Source: Research Brief

Summer is fleeting. If you have school age kids, you're just weeks away from back to school shopping. And a new survey shows that "preteens want more than paper, pencils and protractors for back-to-school supplies." 70 percent of kids between the ages of seven and 12 want to head back to school with a new computer. 69 percent of the kids surveyed say they strongly desire a cell phone..."even naming the new iPhone as one of their choices."

Source: BusinessWeek Blogspotting

Heather Green highlights new numbers from Comscore that show that social networking is off the charts. Now that the Internet is home to north of 1 billion people, the network effects are becoming downright dramatic. Facebook grew 270 percent, from 14.1 million in June 2006 to 52.2 million in July 2007. In the same period MySpace grew 72 percent from 66.4 million 114.2 million.

Source: Notes from the Digital Frontier

FaceBook used to be just for college and, more recently, high school. But now people of all ages are FaceBooking. I've spent the last month immersing myself in Facebook which is - I agree with David from Mediapost - a kind of "unofficial living yearbook." Not to be morbid, but there's only on part of living that's not yet widely covered...death. So David makes the leap. "I’m wondering if the day will come when Facebook’s news feed [the daily stream of updates from you and your friends] begins replacing our obituary pages."

Source: Innovation Zen

Today 3 out of 20 American households have only a wireless phone. That number continues to increase and wireless-only has started to define segments of the population. Adults who rent are much more likely than those who own a house to use a wireless phone exclusively. Half of all wireless-only adults are 30 years old or younger. And adults living in poverty (22.4 percent) were much more likely than those with higher incomes to be wireless-only.

Source: FC Expert Blogs

Robert Buckman blogs that booking your own travel online can be "too much of a good thing." Online travel sites are great unless "you have to book a complex trip with all kinds of connections and different modes of transportation, or are traveling to an unfamiliar or exotic locale." Who do you turn to then? A tried and true travel agent. While online travel sites are still booming, actual travel agencies continue to outsell them. Buckman bets that "travel agents are here to stay."

Why you can't get any work done
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Starbucks' new rival?
Cash at your fingertips
Harry beats iPhone
Our power addiction
No www
Correcting Brittanica

Speaking of McDonalds...have you seen their site lately? Fries are now "potatoes." They tout their "high quality ingredients." A big section is dedicated to "Food, Nutrition and Fitness," complete with advice from an M.D. and a personal trainer. There are tons of pix of people exercising. You'd think it was a spa.

I know this didn't happen overnight for them. But it's a great example of the trend toward "food as the new smoking, "Super Size Me and American obesity.

Related:
Food is the new smoking
Kentucky Fried Coronary reform?
Disney goes healthy
No fast food for you
Tastes like "chicken"
"Meat"
McDonalds, yoga and Philip Morris no smoking tips
The fat market

Source: Marketing Profs Daily Fix

What does BusinesWeek see as the biggest competitive threat to Starbucks? McDonalds - with the help of its new coffee line, Newman’s Organic Coffee. Apparently "Mickey D’s java won a Consumer Reports blind taste test against Starbucks and other brands in February." Starbucks is experiencing declines in growth and stock price. But solid companies "overcome their difficulties and reposition themselves with an even stronger brand in the marketplace." Time will tell. As for me, don't see McDonalds as a place I'd hang out.

Related:
Illy out-elites Starbucks
Starbucks rant
The Starbucks effect
Starbucks as McDonalds
Starbucks economics
Starbucks hooks kids early

Source: PSFK

The veins in your fingers are just like your fingerprints - no two are alike. Enter Hitachi. They're testing a "finger vein money" system that reads your veins instead of your credit card. In the future you may just go to a cash register and place your finger in a infrared LED vein reader to pay. Because your veins are securely under your skin, they're pretty tough to counterfeit. Plus no matter what, you'll never be without access to money. Technology is bringing us closer and closer to making actual cash irrelevant.

Related:
Next generation palm reading
Pay by finger

Source: Springwise

Here's another bike sharing program, this time in Vancouver and sponsored not by ads, but by a bank. Vancity, Canada's largest credit union, kicked off a bike share program "on June 27th by "releasing" 45 shiny red bicycles into the community. Recipients...were requested to keep the bikes for no longer than three weeks before passing them on to someone else." On Sept. 7 Vancity asks that all bikes get returned and then they will donate them to "a local non-profit that will pass them on to individuals in low-income communities." Great community marketing for the bank. I can just see those bright red Bank of America bikes in Boston now...

