“Unfortunately, in any field requiring background and time to get beneath the surface, the ninja dust is easy to throw in the faces of the uninitiated, disguising the underlying truth – which is, all too frequently, only a surface-level familiarity with the necessary materials.”
—Wieden+Kennedy » Why We’re Not Hiring Creative Technologists
October 2011
30 posts
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“It’s a genius play, one that has GigaOm’s Kevin Tofel forecasting the “long-term growth of Facebook [as] more likely to come from the continued use of web technologies which provide a relatively common code base across platforms and similar user experience across devices.” In other words, not from the mere presence of a Facebook app on mobile devices, but rather of Facebook hosting the world’s mobile (web) apps through its own mobile app platform.”
—Zuckerberg’s HTML5 Trojan horse play • The Register
“This is what entrepreneurial means to me: fast, furious, impulsive, courageous, bold, aligned, as little bureaucracy as possible and a general sense that you can walk on water”
—Remodel Your Meetings To Create Internal Entrepreneurs
“[Amazon’s CFO] And while he didn’t spell it out, he made it quite clear that the company was happy to lose money on the tablets in the short term because it could sell more stuff to Fire owners in the long run.”
—Why Amazon Is Happy to Burn Money on the Kindle Fire - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD
I think... about agency roles
When it comes to agency roles, I think…
- That the best strategists are those who can recognise where the business problem areas are (even if they can’t fix them - either because of the skill or the budget lies outside of their marketing comms clients);
- That the best account handlers are all about getting a marketer to focus and decide on what the 1-2 big objectives are, and to keep everyone focused on the “simplify” mantra when it comes to implementation time;
- That the best digital people know digital is a mix of art and science, and recognise where their own personal strengths lie so they know which type of other agencies to complement themselves with.
“Perhaps the most exciting frontier in data journalism now is the attempt to treat large document sets as data. DocumentCloud provides a handy interface for loosening the bonds of the PDF format, allowing for search across documents and extracting points of interest.”
—10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient | Poynter.
“A couple of Web-based visualization tools are becoming standard fare. Check out Google Fusion Tables and Tableau Public. Both offer ease of use and some fairly impressive results.”
—10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient | Poynter.
“My favorite is Google Refine, which looks a bit like a spreadsheet but is meant for things like standardizing names so you can create reliable counts. (You may want “John Smith,” “Smith, John” and “John Q. Smith” to be counted as one person, for example, rather than three). Using Google Refine Expression Language, you’ll be able to do sophisticated data transformations,”
—10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient | Poynter.
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- Decisiveness / Gets Things Done – Entrepreneurs don’t “noodle,” they “do.” This is what separates entrepreneurs from big company executives, consultants and investors. Everybody else has the luxury of “analysis” and Monday-morning quarterbacking. Entrepreneurs are faced with a deluge of daily decisions – much of it minutiae. All of it requiring decisions and action.
bijan sabet: Some thoughts about Siri →
bijansabet.com
One of the most interesting things about my new iPhone 4S is Siri
After a week or so of playing with Siri, here’s are my quick observations:
1. Siri is fun. Siri has personality. It’s not just speech recognition. She has attitude and her own voice.
2. Siri plus geofencing is killer….
“Social deserves its own programming,” McCormack said. “This is a new programming platform.”
—MTV exec: Social is a new programming platform
“It’s hard to admit when a strategy is flawed. It’s very easy, on the other hand, to decide that the market, customer and product thesis is correct but sales-and-marketing execution is weak. I’ve seen too many companies delay making a tough strategy choice by first trying to fix the flaw through a change in execution. If execution is flawed, fix it, but look beneath the veneer to make sure the substance underneath is sound.”
—Two great comments on strategy at startups
“The new social apps also accommodate more granular detail with brand mentions, such as Nike+ allowing for, “John ran 5 miles with Nike+” instead of “John ran.” The potential for a continuous stream of branded social content is exponentially increasing.”
—Facebook Timeline’s New Breed of Apps Lets Brands Get More Social
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Hell-bent on making it work
via giantrobotlasers:
Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?
Musk: Do I sound optimistic?
Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.
Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.Love this quote by Elon Musk.
“One transport company, for example, recognized that in the course of doing business, it was collecting vast amounts of information on global product shipments. Sensing opportunity, it created a unit that sells the data to supplement business and economic forecasts.”
—Are you ready for the era of ‘big data’? - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Innovation
