Prologue The other day my friend Sam asked me where I turn to for business and entrepreneurship inspiration, which led to the following thought: “Yeah, good question – where the hell do I get my inspiration from?”. So after a day of intermittent soul searching, here’s my incomplete list of what’s currently driving me. What’s […]
Category: Business
Earlier today, Netflix published a post to its blog that said, in some of the thickest PR bullshit I’ve ever read, it was raising prices splitting its streaming video plan from its DVD plans, resulting in a 60% price hike for most of its customers: First, we are launching new DVD only plans. These plans […]
Last week we witnessed SIGG, maker of aluminum water bottles, lose the admiration and trust of its core customers in a single day when it admitted that for years, its products contained Bisphenol A (BPA) – despite giving the impression that they did not. Update (8/26/2009): Via The Consumerist, it appears that SIGG has created a voluntary exchange […]
Categories
Is Innovation Inevitable?
Last week the New Yorker had an excellent article on the topic of innovation from author Malcom Gladwell, titled In the Air?. Gladwell argues that the conventional wisdom of the brilliant inventor and the flash of inspiration isn’t necessarily true. Instead, he demonstrates are actually very common: The original expectation was that I.V. [Intellectual Ventures] […]
Until last Friday, it had been almost a full decade since I last launched a copy of Microsoft Access. I spent a fair amount of my undergraduate career getting familiar with it and the concepts of relational databases, and SQL, but once I started working with full-featured database servers like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, […]
We do the occasional email campaign to our current customers at my day job, and in interest of doing things right, I went with the absolutely awesome MailChimp service after looking at it and a number of alternatives. I’ve been very happy with their web app and their customer service, and highly recommend them if […]
Earlier today, the O’reilly Radar blog had an interesting post about an innovative new auto insurance company, of all things. They’re called MileMeter, and the thing that makes them different is that you buy your car insurance from them by the mile, not by the quarter, year, etc. This is obviously going to be a […]
Categories
BP Making Things “A Little Better”
It seems that oil industry juggernaut BP launched a new advertising campaign for its gas stations early this month, called “Helios Power“. The goal is “to make things ‘a little better’” for customers of its BP Stations. In their own words: The theory behind ‘gas stations, a little better’ came from the insight that consumers […]
My new issue of Fast Company magazine arrived in the mail yesterday, with a cover story about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s already up on their website for you to read for free. I’m a big fan of Facebook, but have to admit I didn’t know whole lot about 22 year old (!) Zuckerberg and […]
Categories
The Business of Innovation on CNBC
Last night I was flipping through channels on the TiVo, and happened to come across a show on CNBC called The Business of Innovation. It turns out we caught the third episode in a series of five, each of which will also be available to watch online. Watching this program, I was actually pretty impressed […]