Tag: business

September 18, 2010

Mandated Fun

The Economist recently published an article about the “cult of fun” among businesses. Kyle Baxter has a better take on it:

Here’s a much simpler solution: make the work itself interesting and rewarding for your employees so they can get satisfaction from their jobs, make the environment warm and enjoyable for people to be a part of. If you do these two things (which, admittedly, is difficult, but that is your job if you are running a company), workers will find fun things to do naturally with their colleagues.

August 30, 2010

How Mobile Devices Could Lead to More City Living

Living in an urban area with public transportation beats driving in from suburbia. Productivity can start once you leave the house:

That first hour of the day, Apple and Google employees are banging out emails and getting ready for the day, not sitting in traffic carrying out a set of repetitive, low-level, and occasionally dangerous tasks to maneuver their exoskeletons southward…in the broadcast world, being in your car wasn’t so bad: you listened to the radio for fun at home, so the car was kind of a couch on wheels.

August 6, 2010

WaPo tries to seat TBD.com at the kids’ table

The article published today by The Washington Post about TBD.com, is pretty sad. It is rarely a good thing when make your childish attitude clear in the first 8 words. That’s not a lede, it’s a put down.

Also, who the heck decided to put the term community engagement in scare quotes? Perhaps it’s more depressing that The Post does not even know what that idea means. If the company had cared about community maybe they wouldn’t have had to sell Newsweek for a dollar.

April 13, 2010

Twitter and its plan to run advertising

I wanted to jot down two quick thoughts about Twitter’s announcement earlier today.

First, the money for Twitter is not going to be in running ads against search terms. I just do not think most people use Twitter as a way to consistently search for information. Google can get away with this because a search engine is not traditionally a personal thing. Google leverages the power of the many, Twitter relies upon relationships between users.

Twitter’s true value in advertising, is going to lie in leveraging what it knows about users you follow. If Hunch is able to build something that predicts tastes based upon following habits Twitter ought to able to develop something similar to deliver targeted recommendations.

This last part is what has me actually excited about advertising on Twitter. This could be huge. It could take the type of recommendation-engine that is true of advertising on The Deck and Fusion Ads and extrapolate it to a service with millions of users.

September 27, 2009

Doc Searls On value and valuation

If you listen to Rebooting the News it’s a point that you’ve heard before but Searls puts it well:

If you had told me in 1999 that the two hottest names on the Web in 2009 — Facebook and Twitter — would both be silos, I’d have been disappointed. I’d have figured that by now most folks would understand the infrastructural nature of open code, open protocols, open formats.

September 17, 2009

The next generation bends over

My sentiments exactly. This is why I cancelled my Mint account. They had so much going well for them I just can’t trust that the same level of innovation will be there after the sale to Intuit.

But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.

August 30, 2009

End of year reviews and the grading system

This would be ideal:

In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over the year. It also contains constructive advice and insight regarding how your boss believes you can improve on that performance. My dream is that you already know all of this information because you’ve been getting year-round feedback from your boss.

August 15, 2009

Why aren’t there any journalistic startups?

Just came across this older post from Kyle Neath:

Maybe it’s me, but the answer seems so clear in my head. We have thousands of unemployed journalists. Good journalists. We have VCs ready to hand out money for a shit sandwich. We have a proven business model. Why don’t I see a flurry of journalistic startups? Get rid of the cruft of the newsroom, give power to the reporters and content producers.

Stop trying trying to grasp onto idiotic ideas like “social news” or stabbing blindly at twitter in hopes of saving an archaic organizational structure. People aren’t buying printed newspapers? Stop printing them. People only want to read their news online? Let them read it online.

America needs to stop concentrating on how to save our dying industries and start concentrating on how to create the next booming industries. Isn’t that what the American dream is all about, anyways?

Sounds like a plan to me.

August 14, 2009

Free work vs. internships

From the always good Seth Godin:

Isn’t it odd that were willing to spend $300,000 to buy an accredited but ultimately useless academic line on our resume, but we hesitate to do a month of hard work to create a chunk of experience thats priceless?

This is the whole reason why I got involved with CoPress. Even when I wasn’t an actual team member it was fun work that taught me invaluable lessons about the web, college media, and small companies. I wouldn’t trade it for a thing.

August 8, 2009

The arrogance of Rupert Murdoch

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s writes:

How did [Howard Stern] go from a must-hear personality who was constantly in the news for his antics or his outrageousness to a “whatever happened to?” has been? Simply, he was put behind a pay wall. Oprah has her own channel, but I’ve never heard it mentioned. If the King of All Media and a woman who has enough influence to swing a national election can’t get people to pay, why on earth does Murdoch think he can?

A good point for sure.