Between us, Kathryn and I know at least a dozen, maybe two dozen health and nutrition coaches. And some of them don’t have as many clients as they want. If that’s you or someone you know, read on for a few brainstormy thoughts I had on building your practice. Caveats: 1. Not everything will apply [...]
March 17, 2010
Co-ops, L3Cs, and Hybrid LLC/Co-ops
I wrote a comment to Don’s post, but it was too long for Blogger to accept…. I have a close friend who started one of the first VT L3Cs a couple of years ago, and his intent was to signal that they weren’t out to get rich but to do something interesting and useful that [...]
August 5, 2009
Why not to burn bridges
Karlyn, via Twitter, asks: “why is it so important to not burn bridges when you’re leaving a job? especially if the person you’re burning it with already set it on fire” 1. There is no absolute truth. 2. Different people will have different views of a) What bridge-burning is; b) Whether one should burn bridges [...]
April 5, 2009
The Twitter Inversion
Perhaps another time I could elaborate further on the profound nature of Twitter’s interaction model. There are flaws, but it’s wired us together in as many ways as there are participants. Today, by way of illustration, here is a screenshot view into a couple of minutes of my Twitter stream: The stream actually starts on [...]
February 16, 2009
Patrick Byrne at Dartmouth Tuck School
Patrick Byrne visited Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business this evening. It was something of a local event, since Patrick and his father, Jack Byrne, both attended Dartmouth. The 90-minute format was was structured such that three ’09 Tuck students each asked a question and then the audience asked a bunch of questions. His answers were [...]
January 26, 2009
Facilitating Online Identity Management
Companies should make identity management easy within their online services. Specifically, it’s becoming more and more desirable to have a “split my identity” feature. For example, I have a Twitter account. Turns out I like Twitter. (It wasn’t always the case.) Eventually I want to split my twitter stream into a personal stream and a [...]
January 9, 2009
Economics Blogs
I gave a talk to a local business group about blogs, Twitter, social media and all that, and one of the participants emailed asking for blog recommendations to learn more about economics. Here’s what I suggested. I think Umair Haque is by far the most interesting ‘business strategy’ writer right now. Strategy has to take [...]
October 21, 2008
Downloading .asx video streams
Say there’s an online video that is only available for real-time streaming, and you want to watch it offline at your non-’net convenience, like on a plane or on your iPhone. A lot of these streams have urls that end in .asx. If so, here are some (techie, Mac-centric) references that will let you download [...]
October 14, 2008
Mostly Twittering
Thoughts are shorter-form these days. Twitter is a good place to follow me. Example: New Macbook video: http://bit.ly/1xNvDH Awesome emo marketing, utter techporn, richly deserves to be parodied. So there’s that….
May 2, 2008
Hubris, Denial, and the Financial Services Culture
Interesting behind the scenes report of the Milken Conference and pervasive “Republican/Chicago School of Economics ideology” in the face of a looming great depression. via John Robb.
May 2, 2008
One consequence of specialization is extinction
Sobering reflections from Robert Rich, on making a living as a musical artist in the long tail, based on his life data from the past 30 years. In reality the life of a “microcelebrity” resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit. After every [...]
April 25, 2008
US politics snapshot, all you need to know edition
Henninger/Wall Street Journal Halperin/Time/CNN Sullivan/Atlantic Drew/Politico Ambinder/Atlantic
April 15, 2008
Quote of the Day
Scott Heriferman: “Sadly, no time to really get into Twitter. For me, to stay healthy AND lead a needed meme (meetup to go from 5M to 500M people, ~$10M to $100M+ rev, and 20K to 200K successful meetup groups), can’t get sucked in.”
April 12, 2008
Thriving Office
The Sounds of Success: Home businesses know they must seem successful to become successful. So they play Thriving Office while on the phone. This valuable CD, which is filled with the sounds people expect to hear from an established company, provides instant credibility. It’s amazing what the world has come to.
March 19, 2008
Renting vs Buying
Now that I’m a “homeowner” I think a lot less about all the reasons I thought buying a house was foolish. But today comes Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market to remind me. Ah yes, I remember them fondly. What’s with the scare quotes? Well, the bank actually owns my home, not [...]
March 18, 2008
A Call for Journalistic Courage
Important essay by Walter Pincus on the role of the press in a free society: Today’s mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have [...]
