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L’Hôte: my dream: five federal universities I pray for the day that intercollegiate sports dies. NCAA schools should spin their sports programs off into for-profit entities, give the alums shares and license them the university name. And then be done. |
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L’Hôte: my dream: five federal universities Yep. Federally encouraged indentured servitude aka student debt is not a good thing. |
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Exporting housing services: A huge economic opportunity. Regulatory limits on development is a great example of regulatory capture of entrenched interests - current land/housing owners. More supply is really the only solution to affordable housing. |
The WentNative conference team was emailed this earlier in the day, correctly and humorously. We’ve been aggressively inviting non-white and/or non-dudes to speak and have struck out across the board. Please show us up, suggest people, anything you can — however, we have been trying.
[i’ll give the photomontage artist credit if they want, but I didn’t want to unilaterally out the person or wait to post.]
As a co-organizer of WentNative with @Rafer - I’ll double down on what he said - We’ve tried and struck out so far. Nominations welcome!
Also I think it’s important to note that Rey Peralta of Deutsch - speaking on our Content Marketing for Agencies panel - is a person of color himself. So we’re trying. More to be done.
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SFGate. Monday, March 27th 2000.”AltaVista Switches Web Portal Into High Gear / Revamped site adds new services.” I looked this up because, on June 29, 1999, myself and my mentor/boss Mark Bockley, did a qualitative brand and category audit for AltaVista that clearly indicated that search was the opportunity. We were brought in by Jerry Blanton of their agency, to inform brand building work. We did groups with heavy users of the various brands in the category, and discovered something pretty amazing. I believe our words in our presentation were something to the effect of, “Whoever owns search, wins.” It was clear, from the beginning, that the AltaVista wasn’t listening, and didn’t know how to listen, to consumers. This entire article is an amazing flashback to the peak of the dot-com bubble. Google isn’t mentioned anywhere in this article, and wasn’t even in the Top 20 Internet Properties list at the end of this article and was barely mentioned in our research. I say that to indicate that this wasn’t a case of users saying Google is awesome, and us reporting that Google is awesome, so you should be like Google. This was a case of deep, creative, indirect listening into the motivations at work in an emerging category of behavior revealing unserved needs. AltaVista wasn’t listening that day - they had just been bought by CMGI for $2.3b. I say this also to highlight that strategic insight - through brand listening - is possible (vital!) even when the entire industry is blind: Here’s Rod Shrock, the CEO of Alta Vista, defending portalization in the same article. This is a year after our presentation:
Blinded by Yahoo! And this, from an analyst (any qualitative at work?):
Perhaps it was too late for them to do anything about it, but suffice it to say that deep creative listening with consumers gave them the opportunity to choose - chase the portals and the wisdom of the day, or turn towards the consumer and become helpful. And they chose to follow the pack over the cliff. To anyone reading this, I ask, have you explored how your consumer experiences your category lately? (via peterspear)Some |
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Food service sector should be taken seriously. Good example of regulatory capture. Local licensing schemes are rarely in the public’s interests. |
(via Donald R. Hopkins - How to Eradicate Guinea Worm Disease - NYTimes.com)
Caption: Donald R. Hopkins, vice president for health programs at the Carter Center, helped to eradicate smallpox and is trying to do the same to Guinea worm disease.
Sawickipedia comment: This guy is awesome. Instead of nominating President Drone Warrior for the Nobel Peace Prize - real humanitarians like Dr. Hopkins deserve awards like that. What a modern saint.

life does not get better than this.
A cat dressed like a shark on a roomba chasing a duck.
yes.
The internet NEEDED this today.
As a cat owner… GOTD (Gif of the Day)
Why not just build a phone?
I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.
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Good insight |
![rafer:
The WentNative conference team was emailed this earlier in the day, correctly and humorously. We’ve been aggressively inviting non-white and/or non-dudes to speak and have struck out across the board. Please show us up, suggest people, anything you can — however, we have been trying.
[i’ll give the photomontage artist credit if they want, but I didn’t want to unilaterally out the person or wait to post.]
As a co-organizer of WentNative with @Rafer - I’ll double down on what he said - We’ve tried and struck out so far. Nominations welcome!
Also I think it’s important to note that Rey Peralta of Deutsch - speaking on our Content Marketing for Agencies panel - is a person of color himself. So we’re trying. More to be done.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/de1ec2794ce1b0e972e8cc5e47715d3a/tumblr_mmxdh0vc7g1qz80rmo1_500.jpg)
