TAG: business
The Art of Indie Music in Commericals
New York comedian Aziz Ansari breaks down the advertising music licensing business.
Tags: funny music business advertising video comedy
"Every year, hundreds of nonprofit organizations rely on the Taproot Foundation's award winning Service Grant program to provide millions of dollars worth of pro bono marketing, HR and IT consulting services."
Tags: design business consulting nonprofit marketing
Gold at the end of the rainbow
"What I failed to realize when the news hit was, regardless of how much coin the band makes from the actual sales, they’ve just built a most impressive consumer database."
Tags: music business email marketing crm
Chris Rock On The Music Business
"If the musician is a good businessman, he’s a shitty musician . . . Which is why something resembling a record company is going to be necessary in the future. Musicians make the music, someone needs to sell it."
Trent Reznor and Saul Williams Discuss Their New Collaboration, Mourn OiNK
"But those days are gone. Because, mainly, that infrastructure is broken at the moment. How long before [record companies] are irrelevant? Who knows? They seem to be doing everything they can to make sure that happens as quickly as possible."
Tags: music business economics free
Radiohead Results: 38% Forked Over $6 Average
"Paying downloaders forked over an average of $6, with U.S. consumers paying almost twice as much ($8.05) as those from other countries ($4.64)."
Tags: music business internet mp3
"Beacon is the internal project name at Facebook around an effort to work with third parties and gain access to very specific user data. An example may be a purchase of a book or DVD from Amazon."
Tags: facebook business attention marketing
Why Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) Strategy is a Winner
"It's intriguing to watch Amazon, the old favorite dot com era e-commerce site, transform itself into a technology company with their new and innovative HaaS unit."
Tags: amazon business internet technology
Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin
"San Francisco indie band The Society of Rockets, for example, plans to release its next album strictly on vinyl and as MP3 files."
Tags: music business vinyl mp3
Oink founder: We're just like Google
"If Google directed someone to a site they can illegally download music they are doing the same as what I have been accused of. I am not making any Oink users break the law. People don’t pay to use the site.�
Tags: business copyright bittorrent music mp3 p2p
Is Investing in Facebook Worth it to Microsoft Just to Get International Remnant Inventory?
"So if you're Microsoft, and your search business isn't generating much European inventory or European advertiser interest for AdCenter, a deal like this gives you a much better story to tell."
Tags: microsoft business advertising facebook europe
Outsource to Qualified Freelancers or Firms, Web Designers, Programmers, Technical Writers - oDesk
Tags: business programming freelance
DEFENDING THE PIG - OINK CROAKS
"Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans." - DJ Rupture
Tags: music business bittorrent copyright
Enabling Innovation Through Office Design
"Work has become more mobile and team-based, but most organizations have been slow in changing their workplaces to reflect the new reality"
Tags: business design innovation
"That economic model is not quite over - there is clearly still money to be made selling CDs - but it is on its way out and from a strategic point of view bands choosing to go down that road close the door on a much larger, longer-term opportunity. "
Tags: music business economics
"Microsoft owning a shell called Bungie with all the talent gone isn't a recipe for success (looked what happened when the Palm leadership asked to be spun off from 3Com and the events that followed)."
Tags: video microsoft business management
Armchair Economists, Please Stay Home
"What, pray tell, are the "real products" that will support those industries? Very few bands can make a living off of touring and T-shirts. Oh, that's it, advertising. I bet Arrington listens to a lot of commercial radio..."
Tags: economics music business
Did "Saturday Night Live" Rip Off Aphex Twin?
"NBC didn't actually need permission to use the song for "ephemeral use," and won't, until they plan to air the show again . . . the video remains yanked from all official NBC sites until, presumably, some clearance agreement is made."
Tags: music business youtube internet law copyright
Radiohead's new album: pay what you want
"There’s no doubt that thousands of people will hand over the price of a Sherbet Dip for the download. Presumably though, Radiohead’s argument runs that those people would have obtained the album through file sharing websites."
