Source: Marketwatch

Here's a disturbing number. 41 percent of companies are "struggling to find qualified workers for at least one position, according to the survey of 2,400 U.S. firms." Why? Lack of skills. What's the hardest job to fill with qualified talent? Sales reps. While there are plenty of applicants, many lack sought-after skills for business-to-business and retail sales. It will get worse. Projections are that "an additional 736,000 retail sales people and an additional 187,000 sales representatives are going to be required by 2014."

Related:
Hold on to your top sales people
The sales learning curve

Source: Fortune, TechCrunch

If you're not on Facebook or MySpace, you've probably never heard of Photobucket. But they have 38 million members and they're growing by 80,000 members per day. What is it? Go there to dump all your photos and videos in the bucket and then link to them from anywhere. So even if you switch from MySpace to another social network, you don't lose all your pictures. They claim to be breaking even this year and TechCrunch reports that they are being valued at "$300 - $400 million or more" by Lehman Brothers.

Source: CNNMoney

On April 4 General Motors is set to unveil three new Korean-designed minicar concepts and give potential customers a chance to vote on the best one. With U.S. sales in the minicar segment rising 59 percent in 2006 to 314,225, from just under 200,000 in 2005, car makers are interested in gauging U.S. interest and appetite for the anti-SUV idea. Toyota has the Yaris. Nissan has the Versa. Honda has the Fit. And DaimlerChrysler plans to bring its European smart car to the U.S. in 2008. On April 4, cast your vote at www.vote4chevrolet.com.

Related:
Smart car reservations
Greenwashing

Source: Guy Kawasaki's blog

Guy Kawasaki blogs about an interesting study covered in Science Daily about the relationship between compensation and productivity. Which fosters greater productivity, pay-for-performance bonuses or merit raises? A Cornell study says that a bonus yields better results. Far better. While Guy admits that compensation is complex, this study found "a ten to one advantage for bonuses." Yeah. I never met a bonus I didn't like.

Source: Mercury News

If the consumer side of you can choose which songs to listen to and where you get your news, then why shouldn't the worker side of you have choice too? That's why Netflix CEO Reed Hastings founded his company on the idea of employee autonomy. Work at Netflix and you can take as much time off as you want, as long as you get your work done. "Vacation limits and face-time requirements, says Hastings, are "a relic of the industrial age." At Netflix workers are treated "as adults."

I wonder if he'll provide the same advice to Microsoft, now that he's joined their Board of Directors?

I work as a consultant and plan my own time. The reality is that I work longer than if I were punching a clock. But I know that I have the flexibility to weave my work and my life together and I like owning that.

Join the discussion.

Related:
Life-weaving

Source: BusinessWeek

Consumers spend serious bucks in their quest for health, fitness and wellness...and food companies are onto it. Overall the food industry is growing at 3-4 percent. But foods that provide extra nutrition, energy and medicinal benefits are growing at 20 percent. Called "phoods" and "bepherages" because of their pharmaceutical benefits, 30 percent of shoppers say they are more likely to buy these types of foods, even though studies on their effectiveness are inconclusive. Please pass the "Smart Balance Omega Plus Buttery Spread."

Source: BoingBoing

We've covered continuous partial attention here before. And now recent studies say that "multitasking may be an illusion that actually hurts productivity and increases error." While our brain is capable of trillions of synaptic connections, we just aren't that good at doing two things at once, let alone three or four. One study found that it took an average of 15 minutes following an interruption like an incoming email (or reading this blog post) for workers to return to dedicated mental tasks.

Related:
Cure your email addiction
A.D.D. 'R Us
The divided American attention span
Do parents make better managers?

Source: Mark Baard's blog

Gauri Nanda created Clocky as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. It's an alarm clock "that runs away and hides to get you out of bed." Now, I hate alarm clocks and I think that Clocky might send me right over the edge. But I like what inspired Nanda to design it.

She sought to improve the hated alarm clock by transforming it into a mischievous pet. And she kept it simple. Her guiding principle? Products should do their jobs better without added complexity and without making you learn something beforehand.

It retails for $50.00.

