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 […]
Tag: Innovation
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The Nest Learning Thermostat
I’m a sucker for well designed products and for energy efficiency technologies. Combine the two, and you’ve definitely got my attention. Yesterday, former Apple employee and iPod designer Tony Fadell revealed what his start-up has been working on for the last couple of years. It is, of all things, a home thermostat. Called the Nest, […]
I don’t watch much football at any level (NFL, college, high school) these days, but I heard a story on Saturday’s Weekend America program that I thought was interesting, more from an innovation point of view than anything.
I don’t know if me being excited about this Amazon announcement is more a statement of me as a person, or this crazy world we live in, and I don’t care. Amazon’s new Frustration-Free Packaging program they just launched is 10 shades of awesome. Everyone – customer, manufacturer, deliverer, and Amazon – wins. So anyway, […]
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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] […]
I heard about a very promising new(ish) product called the Climate Energy Freewatt system a couple of weeks ago while listening to an episode of IEEE Spectrum Radio on the IT Conversations podcast channel. The Freewatt is a high efficiency heating furnace combined with a Honda power generator and a solid-state inverter, that uses your […]
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 […]
You’ve been hearing about my love of Amazon for years now, including the awesome web services platforms they are making available to developers everywhere. They started off with a cheap and easy to use message queuing service (SQS), later added pay-as-you-go remote file storage (S3), then added on-demand computing capacity (EC2), and most recently, flexible […]
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Amazon’s Customer Culture
The Harvard Business Review has a fascinating interview with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who I’ve mentioned before is my favorite CEO. In the interview, Jeff discusses how the company’s culture is completely customer focused, and why it’s not easily reproduced by competitors. Mr. Bezos offers a metric ton of insights and advice about running a […]
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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 […]