Tags: music economics business insight
"This false notion that ringtones are something in and of themselves is an anachronism, an artifact dating back to the time when mobile phones existed in their own ecosystem, wholly separate from the PC or the Internet."
Tags: apple business copyright iphone mobile music
"Google's plan for world domination. Also why the iPod Classic sucks."
Tags: google internet mobile wifi wireless apple business
About jobs and networking. Includes the story of how my friend Michael Surtees ended up in New York City (which just happens to be because of me).
Tags: networking jobs business design
Why Passion Matters: #1 In The Series
"I’m more convinced everyday that passion is the ultimate competitive advantage in business."
"First and foremost you need to build an audience, build trust with them, deliver on a regular basis for them. There's no way people are going to come back again and again if your blog doesn't enlighten, entertain, and inform."
"South Park' Creators Win Ad Sharing in Deal
"Comedy Central and the creators of the popular show, "South Park," have agreed to create a hub to spread the program and related material across the Internet, mobile platforms and video games."
Tags: television animation business internet video
"In a way this bundle that constitutes mainstream music begins to establish a model that could be the future of recorded music  that the recordings are the “loss leaders� for everything else."
Tags: music design packaging business culture
"Today that same market is telling rappers to please shut up. While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap."
Tags: hiphop music business branding
"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."
Tags: software business it usability
Facebook Grows Up: Can It Stay Relevant?
"At 19, Mark Zuckerberg came up with a new way for college kids to connectâ€â€and started an online revolution. Now 23, he's trying to build out his business without losing its cool."
Tags: business facebook socialnetworking internet
"Many savvy companies are starting to realize that a good name can be their most important assetâ€â€and actually boost the stock price"
Tags: business branding marketing finance stock
Lawsuit: Music Publishers v. YouTube Doesn't Solve the Problem
"If people don’t know what rights they need to obtain and if there's no easy way to obtain them even if they do know, exactly what do rights-holders expect?"
Tags: music copyright business law
"This is the speech we gave at the 4As account planning conference in San Diego."
Tags: marketing future business web2.0 presentation
Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits
"A new Web site reveals that many of the most obviously self-interested changes come from corporate networks."
The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition
"The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time."
Tags: it business technology usability
Research Note: Strategic Errors Mini Case Study - TimesSelect
"The NYT has lost two years of building edge competencies: learning how to turn stale, inert columnists into managers of living, breathing markets, networks, and communities; learning how to redefine brands . . . "
Tags: nytimes strategy business media2.0
"The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show."
Tags: advertising business marketing
Cheap fashion: the trend may be over
"Prices have fallen dramatically in the past decade as products are sourced from countries with low labour costs, but clothes cannot carry on getting cheaper."
"It’s simply that new content startups understand the value of being lean and mean and constraint-free, whereas old media houses are too stuck in the mindset of big, fancy and infrastructure-bound."
William Safire talks about how the title "strategist" is all the hype.
Tags: strategy politics business language nytimes
"The set-up is an innovative solution to a problem that big corporations have wrestled with since time immemoriam. Namely. What to do when you get too big? And how to avoid being a victim of your own success?"
Tags: advertising marketing business
Deal Note: Twitter's Nonexistent Business Model (Or, How to Invest in Media)
"Rather, next-gen investors are better off understanding why and how value creation and value capture will shift over the next 2-5 years - and then invest in plays which can dominate those shifts."
Tags: business media2.0 startups money twitter
"I thought I’d share my advice here, even though I’m still learning to apply these lessons in my own nascent career as a manager."
Tags: management business
"Ad agency Anomaly is pioneering a new model whereby it provides its creative services in return for a take of the profits. It's a high-risk strategy that could change the industry"
Tags: advertising innovation marketing business
How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life
Best line: "Last winter, CNET's in-world correspondent was conducting a live interview with Anshe Chung, an avatar said to have earned more than $1 million on virtual real estate deals, when Chung was assaulted by flying penises in a griefer attack."
