November 2011
34 posts
2 tags
Chinese Startups: Everything You Think You Know Is... →
Awesome report on China and the startup scene there.
Some guy made a ton of money from US-sale of his startup, so he went to China and studied the landscape to see if he could invest.
My favorite quote:
“The fundamental rules of the Internet don’t apply to China”
“Startup techs are a few generations behind, like .NET behind”
October 2011
74 posts
2 tags
Accurate short-term weather prediction →
“Using your precise location, it tells you when it will precipitate and for how long. For example: It might tell you that it will start raining in 8 minutes, with the rain lasting for 15 minutes followed by a 25 minute break.”
This feels like a project that’s better for VC’s than Kickstarter. And how on earth hasn’t weather.com/wunderground already pounced on this...
▶ Audioboo / Harry Houdini speaking, in 1914 →
One of the earliest recordings of Houdini.
Listen how slowly he speaks. That’s century-old presentation there.
Apple Retail Stores to Allow Self-Checkout via iOS... →
“MacRumors has learned that Apple is planning to launch an update to its retail store iOS app that will allow consumers to utilize self-checkout for purchases of accessories and other shelf-stocked items at the company’s retail stores. According to our source, self-checkout purchases will be charged via the Apple Store app to the customer’s iTunes Store account. “
Apple...
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A voice-controlled future is finally upon us —... →
“That will enable applications like whole-home automation — the ability to set heat, A/C and light controls — controlled by voice through a unified system. And with persistent connectivity of all these devices — the so-called “Internet of things” — users will be able to speak controls remotely into a phone or other device and have them carried across the network before being implemented in...
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Reach Beats Frequency in Facebook's New Layout |... →
“Facebook is showing you to more people but less often per person,” said Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever. “I would say it’s actually much better for brand pages now. As a marketer, I’d totally rather reach more people every single day” than the same people more often.”
Yes. But as a consumer, I get sick of seeing a post from a toothpaste brand every...
2 tags
The Guardian introduces @GuardianTagBot, a... →
“Guardian has been built by Smesh developers, who have implemented a kind of ‘Twitter bridge’ between Twitter and the Guardian’s content API. Smesh have built on their existing infrastructure for realtime tweet-wrangling to capture all incoming tweets @GuardianTagbot via Twitter’s streaming API. Smesh’s software then performs some semantic analysis on the tweets, cross-referencing against a...
Artificial Collective: On Quantifying Ideas →
artificialcollective:
Traditionally, ideas came in two shades: good and bad. And while it used to be easy to discern between the two, the increasingly diverse and complex marketplace many business are facing is making it harder to put labels like those on ideas. Now the undeniable bleed of digital into traditional…
Doesn’t the equity piece, at some point, trickle down to...
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'Engagement': Fashionable Yet Bankrupt - Canalside... →
“It made the claim that consumers are becoming increasingly active in all (yes, all) their purchase considerations, and then went on to pronounce that marketers must seek to increase the level of “engagement” they have with consumers across all (yes, all) channels. Unfortunately it chooses not to define what ‘engagement’ is. Thereby rendering the utility of this piece of...
The illusion of strategy
“As I see it, the world is divided into two types of situations: ones where we can identify what’s going on, and ones where we can’t.”
That’s Graham Oakes, who kills it in a post on strategy.
“In the first type of situation, we observe what’s happening. We identify the forces driving the dynamics of the situation. We use this understanding to determine how we can...
2 tags
Sneakerpedia →
Footlocker killed it with this digital tool. Very impressive and can be added to list of Nike+ as corporate digital utilities.
Via Kate Bordell.
http://bit.ly/uJGtwM
1 tag
Factor endowment theories of trade and investment →
Servers run well in Iceland.
Digital Strategy in a Big Company
Eric Reis, Lean Startup Mogul, has a great post on Nordstrom’s innovation lab.
The basic premise is that lean startup principles can be used in a Fortune 500 company.
