howard Lindzon
fred-wilson:
i said the same thing up at HBS last month. i think we are there now. maybe we’ve been there for several years. but it takes time to wake up and smell the roses.
Too many wannabe VCs, too.
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Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A...
I was pinged by a friend, alerting me to the release of a new ebook, called (ambitiously enough) Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A Guide For Workplace Revolutionaries. This work is authored by Todd Barr of Alfresco, in collaboration with an old friend, Venkat Rao. (You can learn more about the book, at the OccupyMeeting site.)
The thesis of this short book is that we can free...
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Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A... →
My friend Venkat Rao has collaborated with Todd Barr of Alfresco on an ebook, called Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A Guide For Workplace Revolutionaries. Here’s a smaple:
Ordinary technologies conform to existing realities. Disruptive technologies reshape them. It is already clear that tablets are a disruptive technology on par with others that have invaded the workplace...
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Nokia Bonds Are Junk
Nokia’s declining fortunes lead to it’s bonds being rated as junk, after falling to No 2 mobile phone maker, behind Samsung:
S.&P. Downgrades Nokia’s Bonds to Junk - Brian X Chen via NYTimes.com
S.& P.’s announcement came as Samsung dethroned Nokia as the world’s No. 1 maker of mobile phones, which includes traditional cellphones and smartphones. Samsung sold 92...
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“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a...”
– - William Strunk
The best advice for would-be writers: make every word tell. And read Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style.
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“You are a mashup of what you let into your life.”
– - Austin Kleon
(via Brain Pickings)
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“@catherinecronin: Great post by @sharonlflynn on #pelc12: All about connections...”
– April 28, 2012 at 03:40AM via http://bit.ly/IBwpB8
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This is beachfront real estate. Buy In Now.
Lisa Hsia, EVP of digital media at NBCUniversal’s Bravo channel, is cited by Amy Chozick and Nick Wingfield in In Search Of Apps for Television:
I’ve told my bosses, ‘This is beachfront real estate. Buy in now.’
This quote is great, but the piece it’s in fails to touch on social TV and the rise of the second screen: people talking via mobile devices about what they are...
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“@stoweboyd: Bijan Sabet • Thanks John. http://t.co/AAOgr2mR John Maloney...”
– April 28, 2012 at 06:34AM via http://bit.ly/KexAfg
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8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future - Joanna... →
I found this piece astonishingly unrevelatory. Feels like the author sent an email out, and collated the results. Would be better to have Paul Saffo ask a tough question of Esther Dyson, and then so on, around the chain.
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Benchlearning
I stumbled across a new term today, a play on the idea of benchmarking: benchlearning. The notion — as I understand it — is to attempt to sidestep the top-down nature of benchmarking, and to learn through an evidenced-based, non-judgmental examination of statistical information.
The post where I learned about this concept is like reading a Borges short story. Some of that is the...
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Anti-Case Study: Parsons Drops Yammer, Likes...
PCWorld has a piece by Lauren Brousell that is very odd, on several levels. Entitled Desperately Seeking the Right Social Enterprise Tool? it is a recitation of a discussion with Scott Carl, the CIO of engineering and construction company Parsons, about his experiences to dat with work media tools. He relates the experience of having tried Yammer for some time — over two years:
“We are cost...
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Do CEOs Lead Innovation In American Companies?
Gartner CEO Survey Shows 2012 is the Year of Living Hesitantly
The survey results showed that CEOs are advancing innovation management, but many face a digital business strategy gap. This year, Gartner probed investment attitudes toward innovation management and leadership attribution. Overall, innovation management is advancing with few CEOs cutting innovation, and approximately half the CEOs...
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Apple’s Mothra Quarter Was Actually More... →
Apple posted huge numbers again, but the gross margin is truly astonishing:
MG Siegler via Techcrunch
[…] the most amazing number from Apple’s Q2 was 47.4. That was their gross margin for the quarter. It’s hard to describe how ridiculous that number is, but I’ll try.
In Q1 — again, the Godzilla quarter — Apple’s gross margin was 44.7 percent. It was so high that Apple CFO Peter...
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Publicy Is An Emergent Property of Social Networks
Megan Garber looks at some new research on privacy considerations in Facebook photo tagging by João Paulo Pesce and others, and boils it down for us:
On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy - Megan Garber via The Atlantic
The upshot? “Photo-tags can threaten privacy burdens in an indirect way,” the authors note, “by pinpointing the nodes in the social graphs...
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Laser Unprinters
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have devised a way to ‘unprint’ laser printed pages, so that the paper can be reused.
