Checking In: Foursquare, you’re just a feature…

I’m up to something else and haven’t been blogging lately. However, the Facebook Places news made me log in and post.
The part of the news cycle I found most interesting was the response from Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.
The core of Foursquare is check-ins — getting people off the couch and into the world to [...]

You People Are So Gullible

Are people really being taken if they are satisfied with the transaction? I don’t think so.
Still, the blogosphere loves to highlight how one product or brand is inferior to another. It’s great for the blog owners because the polarization drives page views. The chatter is endless. Most of that is driven [...]

Developers Are Divas + Platform Primer

Software platforms are a dime a dozen these days. Still, there are only a handful that matter. For companies that can deliver a winning platform, the economic model is possibly the greatest that capitalism has ever seen. The reasons are many. First, network effects create a competitive advantage that reinforces itself. [...]

The Mobile Phone Is Dead

My uncle had the first television remote control that I can remember. It was wired. That’s right. A cable ran from the remote to the television. Still, even that seemed magical. You didn’t have to get up from your chair to change the channel and that was amazing. This [...]

Commenting On Comments

Many times the user comments in a blog post are the most entertaining part of the article. Here are a few unrelated comments:

Evan: Im really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but the HP slate is one of the best tablets of all time.
Ray Brown: all of those who think that having [...]

The Problem With Ad-Supported Web Properties

FireFox popularized extensions to the browsers that allow users to prevent ads from being displayed when they visit web sites. It’s become somewhat of a cool thing amongst geeks to claim they have the latest and greatest ad blocker. Others point to privacy concerns as a reason for blocking ads. There’s some [...]

I Heard They Hate Puppies (My Apple iPad Post)

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So there it is. The Apple iPad is out and we can start speculating about something else. As a marketer, the most fascinating thing I found around the iPad hype cycle was the user comments on tech blogs. From the initial press it does look like the general consensus is that the [...]

Coming Soon – Your Phone + Your Monitor

Many big innovations are the combination of a bunch of smaller innovations bundled together. The digerati and fan boys yawn when many of these smaller innovations make improvements. They’ve seen some form of it before and the interactive improvement doesn’t get them excited. They want the new thing!
Still, I remain excited about [...]

Apple + Google + Microsoft + Yahoo = Fight!

The NYT posted a ridiculous Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo comparison article over the weekend. I’m not even going to link back to that nonsense. The only thing it really communicates is that the big boys in consumer technology try everything. This is what happens when you have piles of money to play [...]

Are apps the new music single?

Apps stores – they’re popping up everywhere. The mobile space is littered with them. Now they’re creeping into the living room and your HD television. The question is will they last? Will there be 2-3 winners? Dozens of niche players? Will they all die?
Amazon is launching an app store [...]

Dell, Stop Playing With My Emotions

So I got a Dell zino HD last week and the DVD drive doesn’t open. I’m talking pulled it out of the box and the drive doesn’t open. Had to reach out to Dell customer support after admitting personal defeat (and that this was a hardware issue). Their email support form was [...]

Office 2010 + Bing

Quick look (48 seconds to be more precise) at doing a web serach inside of Word 2010.

Sent From My iPhone

I’ve received a number of emails recently from people on their smartphones. Many have signatures that say things like ‘Sent from my iPhone’ or whatever phone they’re using. That’s fine if you think it’s cool to let everyone know you have an iPhone. I get that. Frankly that’s why many people [...]

Can’t delete Adobe Illustrator file from Windows desktop?

I ran into an issue where I couldn’t delete an Adobe Illustrator (AI) file from my desktop. After pieces together bits of information from the web I put together a process that can be repeated. Here’s a screencast that walks you through the steps. Note: This works for me on Windows Vista [...]

Here Come The Lists

Data comes at us from all directions. It can be hard to make sense of it all. So we filter. We ignore. We categorize. We love to group things. It helps us make sense of the world. It happens at work and in our personal lives. While [...]

Palm Ares: Browser-Based Mobile Phone SDK

Palm’s new Ares SDK lets you build mobile applications for the Palm Pre. The core development environment is web-based and there is plenty of drag and drop goodness. This thing is so accessible it made think. Does developer friction (on a device people actually want) actually increase opportunity for software vendors?
Palm will [...]

Ad Targeting: We Can Do Better

I was looking for a deck on Personal Data Networks. That I didn’t find anything interesting is another story. Mental note to blog on that later.
Anyway, I found it odd that a Timbaland ad was displayed on a site like SlideShare.net. It doesn’t fit. And the fact the keywords ‘personal data [...]

Employee CM Matters

I’m a big 37Signals fan. That’s why this blog post struck me as odd. The title of the post describes their main point:
How Basecamp helped Design Extensions grow from a 1 man shop doing under $50k/year to a 5 man shop doing over $250k/year
I’m looking at that and saying so what! Each [...]

Companies (Usually) Die Young

Windows Killer! iPhone Killer! Radio Killer! The media loves to write about the new thing and how it’s going to kill the old thing. Sometimes that happens. Schumpeter’s creative destruction is very real. However, our fascination with products and/or companies killing each other is somewhat misplaced. More often [...]

The Work Compass: Increase Your Productivity

Here’s a very simple framework that I use to drive organizational impact and productivity. I call it the Work Compass. You can keep the answers to yourself or share with your team. Regardless, you’ll do a better job staying on track and filtering out distractions if you spend 2-3 minutes getting these [...]

George Clooney vs. Tiger Woods

A promise is a big deal. Break one and bad things can happen. Namely people may lose trust in you.

Trust Me, It’ll Be Better

Early this month Google decided to sunset Google Gears. The reason? They are embracing HTML5 as the enabler for offline browser storage. Fine. Others, including Firefox, Apple, Opera, and Microsoft will impact the final HTML5 spec. But it’s not here yet. I like the promise. But the comment [...]

Why Crowdsourcing Works

There’s lots of talk about crowdsourcing these days. IMO, crowdsourcing works when the contributor believes they have excess capacity (e.g. time, brain processing cycles) AND will receive some sort of non-monetary compensation (e.g. recognition, purpose).
The formula that makes this work for many is perceived capacity (under) utilization plus (low) opportunity cost plus a belief [...]

The Foundation Post

I had a recent conversation with a marketing professional about a new web technology. It was probably my fault, but they got lost along the way. They got hung up on how DNS works. From there the rest of the conversation stalled. That got me to thinking. Are we all [...]

Guess Who’s Back

A quick overview on my blog and why you might care.