Check out this video:
Lean startup masturbation aside, how awesome are some of the techniques from the lab?
Retrospective meetings with a glass board filled with post-it notes?
Paper prototypes? Using a pen to pick what...
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Why Dr. Pepper 10 is Everything Wrong with... →
Good insight from Becky Lang:
“Since I wrote the website for Zeus Jones, it has been hounded into me time and time again that a cornerstone of a brand should be that it is guided by real values that people can connect with, and that its actions express these values more than simple messaging gimmicks.”
Via Zeus Jones.
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Can a Commercial Be Too Sexy For Its Own Good? Ask... →
From the Atlantic’s series on Marketing:
“Then Axe faced another big problem. Insecure high-school students had been so convincingly persuaded that Axe would make them sexually appealing that they began completely dousing themselves in it. According to CBC News, “Some boys have been dousing themselves in Axe, apparently believing commercials that show a young man applying the...
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Birth of Virgin Atlantic « Ravi-TheSun →
“In ’79, when Joan, my fiancee and I were on a holiday in the British Virgin Islands, we were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico; but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was cancelled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies and agreed to charter a plane for $2000 to Puerto Rico. Cheekily leaving out Joan’s and my name, I divided the...
3 tags
EteRNA | Played by Humans, Scored by Nature. →
Game to help scientists find RNA molecules to cure diseases.
Via Bud Caddell.
3 tags
Follow the Leader // Scott Weiss →
Only one time have I seen company’s leader do this: Ken Chenault.
“Like it or not, everyone watches the leader. What does he do? What does he say? What does he not say? How does he react? His behavior is mimicked and amplified throughout the organization. The CEO and the leadership team ultimately set the company culture with their behaviors verses a set of policies rolled out by the...
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Markets in everything the culture that is Japan —... →
Meanwhile, in Japan, a new fashion has women paying to have their straight teeth purposefully disarranged.
A result of tooth-crowding commonly derided in the United States as “snaggleteeth” or “fangs,” the look is called “yaeba” in Japanese or “double tooth.” Japanese men are said to find this attractive: blogs are devoted to yaeba, celebrities display it proudly, and now some women are paying...
3 tags
MahiFX →
Man oh man. SICK visualization for a foreign exchange brokerage.
Filed under: companies that understand the Internet for marketing.
1 tag
Emergency Runways →
I love the Internet: guy creates a Google map of roads that can be used as emergency runways by planes.
6 tags
noteandpoint.com/documents/pdf/hugomnlhpd.pdf →
Awesome presentation on the proliferation of web-connected devices and how content will be optimized by platform.
1 tag
What our home pages are really saying (a dialog) «... →
Good design best practice:
“Often when I’m designing I try to imagine a screen interaction as a face-to-face dialog between two people. Specifically, I try to imagine that the person visiting or using the screen is trying to have a conversation with a person representing the website or software the screen is part of.”
Via Bokardo.
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What is THEIR digital brand strategy? | Joel... →
“In a digital age, how people seek out your brand is their choice, not yours so you need a digital strategy that makes it natural and easy for people to find you given the purpose they have in mind.
Have you studied this yet? Have you measured how people have formed their strategies to find you by their recurring experiences as they seek brands, advice and offers out on the web?”
A...
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Mobile UI Patterns | Dashboard Navigation →
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Anything that is measured and watched, improves.... →
Anything that is measured and watched, improves.
- Bob Parsons
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How the iPhone Got Tail Fins – Part 1 of 2 « Steve... →
It was the most advanced consumer product of the century. The industry started with its innovators located in different cities over a wide region. But within 20 years it would be concentrated in a single entrepreneurial startup cluster. At first it was a craft business, then it was driven by relentless technology innovation and then a price war as economies of scale drove efficiencies in...
