Okay, back. Been gone for more than 2 months. One month in India and a month working getting ready for a pilot with a group here in Chicago for BettrAt (Which is going well — my favorite part of the webinar we held yesterday: “This (BettrAt) could be the next Facebook, [...]
Archive for the 'Business Idea' Category
I loved the zefrank show (zefrank is where i got that black shirt i have with the small fuzzy black duck that people always think is a stain) I’ve now referenced this video in conversation at least 3 times so I thought I might as well post it.
I saw this while I was [...]
Late last week, the University of Michigan had their BOP conference, limited to a core and exclusive group of BOP notables (Patrick Whitney, Dean of the IIT Institute of Design, and BettrAt’s “Thinker-In-Residence,” was in attendance).
I had a chance to catch up with a friend tonight I hadn’t talked to in several years and we [...]
If I don’t know you, I seriously doubt I care what you think about a product. Stop trying to make me buy it.
If I do know you, and you’re trying to sell me something because there’s a monetary award attached to it, you’re either in some network marketing MLM scheme… and I’m probably not your [...]
Okay, as promised, here’s my Pandora makeover. Don’t get scared off by the red text. Pretend this is an undergraduate design critique or something. Here are some things that Pandora might do to truly improve the experience for users and garner more revenue to boot.
First, let’s take a look at the current [...]
I enjoy listening to streaming music from Pandora while I’m working. (Special thanks to big Dave for sharing his channel with me so I don’t have to spend time sifting or curating the good stuff)
Pandora is an awesome product- it allows for discovery, evolves with me, and is generally a pretty good experience. I’m putting [...]
The NatureMill composter is terrible. The waste still smells so much worse than when I put it in… it’s incredibly loud, and the thing is designed so flimsily (Is flimsily a word?). What a sham (also, a shame). I’m returning it promptly and getting my money back.
This is the thanks I [...]
It’s like I don’t even have to go around with original content… I can just use marketing geniuses like Seth Godin to make the case for BettrAt as a superior long tail based marketing tool (what we’ve been calling content heavy advertorials for the web) that fit into someone’s SuggestBar.
It’s about time service providers, publishers, [...]
As Mr. Burns from the Simpson’s would say, “Exxxxxccccccellent”.
Check out this great New York times article. I’ll keep quiet and curate the best stuff for you.
In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced [...]
It’s funny that I just posted about the NYTimes being one of the few newspapers I read online.
Especially when they have great content like this.
Laptop? Check. Student Playlist? Check. Classroom of the Future? Check.
…The program, conducted in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers [...]
At Bettr@, we believe that content will be the new advertising. We hope we’re not martyrs on this one, because the current state of web browsing really sucks.
Look around, and you’ll see that most of the stuff that’s out there is so irrelevant. I mean…it’s painstakingly obvious that we’re going to be adblind when [...]
Kevin and I were out on a little scavenger hunt today, looking in a magazine related to Running to see how much stuff in it was actually valuable and relevant content related to running vs how much was self serving, irrelevant advertising.
The results were not too surprising: Most of the content was irrelevant advertising, and [...]
At design school, I get surveys all the time. I do some of them. Actually, I do a fair number of them if they are for a class or to help the school improve in some way. Surveys are a easy way to get quick quantitative information from a large sample size [...]
What’s the deal? Everyone’s all hype about widgets lately.
While showering, I took a second to dream about what the ultimate killer widget would be if designed for yours truly.
First of all, none of this web app widget stuff. I already have enough tabs open in my firefox, thank you. I’d much rather [...]
I’m not sure how I feel about gated (or exclusive) social network communities yet. I’ve recently received an unsolicited request to join. It sort of feels like a cult.
Anyway, the request got me starting to think about these types of communities, where people self segregate themselves. I had read about them [...]