Related:
Check out Clocky on YouTube
I'm sure clothes for your Clocky can't be far behind.

Source: Logic+Emotion

Designer David Armano picks up on the designer as enemy thread and says that design and marketing used to be about delivering messages. But now it's all about experiences that are enhanced by conversations and community, making consumers active participants in the process. Armano says that marketers need to "stop marketing" and become "conversation architects." Practicing what he preaches, Armano blogged slides he's developing on the topic (below) and welcomes input.

Sign up to hear David give his presentation at a webinar at MarketingProfs this Thursday, March 29.

Source: BusinessWeek Nussbaum on Design

Bruce Nussbaum says designers themselves are the enemy of design. Why? Because designers are arrogant and can be ignorant about how people actually use their designs. The future, Nussbaum says, is all about "design democracy." While exceptional design may only be done by star designers - we are, all of us, designing more and more of our lives. We want to participate in the design of our blogs, clothes, music, brochures, etc. and we do.

"Maybe the object of design is not a finished product but a set of tools that allow people to design their experiences for themselves. Think iPod and iTunes. Think TiVo. Starbucks."

If you have any connection to design, which Nussbaum wants to rename "innovation," this is a must-read.

More Nussbaum:
Design is the new management consultancy
Building our own identities
Rent your fashion
The CEO tech gap

The midlife happiness crisis
Illustration: James F. Kraus

PowerPoint Idol
Foonz calls
Coffee and a Beatle
CD sales plunge
Kill your screen saver
Cell-blocking paint

Source: ShutDownDay.org

OK, see if you can do it. Can you shut down your computer for a whole day? That's the challenge laid down by the folks behind ShutDownDay.org. Tomorrow is the day. It's going to be 49 and partly sunny in Boston, so who knows? You might pull it off.

Here's some alternate uses for your laptop...

- Thanks Tim!

Source: Forbes

In Q1 Hewlett-Packard's imaging and printing division revenues increased by 7 percent to $7 billion. That makes it the most profitable unit in the company. To keep those numbers up and to expand further into web printing, HP just acquired Cambridge-based start-up Tabblo for an undisclosed sum.

Tabblo lets you upload photos and create prints, books and other stylized items via a Web interface. Founder Antonio Rodriguez says now their aim will be to "become the print engine for the rest of the Web. This means a wide assortment of content that goes beyond traditional online photo sharing." Congrats to Antonio and crew.

More on Tabblo:
Who cares about the OS?
Tabblo tells its own story

Source: Jonathan Boutelle

SlideShare has been called the YouTube for PowerPoint, because they make it easy to share humongous PowerPoint slides with a group. And now CEO Jonathan Boutelle alerts me he's blowing right past that, to become the American Idol of PowerPoint. Huh? OK, he's launched a contest for the World's Best Presentation and among the judges are PPT Masters Guy Kawasaki and Garr Reynolds. If you've got a good PPT send it in or at least steal good ideas from the entrants. Succumb to American Idolization!

Related:
Guy Kawasaki wrote the definitive 10-20-30 Rule for presentations, which just this week I broke in a big way, by creating a 28-page slide deck. D'oh!

Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen compares and contrasts Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Source: TechCrunch

"Good News!" blogs Michael Arrington. CD music sales are down 20 percent from 2006. While legal music download sales are heading up by about 50 percent per year, overall the industry has lost about 25 percent of its revenue base since last year. Instead of suing their customer base, Arrington calls on labels to get that their "massively profitable days are over." The problem? The cost of producing recorded music is trending toward zero. "It’s so cheap to make that consumers can actually make it themselves. And they do. A billion songs a month are downloaded, mostly illegally, from P2P networks."

Source: Ad Age

You know the music industry is radically changed, when a Beatle drops Capital Records after 43 years, and signs with...Starbucks. Yep. McCartney will be the premiere artist for Starbucks' Hear Music Label. Announced at the Starbucks annual meeting, Chairman Howard Schultz stressed to shareholders concerned about recent leaked memos and a stalled stock price, "Starbucks is at its core a coffee company, and its ability to expand beyond that requires the company to be the best at coffee." I'll have a cappucino and a Beatle, thanks.

