I ran across an interview with David Foster Wallace on Salon from just after Infinite Jest came out. It included this quote about the state of Literature: If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have […]
Here’s another twist on the business models for artists meme. A. Koford has been drawing a fantastic web cartoon featuring the Laugh Out Loud Cats, two cats that look like depression-era hobo comics characters, but who speak LOLcat. It sounds screwy, but works beautifully. Check out the site – All of the comics are freely […]
When I was writing about Kristin Hersh the other day I asked why the record labels weren’t able to come up the new music business model that she’s using. I’m still a bit perplexed by this. Similarly, there’s been lots of talk recently about how newspapers find themselves in a pretty unfavourable position these days […]
There’s been a bit of a slow roll through the (mostly) academic blogs discussing a recent paper by Bronnenberg, Dhar & Dube from The Journal of Political Economy called “Brand History, Geography, and the Persistence of Brand Shares”. Here’s the abstract: We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer […]
I grabbed a copy of an odd little book yesterday – it’s called Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell. It’s a collection of six essays. They’re all pretty good (Orwell is always pretty readable), but I don’t see a lot of logic in assembling these particular essays into one book (the title essay is excellent […]
I subscribed to Kristin Hersh today. That probably sounds a bit weird, so let me explain. If you’re not familiar with her, Kristin is pretty much a genius. She started making music over 20 years ago with her first band, Throwing Muses. The Muses have made around 7 records in that time, plus she has […]
Actually, when I first typed that, it said ‘shameless elf promotion’, which would probably be better… In any case, I’m giving a talk on the evening of May 25th as part of Brisbane’s Innovation Festival. It’s going to cover fairly basic stuff, like what innovation is and why it is critically important especially in tough […]
In my previous incarnation as a blogger I mostly wrote about entertainment-related things. But one of the themes that quickly emerged was a discussion of the various projects that my cats got up to – including building a particle accelerator, starting a management consulting company, computer repair (see above) and making a trebuchet. I probably […]
About three years ago, Gerald Marion, a friend from the Brisbane office of Deloitte, introduced me to a book called the Alchemy of Growth. This is an interesting book and one of its main ideas is that there are three horizons for developing new business opportunities. Its a reasonably simple idea with Horizon 1 being […]