Use a laser, save a tree - via University of Cambridge
Dr Julian Allwood, Leader of the Low Carbon Materials Processing Group at the University of Cambridge, and David Leal-Ayala, PhD student at this group, tested toner-print removal from paper by...
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“@ddmcd: Twitter is an Unending Stream of Tiny Billboards”
– April 26, 2012 at 04:14AM via http://bit.ly/Iq7Vut
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“@swissnexSF: Watch our event “Data is the New Oil: From Privacy to...”
– April 25, 2012 at 09:49AM via http://bit.ly/IbCp9G
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“@stoweboyd: Podio Extends App Model Significantly http://t.co/npvvDhCU Big step...”
– April 25, 2012 at 08:41AM via http://bit.ly/K4Wee2
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Three Lightweight Work Media Tools Integrated With...
I am a great fan of Dropbox, the file sharing service. I keep nearly all the files that I use within Dropbox, and I share them with others in many ways. I have a Dropbox Pro 100 account, with an additional 32G from referrals, and I have the setup where I can delete files on my hard drive, but they are still accessible in the cloud.
Recently, I have been experimenting with lightweight work media...
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Google and Facebook Grow Comfortable and... →
Nick Bilton thinks Facebook and Google are slow to get mobile — several meanings of ‘get’ intended — because the engineers and managers there are relatively sessile (go look it up):
Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com
I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.
It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an...
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“@zoelazarus: Everyone wants to be creative: Global Study 75% of People Think...”
– April 24, 2012 at 04:00AM via http://bit.ly/INY1EM
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Effects of Climate Change Seen for Corn Prices -... →
Stephanie Strom via NYTimes.com
Researchers have found that climate change is likely to have far greater influence on the volatility of corn prices over the next three decades than factors that recently have been blamed for price swings — like oil prices, trade policies and government biofuel mandates.
The new study, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that...
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Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong... →
The result of a great deal of cognitive science research demonstrates that people don’t really understand how we think, how we influence each other, and the degree to which we are connected. We also lack an understanding of water, which is the most common liquid on Earth:
Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong - Stowe Boyd via Nexalogy blog:
[…] It turns out that people —...
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“@mathewi: the NYT paywall is still not baling water fast enough out of the...”
– April 21, 2012 at 11:32AM via http://bit.ly/IcxvD9
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“@Richard_Florida: The world gets spikier - average Manhattan rent $3418,...”
– April 21, 2012 at 11:37AM via http://bit.ly/I0eCpH
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“No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.”
– Marco Arment, Time and Taste
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“I was probably being an idiot then.”
– David Karp, Tumblr CEO, explaining the reversal of his previous statements decrying the possibility of putting ads on Tumblr. Tumblr will begin selling ad space in May. (via tpmmedia)
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WatchA Lift 12 talk by Tricia Wang on trust in online social networks.
One takeaway: shared interests lead to shared identity leads to shared responsibility.
via modernandmaterialthings
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Underpaid Genius: Is The Social Network Disrupting... →
Rob Horning at Marginal Utility noodles on our bonding too closely with the individualism of the ‘social graph’ (a term he dislikes at face value, just as I do). He suggests that we may have painted ourselves into a corner by rejecting a class consciousness.
Go read the rest at underpaidgenius.
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“@RogerWCheng: Verizon CFO says data-sharing plan will come out mid-summer this...”
– April 19, 2012 at 06:33AM via http://bit.ly/HSk7cZ
At long last. A single plan for iPhone and iPad? Or across family members in a family plan? Or both?
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“@stoweboyd: Ditto has been acquired by Groupon. Jyri Engestrom is now director...”
– April 19, 2012 at 04:11AM via http://bit.ly/J8H2wL
Have to admit that it seemed like Ditto wasn’t catching on, and given the 30 April shutdown of the service, this could be a talent acquisition (or ‘acqui-hire’). We’ll have to keep looking at what Jyri and team cook up...
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“@AvitaniaInTO: Yes please! RT @brosevear: Says @pgreenbe already industry is...”
– April 18, 2012 at 08:57AM via http://bit.ly/HT1zYL
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Watch Out, Best Buy, Ikea Will Soon Sell Their Own... →
IKEA has announced launching the Uppleva line of integrated HDTV and furniture: it’s genius, and completely supports my contention from yesterday that only two kinds of retailers are growing. One, like IKEA and Apple, are selling their own designs, more or less exclusively. The second are specialty purveyors of carefully curated goods, like Trader Joe’s.
The Uppleva line is going to...
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“History will probably laugh at our time’s attempt to impose a mentality of...”
– iDoneThis, The Slow Web Movement
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“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of...”
– HG Wells
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