Tags: secondlife advertising marketing business
Online Publishers Need To Stop Selling Space
"So what’s the lesson for newspapers and other traditional media companies trying to transform themselves into online publishers? Stop selling space."
Tags: advertising business internet
Sprint Takes Lead as 1st Sponsor of File-Sharing Song
"Sprint has signed on as the first company to underwrite a song to be distributed on file-sharing networks, agreeing to embed its logo on copies of tracks from Atlantic Records hip-hop artist Plies, sources told The Post."
Tags: business marketing music p2p
iPhone Reality/Sanity Check -- my iWish list
"In conclusion, I think the iPhone is the great-great-grand-father of the future of personal media devices."
Create Candor in the Workplace, Says Jack Welch
"At GE, he put these principles into action by implementing a forced ranking system that divided employees into three distinct segments: the top 20 percent of performers, the middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent."
Tags: management business
Treating different customers differently
"If you're going to be obsessed with delighting customers, it's a lot more efficient to focus on customers that are able to be delighted."
Tags: business customerservice
"Fopp's gone bankrupt. Prince is bypassing the stores completely to give away his new CD. But Adam Webb finds that the future of the record shop might not be as gloomy as the past week's headlines suggest"
"Faced with shrinking profits, record labels are touting a new approach"
Tags: music business economics copyright marketing
Prince Points the Way to a Brighter Future for Music
Prince gave away his new CD with Sunday's Daily Mail. "Part of the problem, according to retailers, is that Prince's move helped solidify a growing perception on the part of consumers that music is free."
Tags: music business trend copyright
In Small Packages, Fewer Calories and More Profit
"In three years, sales of 100-calorie snack packs have passed the $20-million-a-year mark, as consumers don’t seem to mind paying more for less."
Tags: food business psychology marketing nytimes packaging health
The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we're doing
Fake Steve Jobs: "The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses."
Tags: apple music business itunes strategy
How to hire the best people you've ever worked with
Some tips on how to hire for startups.
Tags: interviews jobs business tips
"As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else . . . It's called the internet . . . "
Tags: facebook business socialsoftware internet aol
Jobs Effect 1997-2007: A Retrospective
"Now, this might sound trivial - but it's not. Revolutionaries need passion - something to commit to, and to invest in, and to belong to. People are an essential part of the DNA for revolutionary organizations."
dove's evolution is the last of its kind
"If your brand is brave and gutsy enough to get behind a powerful and challenging socio-cultural idea, execute with creative brilliance and support it with a smart CSR program, you will get people to pay attention, but it's . . . unlikley for $50,000"
Tags: viral marketing business youtube
"Those who saw the telephone as a destructive force in communities might have had -- and might still have -- a point, but technological changes have left them on the fringe of society."
Tags: culture privacy identity youth business transparency
The Old Model: TimesSelect Is A Failure
"TimesSelect, the world's stupidest pay-for-content bar to a good user experience, has 222,300 paying members as of May, according to a report just released by the Times."
Tags: newspapers nytimes advertising business
"Crushpad provides grapes from the West Coast's top vineyards, an industry-acclaimed wine making team and a state-of-the-art winery 100% focused on making wine in small lots. You choose your level of involvement and we do the rest."
"We find available domain names that are descriptive, concise and are easily remembered. And if we can’t find one, or you don’t like any available domain names we suggest – you don’t pay anything. PickyDomains.Com is completely RISK FREE."
twittering for busy execs
Download 2007 Digital Fact Pack
52-Page Data Guide to the Digital Marketing World
Tags: advertising marketing statistics business demographics internet research
Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains
"Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire."
Google's Video PlusBox May Be Its Most Disruptive Feature Ever
"There are no ads currently on the YouTube video, but you can bet that will change. What’s clear is that on this particular search the Times, the Post, and MSBNC are likely to lose a lot of the traffic that they otherwise would have gotten."