Related:
The Starbucks network
Starbucks Salon
Starbucks rant
The Starbucks effect
Starbucks as McDonalds
Starbucks economics
Starbucks hooks kids early
Starbucks gathering spot

Source: CNET

A new study publicized by Microsoft says that if you want to conserve the energy consumed by your PC, you should shut off your screen saver. The ugly truth? "A PC running a screensaver consumes more energy than an idling PC in sleep or hibernating mode." How much energy does it waste? A "screensaver-running PC consumes the same amount of electricity as a 100-watt light bulb left on around the clock for one year," costing you $80 in power and releasing 1,350 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. OK, so this is a no-brainer. Turn off your screen saver.

Microsoft is touting it because Vista has improved sleep options:

"In Windows Vista you'll experience better handling of all your PC's transitions between On and Off states. You can quickly put your PC in Sleep mode using the power button on the Windows Start menu or, if configured, using the computer's external power button. Sleep is a new power state that combines the quick-resume benefits of Standby with the data protection benefits of Hibernation."

Here's the harder question. Do you switch to Vista for this? Macs already have it, I believe.

Source: EETimes

I was at the Huntington Theatre last weekend to see Well (highly recommend it by the way). In the midst of the performance, someone's cell phone rang, even though there was a big to-do about turning off your cell phone before the play began. Good news. There might be an easy answer to that annoying problem...paint.

Or rather, "liquid security innovation." EM-SEC Technologies has developed a specially designed paint that blocks wireless signals. Use it to paint the theatre, the restaurant, the doctor's office, and wireless signals don't get through. Developed for the military to thwart airborne hackers, when wireless signals hit the painted wall, the signals simply bounce off.

- Thanks Tom!

Source: Foonz

I use freeconferencecall.com all the time. You sign up and get a number that you can invite people to call. Everyone calls in, does the call, and it's free. Foonz.com, founded by two Boston-based entrepreneurs, is also free and goes one step further. It allows for instant group calls. Let's say you're on the road. You call your dedicated Foonz number and enter the number of a group of people you've already defined. Foonz then sends text messages or IMs to everyone in the group and, boom, you're all on the call. You can also use it to leave messages for a group. No need to be by your email. I'll have to give it a try.

Source: FC Now blog

Biz guru C. K. Prahalad proposes that multinational corporations "can alleviate global poverty while boosting their bottom lines." Critics say that the vast worldwide majority who live in poverty at the bottom of the pyramid is "smaller than Prahalad has claimed and far less lucrative." But a new report shows otherwise. The "4 billion people who live in "relative poverty" have purchasing power that amounts to a $5 trillion market" that is woefully "underserved."

Related:
Karma capitalism
Do-it-yourself microfinancing

Source: Forbes

Google knows an awful lot about us from our search patterns. And plenty of people wonder about Google. What are they going to come up with now? Will it eat my business alive? Brian Caulfield says not to sweat the rumor mill, instead just log onto their job listings and sift through to get clues of their intentions. There should be plenty of clues. "Google, which grew from 3,000 employees at the end of 2004 to more than 10,000 at the end of last year, intends to double its head count in 2007."

Source: Slate

Data shows that money doesn't bring happiness and that's led some economists to move beyond money to study happiness itself. A recent large-scale study reveals a U-shaped pattern. Apparently there is a steady decline in happiness from age 16 to age 45. So much so that our age has a larger effect on our happiness than if our incomes were suddenly reduced by half. "And, equivalently, the 15-year upswing in happiness that follows age 45 is stronger than the upswing that tracks doubling of income." So, how do we climb out of the well of unhappiness? Economists can only speculate, but believe it's got to come from all that wisdom gained in the trench.

Source: A VC

Superdistribution is when you buy say a book and through word of mouth and referral you act as a retailer. Fred Wilson says that when he buys something he wants to "be able to pass it along to everyone else and get paid for doing that. And I want the people who created the thing I pass along to get paid too." The technology exists to do this and as business models evolve and usage evolves, "superdistribution is the future." Picture it. You buy something and it gets added to "a web account that makes you a reseller of that item. At a discount to the retail price. And you should get a decent margin for demand creation. It shouldn't require any effort on your part."

