Category: Internet

  • Ecosystem Shakeups: Q&A with Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton… Or… Amazon, Apple & Android: Oh My!

    Matthew Ingram’s GigaOm article last week, “Amazon shows media companies the future of the web,” provocatively argued that the e-commerce giant’s Kindle Cloud Reader was more than just a way around the 30% cut that Apple charges for books purchased via the Kindle app on the iPad or iPhone.  What the e-book retailer has also done…

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Portland Startups to work with Target, Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Wieden + Kennedy

    Our industry has relapsed into a high digital startup fever, but this time with a new twist— brands working directly with entrepreneurs in order to find the next hot digital companies at the earliest possible stage and to stay at the sharpest edge of marketing innovation. We’ve seen this elsewhere with the PepsiCo10 in New…

  • Netflix’s Big OOPS– didn’t these guys take Psych 101?

    Topline takeway for this post: Netflix has screwed up, turning unconsidered background choices into front-of-mind considerations. They don’t understand how pleasure and satisfaction work. I’m on vacation and somewhat unplugged, but I was still connected enought to receive a surprising email from Netflix yesterday saying that if I want to retain both unlimited streaming and…

  • The Death of Media Channel Loyalty: What the New Pew Data Shows Us

    Over the holiday weekend the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released data showing that 24% of internet users have placed calls online, up from 8% of internet users in 2007. The precise wording of the question was: “Please tell me if you ever use the internet to make a phone call online, using…

  • From the Bizarre Question Department: Voice Page Turning for iPad?

    I love reading while on the elliptical machine at the gym, and it’s a handy time to plough through reports and PDFs using the iPad (gen 1).  However, if I’m tracking my heartrate I have to take my hands OFF the paddles in order to go to the next page on the document, book, PDF…

  • Sat AM Quick Updates on Urban Outfitters

    Quick updates: Urban Outfitters finally spoke out both via Twitter and on the blog to which they link: Hey everyone, please read our statement regarding the I Heart Destination Necklace. http://urbout.co/kqdecK Why the company waited until the Saturday morning of a holiday weekend is beyond me. Note also that my friend Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb found…

  • Urban Outfitters’ Massive Social Media FAIL

    Please check out my latest post over at iMedia Connection about how Urban Outfitters is following in the dubious footsteps of Domino’s Pizza back in 2009 in their failure to address a massively negative social media campaign. Domino’s learned this lesson the hard way — and is now doing social media right — so let’s…

  • Short Post: There’s More to the Amazon story than Fast Company conveys

    Kit Eaton over at Fast Company (a must read in general) blogged today about Amazon’s announcement that it now sells more e-Books than physical books.  Here’s a relevant snippet including a link to the Amazon press release: Since April the first, for every 100 print-and-paper books Amazon has sold, it’s also sold 105 e-books, according…

  • Super Storytelling Smackdown: “Smallville” vs. “Thor”

    This is a post about the difference between experiencing a story and remembering it later, a distinction that we pay too little attention to in the media world.  I’ll talk about theater, movies, TV, Superman, Thor and Shakespeare, and there will be spoilers… lots of ’em about the “Smallville” series finale, but I’ll be careful…

  • Missed Advertiser Opportunity: Fortune Mag’s “Kindle” Strategy

    The May 9th issue of Fortune Magazine contains a terrific 22 page article by Adam Lashinsky called “Inside Apple.” As has been much reported, Fortune withheld the article from its website. To read Lashinsky’s article, you have to subscribe (magazine subscribers get free iPad access), haul yourself to a newsstand or pay 99 cents at…