Repost: Acoustic Conversations with Matt Vrba Live Now!
If you haven't seen it, head over to AcousticConversations.com and check it out. That is, if you like music. And if you have a pulse. This is the latest post from the blog on the show. -- I'm in San Jose right now. Did you see that coming? What with my clever title and all? To be fair, the tune I have in my head is actually from "Rent" -- and let me say this about that: This show breaks me right the hell down. I'm not kidding. There's a new release of the show, I believe celebrating the final Broadway performance. It's ...
Amazon to unleash Kindle format to mobiles?
I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com's retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It's an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another. I, for one, don't think that they should. Kill ...
Tyler Stenson on Acoustic Conversations and the 11 People
Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He's a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn't been posted yet, but stay tuned... it'll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present. This post isn't about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I'll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It's about what it means to be ...
Deloitte says Branded Social Networks are a Bomb
Courtesy of ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, "Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds", original post at the WSJ here. In summary, Ed Moran at Deloitte did a survey of 100 major brands that have online communities. They all suck. What does "suck" mean in this case? Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us. This tells me a ...
The List of Things to Think About
Why the iPhone Succeeds as a Platform
This, right here, is why the iPhone has succeeded as a platform in the ridiculously crowded handset space. From MacRumors: Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch: - Trimming video... [Read more]
From GadgetLab: How AT&T Stumbled Through the iPhone 3GS Launch
Personally, I haven’t had trouble with AT&T’s handling of the 3GS launch. Days prior to the device hitting the market, the company announced that I would be eligible for the fully subsidized rate for the iPhone, saving me $200 to break my old contract as my plan had outlined when I agreed to it less than a year ago. I bought the phone, it was activated in seconds — not minutes,... [Read more]
2009 SLP Service EOY Video: Terror Island
“Goodbye, SpeakUp” celebrates seven years of great design dialog
It’s sad to read posts like this. But it’s important to take note when prolific bloggers close their sites. In an era when the vast majority of blogs now drop the intent of becoming a passionate user’s publishing platform, and are now focused on this ethereal drive for monetization and traffic building and [good lord] microblogging, there comes a time when it’s just too hard... [Read more]
From TED: Can Design Save the Newspaper?
This is a great video of the presentation Polish designer Jacek Utko gave at TED this February. I disagree with his premise that readers are only leaving because they don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news and advertisers are following them. I think the technological shift in publishing is far more pervasive than the disdain for old news. The truth appears to be that people want information... [Read more]
