Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

The Death of Phone Booths

I had the privilege of attending the MediaPost Search Insider Summit last week in Deer Valley Utah. Aside from beautiful landscapes, great skiing and snowboarding and incredible accommodations at Starwood’s prized St. Regis Deer Valley, the folks attending brought with them content that was indeed forward thinking. I have to say — I speak at a decent amount of conferences, but the MediaPost SIS event is definitely in my top 5 in terms of value added. I walked away with more than 6 pages of notes (typed neatly in Evernote on my Samsung Galaxy Tab), met a ton of interesting and down to earth people who also happen to the cool kids that are driving the search industry to new levels of sophistication. While there was a ton of great presentations and panels, the talk from Google’s Michael Slinger stands out as one of the most impactful take-aways. Here’s the short hand recap. Consider what Michael is heading toward and share it with your colleagues… The Death of Phone Booths Michael opened up by sharing two short stories, one about his kids and one about the children of some family friends.  In the first, he mentioned that his kids, both under 10 years old upon seeing an old telephone booth had no idea what it actually was. As we sat around the table, chuckling at the innocence of young children, each of us looked down to see the phone icon on our andriod and iPhone devices.  Look down at yours right now.  Notice something?  When was the last time you’ve seen a silhouette of a phone like that?!? My guess is that it’s been years since you’ve even touched an old rotary handset, right? The second story was even more entertaining.  Michael shared that he had heard from a friend that their kids, much younger in age, had actuallt approached the LCD television in their [...]

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My Case Against the Henge Dock for Macbook and Macbook Pro

I bought a Henge Dock last week. What is a Henge Dock, you ask? This video will fill you in. It’s over 4 minutes so watch as much as you need to to get the point, then read the rest of the post for a fair warning. Pretty cool, right?  I mean, why not buy two of these right off the bat so that you can use your Macbook Pro as part of your entertainment center as well as your home office. The fact is, the folks at henge docks thought of this already and will be glad to offer you a discount if you buy a few. So my big finally day comes last week and my Henge Dock arrives. Here’s what I received in the fancy well branded box. Exhibit A Exhibit B It seems that some assembly is indeed required when you purchase a Henge Dock. Who knew? No worries though. I’m techie enough to be able to screw in a few wires and it will probably take no more than a few minutes, right? Going against what my normal man-behavior usually is, I decided to actually read the instruction manual, just to make sure I wouldn’t mess something up.  I’m sure glad I did. Please take a close look at what I found, as displayed in Exhibit C below: Is it just me, or do you find yourself wondering if there might be a few folks whose Mac’s have been damaged by using one of Henge Dock’s product line.  Unfortunately, I’m well past the 5 day deadline for a full refund. Still, I won’t be using my Henge Dock. It’s simply not worth risking a nearly $3000 investment for the convenience of a $60 accessory. All that’s left is an extremely poor brand impression and enough annoyance to use [...]

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