Somehow the concept of transparency made its way into both my lunch and dinner conversations yesterday. It’s a worn topic, really, usually focused on privacy concerns and reputation (for the individual) or business opportunity, competitive pressure, or again, reputation (for the enterprise).  
At dinner, though, with a good friend, we briefly […]

Cell phone touch typists have arrived and I’m happy for it.
The observational moment was an odd one to begin with.  Crammed into the last row of a propeller plane which operates school bus-style with a full aisle-eliminating back seat load (i.e. 5 seats and nothing behind us), I was already […]

Quick follow up to an earlier post on the electric car movement: it turns out that the battery lease model has a second (intended) entrant.  As reminder of the first:
“Interestingly, …upstart Think, out of Norway, aims to manufacture electric cars with a sales model geared to sell the car itself, […]

How cool!  Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called “Letter to a Young(er) Professional” which covered core recommendations for folks early on the career path.  I hit off with the following:
First, know your options.  If there’s one tool I wish I was given in college it would be a […]

Life’s full of randomness.  Some thinkers even encourage seeking it out as stimulus or influence.  But as Jeffrey Kluger nicely sets up his most recent reportage, ”Of all the things that shape who we are, few seem more arbitrary than the sequence in which we and our siblings pop out of the womb.”  Yup.
It’s […]

Last night I joined some friends to watch Sony Pictures’ “Who Killed the Electric Car?“  The documentary tracks General Motors’ EV1, an electricity-powered vehicle (hence EV, which has stuck as a general term), from birth in the hands of creative tinkerers in the mid-90’s ’til “death” at the hands of… well, nearly everyone involved according to the filmmakers.  One is […]

There’s an odd kind of pleasure in watching technology enter culinary service.  Dining, after all, is such a fundamentally earthy experience.  Nonetheless, I smiled to myself upon receiving the following in a recent restaurant check billfold:
Enter your name and e-mail address to join the Wann mailing list and for chances to win free food […]

I generally try to scan my “held mail” email each day to see what my spam filter, AppRiver, caught.  It’s often a collosal waste of time, but when it’s not, I’m glad I checked.  Type I errors are death for time-sensitive correspondence (and spam filter companies).
So imagine my surprise when I discovered yesterday’s “held mail” email in today’s ”held mail” […]

the early bird get’s [sic] the worm, originally uploaded by thomas23
Here’s a piece of marketing copy from the not too distant future: “Tired of Early Birds Getting the Worm? Try <insert treatment here>!” The thought hit me while reading Brad Feld’s recent post on morning routine; he writes:
Some people […]

Food Supplement Bottle, orginally uploaded by ertessplastic
Over the last couple weeks, the New York Times has put out two articles on “food additives” that offer, I think, an interesting case study for what works and what doesn’t in what will likely be a growing field.
In the first, “Magical or Overrated? […]