Source: BuzzMachine

The curse goes like this - whenever you see a glowing cover story on a company...sell. And a recent study says the curse is true, finding that "a positive or negative cover story marks the end of a company’s "extreme" behavior, either good or bad. After the cover story, they tend to regress, in their corporate way, toward the mean." Jarvis points out another perspective. BusinessWeek, Fortune or Forbes will only put things on their covers when the story is already big ("evident, justified, confirmed"), so big media will always "get stories at their apex." But with blogs, big media has the tools to catch stories that are not ready for the cover, which Jarvis believes "are the stories that are truly valuable."

Source: Roughtype

This week a power outage shut down a San Francisco datacenter bringing down sites that included Craigslist, Live Journal, Technorati and Yelp. Bloggers reacted by discussing our growing addiction to electrical power. Nicholas Carr blogs, "There's a reason Google builds scores of data centers and places them next to big dams with hydroelectric generating stations. The new grid is built on the old grid, and the old grid is fraying." As our data demands get higher, are we closer to tapping out the power grid?

Related:
Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?

Source: DMiessler.com via Reddit

Blogger Daniel Miessler, calls for dropping the www. "It's old. Deprecated. Outdated. Antiquated." It reminded me that some people don't know that you don't need to type in "www" or even the "http://" for that matter. In fact, if you're using Firefox, just type in a name, like "Amazon", and the browser will do a quick Google and take you to the site with the top search result for that name. Save yourself some keystrokes, people.

Source: 93 South

Admitting "that the Boston area is not exactly the hot bed of Web 2.0 activity," Dave over at the 93 South blog does a nice round-up of the "one area that the hub has developed well - online video." He's right - Boston is buzzing with online video companies. Most, but not all of them, are on the business side. So far he's listed 18 companies, including Brightcove, PermissionTV, Maven, Gotuit, ScanScout, and many more.

Source: BusinessWeek

American businesses lose an estimated $650 billion a year through workplace distractions. One researcher says "work-related distractions like e-mail, company crises, and interruptions by co-workers are so common that 46 percent of business leaders arrive at work early in search of solitude." I find working at home to be a good antidote, as well as not keeping email and IM on all the time. Along with the foibles of coworkers, what are the worst distractions? They include over-communication, email, unnecessary meetings, and don't forget those business lunches and birthday celebrations.

Related:
Going post-geographic
Ditch your email
ADD 'R Us
Attention deficit disorder
The No A**holes Rule

Source: Wikipedia via CNET

Wikipedia is one of the most-used resources on the web. Millions of us use it every day, but some say the user-generated site is unreliable and prone to error. In particular, encyclopedias - who have a lot to lose because of Wikipedia. Wikipedia recently took "a swipe at its older brother" by posting a list of corrections to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Related:
Generation We
Cautious Wikipedia
Wikipedia founder takes on Google
Wikipedia surpasses one million entries

Source: Slideshare

Slideshare is a way to share PowerPoint presentations via the web. It definitely beats emailing giant prezzos all around, and like YouTube it makes it easy to publicize content. Now the gang at Slideshare has rolled out what they call slidecasting. It's a "simple web-based way of synchronizing audio with slides." Record your voice or music (think podcast)and synch it with your slides. Then people can navigate the slides along with audio. The audio will keep up whether they skip slides or move back. Presentation guru Guy Kawasaki recently joined the company as an advisor. Something tells me this is just the beginning.

Example of slidecasting:

Source: ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com

Pete Blackshaw, the CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics calls it "nothing short of extraordinary." While he's run a webinar touting the iPhone launch as "the most buzz-worthy marketing event of the year," Harry Potter has generated nearly three times that level of consumer-generated media. "Just think about it: over 4 percent of all new blog posts reference or mention Harry Potter in some way, shape, or form." I'm on page 150, which puts me outside of the fanatic range. Hard core fans have already finished the book and posted spoilers (which I'm studiously trying to avoid).

Source: Will it Blend?

As of this moment there are 1,353,787 views of an iPhone being reduced to black powder in a blender. It went up on YouTube a week ago. There are 4,006,563 views of an iPod being blended. That post went up 7 months ago.

This weekend the click wheel on my iPod Nano stopped working. This is my second Nano. The first one died about 7 months after I bought it. Apple gave me a new one because it was still covered under warranty. This time, all I got was a 10% credit for recycling it.

Yeah, I bought another one, because I'm addicted to my iPod and not because it makes sense that I'm dropping about $200 per year on an MP3 player.