I can see this trend in what I do on Netflix today. I see what my friends are watching and then through that recommendation, I might watch it too. Flip a switch and it could be me checking out the purchasing patterns of all kinds of people.

Source: Social Media Club

If you're a blog geek like me, you know about Twitter, a broadcasting service that lets you write and send short text bursts about what you're doing right this second. Twitter recently won the SXSW Blog award for "revolutionizing the power of publishing" and at one point last week there was so much Twittering going on, it ground Twitter's servers to a standstill and it's still slow. Jason Chervokas blogs that Twittermania admittedly smacks of "irrational exuberance," especially on the part of the uber trendy geek SXSW crowd.

But regardless, it "has exposed the enormous latent demand for low-cost, everywhere messaging that effortlessly crosses platforms and unites messaging channels." Twitter is the nugget of messaging services to come, where vast hoards of regular people (not just geeks) can instantly send relevant bits of info to their choice of recipients - one or many.

Cheering on the sales floor
Illustration: James F. Kraus

411 for free
Geni your family
Smells like green spirit
Ice cream truck 2.0
The end of accidents
Office replacement?

Source: Textually.org

Some UK schools are installing new detection systems to detect the sending of text messages on mobile devices. Apparently students' pervasive use of mobile phones for cheating on exams, is driving the need for the solution. "What's novel about this system, is that it does not block signals, which would be unlawful under the Wireless and Telegraphy Act, but detects mobile phone activity."

The detectors discreetly alert teachers that a mobile is switched on. Or they make a recorded loudspeaker announcement. “We have detected your mobile phone," an authoritative voice booms. "Turn off your mobile immediately."

Just in case exam rooms weren't anxiety producing enough, now teachers will have scanners. Yow!

Source: The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) via Marketing Daily

Heineken, Europe's largest brewery, is opening up a chain of bars worldwide with the goal of becoming the Starbucks of beer. The bars will sell "other beers as well as wine and spirits, but only Heineken-owned brands are available on tap. TV screens show Heineken ads and sports events sponsored by the company." The first one will open in Hong Kong's international airport.

I could see Sam Adams doing more of this in the U.S. - Everytime I'm in Terminal B at Logan that Sam Adams pub seems to be doing a brisk business.

Related:
Heineken bar in Times Square
Wanted: Chief Beer Officer
This woman knows beer
Brewing a new image
Vitamin beer

Source: Wired

Meet Koji Kondo who, in video gaming circles, is a rock star. Wired reports that "the longtime head of Nintendo's sound department, Kondo's piano performance capped last week's Game Developers Conference."

Play the video and chances are you know that Mario song by heart.

Kondo's career began at Nintendo two-decades ago. He the man who created "the familiar hop-and-jump Mario music" and "breathed life into every Legend of Zelda epic." It's a testament to Kondo's genius for catchy tunes that the Super Mario Bros. theme song has been on the Billboard ringtone charts for 125 weeks, "currently sitting right between The Black Eyed Peas and 50 Cent."

Source: TechCrunch

Michael Arrington reports that "Jingle Networks, operator of the 1-800-Free-411 service, just announced that they now control 6 percent of the U.S. market in 411 calls. This is up from 1.5 percent a year ago." A staggering 2.6 billion 411 calls are made in the US annually and it represents a $7 billion market. 411 fees can cost as much as $3 per call and it's one fee most of us hate paying with a passion. 1-800-Free-411 is free because it plays a 12 second ad before giving you the number. Fair trade. No wonder thy have raised over $60 million in investment and logged 17 million calls in February alone.

Source: The Next Net

Earlier this week, we talked about The Gorb, an anonymous rating system that blogger John Whiteside called "a giant bathroom wall on which you can scrawl anonymous comments about people." Now we have TheFunded.com where entrepreneurs can rate and write comments about VCs. Big difference is that the site is invitation only and it is not anonymous. It might become a helpful resource to entrepreneurs, but as Eric Schonfeld says, "VCs are not going to like this."

