Personal cloud innovation happens at the edges, by Jeff Kramer Gartner Says the Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users’ Digital Lives by 2014. A bit aggressive. From March 2012. Photos of Florence, shot from about 25,000 feet up, en route from Newark to Rome via Munich Innovations in Digital… Continue reading

Sell your data to save the economy and your future, by Jaron Lanier, for the BBC Heights of Fancy, by Thomas Leslie, an op-ed in the New York Times. Leslie, “a professor of architecture at Iowa State University, is the author of Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934,” says the new spire on One World Trade Center in… Continue reading

The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual, by Pete Mortensen in Co.Design The State of Wi-Fi, by Ubiquiti. Lots of stats. Disruptions: At Odds Over Privacy Challenges of Wearable Computing, by Nick Bilton, in his Bits blog at the New York Times McKinsey Global Institute: Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and… Continue reading

Media Tell Hollywood Thou Shalt Not Put A Stumbling Block Before the Treaty For The Blind, by Harold Feld. Points to the We the People Petition Why is the Media Hyping Cord-Cutting? Elements of a viral launch page, by Simon Schmid on Smashing Fred Wilson on “natural advertising” Science Tornadoes and Climate Change: Huge Stakes,… Continue reading

I’ll be participating in a run of good and fun events over the next few weeks, taking me to at least five cities in five countries. Here they are: Currently: New York, Boston and Cambridge. Then… OuiShareFest, May 2-4, Paris, where my talk will be about Markets and Relationships VRM Day, May 6, Mountain View, where… Continue reading

Last week, while most of us were busy watching the Boston Marathon bombing events unfold, an icky bill called CISPA, or HR264, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, with enormous lobbying help from IBM and other industrial giants. There are lots of angles on why CISPA is a Bad Thing (see the link pile below for a small sample);… Continue reading

All these living things have been declared dead… Anonymous travel Apple (in 2005) Blogging (by Francine Hardaway herself, no less) Common courtesy Driving Google (in 2006) Google+ Internal medicine Journalism (in BuzzFeed, next to “The 30 Most Important Cats of 2012”) Marketing Microsoft (Paul Graham, in 2007) Search Social Networking Social media Starbucks (in 2008) Thinking (with various adjectives, especially “design…”)… Continue reading

Last weekend the cover essay in the Review section of The Wall Street Journal was The Customer as a God, by yours truly. Now that a few days have gone by, and I’ve done lots of responding in the comments below that piece and elsewhere, I can start looking at some of the responses that have… Continue reading

The storm is hitting right now: Remember that auroras can be a thousand miles high. So even if they’re over Canada, they can still be visible in the upper part of the lower U.S. 48. Or even sometimes south of there. And maybe that’s a better place to be, since it stays light up there… Continue reading

One nice thing about blogging is that you get to correct what you write. Tonight I put up a long post that I had second, third, fourth and fifth and additional thoughts about, and finally decided to kill. I do that a lot, actually. Just not usually with stuff I’ve already put up. But I… Continue reading

The Intention Economy came out on Tuesday, and coverage has been spreading. Meanwhile, while I’ve been busy at IIW, where VRM mojo has been major. Notes from the many VRM sessions at #IIW14 will appear on this page soon. Meanwhile here are some excerpts pieces that ran this week. From Selling You: Not Just on Facebook, by Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes —… Continue reading

While everybody else is stuck in 1080p — aka “full HD” — Apple is thinking and developing on a bigger canvas than that — starting with the new iPad‘s 2048 x 1536 screen. They are always looking to move standard usage forward by large steps (where they change the whole market and win big in… Continue reading

Some clothing we need. That’s the kind that keeps us warm, or shielded from sunlight, or from getting our feet burned or cut up. Some clothing we wear because we like the way it makes us look, or how it gives us a way to conform with social conventions, or to flaut the same. But… Continue reading

According to this… … the Aurora is on. The Kp Index has hit 5, and a geomagnetic storm is on. Here’s today’s SpaceWeather on the matter. Follow the links there. Bear in mind that the aurora are curtains of light up to a thousand miles high. So if the auroral oval is pushed down over… Continue reading

I was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up… Continue reading

For the last three days I’ve been skiing at Mammoth Mountain, an 11,059-foot volcano built to its current shape between 110,000 and 57,000 years ago. It is still active. The mountain’s last eruption of rock and lava was about 1200 years ago, essentially in the geologic present. Lethal gasses burp out of fissures, and hot springs… Continue reading

At the bottom of How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation, an excellent essay in the latest Economist, I found this… … and decided to leave the first comment. You can read it here. Continue reading

In terms of sales, Android is tops in smarphones. According to this ComScore press release, Google had a 46.3% market share of U.S. smartphone platform sales (with Android) in October, up 4.4% from July. At 28.1%, Apple’s iOS share was up 1%. Apple’s share of total subscribers was 10.8%, up 1% from July. Yet when… Continue reading

Harvard Yard thinks it’s October. The Red, Sugar and Norway maples, the Scarlet and Pin oaks, the dogwoods and hawthorns, have all been at peak Fall color around Boston the last few days. The weather has been glorious too, hovering around 70° in the afternoons. Lots of people walking around in shorts, the sidewalk cafés… Continue reading

Today is the first day in months when my first question wasn’t, “What can I do to finish (or improve) the book today?” That’s because I turned in the (hopefully) final draft yesterday morning. Details: The book is The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge and the publisher is Harvard Business Review Press. You can… Continue reading