While I was in the Apple Store, my 11 year old son told me he wanted an iPhone.

It's things like this that send millions of us to YouTube to get satisfaction on watching these pricey, desirable gizmos in the blender.

Related:
iPod in a blender
Love. Hate. iPod.
Putting iPod on notice
My name is Maura and I'm a crap addict

Ad-supported bike sharing
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Bad FAA/FCC,bad
Super-transparency
Google backlash
Wiis for Mom
Sony's new blog
Facebook vs. email

Click here to link to Boston Globe column.

Source: FC Now

Apparently Business 2.0 is on the rocks. But a faithful reader, Colin Carmichael, has started a Facebook group called, "I read Business2.0 - and I want to keep reading!" Bus 2.0's "Editor in Chief Josh Quittner, who has been trying to secure private investors to keep the magazine afloat has even joined the group, along with various Web 2.0 luminaries, like Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Matt Cohler, VP-strategy at Facebook." If you want Business 2.0 to stick around, join the group like I did and maybe you can help save a magazine through social networking. There are over 900 members so far.

Source: CNET News blog

Ross Mayfield, is the CEO and co-founder of collaboration software company Socialtext. And this week he used his blog and LinkedIn "to find a replacement - for his own job." Admitting on his own blog that Socialtext needs "to be taken to the next level" he opened up recruiting for "CEO 2.0 for Socialtext." Apparently he's now got a lot of email. As Martin LaMonica of CNET comments, "Now that's transparency."

Source: Business 2.0

Usually it's Google making it rough for others, but this week has been rough for Google. Congress (as well as the FTC) is investigating its proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. Bertelsmann and SAP just "scored a $166 billion grant from the German government to build...a potential European Google-killer." And to cap it off, Google missed earnings, albeit by a "hair's-breadth." Business 2.0 advises Google to stop hiring like crazy, fight for the Doubleclick deal and find a way to turn YouTube into a cash cow.

Source: Forbes

The Nintendo Wii has done what few traditional video games have done...appeal to non-gamers, including moms and grandparents. At this year's E3 videogaming conference, Nintendo "unveiled three new peripherals designed to appeal to those who have never been able to hack complicated controllers - the Wii Wheel, the Wii Zapper and the Wii Balance Board. The Wii Balance Board works "in tandem with a program called "Wii Fit," which allows users to try their hand at a number of different exercises, including yoga, hula hoop, soccer and ski jump."

Engadget has the pictures.

Source: Groundswell

SONY Electronics has joined the blogosphere. Rick Clancy, head of corporate communications, is the author and Forrester's Josh Bernoff says he's the "ideal choice." Why? First, "he's a straight shooter - not something you take for granted with PR people." Second, "he has something to say," having been at SONY a long time. And third, "he has authority." Whatever SONY Electronics says, goes through him. Blogs are tricky for corporations. But Bernoff gives Clancy good marks for his first post. "It's personal, not too corporate. Now we'll see if he can keep it up."

Source: CNET

I'm just back from Anastasia Goodstein's YPulse Mashup in San Francisco where a mix of academics, advertisers, marketers, educators and web companies met to discuss technology and youth culture. It was a fantastic event.

Stefanie Olsen has a great write up of one of my favorite panels - a group of teen entrepreneurs. It came as a surprise to many adults in the room that teens only use email in business or to communicate with adults. Instead they use MySpace and Facebook to communicate throughout the day, even checking it on their mobile phones when away from their computers. Teens almost universally said they only occasionally check their email. Olsen wonders if "the future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.

Related:
If you have any interest at all in the youth market, read Anastasia's blog.
Cop a youth buzz
The new generation gap
Name a TV network?
Teen experiences
Teen spirit
Pop goes the soda
Smells like teen spirit

Source: Springwise

Paris just placed over 10,000 bikes around the city as part of "an ambitious bike sharing system." The goal? Change the way people move around the city, reduce pollution and promote exercise. Pick up a bike from one of the 750 self-service points for just 1 Euro per day with no cap on the number of rides. The program is "operated by outdoor advertising giant JCDecaux, which is footing the bill in exchange for exclusive rights to 1,628 Paris billboards." We should do this in Boston.

Source: The Raw Feed

Like many other Boston-based technology workers, today I will start my week by flying to San Francisco. My thanks go to Mike Elgan for calling the FAA and the FCC out on the carpet. Given that "240 million of us pay... more than a quarter of a trillion dollars annually for airplane tickets," they are failing to make our planes safe and to maximize the quality of our electronic communications. What do we want? 1) Install low-cost WiFi on all passenger jet airplanes, 2) Shield all airplanes from gadget interference, and 3) Ban cell phones forever.