Tags: video business marketing google media2.0
Chris Anderson: "A while ago US News asked me for the five business books that had the greatest impact on me. Now they've published my list, along with the lists of other executives and notables."
"This interesting video, from the folks at GOOD Magazine, shows just how much advertisers are paying to bombard New Yorkers with out-of-home advertising."
Tags: video advertising business nyc
Jane Siberry's "you decide what feels right" pricing
"The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you can� policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free  but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track."
Tags: music business pricing money
Bummed I'm missing it, some great speakers there.
Tags: conference trend planning marketing business london
Stewert Butterfield responds to Flickr Complaints
"There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution."
Tags: flickr business transparency community
Branded Utility: Interview With Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly
"Brands being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch."
Tags: brandedutility marketing business interviews trend
"It's dominated by diminishing return economics - it's just another mass media play in a micromedia world. In that mass media world, remember, MTV was QVC - they were basically the same business model for different domains (music vs consumer goods)."
Forrester's new Social Technographics report
"At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies."
Tags: research socialsoftware marketing business
"Gaussian distributions tend to prevail when events are completely independent of each other. As soon as you introduce the assumption of interdependence across events, Paretian distributions tend to surface because positive feedback loops tend to amplify
Tags: networks powerlaw business research bestarticlesof2007
"You put all that together and you think, what would the advertising customer like? And what they would like is they'd like a single way in which they can see ads and then have the computer do the allocation for them."
Tags: google advertising future marketing business
Guess Who's Knocking on Marketing's Door
"If conversation is advertising's new sweet spot, should consumer affairs play a more central, strategic role in the marketing equation?"
Tags: conversation business marketing consumeraffairs
"It struck me that this control very much reminded me of another company: Wal-Mart. Here's a summary of the critical points that define the similarities between the two"
Tags: google walmart advertising business economics
"Unexpected films find success with DVD rentals, sales while box office, award winners fall flat"
"ParkAtMyHouse is a new service that provides affordable and penalty-free parking around public venues by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks and other spare pieces of land to drivers needing somewhere to park."
Moscow's suburb for billionaires
"Most people in Britain are now familiar with the scruffy, boyish and invariably unshaven features of Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club, and Russia's most famous billionaire."
Tags: russia business economics politics money
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
A new theory of the hit record.
Tags: business culture marketing psychology nytimes bestarticlesof2007
me + alex quit google. (dodgeball forever!!!!) on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
"It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources"
Tags: google mobile innovation business
"Muji's US target will be an active group of Americans who seek alternatives to showy brand consumerism; those who are looking to pursue higher goals in their consumption habits, but importantly, want to show and share those goals to others."
Tags: business shopping japan design nyc
Wieden Loses Nike over Digital?
"Perhaps if the agency teams worked together, we'd all get better at learning what consistently works online -- and then producing campaigns to match that expectation."
Tags: nike marketing advertising online business
"A survey of leading thinkers, gathered to judge the advertising world's Effie Awards, offers a valuable snapshot of an industry in flux"
Tags: marketing business research advertising
"I believe that "large" is doomed to mediocrity not due to size, but because of the inherent inability of "large" to generate a strong sense of common purpose in the organisation beyond making money for its stakeholders."
Tags: business leadership small
A study proves that the bigger his mansion, the worse the CEO
Tags: business realestate economics research
"Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear."
Tags: transparency business blogs trend marketing culture
"The following are the principles that I use to be a transparent company."
Tags: business communication transparency
"The "long table" is a physical manifestation of networked culture. Information is less driven by hierarchy and process and more driven through connections, collaboration, transparency and as Noah aptly put it in his blog, moments of serrendipity."
Tags: design ideas marketing business
Is a new breed of wireless worker emerging?
