QR Hunt
Do you know what a QR code is? They're the funny looking boxy UPC things. Here's one: If you scan one of these with a smartphone barcode reader, it will read out the information. The one above contains a URL to a website, but they can contain just text or an image. They've been heralded as the next big thing for marketers, but in the United States, they haven't really caught on. There are a...
By Invitation Only
It seems that initiation is not so much about internally developing a vision of something over a long period of time, and then persuading people to think you're right. It's more like standing up and announcing to a sea of cubicles, "Hey, I'm going to get Middle Eastern food for lunch. Anyone else want to join me?" It's standing up, saying something, and seeing if anyone else follows you. (The analogy is even more realistic...
Scareware
Scareware is software that is installed onto a user's computer and makes the user think that they've been infiltrated by a computer virus or a worm. At the same time, it offers the user the chance to clean their computer by purchasing a computer program that will scan the hard drive and remove all threats. The threat is fake, but it can seem real enough to get people to put in their credit card numbers...
Meeting and Defying
Director David Fincher gave a talk a couple of years ago that I attended, in which he shared a story about the release of his film Se7en. As a promotional tactic, the production company did a screening of the film shortly before its release. It wasn't widely publicized, but a poster was placed outside to drawn in people to watch the film. According to Fincher, the poster said something like this: "Do you want to...
Children and Time
I tend to act differently around people that I know are parents. As much as I try to treat people equitably, I can't get past this one. It has a lot to do with someone that lots of parents have told me: "Having kids changes everything in your life." I don't fully understand it, but I think I have a cursory grasp of what they're saying. Having kids shifts your priorities. It changes the way...
"Every revolution destroys the old before it brings the benefits of the new." -Clay Shirky. About three months ago, the city where I live lost both its Borders and Barnes & Noble. They were both located a few blocks from me, right across the street from each other. They both shut down in the same week. This sent me shopping to the one Borders left standing in our area ten miles to the West. Earlier...
The Problem with Demanding Evidence
Amanda Hocking has been getting a lot of ink lately. She's a self-published author of fiction on the Kindle. She sells her little e-books for $1, $2, or $3 each. The latest news is that she's making millions of dollars without having ever gone through a traditional publisher. If you were looking for evidence that this is even possible to do, there it is. I've been telling everyone I know, with all my fervor, that...
More Than a Feeling
Here's something that I figure is at least partially true: in terms of government and most larger businesses, transparency is not complete. This isn't a conspiracy theory, because I'm not being specific. And I'm not saying it's entirely a bad thing. But I think that, in general, there are some things we don't hear about. They might be defense plans, it might be accounting fraud, or any number of things, but I don't believe the...
Making the Cut
After bassist Cliff Burton of Metallica died back in the 1980s, the rest of the band started holding auditions for his replacement. One of the people who auditioned was a guy by the name of Les Claypool. Les Claypool is the lead singer and bassist (how often do those two things go together?) of a band called Primus. In terms of alt-rock bands of the 1990's, Primus achieved a great deal of success. Every rock...
About five years ago, Netflix created a contest that would award $1,000,000 to any person or group of people who could improve their movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. To aid contestants, they released an enormous sample dataset of users, movie titles, and ratings. Each username was replaced with a numeric code. That way, users could be compared to one another, and the general rating habits of a single user could be analyzed, without divulging potentially...