Last night I went to the theater. I took my son to see the Broadway-ized version of Green Day’s Rock Opera American Idiot. I was ready to hate the show, and instead I loved it. I didn’t expect to find business change there. I was wrong. Hats off to Green Day and the entire production staff of American Idiot for a business change that worked.
But WOW do I have issues with Foursquare.
You know what I hate? Tofu (insert sound of angrily indignant health-conscious readers here).
Actually, what I really hate is when I do business with a company that makes a promise and doesn’t keep it. There are lots of flavors and shadings to that, of course, and I understand that sometimes there are things that are beyond your control.
Panera Bread, you lose.
Jason Calacanis, currently the CEO of Mahalo and a guy with a long track record of creating stuff in the tech world that sells for a bundle of money, isn’t known for being all warm and fuzzy. Or even a particularly nice guy.
OK . . . not direct enough. From all indications, Jason Calacanis is a bit of a jerk.
This week, he managed to outdo himself, responding to a politely-worded resignation letter from one of Mahalo’s employees in a way that can only be called “nasty”.
Today is my birthday. I’m getting very little done because . . . well, because it’s my birthday! But on other days I don’t really have an excuse.
I use software to keep me on track, to track my time, and to keep me from forgetting things. I’ve carried a PDA of one sort or another since 1994 (a Sharp Zaurus), and because I was one of those people who wrote about technology trends was sent and started using a Palm Pilot about a month before they hit the street in the summer of 1996. Of course, I’ve been using a Droid since late last year.
Remember back when Google launched the Nexus One SmartPhone and told us we should expect to see “their” phone on every major phone network? I commented at the time that the Google Phone looked like way less business change than Google wanted us to believe they were creating, and later told you that Google’s fragmentation of the Android Operating System might kill phones they were less attached to, like the Verizon Droid.
Now it looks like the entire Google Phone movement and creating the Nexus One was nothing more than a red herring to get carriers to develop Android devices.
Just yesterday I asked a question: can you really trust Google’s tools enough to run your business in the cloud? And it got me thinking about yet another initiative Google recently announced: printing documents in the cloud.
I’m not talking Google’s often-questionable security on this one. In fact, in a way I think cloud printing makes more sense than many of the other things we’ve all started doing virtually since Google became big brother. But because it’s so simple I pretty much ask “who cares”?
The shoemaker’s kids don’t have shoes.
I’ve been known to apply that old saw to lots of situations. Friends get angry at me when I do it, clients pay me to teach them about making sure they have shoes of their own, and because I’m human I’m as guilty as anyone; the things I’m best at teaching to others I don’t always handle well for myself.
What do you do when Google shuts you down?
Perhaps you’ve noticed that privacy has been getting repeated coverage here, lately. Whether it’s about the US Congress trying to pass new data privacy laws, the US Supreme Court protecting employer rights, or even something as superfluous as ChatRouletteMap, privacy has been on my mind, and of course the way it affects your business and the changes you’re trying to make to keep your business vibrant are effected by how you handle privacy.
Our friends at Google, a company that’s long been playing both sides of the privacy game, have a new tactic: Google has set up a page that shows a map with details about their data and privacy communications with governments.
Whose business is it, anyway?
It was just a few weeks ago that the New Jersey Supreme Court made me embarrassed to have lived many years of my life in the often-unfairly-maligned state. Now, the United States Supreme Court looks to be ready to fix the problem.
Let’s recap:
First, there is no constitutional right to privacy. We have many laws in the United States that establish privacy as something that may be reasonably expected under certain circumstances, but privacy isn’t a right.
Is it time to dump e-mail?
My head hurts just thinking about that question. But as great as e-mail is, it has problems.
For one, e-mail is too linear. So while e-mail is great for communications that involve me sending you a message, you answering, and the subject either being considered addressed or me being able to ask the next question until the chain of e-mails reaches its logical conclusion, it’s limited.
Depending on your perspective, there’s a change brewing in the bowels of the airline industry that’s either the best, most brilliant business change of all time, or complete cocky-doodie. European short-haul carrier RyanAir, already notorious for making pretty near everything a paid extra in their flights between European cities, wants you to pay to use the bathroom.
Yes, you read that right. Always seeking new ways to make money, RyanAir, the airline that has been known to price the occasional seat at just one euro and make money instead on extras, has decided that using a bathroom needn’t be free.
I’m all for privacy.
To be honest, privacy is a relatively new phenomenon sociologically and absent issues like identity theft and stealing from other simply by having their private data and knowing how to misuse it privacy shouldn’t really be that big a deal; just don’t do anything you’re ashamed of. But in the Internet / electronic age there’s a need to protect information. Privacy matters.
But as anyone who knows anything about the technological practicalities of privacy will tell you, there’s really no such thing; data systems will always get breached, and the best path to privacy isn’t about technology so much as knowing how technology you create will get used, and by whom.
Over the years since this Internet thing started taking hold, there’s been a lot of debate over an important question: Are Bloggers Journalists?
Of course, the question seems more important to former journalists who are unable to find work than it does to most other people. Well, I know a few of those and the one point that I’ve heard a few times and sticks is that journalists are held to a set of professional standards that separates their work from what bloggers do by virtue of imposing external or reporting and editing chain of command accountability for the accuracy of what they write.
How fast is your web site? You ask yourself that question all the time, right? You don’t want your customers waiting around for pages to load, and you certainly can’t risk losing the interest of someone new as they wait to see your web site for the first time.
It’s the biggest, if not only reason we’ve long recommended against heavy use of Flash. Now Google has added a reason for you to care about the speed of your web site: faster web sites will get higher rankings.
This troubles me.
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Should You Respond To Cranky Customers? Yes, and Here’s How.
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