3 tags
Google: Not Doomed « Traffick: The Business of... →
That’s fair enough. But Facebook is a pretty specific enemy. And the problem comes when you assume that Facebook is doing so very well and that Google is doomed because Google doesn’t “get” what “Facebook gets” about a “social platform”.
And then Google’s Q3 results came out.
Without a dime of revenue from Google+, or a dime of revenue from the huge spike in advertiser-to-audience fit that...
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How the iPhone Got Tail Fins – Part 2 of 2 « Steve... →
Market Segmentation General Motors had turned the independent car companies acquired by its founder Billy Durant into product divisions. But in a stroke of genius GM transformed these divisions into a weapon that Ford couldn’t match. With the rallying cry “a car for every purse and purpose,” GM positioned its car divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac) so they would cover...
4 tags
Disney launches Appmates mobile app toys for the... →
sweet idea for toys and digital
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investing for all - mogro →
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WillCall →
Digital creating temporary markets for things.
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Booktrack: Soundtracks for Books →
Case of Digital used to enhance a product experience.
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dabball - browse, buy, and play games with art →
interesting business model to sell stuff–via a game with art.
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Stiiv →
Striiv is a sleek fitness device that fits on your keychain and counts every step you take. Striiv motivates you to transform your life with games, donations, and personal challenges that are powered by your activity.
Nizo for iPhone →
1 tag
Collaborative Consumption →
We should all be familiar with this term: collaborative consumption.
“Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before. Watch the video.”
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hack the agency | Influxinsights →
agencies acting like startups.
“One tool I really liked was the “Business Plan” which took the form of a single landscape sheet divided left to right into sections like “Revenue”, “Channels”, “Key Partners” “Value Proposition”, “Segments” etc.
Instead of being just a dry document that gets handed over- this thing lives and breathes, morphs and changes as people ideate around the business...
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BBC News - Viewpoint: The internet of things and... →
“As he says, “creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal to consuming something made by others, even of high quality”.
“Although slightly dull, I think that is really profound, and people missed that about social media. It is not about the readers, it is not about the quality of the stuff, it is about the writers and the act of...
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russell davies on people and the internet of... →
Russell cites Arduino as the killer application in this community, it’s the “thing” that connects external devices to computers. People are having fun with this technology by sending weather balloons up into space with digital cameras, or making bubble machines that are triggered by certain tweets. Those involved are a community of hackers that are motivated by making magical stuff, as Russell...
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The second economy - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy... →
In both these examples, and all across economies in the developed world, processes in the physical economy are being entered into the digital economy, where they are “speaking to” other processes in the digital economy, in a constant conversation among multiple servers and multiple semi-intelligent nodes that are updating things, querying things, checking things off, readjusting things, and...
The second economy - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy... →
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understanding the facebook dislike |... →
“Over-time, we are going to see much more sophistication with Facebook as brands try to move their “like” bases into different channels via different communication and content efforts. This approach will allow them to develop discrete and dedicated strategies for specific segments.
The idea that a brand only has a single page for all consumers is fast becoming a dated concept.”
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Startup Tools « Steve Blank →
Amazing list of web tools for startups.
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Pendulums, Tea, and Jack Cheng | One Skinnyj →
Jack Cheng on product work vs. client work.
“Disrupto began as a product company when we built Steepster. When others saw the experience we’d created around it, they came to us asking for design and product strategy work. Our client services business took off, allowed us to build an amazing team, and when that was happening, we used whatever downtime we had to work on our own ideas. Now...
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Software training online-tutorials for Adobe,... →
Training videos for software.
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The real world, now in real-time! Say hi to... →
New Foursquare functionality:
“Now, if you follow a list, like the 101 Best Dishes of 2011, foursquare will let you know when you’re next to one. Or you save that yoga studio to your To-Do List (because you really want to try it); we can remind you when you’re close. Or, better yet, if you’re driving home and three of your friends are getting together nearby, we’ll tell you so you can...
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Udemy - Academy of You | Find and Create Online... →
an online version of Skillshare.