Camping WiFi
Illustration: James F. Kraus

The next small thing
Testosterone business
Generation test
Depp webisodes?
Dump that great idea?
Onboarding

Source: BusinessWeek

A widget is a little box you can post on your blog or social network page. There are all kinds. They dynamically update. Show the weather, the latest YouTube hits - whatever. And they can also dynamically deliver little ads. And that's why they're being called the next web revolution. Case in point? iLike has a widget that lets people share their favorite songs and musicians. It took them six months to sign up thier first million users on iLike.com. But when they launched a widget on Facebook? It took a week to get the next million. Now the CEO says, "We are already making more money from Facebook than our own Web site."

Related:
Widgets are the new big
Technology makes resolutions easier
Facebook as the anti-MySpace
Microchunking the Web

Source: Businesspundit

Ever heard of the ultimatum game? Two people play. Person 1 is offered $40 and allowed to choose how much of that $40 to share with Person 2. If Person 2 accepts, they each get the money. If Person 2 rejects the offer, neither gets the cash. Since $1 is better than $0, you would think Person 2 would always accept the offer. No. People want fairness and often reject lop-sided offers. Now new research shows that "men with high levels of testosterone are even more likely to reject lowball offers, revealing that men "would rather accept less themselves than see a rival get ahead." Robert May suspects that "poor M&A decisions by CEOs stem from the same root causes explored by this research."

Source: Brazen Careerist

I was born at tail end of the baby boom in 1962. But, maybe since I have always worked in emerging tech, the boomer profile has never really fit for me. My generational slice is sometimes called Generation Jones. We're wedged in there between Boomers and Gen X. But Penelope Trunk points us to a fresh idea that she developed with Boston-based media researcher Margaret Weigel.

Trunk says "maybe you are not really part of the generation your birthday falls under." Instead, maybe "we should determine our generation not by our age but by how we use media."

Take her generational test. I took it and my media age is solidly Gen Y. Could it be that the old adage, "you're as old as you think you are" should really be, "you're as old as the media you use?"

Source: Ad Age

Ad Age says don't be surprised if you soon see Johnny Depp in a made-for-Web movie. United Talent Agency digital head Brent Weinstein is leaving the shop that represents movie stars such as Vince Vaughn and Johnny Depp to become the CEO of 60Frames Entertainment, a new company dedicated to handling the financing, ad sales and syndication of "professionally produced online content." Weinstein is betting that custom Web shorts with stars will make amateur YouTube hits look like child's play. They may be right. I'd watch Johnny Depp in anything.

Source: Forbes

When is it time to dump your great business idea? Wil Schroter says there are "three ways to know when enough is enough." First, are paying customers lining up? "It doesn't matter how ingenious your product is - if you can't communicate its value, it may as well not exist." Think Segway or Apple Newton. Second, can you sustain a competitive advantage? "Your idea is what gets you in the game; your competitive advantage is what keeps you there." Think Friendster. And lastly, you still think it's a good idea, but you aren't ready to quit your day job? Get out now - you're no entrepreneur.

Source: San Jose Mercury News

"Three decades after San Francisco-based Charles Schwab led an investor revolt against mainstream stock brokerages, an Internet start-up a few miles to the south (Burlingame) is redefining the meaning of a discount brokerage." Zecco offers stock trades for free. But the biggest threat to established players? Zecco fosters "virtual "communities" where investors can trade stock tips, boast about their trading prowess and conduct their trades in public view for everyone to analyze." Bill Doyle, vice president of Forrester Research in Cambridge says, "I think it can change where people turn for advice."

Source: DailyTech via TechMeme

There are a few places I go where I look forward to being without WiFi. One of them is the great outdoors. But according to Kampgrounds of America (KOA), more people are expecting Internet connectivity when they go camping. KOA now boasts that 379 of its campgrounds offer WiFi. I wouldn't call KOA campgrounds the "great outdoors," but surely it's a sign that soon there will be very few places you can't get WiFi. Then there will be no escape. Just each of us making the decision to either log on, or log off.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Until recently website rankings have been calculated based on counting web page views. But video and technologies like Ajax, that allow one web page to automatically display continuous data, have made the page view a relic. As a result, Nielsen/NetRatings has announced they will abandon the page view and instead rank by time spent on site. Using this method, AOL ranks first in the U.S. with 25 billion minutes in May, even though by page views it's ranked 5th.

