Category: Developments
-
Wallets are personal
A lot of big companies are eager to get their hands in your pockets — literally. They want your mobile phone to work as a digital wallet, and they want the digital wallet app you use to be theirs. Naturally, this looks like it should be a big business — and to some degree it…
-
Bringing manners to marketing
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a success, and remains so, because it gives lessons in manners to marketing. Thus Cluetrain is also highly sourced by manners-minded marketing folk, who have eagerly leveraged Cluetrain‘s first thesis: “markets are conversations.” It is now almost fourteen years since the Cluetrain website went up, thirteen since the original book came out, and three since…
-
The Personal Revolution
While the history of computing and communications often appears to be one led by big entities in business and government, the biggest revolution has actually been a personal one. Each of us, as individuals, have acquired abilities that were once those of organizations alone — and have done far more with those abilities than the…
-
Cataracts for Customers
Let’s say you have an iPhone, and your carrier is AT&T.* That puts you deep inside what Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) calls a confusopoly (and illustrates here). His text explanation: A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers…
-
Personal vs. Personalized
In Worth The Deal? Groceries Get A Personalized Price, Ashley Gross on NPR says, Heather Kulper is one of those people who really wants to get a good deal. She’s a mom in a suburb north of Seattle who writes a blog about coupon clipping and saving money. On a recent shopping trip to Safeway, Kulper…
-
Free vs. Followed
The fight between the free market and the followed market is about to begin. And the way to bet is on the free market, because it’s what we know works best. Also because the followed market is nuts. It only persists because it’s normative at the moment, and an enormous sum of investment is going…
-
The Promise of the Personal Cloud
The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings. For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds. For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they…
