RSS feed borked fixed
Posted on June 27, 2008
Filed Under Comedy, Tech | 3 Comments
If you are reading this in a feed reader can you please leave a comment on my blog to let me know. My RSS feed appears to be broken, so I suspect no one is getting updates, but then again some people report seeing all the latest so it is a bit odd.
UPDATE: Thanks Justine. All good now…problem was between the chair and keyboard :)
Francis & The Lights
Posted on June 26, 2008
Filed Under Music | Leave a Comment
This reminds me I need more music in my life.
You can download the EP here.
The devil’s in the detail
Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under Business, Tech | Leave a Comment
This post has been sitting as a draft for weeks now, but this morning Dylan Bland’s post about focussing on the details prompts me to push it out there. I had been meaning to add some more thoughts, but I’ll probably never get around to it so here we go, as is where is…
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Stephan posted awhile back about being turned off by uninspiring business pitches which get lost in the details…
What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things… [read the rest]
Of course I totally agree about the need to be able to pitch an idea focussing on just the problems solved and the benefits delivered rather that the minutia. The point being that you really can’t expect people to grok the details in the first five minutes, rather you need to get them to that ‘Aha’ moment so that they understand the value proposition.
That said, I also find the opposite to be true. The number of times I have had conversations with people about business ideas (typically web based) which exist only at the 30,000 foot level. Regardless of whether they can succinctly describe the business in such a way that gives me that aha! moment, I find it incredibly frustrating when they haven’t thought through even the simplest of details.
Flynn pwns my laptop
Posted on May 29, 2008
Filed Under Tech | 2 Comments
Today was the first time I was not able to access my laptop because Flynn was using it with serious intent…playing pairs on uptoten.com :)
He turns 4 in August and he’s going to need his own computer before long…hmm, an eee PC in our future I see.
Weezers new video
Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under Cool, Music | 1 Comment
Weezer have a history of innovative videos and their latest for Pork and Beans is very cool…
via Waxy
Context is everything
Posted on May 5, 2008
Filed Under Business | Comments Off
Amongst all the handwringing and talk of Yahoo’s stock price plunge Jason Kottke makes a pretty salient observation…
On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion.
Read the rest of Jason Kottke’s post, Yahoo stock plunges?.
Certainly Yahoo’s stock price wasn’t on fire before the Microsoft offer and Yahoo has issues, but personally I’m erring toward the don’t sell side of the fence. Not because I don’t like MS (I do and I use MS Products all day long), it’s more because I like the idea that there are three big guys competing in search, I really like lots of the Yahoo products, I think they’ve brought lots of great talent in many of their acquisitions, and I want to see them have a chance to pull it all together.
I have no skin in this fight and I have no real insight to most of the big issues here (eg. cultural fit, technology fit, people fit), but selling doesn’t feel good for the internet.
Check out this 10 year chart of YHOO stock prices. That sure puts the recent fluctuations in context.
Things I’ve learnt: When buying a car…
Posted on April 15, 2008
Filed Under things I know | 6 Comments
When buying a car there are 3 basic parameters to consider:
- Affordability
- Reliability
- Coolness
You can pick any two.
Of course affordability is relative and cool is subjective, but in my experience it simply isn’t possible to have all three.
UPDATE 05/05/08: I brought a new (used) car…a Skoda Fabia vRS, and I’m very happy with it.
It’s the best combination of affordability, reliability and coolness I could find. Skoda has a rather chequered history as a marque, but there’s no denying they are making really solid cars these days (2 of the top 5 in the Top Gear 2006 survey).
It’s a 1.9ltr Turbo Diesel so it gets great mileage, which at 4-5ltr/100km is down to hybrid territory. But of course that assumes very moderate driving, which is not necessarily a safe assumption…the turbo charged 1.9ltr engine delivers about 130bhp which is a hell of a lot for such a small car (based on the VW Polo platform), so it is fun to drive, and difficult to drive moderately :)
Phonebooks
Posted on March 25, 2008
Filed Under Business, New Zealand | Leave a Comment
Yep, it is that time of year again…time for a quick rant about phonebooks. We had ours delivered the other day (all 4.6kgs of them) and I put them in the recycling today.
According to the 2006 census there are 2,724 occupied dwellings in our suburb (Kohimarama), which means approximately 12,530kg of phonebooks (not counting all the businesses).
Let’s imagine that 20% of those households could do without their dead tree versions of the phonebook… we could save 2.5 metric tonnes of printed paper in Kohi alone!
I know that they use recycled paper in the production but even if that is 60% or so we’re talking tonnes of institutionalized waste. Not to mention the waste of resources printing the things, and the solvents in the inks, blah blah blah…
For the love of God’s green planet please let me atleast opt out of receiving the bloody things. I don’t want them.
Photo by jonobacon.
Battledecks
Posted on March 17, 2008
Filed Under Tech | Leave a Comment
Talk about funny, Battledecks is competitive improv for the biz/geek crowd…take a dozen or so rediculous powerpoint slides and improv a presentation within a set time limit. I guess the crowd chooses the winner.
That’s a recipe for comedy. Here’s some of the slides from the recent SXSWi Battledecks session:
Via Ted (who tied for 2nd, sweet!)
[I'm going to SXSW next year if I have to swim]
Umair Haque on the shrinking advantage of brands…
Posted on February 15, 2008
Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment
I hate to blockquote so much of a great post, but if you have any interest in marketing and brand and business generally, you need to read this…
Quick – what’s the top brand in the world? Coca-Cola? Nope. IBM? Nope. One of GE’s stable of brands? Wrong again.
All these players are near the top. But the most powerful brand in the world today is, according to the gold standard of brand valuation, Millward Brown’s Brandz report, Google.Now, that might seem superficially logical. But from a strategic point of view, it’s nothing short of astonishing. Why? Because every other player in the top ten has spent decades – if not literally centuries, as for P&G and Coke – investing billions in advertising to build a brand.
But where these players invest on the order of 5-10% of revenues on advertising, Google’s advertising expenditure is almost exactly zero.
Read the rest, it’s really good (and there’s a bonus video).
I’ve often reflected that pretty much everything we need to know about marketing was written back in 1999 when the Cluetrain Manifesto was published on the thesis that “markets are conversations”.
And this is what Umair is saying essentially, that the value of traditional brand equity is fast eroding as the cost of interaction amongst consumers drops and the value of that interaction grows…in other words ‘consumers’ (aka people) would much rather talk to other consumers than consume mass media from corporations…and they can do this much more efficiently than the corporations can carpet bomb them with media.
So at the very least we all better be listening to those conversations, if not actively being part of the conversation…which if you’re reading this probably comes second nature because you are already participating.
UPDATE: I posted this late last night and kinda ran out of steam, but went to sleeping thinking about it and there’s definitely more to say, particularly about the challenges that traditional businesses clearly have with participatiion…I mean it isn’t like the individuals within large traditional organizations are not participating (lots are), but often those organizations do seem to have to have some old school notions of brand and organizational blockers which prevent effective particpation, e.g. “blog writing isn’t on anyones job description!”.
Anyway, it also occurred to me that I should cross post this to Online Marketer (our new team blog) and continue the conversation there. The blog is just getting started, but if you are interested in online marketing I promise it will be worth subscribing to.
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