I found this story in today’s New York Times to be fascinating. In a world in which customization, direct service, and online shopping seem to be the order of the day, Dell seems poised to break from its past and consider selling through retail channels. That’s a dramatic departure and one seemingly at odds with…
Every other Friday, we do what we call a “Payday Pizza Presentation” where one of our team members makes a presentation on a topic we think would be of interest to everyone while we all eat free food. Sometimes its about internal processes, at other times it may be about industry dynamics, technology trends, social media ideas, etc. Today,…
What happened yesterday at Virginia Tech surely represents one of the most brutal, cruel, and tragic events ever to occur on a college campus. There are no words that can comfort the victims’ families. There are no actions that can make this situation right. There are, however, some observations that come out of it, especially…
Call me a fuddy-duddy. Call me a curmudgeon. But I find the flurry of April Fool’s blog posts to be annoying. The best ones make it hard to tell fact from fiction (see TechCrunch & FC), but unfortunately that makes one doubt even real news today. Plenty of people have been caught in the fake news…
I was listening to Joseph Jaffe’s Across the Sound podcast recently and he expressed the oft-heard point of view that “content wants to be free.” Though I often agree with what Jaffe has to say, in this instance I must say “hogwash.” Simply put, there is no such thing as free content. Content providers receive…
I hate spam. But I think I hate spam blacklists more. Earlier today, a company that I do a lot of business with had their email server address added to a spam blacklist. Since the email hosting provider I use screens inbound email using that blacklist, nobody from that company can email me until they…
A colleague shared this video with me earlier today and it certainly got me thinking. I have embedded it below, and it is worth the six minutes or so it takes to watch it through. It demonstrates several things: the world is changing online video helps make ideas more compelling statistics are powerful tools As…
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger isn’t so sure. “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he is quoted as saying. It’s all about the Internet, according to an interview he gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and reported at Haaretz.com:…
At some point years ago when I was still in school, I learned about Occam’s Razor. A 14th century English Franciscan friar, William of Ockham, is said to have opined about not making things overly complicated when solving problems. In a nutshell, “the simple solution is almost always the correct one.” (Wikipedia has considerably more…
Jeff Jarvis came away from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland convinced that the mighty don’t get it. He believes they think of the Internet as all about individual action. He argues: The internet is more about collective action. It is about connections. It gives us the power to find each other, to join…