Source: PaidContent

Geni.com's tagline is "Everyone's Related." CEO David Sacks, (the former COO of PayPal) calls it "family networking." Last night I entered all the members of my immediate family into Geni and as I did, my family tree grew in a very visual and intuitive way. I could invite each person I added to my tree by email, so they could help me build it. Here's the thing...it only took me a few minutes. Very powerful.

Our family always talks about creating a family tree. But it's hard because we all have bits of the information, and we're spread out all over the place. This way, we can work together and build it. Very viral. No wonder Charles River Ventures just sunk $10 million dollars into Geni.

- Thanks Ginny!

Source: Wired

The consensus among the 550 researchers, students, entrepreneurs, CEOs and financiers who gathered at Energy 2.0: The MIT Energy Conference was, "if a green energy revolution is brewing, it will be the students and twenty-somethings who fire the engines of innovation, rather than today's dominant companies." A good indicator? Energy 1.0 hasn't used new technology in 25 years. But today a massive market forces are building. As oil prices spike and solar and other alternatives drop in price, look for a boom that could rival the internet.

Related:
Google plants solar trees
Blueberry solar
Nano-solar energy
Solar coffee
Personal windpower
Lunar power
People power
Dung power
Greenwashing
Vermont cow power

Source: Brazen Careerist

Penelope Trunk blogs that some of the best salespeople are...cheerleaders. Why? They're good looking and use "exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm...they can get people to do what they want." Recruiting firm Spirited Sales specializes in cheerleaders. Their website points to cheerleaders' track record of leadership. After all "athletes are coveted by recruiters because athletes do better in business than non-athletes. Outgoing, results oriented, disciplined...and a bombshell. So what goes with the job? You get hit on. Constantly. Trunk provides the top five ways cheerleaders can turn that to their advantage.

Source: Springwise

We've talked about how today's adults don't really grow up. So no surprise that entrepreneurs are tapping the forever youngish. Here are ice cream trucks for grown-ups. In Los Angeles Heartschallenger is a "specialty truck stocked with international ice cream (try the Japanese mochi balls or Armenian whipped vanilla bars), candy and toys." It's available for parties and "regularly drives down Sunset Boulevard, and is also known to pop up near clubs after closing hour." They plan to launch another one in New York soon.

Here's a grown-up ice cream van from the UK:

Related:
Adults are the new kids
Forever youngish
Blame it on the AARP
Gotta love those boomers

Source: Grant McCracken's blog

Generally we make friends by accident, finding them in where we live or go to school and those accidents regularly change our lives. But anthropologist Grant McCracken says the internet "extinguished the need for accidental sociality" and he believes that future social networks will make it possible to sort the world to identify "people with whom we are most likely to see eye to eye, meet idea with idea, draw innovation from creativity in a pell mell rush to revelation."

While he thinks today's social networks don't do a good job, he guesses that "machines, once they are dedicated to this purpose" will do a better job than we ever could, because they are so good at finding patterns.

"One of these days our descendants will be astonished to hear that we built our social networks by hand out of accident and coincidence (aka randomness, chance and probability). "What," they will want to know, "that was enough for you?"

Source: BoingBoing

So people are starting to put their avatars on their business cards and they’re doing it with Moo cards, which are my favorite business cards these days. BoingBoing calls them "little kid-sized business cards with lavish photos," and I guess that nails it. You can put a different Flickr photo on the back of each one and buy them in packs of 100. And now you can make Moo cards via your Second Life or Habbo Hotel account - both of which would let you put your avatar in various backgrounds on it. Very cool.

Source: Slate

Ironically the FAA is "contemplating dumping Microsoft Office in favor of the browser-based Google Apps suite." Ironic because you can't use web software in the air. But even for FAA desk jockeys, Harry McCracken doesn't recommend it. Google Apps doesn't yet have equivalents to PowerPoint, Access or Publisher and it still lacks some of the functionality we've been using for decades. But McCracken points to a company that's farther along with web-based alternative to Office: ZoHo, and reviews it favorably.

Why do people like the idea of web-based apps? Price is a big reason. It starts out free, which is a good price. Then upgrades for Zoho, for example, are $295 for "a 25-user, one-year subscription to Zoho Virtual Office. That's "100 bucks less than one copy of Office 2007 Standard."

