Business is social again
I’ve been musing on this topic today after chatting to David Ibsen yesterday about all things social media. It struck me that the melding of business and personal enabled by social media harks back to a previous age when business was really social. Wining and dining clients and customers seemed to be de rigueur in the Mad Men era, but then business got more, well, businesslike in following decades. Now, again, the personal is almost inseparable from the professional and is all part of the way business gets done. The only difference is that the socializing happens online.
Slow news day?
Turns out that “Slow news day?” is one of the most frequent comments on TechCrunch. Click here for TC’s amusing list of “Ten Comments You Think Are Cool And Insightful But Aren’t.” Note to the haters: be more original!
Mail Goggles? Is it April Fool’s Day already?
We all know how attractive beer can make things look. Google today announced a solution to the online equivalent of drunk dialing (inebriated emailing?) – Mail Goggles for Gmail. It stops you drunkenly emailing your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend or boss by forcing you to perform ‘complicated’ maths calculations before you hit send. On Google’s example, that meant getting five sums like 11 x 2 and 37 + 19 correct in 60 seconds, although you can set the difficulty level so that eggheads can’t cheat the system. It works by default late at night on weekends, but you can also change that. More views on it are here and here. I’d love to know how many people will actually use this, or is it just a great PR idea from Google?
Technorati Tags: Google
Rumors weren’t the only thing flying at Microsoft today
Will Microsoft buy all or part of Yahoo? Or perhaps Facebook? Or both. That’s all very well, but the big news of the day is Steve Ballmer’s egging at a Hungarian University – see the video here, courtesy of cnet – by a protester unimpressed with Microsoft’s corporate policies.
What is it about Microsoft executives that makes people want to throw things at them? Remember this?
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Ballmer
Google domains – sublime and ridiculous
Royal Pingdom did some digging and came up with a list of domain names owned by Google. They range from the amusing (googlepoo.com) to the paranoid (googlesucks.com) to the bizarre (bayareaburritos.com). Too bad there’s already one gossip site out there whose domain name I bet Google wishes it had snagged…
Technorati Tags: Google
Goodbye shredder, hello 41pounds.org
This could just be the most useful – and environmentally-friendly – service I’ve come across in a long time: 41pounds.org claims to stop 80-95% of junk mail and unwanted catologs per household. 41 pounds? Yeah, that’s the weight each individual receives in junk mail per year.
Technorati Tags: Earth Day, 41 pounds.org, junk mail
The making of the iPhone
When you have 10 minutes to spare, check out the fascinating account by Fred Vogelstein in Wired of how the Apple iPhone came into being – and how it changed the dynamics of the wireless business.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone
