Marissa Mayer’s Housecleaning Goes On

Marissa Mayer is not taking it slowly: the attrition rate at Yahoo’s board is really blinding. Most recent is the announced departure of Alfred Amaroso, the chairman, who assumed the role 14 months ago. Yahoo has appointed another director, Maynard Webb Jr, former CEO on LiveOps, as interim chairman.

Yahoo Chairman Is Stepping Down - NYTimes.com

Mr. Amoroso and Mr. Webb joined Yahoo’s board 14 months ago when four longtime directors stepped down under shareholder pressure. Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang, started the exodus when he left the board a month earlier. Finally, late last year, Intuit’s chief executive, Brad D. Smith and the Weather Channel’s chief executive, David Kenny, stepped down.

[…]

A former accounting executive, Sue James, is now Yahoo’s longest-serving director. She came on board three years ago. The other directors, including Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, have been appointed since February 2012.

The rapid turnover probably suits Ms. Mayer, who has been trying to infuse Yahoo with new talent and ideas since she defected from a longtime job at Google to tackle the challenge of turning around one of the Internet’s best-known companies.

I’m betting that once the dust settles, the average age of a Yahoo board member will have dropped a few decades, and the gender ratio will shift. Right now, the only women are Mayer and James.

26 April 2013 6 Permalink

#efermr Makes Tweets Ephemeral

#efemr is a service that makes Tweets time-limited.  After signing up for the service — which needs access to your account to remove the time-limited tweets — efermer looks for tweets from you that have a time stamp in a hashtag — #1h (1 hour) or #5m (5 minutes) — and then deletes the tweet at the appropriate time. efermer retains the deleted tweets so that you can report, of archive.

23 April 2013 8 Permalink

WOTD: Line-Busting

A new term: line-busting, which is the new retail tactic to get store associates to take orders and/or collect payments for goods anywhere on the store floor, using handheld wireless devices, like iPads. This gets the associates out from behind the cash registers and counters, and obsoletes that fixed mode of interaction, making the shopping experience very different. It also can decrease the wait time involved in waiting to order or pay, and therefore decreases the likelihood of abandoned purchases by frustrated shoppers.

Also note that these tablets can be used to show merchandise not physically in the store, and allow shoppers to buy those goods and have them delivered to their homes.

The blendo experience of talking with an associate and having them show both immediately available and remote goods is an interesting blurring of online and IRL shopping, and one made social through the device and shopping software.

[PS I couldn’t find the definition in Wikipedia, so I wrote it here.]

22 April 2013 13 Permalink

Ito’s Nine Principles

Michael Copeland of Wired interviewed Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab, getting past the techno-utopianism and down to an almost Taoist set of principles for thriving in the postnormal world, a time of mounting uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, and volatility. After chatting about the falling cost of innovation, and Schumpeterian disruptions in hardware, genetics, and healthcare we get down to the meat:

Michael Copeland, Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos

Wired: And in the face of that we ought to do what?
Ito: What you need to do is understand these changes are happening, and build systems and governments and ways of thinking that are resilient to this kind of destructive change that is going to happen. It’s a kind of change that is really hard to predict, it’s really hard to control, so how do you as a human being, or as an organization, survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where planning is almost impossible?

Wired: Please tell me you have an answer.
Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It[’s] disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.

A few thoughts:

The ‘risk/safety’ dichotomy is also ‘be biased toward speculative experiments that allow deeper understanding of implications, rather than optimizing around lowering disruption and short-term costs’.

One thing missing is the principle related to resilience: ‘go slow to go fast’. This means you need to step out of the flow of today’s operational frenzy to take new actions. In martial arts, this means you must relax your muscles and nerves to respond or attack quickly.

‘You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told’ is priceless.

(via brucesterling)

Source: brucesterling

16 March 2013 1329 arig Permalink

Toyota i-ROAD: Another Concept For City Vehicles

Toyota is another company thinking innovatively about the future of transport.

From the press release:

• Toyota i-ROAD, a new form of transport, making its debut at Geneva
• Compact, all-electric, three-wheeled personal mobility vehicle (PMV) with a comfortable, enclosed two-seater cabin
• New Toyota ‘Active Lean’ technology automatically balances the vehicle when cornering or travelling over stepped surfaces
• 850mm width is no greater than a conventional two-wheeler, making i-ROAD as easy to manoeuvre as a scooter or motorcycle through urban traffic.
• Zero emissions, near-silent EV powertrain gives a range of up to 30 miles, with recharging from a conventional power supply taking just three hours

Toyota’s new i-ROAD personal mobility vehicle (PMV) makes its world debut at the Geneva motor show, a new, flexible form of transport designed for city streets.

Seating two in tandem and under cover, i-ROAD is an electric vehicle with a range of up to 30 miles (50km) on a single charge. Using ‘Active Lean’ technology, it is safe, intuitive and enjoyable to drive, with no need for driver or passenger to wear a helmet.

It’s the latest concept to emerge from Toyota’s 40 years of research and development of vehicles that use less energy, place less of a burden on the environment and are practical in meeting people’s everyday transport needs. i-ROAD takes the company closer to its goal of creating the ultimate range of eco cars.

Source: media.toyota.co.uk

6 March 2013 32 Permalink