Related:
Quick 'n clean Ajax
Scary Web 2.0 math
Kayak load of dough and Ajax

Source: FC Experts

Here's a bad onboarding example: you show up on your first day of a new job and no one knows you're coming. Whirlpool does the opposite, a focused onboarding process that helps new hires hit the ground running. They identify goals and expectations, arrange a "new employee welcome" conference call, assign mentors and help extensively with roommates and relocation. Is it worth it? Research shows employees are 69 percent more likely to be with a company after three years if they experience a structured orientation program.

Latte, but make sure to hold the carbon
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Green gold
Message in a bottle
Vacation solidarity
iPhonatics and iTards
Offshore tutors
Bad CEOs get the boot

Source: Wired

I'm a huge Charlie Rose fan, but I often miss the broadcast. Now, thanks to a recently revamped CharlieRose.com, I can catch up easily by watching shows online. Shows are also available for purchase by download or DVD. The best part? Searching the well-categorized archive. "3,600 hours stretching way back to 1994." Fun fact: Bill Gates has been on Charlie's show 9 times. Steve Jobs? Only once in 1996 and it was a Pixar piece on Toy Story. It's a riot to hear him talk about how he likes working with Disney and it would be nice to keep making movies with them.

Source: Pink Slip

Maureen Rogers points us to TutorVista, based in Banglaore, India that offers "World Class Tutoring, just a click away." Staffed by well-educated Indians working from home 24/7, a visit to the site reveals a startlingly low cost of $99 per month and a first month trial for only $24.99...and that's for unlimited tutoring. Rogers says, "One more job going overseas, one more amateur act being professionalized." And another example of how the web matches people with the services and products they need, regardless of physical location.

Source: Fast Company

Want to do something help stop the climate crisis? Stop buying bottled water. Last year Americans spent $15 billion "for a product we have always gotten, and can still get, for free, from taps in our homes." In the US we ship 1 billion bottles of the stuff around a week. That's "37,800 18-wheelers." And water is "so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with [it] - you have to leave empty space. To top it off, US tap water is safer than the bottled stuff and 24 percent of what we buy is "tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi." What are we thinking?

Source: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

OK so I go away on vacation and completely miss iPhone mania. But coming home on the plane, the flight attendant announced on the loud speaker that they were "confiscating" all iPhones, to which a guy who had one replied,"Nice try."

The best way to experience iPhone mania? Read the anonymously-written blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs." Here's a quote from "Steve." "Some iTard paid $305 for one of the paper bags that we put the iPhones in. No guff. ... Is Apple doing this stuff itself in order to keep the mania going. Um, yes."

However, I still want one.

Source: The Economist

Following the trend of putting the 'eco' into economics, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recently did a tree census. The value the city's nearly 600,000 trees? $122 million. How does he arrive at the number? "$11 million for filtering out air pollutants; $28m saved in energy consumption (less need for air conditioners); $36m for stemming storm-water run-off; and $53m in aesthetic benefits." Bloomberg plans to plant another 1 million trees to increase property values and clean the air.

Source: Harvard Business Review

A new study shows that four times as many CEOs are being dismissed now than in 1995. The good news? It isn’t just a result of trigger-happy boards. With more independent boards and strengthened government practices, ineffectual CEOs are being dismissed once they’ve had a fair chance to prove their worth. The study found an ousted CEO’s company achieves only half the profit, cash flow and market capitalization of a comparable company run by an effective CEO for the same length of time.

Source: Forbes

Starbucks is tracking a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - their carbon footprint. Calculating the number and cutting emissions is tricky. Power consumed can come from coal as well as other less injurious sources. And do you include the cost of transporting and disposing of goods even when you don't have control over it? If you just calculate utility bills, Starbucks serves up about two ounces of carbon emissions per cup. And while Starbucks has joined with companies like Staples and Google to buy bulk wind power, reducing emissions is still just getting off the ground. Look for more companies to follow Intel and Sun Microsystems who now report their carbon footprint annually.

Source: BusinessWeek

My pic of a Bahamas sunset

Well, I did it - for seven days straight. No newspaper. No computer. No cell phone. No TV. No calls for work. And I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Liz Ryan who writes that "in the knowledge economy, the only way to free yourself from your work is to conspire with your colleagues to put everything on hold." Because the system we work in "never sleeps," we all need to practice "vacation solidarity." Thanks to all of my colleagues who filled in for me or waited on projects until I got back. Now it's your turn. I owe you one.