October 2004
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The best cooking show ever
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1 min read
New Scandinavian Cooking is just so wonderful. I love when someone takes a format that is already popular and full of variation and just takes it in a whole other direction. In the episode I saw, host Andreas Viestad skied through a sunny day over to a man pulling three char out of a fishing…
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Making advice palatable to CEOs
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1 min read
I had just read What New CEOs Need to Know (here’s a free, shorter version) and was contemplating the CEO’s experience (expressing a strategic vision, trying not to send the wrong signals, not in power but reporting to the board, not in touch with operations, balancing obligations inside and outside the company…) when I came…
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From anger springs innovation, sometimes
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2 min read
Tom Peters in Re-Imagine! For me business is personal, not an abstraction… I’m writing another book because I’m pissed off… I happen to believe that innovation comes not from market research or carefully crafted focus groups but from pissed off people…. Many people I’ve met who strive to be designers and innovators are driven by…
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Product naming as lifestyle signal
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1 min read
A product named FreeStyle Flash is…? Take a guess, then look at the answer.
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How a competitive stance blocks innovation
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1 min read
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Think for yourself – stop copying a rival make a great case for reducing the focus on competition and refocusing on innovation: Assisted by new means to analyse competitors and influence their behaviour, companies [in the 1980’s] placed competition at the centre of strategic thinking, where it has…
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Lemme just email you the wiki…
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1 min read
TiddlyWiki: It’s written in HTML and JavaScript to run on any browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to any web server, or sent by email. Whoa, wikis for the masses. It’s not as if they’re hard to setup (I’ve set up two personal…
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Those wonderful blue Greek coffee cups
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1 min read
…you find all over New York are now available in a more environmentally-friendly ceramic version.
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My birthday is Tuesday…
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1 min read
…and I’d like everyone in America to chip in and get me a new president. Thanks! Oh, and some tickets to The Incredibles.
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Ketchup desire lines
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1 min read
Just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s article on ketchup, which Peterme and Christina liked so much. The article explores the connection between consumer research and our tastes. The best quote: “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” Immediately afterwards I was grocery shopping (and bought some Gulden’s mustard, incidentally) and saw this: I wouldn’t be surprised…
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Customer culture and company value
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1 min read
The recent legal scandal involving four insurance companies in the U.S. caused them to lose $4 Billion of shareholder value in 2 days and now one chief executive. Having worked in one of those companies, and for others who are similar, I’d say a deep, underlying cause is a severe lack of empathic concern for…
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What’s next for iLife: Film Direction
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1 min read
iLife let’s you be composer and editor with production capabilities that required an entire studio 15 years ago. The next logical step in consumer production is full-on film direction, a combination of simulation and multimedia that completes the DIY promise. An example of what amateurs are hacking together is Mike Fraser’s 100 years (Windows Media),…
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Steve Jobs on managing for innovation
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3 min read
From an interview in BusinessWeek… On motives: …motives make so much difference. …our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs — not to be the biggest or the richest. We have a second goal, which is to always make a profit — both to make some money but also so we can…
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Espresso has less caffeine than brewed coffee
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1 min read
Zap recently told me this, and I was happy to confirm it: 1 oz. of espresso has 35mg of caffeine while 8 oz. of coffee has 250mg (31.25mg per ounce). So I’m happily downing my second double-espresso of the morning.
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PBS series on innovation
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1 min read
They Made America is a four-part series in November: American history is filled with the stories of influential innovators, whose ideas and entrepreneurial spirit gave birth to commercial milestones like the steamboat and cultural touchstones like the Barbie doll. Twelve of these individuals are profiled in They Made America, a four-part television series from the…
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Google word clustering and the UI plunge
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1 min read
John Battelle reports on Google’s recent demo of word clustering algorithms, which could force them to take the UI plunge: What do I mean by that? Well, of all the major engines, only Google has strictly maintained what might be called the C prompt interface to search: put in yer command, get out yer list…