Q: Hey Chris! Since you seem to know so much about it, who would you place your money on? King Kong or Godzilla? Thanks in advance for your thoughtful answer. BenPosted by ben A: I’m not much of a gambler – I only like to put money at risk when I (think) I can influence continue…
One of the best things about my involvement in Colligent (f/k/a IndieMarketer) is the ringside seat it offers me on the digital music business, and on digital media in general. From a macro trends perspective, anyone hoping to make money selling access to digital media, whether it’s music, film, still images or text, had better continue…
I think this one actually goes under the heading “Slightly Embarassing Private Obsessions”, but here goes anyway. For as long as I can remember I’ve been fixated on money. But not for the usual reasons. My obsession isn’t about stuff. Instead, it’s a strange cocktail of two very different ideas I inherited from my parents. continue…
Earlier this week I promised to introduce the prototype of a new product I’ve been working on. This is the first in an ongoing series of posts on the startup process, with a goal of opening up the experience for you to read, comment on and even participate in (more on that part later). But continue…
Last November I wrote a post titled Background Processing, describing how an idea for a new product sneaked up on me as I was thinking about something else. I didn’t describe the idea at the time, partly because it wasn’t what the post was about, and partly because I thought I might actually do something continue…
You know how once you get an idea in your head you start seeing examples of it everywhere? Last week I posted about using peer-comparison marketing (e.g., “peer pressure”) to drive reductions in residential energy consumption. Two days later Read/Write Web (one of my favorite group blogs on the future of the consumer web) posted continue…
Just saw this article in today’s New York Times. A pilot project in Washington State gave ratepayers live data on their energy consumption and let them make consumption changes (e.g., furnace and water heater thermostat adjustments) remotely in response to market conditions, resulting in an average 10% reduction in consumption across the sample. This is continue…
You can tell I’m catching up on my feeds post-holiday, can’t you? This piece from Mark Hopkins at Mashable is (from my perspective) missing a crucial point: Amazon has built a very slick Roach Motel for your purchasing history. What they need to do next is give you the option of downloading (and/or feeding over continue…
I can’t possibly do justice to his great post, but Andrew Chen has been doing user interviews to understand how people think about their web of personal relationships, and his conclusion matches up well with my own intuitive sense for where the useful social graph really lies: it’s not Facebook, it’s not the inbox, it’s continue…
Diving deeper on my current obsession with data portability and legacy datastores, here’s an idea that someone’s probably already working on and that should definitely see the light of day (with a nod to my friend and colleague Dave Naffziger for inadvertently planting the seed last April). First, a pair of assertions: Humans are peer-obsessed; continue…