Another reason? Upgrades. You subscribe and the software is constantly upgrading via the Web and you don't have to deal with software on your hard drive.

Related:
Google's web Office strategy
Ozzie at the helm
Google bigger than Microsoft by 2010?
Google Office
Trusting the new web
Writely goes Google
IBM software-as-a-service
The rise of software-as-a-service

Source: Berlind's Testbed

David Berlind covers the launch of the TheGORB.com. Unlike LinkedIn which TheGORB describes as a "positively skewed system," TheGORB lets anyone submit ratings of you anonymously and without your permission. It's eerily simple. You type in a person's email address and TheGORB shows you their rating and asks you to rate them. "We act as a platform for people to express their free speech rights." If someone pans you on GORB? Too bad..."Like your real world reputation, you do not opt in or opt out of your reputation." GORB advises you to get others who know you to rate you well. Is this the Web 2.0 version of 'what goes around, comes around?'

Source: Gaming Insider

Shankar Gupta observes that virtual worlds are launching all over - Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, MTV, Nickelodeon and more and it's reminiscent of what happened with social networking. At first social networks were offered for their own sake (MySpace), then by niche (Facebook, LinkedIn) and then social networking became bundled in with sites as a feature, like on Netflix where you can share your movie lists with friends. So if "social networking is a feature, not a product," will the same be true for 3D virtual worlds?

Related:
All software must be social
Kid Life: Nicktropolis

Our universe in exabytes
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Sales rep confessions
Major bands, DRM-free
Blogs as resumes
Google Alerts
Where young adults are

Jeff Jarvis and Peter Hauck have launched Idol Critic, a blog that "gives you the water-cooler buzz about America’s favorite show." I like the host Liza Persky. Great example of how social media is changing TV and how TV and your computer are mashing up.

Here are other examples from my life where my computer deploys to the living room:

• I often watch 24 at the same time I read live updates to Dave Barry's blog. The show is much improved that way.
  
• Since I usually watch 24, I catch up on Heroes (which airs at the same time) by watching it when I have time on my laptop. If I watch Heroes on TV, then I catch up on 24 on my laptop.

Source: Marketing Daily

A new study shows that our lunch "hours" are more like 25 minutes, and often just 8 minute breaks. As such, we're eating more "grab-and-go foods" from grocery stores at our desks...and restaurants are feeling the pain. More than a third of the $182 billion industry comes from lunch sales. But since 2000, the total growth for restaurant lunches has been under $1 billion. Sandwich joints are apparently in danger of going under, while desk jockeys load up on self-serve deli products (up 7.2%), fresh produce (up 12.9%), and bottled water (up 17.8%).

Related:
Stop eating at your desk, again

Source: Between the Lines

This Sunday IT people will be watching their applications, PCs, servers and networks to see whether going to Daylight Saving Time three weeks early will affect their systems. Larry Dignan says "CIOs will be looking at the bill." Forrester conservatively puts the cost to IT at somewhere between $200 and $300 million, but Dignan says it's probably a lot more.

The feds say this should save energy, though no one knows how much and it appears Congress did no cost benefit analysis. Larry Dignan puts all the blame on Congress(Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey is a sponsor of the plan) and President Bush "for moving along a DST change without evaluating the technology costs or pain involved."

Source: The Consumerist via Megite

The Consumerist is a blog with the tagline "Shoppers bite back." And lately they've published a rash of confessions by mobile phone sales reps. It started with a former Verizon rep who provided tips on how to game the sales process. Tips like: "Never get a 2-year contract." and "Insurance is a rip-off." Then a current Cingular sales rep fessed up. And a former Sprint rep is the latest. It's a great example of the Internet and blogs changing the balance of power and, hopefully, providing companies more of an incentive to be transparent.

Source: Ars Technica

As the DRM debate drones on, some companies and bands are going their own way DRM-free. And a new deal between Amie Street and Nettwerk who reps headliners Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and Paul Van Dyk, will be a good test to watch. Amie Street is like music stock exchange. The songs increase in price as demand increases. Nettwerk is different because it acts as the management company, publishing company, and record company rolled into one - for a 20 percent cut. The bands own their songs outright. And when you buy their songs from Amie Street, you own the music outright. Sounds right to me.

