Innovation

You can now have a chat bot that translates for you. I know web resources for translation aren’t new, but having them around as competitive features is pretty cool.  Every once in a while I marvel at what our civilization accomplishes, and this is one of those moments.  This isn’t as big as penicillin of…

Boom Studios, which publishes a couple of awesome zombie comics released "North Wind" recently both for free online and in comic shops for sale.  This is pretty cool.  I asked my local comic book guy, Frank of Amazing Fantasy in the Sunset, what he thought about it. He said, "I know comic book shops that…

Anyone who has read my blog knows that I think that Apple owns the music player business.  I’ve said it many times before but I need to add an asterisk to that.  Apple has the market share and the momentum but there is room for other viable businesses, and you can see them when you…

I don’t buy the first version of any product, iPhone included.  I owned a Newton, what else is there to say? I’ve been dying to buy an iPhone, though, and this mandatory wait has killed me.  But in mid-January 2008 Steve Jobs is giving a keynote at a major Mac conference, and it’s likely that…

When hunky NY Times reporter Brad Stone unmasked Fake Steve Jobs, the faux blog took a bit of a nosedive in quality and I stopped reading. Recently a friend who works at Apple pointed me at this column after an evening discussion, fueled by red meat and decent wine, about how I thought that Google…

It was so incredibly subtle, and nobody noticed it, but it just happened.  Google went from early adopter to fast follower.  Instead of bringing out market-changing products that disrupt, they’re reacting to other’s innovations.  As evidence I offer: Google Reader, a superior product produced as a response to Bloglines, which I abandoned for the Google…

Convio, one of the leading online nonprofit marketing product companies, had their annual confab this past week.  Here’s my take: APIs, Datasync tools, and extensions New channel conflicts for API publishers The next two years Additional reading APIs, DataSync tools, and extensions One of the non profit bloggers I read but often don’t agree with…

The must-read article this week was in the Wall Street Journal.  "A New Generation Reinvents Philanthropy"  talked about how the use of social networking is introducing people under 35 to non-profits, both through innovative giving tools like Kiva.org, as well as innovative tools like Facebook being utilized by very traditional brands. "Joe Alamo didn’t set…

One of the big stories this week is that Comcast was accused of hiring an advocacy firm to fake public outrage over their object to the Big 10 moving games to their own channel from free tv.  Helping to organize a coalition as a large corporate funder is certainly nothing new, and if done transparently,…