For tech entrepreneurs and managers, there is no “right” major or field of study. While having a degree in slinging code may present a short-term advantage at startup time, it may comprise an equally important disadvantage if the degree came at the cost of other critical “soft leadership” skills required to focus, lead and grow companies. So, it’s time for Silicon Valley to get over its obsession with engineers. And, if you run a startup, hire that psychology Ph.D. You may get a lot more than you bargained for.
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To help Oro Verde, the rainforest fondation, no need of humans to raise money but only the free and principals actors: Trees.
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Friday was our last day at BigDoor.Eric, Steve and I had a great time working with the BigDoor crew; so much so that we ended up staying on two months longer than initially planed when BigDoor acquired OneTrueFan. We built some cool shit, made new friends, and learned a ton — can’t ask for much more than that.
Thanks guys! It was a pleasure working with you all. Keep kicking ass.
Now on to building more cool stuff… I’ll tell you about that soon.
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Do you know that Antarctica is balmier and wetter than the surface of Mars? Yet I don’t see people lining up to build condos in Antarctica. So how long? A thousand years. Never. We can visit them. But to land there and say, “What an oasis!”—not anytime soon.
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yongfook: Design is Horseshit! →
In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic
I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design in all forms - copywriting in particular fascinates me. I’ve never called myself a designer.
Here’s my pitch. This…
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The concrete lesson to be learned from this is: In the modern era, business models are a commodity. I never want to hear about people asking, “But what’s their business model?” because in a world where you can grow a userbase of 1 billion in a few years, displaying remnant ads and getting a $0.25 CPM will do. Or just throw some freemium model on it, and monetize 1% of them. If you can build the audience, you can build a big business.
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1) “Down-trading” Is Declining—Consumers are migrating to higher priced products. Unlike in 2008-9, the current slowdown in the economy (growing only by 7% instead of 9-10%; Europeans and Americans read this and weep) is not causing a return to private label. One executive said that the challenge for consumer products manufacturers is “to make the unaffordable into affordable” through packaging (for example, sachet-sized products). Indian brands are challenging multinationals by offering “affordable quality.” In some cases, the Indian brands cost only 10 percent of their multinational competitors. One example is hair color (India is the only market in the world where men buy more than women); the largest selling SKU is priced at 12 rupees or 25 cents US.
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Bailey and Geary found population density did indeed track closely with brain size, but in a surprising way. When population numbers were low, as was the case for most of our evolution, the cranium kept getting bigger. But as population went from sparse to dense in a given area, cranial size declined, highlighted by a sudden 3 to 4 percent drop in EQ starting around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. “We saw that trend in Europe, China, Africa, Malaysia—everywhere we looked,” Geary says.
The observation led the researchers to a radical conclusion: As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive. As Geary explains, individuals who would not have been able to survive by their wits alone could scrape by with the help of others—supported, as it were, by the first social safety nets.
— If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine
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Redefining Engagement to be More Engaging
It starts with redefining engagement as we know it today to ultimately improve experiences tomorrow. I spent some time exploring existing definitions and I was surprised to find a lack clarity around such an important word. Since we spent so much time talking about what engagement is not, I invested time in researching the best practices of brands that were clearly driving communities in a particular direction through digital, social, and mobile channels. Those companies include Virgin America, Dell, TOMS, Whole Foods, Giant Nerd, among others. As a result, a working definition for engagement came into view…
Engagement is defined by how a brand and consumer connect and interact within their networks of relevance.
Simple. But, it’s also incomplete. It’s not just about the moment or competing for attention, it’s about the aftereffect.
Engagement is measured by takeaway value, sentiment or feelings, and resulting actions following the exchange.
If we look at the nature of the community in which brands are investing today, editorial programming, contests, gimmicks, campaigns, etc. lend to only one of the multifaceted sides to customer engagement. Community is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter. This is why businesses must think about investing engagement by defining experiences, journeys, feelings and outcomes. Without doing so, they by default introduce experience divides that disrupt flow, hinder sentiment, and obstruct clicks to action.
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You’ll never win on features against a market leader
The other important part to remember is that for the most part, if there’s a winning product X on the market, you’re unlikely to win by creating the entire featureset of X 1 by adding more features. Here’s why:
First off, that’s crazy because you have to build a fully featured product right away, and that might already take years to match a market leader
Secondly, as described in the Innovator’s Dilemma, if you’re mostly copying the market leader and then adding features, those features are likely to be sustaining innovations that is likely on the incumbents roadmap already- by the time you’re done, they’ll either have it or just copy you
Instead, the idea is to have a simpler product that attacks the low-end of the market leader’s product by taking a completely different market positioning. That way, you don’t have to build a fully featured product and you can take a completely different design intention, which leads to a disruptive innovation.
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few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine the effect that physical proximity had on the quality of the research. He analyzed more than thirty-five thousand peer-reviewed papers, mapping the precise location of co-authors. Then he assessed the quality of the research by counting the number of subsequent citations. The task, Kohane says, took a “small army of undergraduates” eighteen months to complete. Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear: when coauthors were closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality. The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart. “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions,” Kohane says. “Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it’s still so important to create intimate spaces.
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The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.
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thejakers: Ogilvy's 10 Tips on Writing →
From a memo to Ogilvy & Mather to all agency employees in 1982:
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to…
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We Wonder: 12 steps to better copywriting. By David Ogilvy →
April 19, 1955
Dear Mr Calt:
On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:
1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.
2. I spend a long…
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Hadoop, HBase and R: Will Open Source Software Challenge BI & Analytics Software Vendors? →
Harish Kotadia:
Predictive Analytics has been billed as the next big thing for almost fifteen years, but hasn’t gained mass acceptance so far the way ERP and CRM solutions have. One of the main reason for this is the high upfront investment required in Software, Hardware and Talent for implementing a Predictive Analytics solution.
Well, this is about to change – […] Using R, HBase and Hadoop, it is possible to build cost-effective and scalable Big Data Analytics solutions that match or even exceed the functionality offered by costly proprietary solutions from leading BI/Analytics software vendors at a fraction of the cost.
Vendors will argue that software licensing represents just a small fraction of the costs of implementing BI or data analytics. What they’ll leave out is the costs of acquiring know-how and more important, the costs of maintenance and modernization of their solutions.
Original title and link: Hadoop, HBase and R: Will Open Source Software Challenge BI & Analytics Software Vendors? (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)