Related:
Power to the musicians
Music stock exchange
Amie Street founders make the hot list

Source: Dilbert.blog

People ask me what's so great about blogs. Here's a great example. Dilbert creator Scott Adams blogs that he just set up Google Alerts, a free service where Google sends you an email any time certain keywords you specify newly appear on the Internet. That way...

"Any time that 11-year old Vijay sits at his Dad’s computer in Lucknow, India, and blogs about his favorite Dilbert comic, Google finds it, and sends that link directly to my left front pocket. I reach in, pull out the Blackberry, click the link, and Vijay’s blog opens. I read it, just to see what little Vijay thinks of me today. In India. Minutes ago."

And 11-year old Vijay in India gets his blog read by Scott Adams. As Adams says, "How...cool is that?"

Source: Innovation Zen blog

Daniel Scocco says that while blogs won't completely replace resumes, "bloggers certainly have an edge over job seekers that do not publish one." He points out that hiring a blogger is a "lower risk proposition because you have more information and a better idea of how they are going to perform." I just went through hiring situation where there were three strong final candidates. One had a blog. The other two did not. We hired the blogger.

Source: Logic + Emotion

David Armano is a Creative VP at Digitas and a blogger. He creates and shares some great visuals. Here David created three figures - Artist, Graphic Designer and Designer. Then another blogger, Beeker, grabbed it and added the last figure, "Production." If you've ever worked in a creative or publishing field, you'll know how true this graphic is. Armano rightly says production people are essential to bringing ideas to life. They're like "theater crews who work behind the scenes to make sure that what's happening on stage has impact."

Source: IDC sponsored by EMC

An exabyte is one quintillion bytes. And in 2006 alone, the human race worldwide generated 161 exabytes of digital information. So? Well, that's about three million times the information in all the books ever written - or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun. And as a new study from IDC shows, the forecast for the world's information is partly cloudy with a 100 percent chance of exponential growth. That's why I'm so keen on information mapping and why information infrastructure is so crucial. We need macroscopic tools to grok our expanding universe of exabytes.

No surprise EMC, the data storage giant, sponsored the IDC report.

Related:
More on exabytes

More on data mapping:
Maps go encyclopedic
What's Google Earth really up to?
Maps as fundamental strategy
Pop vs. Soda map
Building a macroscope
Google traffic map
Real-time maps of cities
Visualize websites

Source: eMarketer

Rupert Murdoch thinks MySpace will get to $1 billion all on its own. But eMarketer estimates that $865 million will be spent on social network ads this year. Facebook, a new survey suggests, is the current fav for young adults age 17-25. Nearly 70 percent of females and 56 percent of males name it their most favorite site. With young adults spending increasing amounts of time on social networks...turn up the ad dollars.

Source: Digital Markets ZDNet blog

Donna Bogatin of ZDNet disagrees with Om Malik who said of the Cisco/Tribe deal, "This social software thing – it is too marginal, doesn't make money and can't make you cool." Bogatin replies that Rupert Murdoch didn’t get that memo.

She quotes Murdoch from last month at the Media Summit:

"[MySpace] advertising revenues have gone from basically nothing to $25 million a month, growing monthly, 30 percent every quarter, next year search revenue from Google kicks in...we are looking at a billion dollars in revenue."

Which is why Bogatin says traditional companies are smart to be flocking to social models. Follow the people. Follow the dollars.

Source: TechCrunch

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says the newly relaunched USATODAY is "no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways."

Like...every article allows for comments and you can read it in ways other than the newspaper's editors organize it. Read it by most read, most commented, most recommended, most emailed. You can recommend articles to make them more prominent. And if you register you get your own home page.

If all software must be social, USATODAY clearly believes the news should be too.

Source: A VC

Fred Wilson says Marc Canter asserted last year that "all software must be social." Remember when you bought software in a box at CompUSA? Now CompUSA is shuttering its stores and software comes from the web...and that changes things, because the web is the ultimate social network. Integrating social networks into software is where we're heading. That would be why Cisco recently bought Tribe and why tools like Ning that offer DIY social networks are popping up.