March 4, 2008
Adjacent Social Objects == Gonzo Marketing
Chris Locke, after co-authoring the Cluetrain Manifesto, went on to write a great book called Gonzo Marketing. Wicked unlucky for him, the book was released on October 1, 2001 – kind of a bad season for US commerce. The book gets mixed reviews – sometimes because it’s somewhat dated, but primarily for the writing style, [...]
February 29, 2008
Economics Worldview Today
Credit cards are as dangerous as they are convenient Economics of the Macropocalypse Home to house Will the center hold? Why the Fed is compelled to lie to Congress
January 17, 2008
Running Out of Ideas?
Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article: Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas. Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, “Actually, I do think it’s a pretty interesting social experiment.” Thanks Pito, for taking a look.
January 15, 2008
FDA Says Food From Cloned Animals Is Safe
NY Times: After years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday declared that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe, removing the last government hurdle before meat and milk derived from copies of prize dairy cows and superior hogs can be sold at grocery stores. Tuesday’s decision means cloning technology could [...]
January 14, 2008
The Game Was Completely Up
The Economist: In 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting [...]
January 2, 2008
Handmeon Update
Here’s a status (promotional) update (flogging) on (of) my project (startup) to change the world, Handmeon. We got great press during the holiday season, including the Boston Globe, Vermont Public Radio, Seven Days, and the Valley News (broken link; left here for posterity). Jeff had an epiphanette while in dialogue at GiftHub.org which we’re discussing [...]
January 2, 2008
Iowa Caucus Closers
I had my hair cut today, and the stylist told me she supported Barack Obama in the NH primary. We chatted about that, and I asked her if she had considered Hillary Clinton. She said, “Well, it’s funny, because when I first heard she was running I got really excited. People came into the salon [...]
January 1, 2008
MBA in Guesswork
Good quote from a commencement speech by Bruce Eckel: Management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It’s all guesswork, so if you don’t have good intuition you’ll probably make stupid decisions.
December 27, 2007
Shopping As Hero’s Quest
To complete my cultural survey, today we went to the mall. Had this been a comparative cultural survey, we would have also gone to this mall, where they have valet parking, which could be quite handy given the size of mall parking lots. Nintendo has done an amazing job marketing the apparently amazing Wii video [...]
December 24, 2007
State of the Music
Wired Magazine has done us a public service by hiring David Byrne to report on the current state of the music industry. It results in two feature articles: David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music (with a striking photo!), and David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. Both [...]
November 26, 2007
How the Housing Bubble Worked
If you want to cut to the chase on the “sub-prime mortgage meltdown,” or whatever we’re calling it these days, tune into this post by Berkeley economist Brad DeLong: Let’s look at the loan history on this property…. The property was purchased in January 2005 for $1,157,000. The combined first and second mortgages totalled $1,156,730 [...]
October 10, 2007
Branding is Dead, part XCMXLLIV
I was thinking today that one reason branding was so important in the industrial age is that there were so many players in the chain. If you had any hope of having your “message” reach the end-user, you had to line it all up clear as a bell. And industrial organizations were so big, too. [...]
October 1, 2007
What many people criticize
Adam Nagourney at the New York Times on NH’s independent voters: As a rule, they are middle and upper income, college educated, socially moderate, fiscally conservative, anti-Washington and repulsed by what many people criticize as the overly partisan atmosphere there. This is the first article I’ve read with any analysis that comes even close to [...]
September 11, 2007
Apple’s .plan
In Unix culture there is the idea of the “.plan” (dot-plan) file. It lives in the user’s home directory, and is a place to write updates about your life or work. It pre-dates blogging and Twitter by nearly a hundred years, but was typically updated much less frequently than either. The id software founder and [...]
July 18, 2007
What is beauty?
This Dove ad should be required viewing for anyone who has ever wondered about “manufactured beauty.” (1:30) Dig the photoshop work where they extend the neck, puff the lips, trim the shoulders, lower the eyebrows, etc. She looks totally normal at the start, and a super model at the end. Update: Sassy Pants points to [...]
July 5, 2007
Toilet 2.0
If you’ve been thinking that you use too much toilet paper, the Washlet might be for you. It also claims to increase happiness. Bubblegen provides a good overview of the strategic challenge.
