Kassia Krozer writes a fantastic blog that primarily discusses the book publishing industry. Her post today has an excellent quote from author Mur Lafferty (here’s his original post): What really surprises me is when you hear publishing people say that they don’t know what to do, or that they refuse listen to Internet professionals. They […]
Lee Sigelman wants to know why smartphones don’t have keyboards that look like this? That’s the Dvorak keyboard, and by all (well, most) accounts you can touchtype significantly faster on one of those than you can on a qwerty keyboard. The persistence of the qwerty keyboard is the poster child for the idea of economic […]
Here’s a nice talk by Tom Peters on innovation. Some of the points that jumped out at me: He again emphasises the importance of process/business model innovation – we simply can’t get stuck on only thinking of new products as innovation. The idea that you should only buy from vendors that are in the top […]
Where you are is still important. Location has a huge impact on the resources available to you, the education of the people that you work with, the money available to try out radical ideas, and the cultural attitudes towards new things. Check out this from a Time Magazine article on California: Ignore the California whinery. […]
It’s hard for birders to see albatrosses. You have to a book a boat trip, they take all day (or longer!), and there are long periods of boredom punctuated by frenzied excitement when you run across birds – which you really hope you don’t miss seeing! And even if you’re not prone to seasickness, inevitably […]
Here is Nassim Nicholas Taleb talking about using nature as a model: The whole talk is well worth watching – it’s one of the best I’ve seen from Taleb. He tends to focus on avoiding negative black swan events (extremely rare events with disproportional impacts), so almost always talks about mitigating risk. When we’re trying […]
I was talking with my colleague Jay Weerawardena today about leadership. We agreed that an important aspect of leadership is inspiring people, but also putting people into a position to succeed. That idea fit in very well with Itay Talgam’s TED talk, which was posted: There are many useful points made in this talk, but […]
Edward Glaeser has written a couple of posts over the past week looking at Argentina on the Economix blog for the NYT. It’s an interesting topic. Argentina was a wealthy country at the start of the 20th century, but by almost every conceivable ecnomic measure available, it is much worse off now than it was […]
We already know that giving stuff away can be an important part of building an effective revenue generation mechanism – and it seems to work quite well in publishing in particular (even academic publishing!). Two of the strongest proponents for giving away some version of work for free are Seth Godin and Cory Doctorow, and […]
Here are the slides + audio for the talk that John gave today at the Brisbane Innovation Network meeting: The Three Stages Of Innovation Strategy View more presentations from Tim Kastelle. There were a few key points that John made. The one that really jumped out for me was the issue of time. This process […]