Tags: culture mobile wireless business
A question to ponder: should big companies even try to innovate internally?
"Even though Yahoo has grown into the entity it is today by virtue of building innovative products, perhaps its future growth path should be driven by its ability to SPOT innovation, not create it."
Tags: yahoo innovation business
"By looking at marketing as a service rather than a message, marketers are sure to gain competitive advantage, enhancing their product offerings and engaging their customers and prospects in fresh and meaningful ways."
Tags: marketing brandedutility business trend
"Great design drives profits. We know that. But we can't prove it--yet."
Tags: business design marketing roi
Big Companies, Small Companies, Innovation and Brickhouse
"Big companies are no longer competing only with big companies anymore. They're competing more and more often with two kids in a garage. Embracing risk, and the concomitant failure, is an essential part of this."
Tags: innovation yahoo flickr process business
"The Carbon Trust is launching a green equivalent to the Fairtrade label - a consumer label which details the carbon footprint of a product and a commitment by its producer to reduce it."
Tags: environment carbon business marketing packaging
Arcade Fire's Neon Bible Debuts at #2
"The Arcade Fire's second album, Neon Bible, claimed the No. 2 spot on the U.S. Billboard 200 charts this week, stomping all over new LPs from Daughtry, Relient K and Robin Thicke."
Seven steps to remarkable customer service
"Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literallyâ€â€the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark."
Tags: customerservice tips business
You make profits for nine days a year
"Companies on average are only profitable for nine days out of the year. If you take all the profitâ€â€the net incomeâ€â€at the end of the year, and divide it by 365, and take the sales and divide it by 365, that’s all you’ve got, is nine days."
"The way to inspire a designer is to give them the message and feeling you want to convey, and the freedom to convey it in a fresh, new way."
MySpace driving down the price of advertising
"Which means, I think, that while MySpace is making more money every quarter, it's actually getting worse at monetising the traffic it generates. Or to put it another way, its yields are declining."
Tags: myspace advertising business
Shareholders as Brand Evangelists
"We tend to view consumers as marketing’s focus and shareholders as finance’s focus. But odds are if you’re a publicly traded company, you have a lot of individual investors who bought your stock because they simply love you as consumers."
Tags: marketing business stock wordofmouth starbucks
How to do it right . . .
JetBlue Begins Reimbursing Stranded Passengers
"The company will begin payments ranging from $25 toward a future flight to a round-trip ticket to passengers kept waiting by the airline’s own mistakes."
Tags: nytimes airports travel business
"I’m told some of their executives broke into a sweat as we worked through this rigorous process that requires you to let go of something in order to get something better."
On Having Balls, Part II: Staying Hungry
"We think it takes a lot of balls to destroy what you have in order to make room for the new. Even if we fail, at least we gave it a shot. But hopefully, we won't."
Tags: business risk startups entrepreneur
Beyond the X's and O's, a Lesson in How to Be Big
"For starters, protect the product by limiting its exposure."
Tags: nytimes sports marketing branding business television media
A Good Corporate Blog: Southwest Airlines
"ts strength lies in it's the diversity of its writers who represent a number of different sides of Southwest's business; from pilots and attendants, to schedule planners."
Tags: corporateblogging blogs business travel
"Now that a billion people are online, even sites aimed at a narrow slice of the Web audience can attract huge crowds. Make way for the meganiche!"
Tags: business economics longtail marketing trend
Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.
Tags: business finance culture
I Know What You're (Collectively) Thinking, Planning
"How long before the collective search terms of a company can be used to sufficiently predict the products and services they next bring to market?"
Tags: attention business search future identity privacy
Patrons or Pirates: the music industry has to choose
What if the music industry restructured itself to more resemble the arts?
Tags: art music business culture
"I believe that the basis of competition in web services will shift from the data to the system that manages the acquisition, and use of that data."
Tags: data trend future business internet
How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote
Should he really have announced six months before release?