February 27, 2007
Compare and Contrast
Today in links: A $1,000 brownie Brûlee’s “Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis” is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is [...]
February 22, 2007
Food Security
When I say that “the food supply is far more fragile than people realize,” this is what I have in mind. It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last [...]
January 11, 2007
Results of Thinking Systemically
Finally found the quote I’ve been looking for: “He’s the only guy who has applied systems thinking to media,” said Paul Saffo, a consumer electronics industry consultant who is a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. Paul is referring to Steve Jobs. Bonus: This is an interesting Google search.
January 11, 2007
Ryu at Dartmouth
Wow, I had no idea this was a local person. Excerpt from PaidContent.org: And then Pogue introduced us to an 18-year-old Dartmouth student named Phillip Ryu. The kid ran a competition called Mydreamapp.com, where amateurs competed to design their fantasy Mac application. The winner, a product Atmosphere (“an ambient way to see your weather”) is [...]
January 9, 2007
Completely Redefining What You Can Do
I will be one of approximately 143,215,697 people to mention this today or tomorrow, but this is as close as it gets to product-orgasm. Cell phones have sucked forever, and this is a whole new game. iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet [...]
January 3, 2007
Design Is Good For Business
DETROIT, Jan. 3 — The Chrysler Group was the only Detroit carmaker to report a sales increase for December, while the Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda both saw their sales grow last month, figures from the auto companies showed today. I assert Chrysler gained sales because of design, with a capital-D. Of the US automakers, [...]
January 2, 2007
Mattresses
How to cut through the marketing gimmicks. The secret to mattress shopping is that the product is basically a commodity. The mattress biz is 99-percent marketing. So just buy the cheapest thing you can stand and be done with it, because they’re pretty much all the same. And that’s all you need to know. Not [...]
December 27, 2006
Sneetchcrafted Chocolate
Reading this investigative journalism piece about extremely overpriced chocolates made in Plano (Dallas) Texas, you will learn a whole lot about the origins, processing, and packaging of chocolate. Bonus: The word “Sneetchcraft,” following Dr. Seuss. “This collection of four of Dr. Seuss’s most winning stories begins with that unforgettable tale of the unfortunate Sneetches, bamboozled [...]
December 4, 2006
Rich People Don’t Care About Gas Prices
Great essay, with attitude, on why Ford, GM, and Chrysler are sucking eggs so hard. We’re looking at two strategies here. Toyota: build affordable transportation for the masses at a quality level that slightly exceeds expectations relative to price. GM et al: build oversized, under-engineered and fuel inefficient cars for people who don’t care about [...]
November 20, 2006
One Bank, One Card
Here’s a new video for all you U2 fans: One (4:49). Spoiler: Corporate execs wearing ties in a typical hotel conference room co-opting the song with celebration lyrics of their merger. Funny. Sick. Unbelievable. Horrible. Capital-C Culture.
November 7, 2006
The World Standard in Studless Winter Tyres
Glen said, “The ultimate winter weapon is still the Hakk 2′s with studs, but if you don’t want to run the studs with the noise and the rolling resistance and everything, then the RSi is what people are talking about.” Better than the Hakk 2′s? “Without the studs; With the studs, Hakk 2′s are what [...]
November 7, 2006
Dear Boloco
Quality control in Hanover has GOT to improve. Today: Regular teriaki with chicken. $6.25 They forgot the chicken. Then realized that this is normally $5.25 if memory serves. Last visit: Ordered extra chicken. Got normal amount of chicken. This is the sort of thing where it’s way too much of a hassle to go back [...]
October 31, 2006
Enormous Copyright Infringement Claims
Interesting business strategy analysis of the Google purchase of YouTube.
October 12, 2006
Children
There’s a new bead store in town. It’s nicely decorated, and my favorite part is a sign on the wall: Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free kitten. Hard to believe they’ll survive when Hanover rents are a couple of grand a month and a beads cost a nickel or a quarter [...]
October 6, 2006
Advice on Work
Paul Graham: The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You’ll either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, in which case [...]
October 2, 2006
Sonny Boy
The meeting was 15 people, by invitation. Hosted in a very comfortable high-tech room. The guest speaker was from a famous university a few hours south. Worker bees and VPs gathered to talk shop and think big. 45 minute presentation, then lunch is served. We introduce ourselves. Discussion ensues. Eventually I ask: “What kinds of [...]