Wikipedia

Google Inc.’s social network debuted at the top spot on a customer-service index of social-media websites, including Facebook Inc., which sank to a record low in the annual report. Google+, which was started in June 2011, tied information aggregator Wikipedia with a score of 78 in the social-media category on the American Customer Satisfaction Index Continue Reading →

I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.  –Tibor Kalman, graphics designer I have not been writing as much as I used to. An overview of much of my writing would reveal a highly critical point-of-view of conventional Continue Reading →

Three years ago, the word “gamification” would have turned up zero Google results. Today, that same search yields 13 million entries. Clearly, the idea of using game thinking and mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems is gaining appeal. Tech companies like Oracle and Salesforce have made sizable gamification acquisitions, while social infrastructure start-ups like Gigya ($15.3 Continue Reading →

There are several different ways to study the nature of matter, but one of the most fun is to smash very tiny particles into each other at extraordinary speeds and see what happens. This is what they do at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) one of the largest, most complex, machines ever built. This $10 Continue Reading →

LinkedIn just found about 6.5 million current passwords on a Russian file server.  No one knows who hacked LinkedIn or what the hackers were planning, but the security breach was bad enough that LinkedIn suggested that users change their passwords.  In this case, the hackers stole passwords, so no matter how strong they were, the Continue Reading →

Originally posted at Keller Fay.  As far as we have been able to determine, the phrase “Word-of-Mouth Advertising” was coined by Ernest Dichter who, in 1966, published an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “How Word-of-Mouth Advertising Works” Dichter was a psychologist by training.  His firm focused on consumer behavior and the motivations that Continue Reading →

I knew Earth Day was coming by my email inbox. Every day for the past few weeks I’ve gotten pitches to write about some company’s new eco product. The words LEED certified, Eco, Green, Recycled, Renewable have become an endless blur in the subject line of in-bound emails. This is now a spring ritual. Last Continue Reading →

Some say the glass is half empty (AT&T has only 28 LTE markets), some say the glass is half full (Verizon has 203 LTE markets) – a physicist would say the glass is 100% full: half liquid, half air (4G is a marketing term, not a technical standard).  Let’s review. Unlike 3G which is a Continue Reading →

At some point growing up, many kids heard this advice from one or both parents: “Now ____, be on your best behavior.” Quite soon, we TV viewers may have to heed that advice, when dealing with our relationship to TV sets. There’s a huge disrupt ahead for that relationship, and thank Ralph Santana for the Continue Reading →

In mid-summer 1986, the New York Mets were about 20 games ahead. Jerry Della Femina called and asked me to write a song and produce a music video for the team. It was the kind of idea that Jerry was famous for – create and produce not only a song and music video, but create Continue Reading →