Nothin’ Like a Little Home Cookin’…
High stakes, low yields and endless pyrrhic victories… Well, the verdict is in, at least this week’s verdict is in, as Apple got a jury in their own back yard to endorse their claim that rounded rectangles actually does amount to Intellectual Property. Interesting, since many displays have employed rounded rectangles for years. The next […]
The Perils of Being Cool ……
Aesthetics, Intellectual Property and pyrrhic legal victories Awhile back there were a couple of posts here about the intersection of design and technological innovation (The more I buy gadgets, the better I like furniture and The Ghost in the Machine …October and November 2011) which raised the question as to whether or not design and […]
Social Media: Trouble in Paradise …
Walled Gardens, Social Media and Toxic Value Proxies The trouble with events is that they sometimes have calamitous confluences. Take Facebook. Unless you’ve been lost at sea for the past several weeks you’re probably aware of the bourgeoning Greek tragedy that is currently known as the Facebook IPO, the largest IPO in the history of […]
The Apple of Sauron’s Eye
Rethinking Anonymity… Not just 4 the lulz of it all As someone who has lost sleep chasing bad guys through the briar patch of the onion router (TOR) only to lose them at the doorstep to China or Azerbaijan, you wouldn’t expect me to be anything less than a fan of full transparency when it […]
The Ghost in the Machine…..
The Economy of Innovation and Mutually Assured Destruction Over the past few months, a number of the posts here have dealt with the notion of the economy of innovation (See Requiem for a Business Model, Parts I & II… January and February) Both of these posts explored the idea that rivals could not afford to […]
The more I buy gadgets, the better I like furniture….
Affordances and the Luddites who love them… Sad week, this week, with the passing of Steve Jobs, a true and uniquely American genius, not particularly when it came to computing, although he obviously had his bonafides when it came to bits and bytes, but especially in what it means to be human. He recognized more […]
The Search for El Dorado
Mad men, production functions and social media marketing Years ago, a colleague of mine, Barry Clapp, explained to me his theory of advertising. I’m sure I don’t remember the subtleties but it went something like this…. Demand for any consumer good or service over any prospective population of buyers is essentially random, consequently the value […]
A Flash in the Magic Pan
Monetizing cultural phenomena and other quixotic adventures A couple of weeks back, the CEO of a web start up called Svpply, Inc caused a ripple in the blogosphere when he posted that he really didn’t know what he was up to. He was candid in describing the challenges that he faced on a daily basis […]
“Over here, stupid!”
Like many of my ilk I have found that I am prone to specific loss of normal cognitive functions that seem related to my gender. For starters, I can’t find things, simple but important things, like keys, insurance cards, post-its with passwords, that kind of stuff. Now nearly everyone experiences this kind of short term […]
Requiem for a Business Model…..Part II
This one’s just too good to pass up. Normally, I don’t post about current events. Mostly because it is difficult to learn any thing from the blur of the present. But since the last couple of posts dealt directly with Microsoft and Open Source Software (Requiem for a Business Model) and indirectly with Nokia (Value […]