Tags: apple technology mobile design presentation business
Stephen Colbert explains the whole AT&T thing!
"AT&T just bought Cingular? Cingular was already owned by AT&T? Bellsouth owns who?! Let Stephen Colbert help you figure this out!"
Tags: funny video phone mobile business politics
2006 Agency Of The Year: Nobody
"What should an agency of the year look like? In my eyes–in this era of the rising “you�–an agency must embody ten critical attributes and capabilities"
Tags: marketing change culture advertising business management
"Whether you have your eye on a plum promotion, a plump pay rise or just a happier workplace, begin your quest here with our tips on making more of your nine-to-five this year. To kick off, Seth Godin says being average in 2007 just won't do ."
Tags: marketing passion remarkable business management ideas
Breakfast Is Late, So Business Is Good
"For the late-rising professions, the networking site of choice is a cafe with a Continental vibe."
Tags: coffee breakfast trend business networking food nytimes
Some thoughts on innovation from Grant McCracken.
Tags: innovation creativity business management
"A group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so that they are able to accomplish something that they would not be able to accomplish separately."
Tags: marketing business passion quotes
The difference between strategy and tactics
"If you are tired of hammering your head against the wall, if it feels like you never are good enough, or that you're working way too hard, it doesn't mean you're a loser. It means you've got the wrong strategy."
Guy Kawasaki offers up some tips.
Tags: networking tips business entrepreneur
Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm
"Google, in typical eccentric fashion, has created an automated way to search for well-rounded candidates."
Tags: google management jobs culture business nytimes
Is Design the New Management Consultancy? Not Exactly
"Some folks are asking this question. I’ve spent the past two years making the transition from designer to business consultant, jumping a lot of hurdles along the way. Here’s a little of what I learned"
Tags: design business consulting strategy management
Wave v Particle Model of Messages
"The particle view of messages makes sense in our post-mass-media world where communications are dominated by one-to-one exchanges rather than broadcast blasts from centralized sources."
Tags: marketing communication business viral
Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village.
Tags: architecture business management city collaboration culture design innovation productivity
"A consultancy called the Attention Company has just complete a fascinating survey of what it calls "Out There" people---think Mark Cuban and other promoters of radical transparency."
Tags: statistics transparency blogs business attention privacy research
Marketers: It's Time To Stop Blaming Your Woes On The Consumer!
"Marketers should embrace this growing period of reciprocity by refocusing on the fundamentals. Those fundamentals mostly likely are what made you successful in the first place!"
Tags: marketing trend business customerservice
Is Mad. Ave. Ready To Go Naked?
"These brash Brits say they have the cure for what ails the ad business these days. Is Naked Communications a real revolution, or just Brand X in a new box?"
Tags: business advertising marketing communication planning
10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations
"Social Media (Blogs, Forums, Wikis, Podcasts, Video blogs and other tools) are appearing in every industry. Below are my 10 strategic themes for 2007."
Tags: socialmedia blogs community business marketing
"Under the new model, a blogger can permanently "activate" the content, distribute it and allow the New York Times to generate ongoing ad revenue from the article."
Tags: nytimes internet business newspapers blogs
Craigslist Meets the Capitalists
And confuses them quite a bit by saying they are not all about making money.
Tags: business craigslist economics finance
No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace
Tags: business change culture innovation management productivity time
"How do you do it? By honoring your community, making reasonable and transparent rules, getting experts to help you, and encouraging positive, thoughtful behavior from your site's members."
Tags: community google design business socialsoftware
Getting High Performance out of High Potential People
"Manage for Passion. This is the key takeaway."
Tags: management creativity leadership passion productivity business
"Markets today are so bigâ€â€the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollarsâ€â€that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there."
Tags: business longtail marketing management small videogames
The Bloomberg-for-president scenario starts with the mayor’s growing sense of himself as a man of destiny. Throw in the country’s disgust with the two parties, add a half-a-billion bucks, and you’ve got yourself a race.
