Archive for February 2011
At Issue } essential reading
Web's Hot New Commodity: Privacy
As the surreptitious tracking of Internet users becomes more aggressive and widespread, tiny start-ups and technology giants alike are pushing a new product: privacy.
And The Award For The Most Dead Entertainment Medium Goes To… The Web
You Californians sure seem obsessed with this “Oscar” thing. As I write these words, every one of my friends with a 9x zip code is dressed to the nines, snarking their way through one of the forty three billion Academy Awards parties taking place across the state. I am not amongst them: partly because I am unforgivably late with this column, partly because I haven’t seen any of the movies nominated for the major categories, and partly because watching Anne Hathaway and James Franco (pictured left) being funny is like watching a Chuck Lorre remake of Joanie Loves Chachi.
Nestlé: Between Food and Pharma
Nestlé is a worldwide brand probably known best as a maker of chocolate, not exactly a health food. But the brand is making a serious push to become a global power in the emerging industry of foods that are not just healthy, but that offer specific medical and health benefits.
Social Progress = Economic Success: Social Innovation at Work
In recent months, business leaders been embarking on a new conversation in the U.S. about how our business, government and consumers will meet challenges around the environments, infrastructure, and of course, the economy.
The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer
Over the past five years Forrester Research has observed an increase in the number of companies with a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company. These individuals often serve as top executives, with the mandate and power to design, orchestrate and improve customer experiences across every customer interaction. And whether firms call them Chief Customer Officers (CCOs) or give them some other label, these leaders sit at high levels of power at companies as diverse as Allstate, Dunkin' Brands, Oracle and USAA.
How Chrysler Chief Olivier Francois Is Selling Detroit
Joel Martin, principal of Eight Mile Style Music and co-owner of Eminem's song catalog, is used to getting the cold shoulder from Michigan automakers who have generally found the rap artist's song lyrics too spicy for their mainstream audiences. So, imagine his surprise when he got a call on his cellphone one day last December from an assistant at his Ferndale, Mich., office that said "The president of Chrysler is here looking for you."
Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing
When planning new products, companies often start by segmenting their markets and positioning their merchandise accordingly. This segmentation involves either dividing the market into product categories, such as function or price, or dividing the customer base into target demographics, such as age, gender, education, or income level. Unfortunately, neither way works very well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and 95 percent of them fail.
An HTML for Numbers
Is Google's Public Data Explorer the first step toward a universal data format?
On Governing By Design
Design is an inescapable dimension of human activity. To adapt one of my favorite quotes by Reyner Banham, like the weather it is always there, but we speak about it only when it is exceptionally bad or exceptionally good.
Baked In: Fashion Site Polyvore Taps an Army of Anna Wintours
Mark Zuckerberg says social dynamics of the kind Facebook pioneered will one day be a core part of every industry. In the first installment of our new series, we take a look at some companies that are "baking in" social right from the start.
