Earthquake turns TV networks into print
An 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan yesterday, and a tsunami is spreading, right now, across the Pacific ocean. Thus we have much news that is best consumed live and uncooked. Here’s mine, right now: Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones, tablets and...
Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy
[This piece was written for Triangle Business (in Raleigh, North Carolina ) and published twenty-five years ago, on February 10, 1986. Since it might be worth re-visiting some of the points I made, as well as the event itself, I decided to dust off the piece and put up here. Except for a few spelling...
Solved Science Theater 2010
This morning, while freezing my way down 8th Avenue to Piccolo on 40th to pick up a couple of cappuccinos, I paused outside the New York Times building to admire its stark modern lobby as KNX radio delivered the latest storm news from Los Angeles through my phone’s earbuds. In the midst of reports of...
Balk Friday
Yesterday’s paper came late. Guess it was too heavy. The thing weighed about four pounds, most of which was advertising for sales today, Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas Shopping season. Buy Now and Save! Celebrate the birth of the Savior by spending big, in herds. We were at a house with TV...
Bread and Circuits
I lost my Sprint data thing and my smartphone is getting dumber by the second. (In fact, I’m on my way to trade it in.) So the only way I can get online from the road right now is by stopping at a Panera Bread, which has slow but free wi-fi. The kid is with...
Networds
Live blogging Barbara van Schewick’s talk at Maxwell Dworkin here at Harvard. (That’s the building from which Mark Zuckerberg’s movie character stumbles through the snow in his jammies. Filmed elsewhere, by the way.) All the text is what Barbara says, or as close as I can make it. My remarks are in parentheses. The talk...
The Data Bubble II
In The Data Bubble, I told readers to mark the day: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. That same series is now nine stories...
Happy 42 Day
It’s 101010 today. In binary, that’s 42. It’s also the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
And, as it happens, our son’s 14th birthday. You can imagine how very cool that is.
A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering...
CRM+VRM 2010 Follow-up
It’s been a week since VRM+CRM 2010, and there have been many conversations on private channels (emails, face-to-face, phone-to-phone, face-to-faces), all “processing,” as they say. Meanwhile we also have some very interesting postings to chew on. (Note: This is cross-posted here.) First, Bill Wendell‘s RealEstateCafe wiki has a nice outline of sessions at the workshop. Better than...