Questioning "VPs of innovation"
"If ever a VP of something is created, say a VP of quality or a VP of sarcasm, it means one thing: 1. The company is failing at that activity. 2. The company will continue to fail at that activity until that VP is no longer needed."
Tags: business innovation management culture
Attracting Talent in Spikes and Firms
"The winners in the global economy will be the firms that can find ways to break this vicious cycle and harness network effects for talent development both within and across firms."
Tags: business economics management strategy talent
10 Reasons to Go Short on Second Life
"I thought the blog/Web 2.0/Cluetrain revolution was all about authenticity and living online the way I do in real life... my digital world as a reflection of my real interests and real personality?"
Tags: secondlife business venturecapital
Quick Tips on Corporate Blogging
From Organic and their blog Three Minds
Tags: blogs business tips management
"You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting."
Tags: creativity lifehacks personality conversation tips business
Oh the emails you'll get . . .
On management consulting: "The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. "
Tags: business consulting management productivity software
"So if you want to get into the venture capital business, become a connector. Find a job that lets you build your network."
Tags: networking venturecapital business tips
"The following eight strategies encourage you to think productively, rather than reproductively, in order to arrive at solutions to problems."
Tags: thinking creativity business innovation brainstorming tips lists
"Ok, so even this simplest commercial message is coded and symbolically purposeful."
Tags: marketing business food 5dollaridea
Idea Factories: Renegade Marketing Group
Story about Renegade (where I work) and how it's an idea factory.
Tags: marketing advertising business collaboration ideas
"The right thing is to build not a bubble, with it's binary in-or-out choice, but to build a gradient, with shades of resources you make available as people achieve success."
Tags: business google identity opensource startups
Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal
Mark Cuban shares 'details' on the YouTube deal from an anonymous industry insider.
Tags: youtube business copyright google law video
The story of the downfall of Friendster.
Tags: friendster venturecapital business internet socialnetworking history nytimes
Some possible pitfalls for Netflix? I don't think so, but it's an interesting point of view.
The Obvious Corp - Evan and Biz Take Back Odeo
The greening of The Valley, why sustainable companies matter.
Tags: business venturecapital web2.0 entrepreneur startups
Embed marketing in products: Crispin Porter + Bogusky CEO
"Google and Starbucks both don’t use much traditional media to get their message across, he said. But that’s because their marketing is embedded in the brand."
Tags: business advertising design trend
Ad Agencies Being Left Out of the Innovation Party?
"For advertising to succeed and move up the ladder, it needs to break away from ego-centric creativity, the 'Madison Avenue' and 'Ad guys' nomenclature that's more albatross, than asset and sharpen its collaborative processes."
Tags: advertising business innovation
The Future Was Staring Us in the Face
"However, aside from his famed “reality distortion field,� the argument adheres to basic business principles and provides an extremely useful template for the introduction of new products and services into emerging or underdeveloped markets."
"As Mr. Schultz sees it, customers get a new cultural experience and Starbucks gets a 'halo'  the associations people have with beloved music, with 'quality, good will, trust, intelligence.'"
Tags: starbucks nytimes branding business
What portion of Google's revenue is Search versus Contextual?
"Google derives about 78% of its advertising revenue from Search, and the remaining 22% comes from other sources, primarily Contextual."
Tags: google business search advertising money
"And of course, that’s the trap for most brands. They confuse social media with traditional communication channels, and they do what they know: talk at people instead of with them."
Tags: marketing branding business media2.0 socialnetworking
"I'd been considering a new MacBook portable, but it's increasingly obvious that Apple has a lemon on its hands -- or, rather, that far too many Apple customers have lemons in their possession or back at the shop for repair."
Tags: apple laptops customerservice business
"Now the challenge becomes matching the panoply of innovations to the business goals, otherwise you run the risk, as Google is doing, of losing focus and confusing customers."
