Doing More With Less Since 1972
Nancy Reagan had Just Say No.
Laura Bush promoted the importance of literacy.
Now, Michelle Obama is fighting obesity.
When are we going to elect a First Lady who raises awareness of the threat the President (and Congress) poses to the futures of the country’s young people?
…and why Wave may not.
When I was watching the presentation for Google Buzz, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the functionality was duplicated in Wave. So why could Buzz catch on where Wave hasn’t?
Because it’s not something “new”. It’s just something in addition to the email everyone is used to working with.
In large organizations, services like Yammer (which I love) are too much of a shift in mindset for too many people at once. But if something is introduced as simply an extended feature of a tool you’re already using, the game changes.
The enterprise LOVES its email. It’s smart to build a service on top of that instead of trying to establish a new service altogether, which is what Wave tried to do.
What I really love is that both of these products are coming out of the same company and look to be competing with one another on some level. The end user will be the ultimate winner as these two groups within Google try to make their product the standard.
As Sharepoint…either way, it was (sorta) nice knowing you.
And still, I think the most potential is in the enterprise.
If it would only write to Twitter. Lot’s of people have a lot of equity built up over there and aren’t going to want to throw that away.
I’ve read two articles in the WSJ this week about the housing market, and now I’m less certain than ever about what’s going to happen in the next year.
Is 2010 the Year of the Short Sale?
If 2009 was the year of the foreclosure (and loan modification), then 2010 may be shaping up as the year of the short sale.
I’d say 2011 is more realistic, unless they are predicting a slew of short sales starting in Q1. Our experience with trying to purchase short sales is that they take a long time. How long? We’re not really sure, because we haven’t made it to the end of the process yet. But five months seems to be a reasonable expectation for a minimum, and that’s just for the bank to get back to you with a yes or no.
I’m interested to see what is going to happen when, by the time the bank responds to an offer with a “yes”, the house is no longer worth the amount that was originally offered. Because, some people think we’re still in a housing bubble:
Rental apartment vacancies are reaching record highs. Many segments of the housing market are still oversupplied. And the core demographic in the country—the baby boomers—are reaching the age where they’re more likely to downsize, buying less house in the years to come.
Throw in the tax credits, artificially low mortgage rates, and the fact that the fed is still buying mortgage backed securities, and it’s hard to make the case that the housing market is not still artificially high.
It seems like the easiest way back to a true(r) market would be for banks to sell off their bad assets as quickly and efficiently as possible through the short sale process. Quick and efficient doesn’t seem to be the order of the day, however.
I have a gmail filter set up so that notifications of new Twitter followers don’t get sent to my inbox. I go through them a couple of times of weeks, and I’ve picked up on a few patterns in my follow-back decision making…
Expect this list to grow and evolve.
Are we any better off now than we were 10 years ago? Ok, just had to ask that because it seems like the thing to do. I know that for a lot of people the answer is a definite “no”. As for me, I’m infinitely better off than I was then. The last decade has been one of tremendous technological advancement, but there’s plenty to lament. Here’s my list of 10 things I had 10 years ago that I’ll probably never have access to again.
Augmented reality sounds like a really cool thing. And I guess it is. Or am I just obligated to say that?
Being truthful, when I watch videos like this one, there’s a part of me that would gladly pay $20 for a whole seat, even though I’ll only need the edge, to watch monster trucks (real ones, that waste tremendous amounts of fossil fuels) roll over neatly stacked bricks of smart phones.
Disclaimer: I’m astronomically ignorant, so I really like to use the Google Sky app to find constellations and to see what the sky looks like on the other side of the earth by pointing it at my feet.
At least this is where I hope we’re headed. The coming announcement of a partnership with Google, iLike, MySpace, and LaLa gives me hope this could be happening sooner rather than later. Currently, nothing really syncs up to move music from a computer to the Android phones for music the way iTunes syncs up with the iPhone. But maybe it’s that paradigm that’s wrong to begin with. What if it worked like this…
I’m sure there’s even more that could be done that I haven’t even considered, but manually moving files over to an Android device seems very 2001. And if you’re like me and have hundreds of gigabytes of music, there’s no way to get it all over there anyway. I want it to always be available. All of it.
Healthcare: Time to Start Over
After all, isnt it better to get it done right than to just get it done?
If I thought it would do any good, I’d link to this article and suggest you read it. I’m worried we are collectively going on several faulty assumptions:
I’m wishin’ someone could explain this to me. It’s been bugging me for about 20 years now. Watch, then read…
If your best friend Harry has a brother Larry who is going to marry, isn’t it weird that Larry would ask you to be the best man at the wedding? Doesn’t it seem like he’d be more likely to ask Harry? I guess it’s plausible that you could be Larry’s best friend and Larry not be your best friend. But it seems like this is a best friend triangle you’d rather just not be a part of, especially considering that Larry and Harry are brothers.
I guess it’s possible that Harry is the one getting married and Young MC just mentioned off the cuff that Harry has a brother Larry…dunno.
Like I said, that’s been bugging me for 20 years. This, on the other hand, has been bugging me for 2 solid days:
I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, but lost track of time when I got distracted trying to find a way to visit links posted in Yammer through their new Outlook plugin. </sarcasm>
Right off the bat, let me say I’m pretty fond of Yammer so far. It’s a very convenient communication tool for work, and the more people use it the more powerful it becomes. So I was pretty excited when they announced a plugin for Outlook (which I’m not a huge fan of). My initial thinking was that the plugin would remind people who were about to send an email that they could just as easily send out a Yam, increasing the use of Yammer and making it more powerful in our organizataion.
The problem is we use Yammer for sharing links a lot at work, both internally and externally. With the Outlook plugin, you can’t click (or even copy) links. MAJOR FAIL!
Hopefully they’ll get this issue resolved in the next release. It seems like a pretty important feature to me.
Never Forget
So the big move is (halfway) over, but I’m still not feeling like we actually live here yet. However, I’ve noticed several things that are the same and many that are different:
Same
Different
Not the Security and Exchange Commission–I’ll straighten them out next week. I’m talking about the Southeastern Conference.
Now, these are just the simple-minded observations from someone with absolutely no formal training in marketing:
Michael Silence has been diligent in covering their decision to threaten bloggers, Tweeple, people with phones, and YouTubers, and you can get a ton of information on this from him and others.
I saw this comment to a comment on Facebook and thought it was pretty powerful…
So far this month, 10 members of our military have lost their live in Iraq, and 22 have lost their lives in Afganistan.
These were mostly young people in their 20s and 30s who put themselves in harm’s way to perform a job most of us don’t have the courage to perform. The fact that they were willing to do so affords us the opportunity to watch 24 hour “news” coverage on the deaths of entertainers who are at least 50 years old.
Yeah, 50 is young too. And it’s shocking. But let’s keep this in perspective.
I’m not saying I’m any less guilty than anyone else is of getting distracted by day-to-day life–I don’t mean to cast any stones. But it is shame when so much emphasis is placed on the death of a few celebrities while we all but ignore the sacrifice of people who, at the very least, deserve to be recognized on television/radio/print by news organizations.
I have to give props to George Stephanopoulos. He recognizes all of our fallen service people every week on his show.
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