Commitment to a cause is measured by the loss you incur from supporting it.
Changing your profile color on twitter is not much of a commitment, because you don’t lose much. Donating money, spending time are much bigger losses, so they show more commitment. Opportunity costs present a grey area: if you decide not to have an iPhone because you don’t want to support AT&T, then you have lost out on something.
I heard some people, incl. Google CFO Patrick Pichette, claim that Old Spice is the future of marketing.
Not so.
Viral marketing does not equate to increase in sales.
The same was said of Budweiser and their “Whassup?” campaign. In fact, sales of Budweiser declined while the ad / meme was running full swing. Increasing awareness does not increase sales unless there is a clear value proposition, of which there was none. Eventually Budweiser went back to traditional advertising with horses and cowboys, and sales resumed.
Last week I got an iPhone, this week I got a Wii. Both devices feature major improvements in User Interface.
While the devices are very different, they both feature a web browser that has to face small resolutions (a television’s resolution sucks). On the Wii you use your Wiimote (remote), on the iPhone your fingers. I won’t go through the details as they have been amply explored on the internet; I will however note the differences and similarities.
The keyboard: the buttons change in size on hover above on both devices, providing visual feedback. The Wii provides a short vibration, providing tactile feedback.
[Never got around to finish this review, but I'd be interested on hearing anyone's take on the future of User Interface]
People who know me know that I am a proponent of the paperless office, and even the diskless office (aka. the cloud office, which involves using a combination of software as a service and cloud software for everything). I use a variety of tools to achieve this, Google supplying a large amount of these, and Mozilla a key one with Weave.
However, in writing my thesis, I had to switch to paper for the mathematics / game theory model. It was just that much quicker to write new equations and solve them. While limited, paper for math certainly is more agile.