BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Journey Back, Journey On: Watching my son rediscover a comic book 4 years later

    Saturday morning. Mom’s at yoga. Dad’s puttering downstairs. 13-year-old Big Sis is hibernating — those pesky teenagers. What’s an almost-9-year boy old to do? That’s my imagination of what W, my son, was thinking after I shushed him for the fifth time when he was playing in the open area right next to where his sister’s puberty-induced coma went…

  • From the Archive: Why does “on demand” feel so… demanding?

    A kind tweet today from my friend David Daniel reminded me of this post, first published October 1, 2006. A look through my site found it a casualty of a domain transfer, but the always-useful Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive brought it back from the dead. Original version (with original comments) can be found…

  • 2 Kinds of Wearables: Info display vs. creation, and how they work with time

    Note: I’m keynoting about wearables at the Brand Innovators Fashion Week event on Friday, February 14, 2014.  The kind folks at Brand Innovators have published this piece as a white paper. You can learn more about the event and download the white paper here. People talk about wearable computers in one lumpy category, but doing…

  • Short post about “My Facebook Movie” — from Charming to Cloying in 21 hours

    The first person I saw share “My Facebook Movie” was Terry Kawaja, 23 hours ago as I write this short post.  I clicked.  I smiled. I shared mine a few minutes later. Then I looked at those of two friends and stopped. This morning I saw that my wife had shared hers, so of COURSE…

  • UP, UP and away… How a wearable computer changed my brain

    Old dogs can learn new tricks.  So can people young and old.  Behavior is metamorphic, although we seldom recognize that plasticity in the moment.  Instead, we think the world changes while we stay the same, that our children are less responsible than we were at their age but that we threw crazier parties.  We think…

  • “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” now live on Medium

    My latest Medium post — “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” just went live on Medium.  Here are the first few paragraphs: After my eight year old son accidentally set the clock on my computer forward things got weird on Twitter. Tweets had the time signature from 2019 complete with links, but when I clicked…

  • Two Reasons iCloud Sucks

    I’m an Apple user and ordinarily a happy one, but iCloud is an abject failure. Here are two (of many) reasons why. Reason #1: You can’t get there from anywhere intuitive or convenient. Apple insists that you access your iCloud files either through the application or through a browser.  But I might not want to…

  • Short Post: Best iGoogle Replacement

    I’m a devoted iGoogle user since it first came online, and so I staggered through all the stages of grief when Google announced that it was discontinuing the product 18 months ago… with the count down ticking down to November 1… just a few days from now. For months I’ve held on to the fond…

  • New piece on Medium: “The Next Airline Disruption”

    I just uploaded a new piece to Medium.com about how the airline industry can practice innovation through simplification. Excerpt: Here’s how a savvy airline can disrupt the rest of the industry: create a secondary market in airline tickets that allows customers to buy and sell tickets to each other with no fees.   Need to…

  • On Medium: Season 2 of “The Newsroom”

    Just published a short piece on Season 2 of HBO’s “The Newsroom” over on Medium.com –“’Newsroom’ Season 2 Delivers: The problems of S1 turn into triumphs in S2.” Here are the first few paragraphs: I was crankily devoted to the first season on HBO of Aaron Sorkin’s latest intense one-hour drama featuring geniuses who have memorized…