Tag Archives: company

Facebook, brands & you

From the recent Forbes piece, Why Business Needs To Get Social: Businesses that ignore the call to be “social”–that is, to abide by a social contract with their constituents (customers, partners, resellers, employees)–run the risk of appearing pathological. I see “social” business as an inherently healthy change. Social contracts generally involve listening and talking, give and [...]
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Metropolis Mag’s “Capturing Culture”

Short article in the latest Metropolis about Chronicle Books hiring a corporate anthropologist to help design new offices. It’s a quick read: “[Her] thesis is that organizations have their own kind of invisible structure. In other words, what you see on the flowchart of a company isn’t necessarily how the work gets done,” Carabetta explains. Stephenson [...]
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Topspin & Day 1 of changing the music industry

Pretty exciting! Topspin goes live: Topspin is founded on the principle that while costs of production and distribution in the music industry are dropping, unlimited choice for consumers only increases the importance of efficient marketing. Marketing means both connecting and cultivating relationships with your existing fans (much of what Seth Godin describes as “Permission Marketing” applies) [...]
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Why bother if the idea sucks?

Thinking of starting a business? Just follow along with these convenient lists! It seems the trend with successful CEOs (and some less so) is to post a long list of things and call them your “rules for startups.” You get gems like “NEVER EVER EVER buy swag” or “Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love [...]
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TIVO BFF!!!1

My mind wandered after that last post and I started to think about what it means to be human in today’s always connected world. Of course, it means you’re nothing unless you’re in someone’s social network (du jour) buddy list. Where does that leave the Big Corps trying so hard to fit in? The companies I [...]
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Friending the Corporation

A post on Intermediary Factors had a couple of interesting quotes from a recent Jupiter Research report, “Networked Media: Thriving In An Intermediated World” David Schatsky, president of Jupiter Research one comment speaks volumes if we put it into context of the emerging market. He says “By paying closer attention to the tendencies of the end [...]
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Knowing your audience

From WSJ’s short interview with Tesco CEO Terry Leahy: Q: Tesco is famous for doing a lot of customer research with it’s loyalty program, the Clubcard. LEAHY: It’s an important technical part of an even more important philosophy, which is to listen to customers—but really listen. Many organizations say they listen, but they’re very selective in what [...]
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Generations of Design Thinking

Bank of America has a pretty useful account feature called “Keep the Change” that came about from some work they did with IDEO. Keep the Change is brilliantly simple: use your debit card for purchases and Bank of America will round up to the nearest dollar, depositing that amount into a savings account. And [...]
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The Purr of 248hp at 185kW

If the Prius or the Honda Hybrids aren’t doing it for you, check out what the folks at Tesla Motors are building. Pretty amazing & impressive engineering. I saw a nice presentation from JB Straubel (Tesla’s CTO) and Bill Moggridge (IDEO, Tesla design consultant) where they outlined some of the decisions that went into the [...]
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Connect the dots business plan

Greg Yardley makes an interesting observation about the Y Combinator-funded start-up, Wufoo, an online form creator that makes creating a form “easy and painless”: “I see Wufoo as part of a broader trend – the gradual outsourcing of all routine development and administration to more efficient plug-together-and-play solutions. In a year or two, all the little [...]
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