The next issue? Opening up the networks so they aren't gated off from each other and making your profile portable, so you don't have to join separately each time. We're heading deeper into the social stew.

Robot surgeons, chameleon soldiers
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Blame it on AARP
The 'fail fast' strategy
WiiToob
Appearances matter
Parents as managers?
Relentless connectivity

Source: Pink Slip

Maureen Rogers blogs about a new UK company called Zen Temple that provides business astrology. Using iChing and symbolism they "divine" the right time to launch a product, enter negotiations, etc.

Hey whatever helps, but I've always found it's hard enough to get marketing, development and sales to agree, let alone the stars.

But, like Maureen says, it probably makes about "as much sense as some of the mumbo-jumbo I've experienced with [big name] consultants. Plus it would be a lot more fun."

I've had a flood of links from readers recently, so I'm including some of them here. Floods are the theme today. While I was blogging this list, my basement flooded. Ugh.

Karen Gage, CMO for WebCT before their merger with Blackboard has led the launch of Blackboard's Scholar, a social bookmarking site for academia.

In a post-Enron/Global Crossing world, do you need an integrity consultant? Waltham-based Integrity Interactive provides tools, services and training so your company won't be the next corporate scandal headline.

BostonSMS is a mobile phone texting service that helps Boston's resident parking neighborhoods exchange parking spot information. Right now it provides service to the North End only.

SpotScout, based in Cambridge, is another such service based in Boston, New York and San Francisco. Read about them at the Globe's Daily Business Update.

Source: eyespot

The NBA is trying to beat YouTubers to the punch by pro-actively offering NBA videos to fans so they can mix and mash them up and share them with friends. This way, the NBA retains a level of control and management over its content, but feeds the hungry fan base. They're using technology from eyespot which until now has focused on letting consumers edit video directly at Eyespot.com. It looks like you can't share the videos anywhere but at the NBA though...no EMBED tags for you.

Source: Forrester Groundswell blog

Forrester's Josh Bernoff has launched a series of fireside chats with thought leaders in the Boston area on topics related to innovation and technology. The series is a "coproduction of MITX, a local group that promotes Innovation and Technology activity in Boston, and WBZ-TV." Definitely worth a look.

By the way, Forrester analyst Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are writing a book called Groundswell about how people with social media technologies are changing everything. Now Bernoff will become contributing author to Li's popular blog, giving us even more reason to follow the blog.

Source: FC Expert Blogs

Photo: Forth & Towne website

The Gap recently closed its Forth and Towne division aimed at women over 35, after having sunk $40 million into the enterprise. Adam Hanft blogs that the reason it failed was because "baby boomers don't want to be addressed as baby boomers." He says age is the "last remaining taboo in American marketing" and we should blame it on the AARP. "Their ham-handed, stereotypical representations of mindless, happy retirees" turned off an entire generation. The challenge for marketers? Target this vast category without turning "their brands into Centrum Silver."

Boomer-related:
A jackpot of spenders
Gotta love those boomers
Working with kids of boomers
The gray ceiling
The IM Gap
Jeff Taylor's next big thing

Source: Business 2.0

VS.

Web 1.0: Pets.com raises $82.5 million in an IPO, airs a sock puppet Superbowl ad, builds warehouses, gets funded by Amazon...and goes out of business. Web 2.0: Dogster, a social network for dog lovers, launches. They also have failures, but instead of flaming out, they find ways to transform "mistakes into better features" and even make a modest profit. Another company using mistakes as shortcuts to success? Google. Where they practice "a 'fail fast' strategy: launch, listen, improve, launch again."

Source: Online Media Daily

Outside.in is a newly launched site "which culls local news and events and allows users to search it by zip code." The site currently covers Boston and 62 other cities and the many things that go on in their 3,217 neighborhoods. The site can take in feeds for local blogs and sites and match that content up to local and national advertisers by zip code, making the ads very localized. Local is the great untapped market on the web.

Related:
Placeblogging
Local Yokel
Wicked Local
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