Tags: google innovation business
Finally, some honesty in the business.
Tags: funny video advertising business
How to Run a Meeting Like Google
"No one wastes time searching for a purpose at Marissa Mayer's meetingsâ€â€even five-minute gatherings must have a clear agenda"
Tags: meetings management business google tips
Are Marketers Serious About Ceding Control to Consumers?
"Customer service becomes a powerful media department when consumers chronicle their experiences with your brand."
Tags: marketing advertising business
Colbert Demands Royalties From YouTube/Google Merger
"Colbert demands royalities from Googles recent acquisition of YouTube and runs throught all the great entries in the Colbert GreenScreen Challenge."
Tags: funny video youtube google business media2.0
Announcing The Techdirt Insight Community
"Companies sign up to engage the Techdirt Insight Community to raise issues, get feedback, test ideas, review products, make strategy suggestions. . . or any number of other services that require a dedicated group of experts."
Tags: blogs business research marketing technology
Digital Competition - Avram Miller
You know when you read one of those things where someone has said everything you're thinking . . . and then you realize they said it seven years ago?
Tags: internet business venturecapital
10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces
Photos from ten really cool looking spaces created to inspire creativity.
Tags: creativity design business management architecture furniture productivity
How YouTube Kicked Google's Ass (and everyone else's too)
"If you go back and look at YouTube's traffic, the day they let people embed their videos in MySpace pages is the day they took off and never looked back."
Tags: youtube google video business startups
"One trend I’ve found is the high number of innovation efforts within established companies, and how rarely they have any effect."
Tags: innovation business management
Knocking the exuberance out of employees
"If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up."
Tags: management business passion creativity
Paradigm shift: What Google didn't buy
"They could have considered buying The New York Times. But no--they didn't, did they--and the decision to spend all this money on YouTube shows that the coffin nails of mainstream media are already strewn across the open grave"
Tags: google youtube media2.0 nytimes business newspapers
Engagement Is a Euphemism For Measuring the ROI of Brand Advertising
"Between Google, with its algorithms . . . and TV brand advertising, with its outdated input metrics that are useless for measuring real return on investment . . . is the “fuzzy middle� where the battle for the future of advertising will be fought."
Tags: advertising engagement business marketing television
The 20 smartest companies to start now
"Howard Schultz, Steve Case, Vinod Khosla, and other major investors are sharing their best startup ideas. And they're willing to give a collective $100 Million to the entrepreneurs who can make them happen."
Tags: venturecapital business entrepreneur startups
Book Sales Get a Lift from Google Scan Plan
"Publishers are starting to report an uptick in sales from Google Inc.'s online program that lets readers peek inside books, two years after the launch of its controversial plan to digitally scan everything in print."
Tags: books copyright google search business
"Revolutionizing branding is the real play at the heart of all this. Google thinks they are closer now, with YouTube in their back pocket - because they have a platform for experimenting with branded ads."
Tags: youtube google marketing business video
Sony ex-chairman warns on future
"Japan's consumer electronics industry is dying, Sony's former chief says."
Tags: business japan technology
"Are industries based upon rapid fire information inherantly less stable than ones based on selling material goods?"
Tags: advertising media marketing business videogames
Calculating the ROI of blogging
Charlene Li at Forrester offers some thoughts on how to think about the ROI question as it relates to blogging.
Tags: blogs business corporateblogging
10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website
"These are the top 10 things I learned from attending the Future of Web Apps Conference 2006 in San Francisco earlier this month."
Tags: tips internet marketing design startups usability business
"Business is about taking a bright idea and assembling a team that can turn that idea into a product and bring that product to customers who want to buy it. It's that simple. "
Tags: venturecapital lists business marketing
Is The "Traditional Venture Capital Model" Broken?
"So we need a new approach to the kind of companies we fund and we need a new approach to how we fund them and how we get out of them."
Tags: venturecapital