The F1 season begins with the Melbourne Grand Prix on March 17th. Like all season starts, the preamble and build-up contains huge excitement to pique a fan’s interest in the foreplay of this spectacular international road show. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes will, of course, finish victorious with both the drivers’ and the constructors’ titles returning to […]
How do you explain Twitter to someone who’s new to the whole thing, as many are with their new tablets from Santa? I’ve always said it’s like the modern CB radio. CB radios were (and still are) used for short bursts of speech – an open broadcast. Twitter is exactly that but it’s online instead […]
I’m no Tom Hanks or Usain Bolt, but I’ve received my fair share of sales calls. Most appear to know that success doesn’t happen on the first attempt so they get their kicks of rejection hoping it to be the road to a sale. Maybe there’s some groupthink going on, “I wont get a sale […]
Google search is trying to become ever better. Their standard 10 blue links are a thing of the past. Now it’s a more ‘augmented’ affair as they constantly try to improve the quality of their results. They genuinely want you to find what you want rather than becoming disenfranchised and switch to Bing. So obsessed […]
So, David Beckham played his final game for LA Galaxy last weekend and lifted the MLS Cup to close their season on a high. Mr Beckham has decided not to take the easy road and continue with the status quo of life with LA Galaxy. I would’ve thought it’d be incredibly easy for him to […]
SEO specialists have had life relatively easy over the past 10 years. Their magic formula before Google’s Panda and Penguin updates was something like: Meta data, title tag, URL, H1, keywords, frequency, then link to hell and back. (Plus white text, mini text and other black hat bits.) The black hat world is thankfully shrinking […]
Reuters has called Starbucks out on their accounting tactic that sees them report a loss to the taxman while boasting healthy cashflows to investors. From the article, “Over the past three years, Starbucks has reported no profit, and paid no income tax, on sales of 1.2 billion pounds in the UK.” Of course, our coffee […]
Apple have sold more iPhone 5s in the 3 days since launching, than they did in their whole first month of the iPhone 4S’ launch (i.e. x10 growth). How is that phenomenal growth possible given the current economic climate? Is the iPhone and other such tech a social leveller? Harrods is capitalising on its ‘brand’ […]
A piece on the BBC this weekend sites a survey from Experian that indicates town centres will need to market themselves as convenient hubs for picking up products ordered online. From it, “More shops will need to adopt “click and collect” and retailers should embrace mobile commerce and social media to develop their online presence…” […]
Someone asked me the other day who to look for online; who are the voices they could tap into outside of the usual channels? Here’s a dozen go-to folks @John Battelle – the web’s favourite professor-turned-entrepreneur. He penned one of the original books on Google and his Search Blog is just as worthy of your […]
Tech’s Big 4 want to own your digital life and this land grab has developed in recent years away from digesting lines of code (by browsing on Amazon, searching on Google etc) to a physical tie up via hardware. The old days were ruled by Gateway and Dell with their desktops and laptops. Now it’s […]
Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and other tech giants will have to reply to Google’s Glass project, but I shudder to think about the court cases over patents that’ll follow. The only folks wealthier than the company board members will be the lawyers that represent them. These glasses (and their many successors) won’t be for the nerds, […]
I often see something like this in organisations: A new staff member is brought in to do good work. She shows promise at first, but her star fades. As it fades, the employee feels a bit more of the boss’s breath on their neck. Instead of upping their game and reengaging fully, they start into […]
In our internet-fuelled world of deafening noise, I’ve long preached about curation to help us with our web-induced A.D.D. I don’t want to check out 250+ blogs, I want someone to save me time and trawl through all that chaff and siphon out the nuggets of news and information that are right for me. Twitter […]
The most talked about company award this week goes to Facebook (FB), thanks to their IPO which launches on the Nasdaq tomorrow. They’ve set the share price range at between $34 and $38 for 421.2 million shares and it’s oversubscribed by as much as 25 times. But there are those sceptics who say the price […]
I love to talk about social media with enthusiasts of the game. How they’re practising it, where they see the benefits, where will it be in a year or so’s time. But I see more and more so-called specialists coming into the market where they sell their (apparent) expertise to businesses that either don’t have […]
Culture is surely the most nebulous of business concepts. It’s nigh on impossible to quantify accurately and just as difficult to effect. Its perception often looks very different from the reality within. Steve Jobs’ autobiography pretty much confirms everything we already thought about the much-heralded Apple leader: he was bloody minded, rude, spoilt, obnoxious, argumentative, […]
There’s no question that many supply chains are shrinking as manufacturers can become retailers, and retailers can increasingly become manufacturers. Plenty of retail sectors are feeling these waves in their ponds. It strikes me that cross-pollinating, and horizontal and vertical integration sound wonderfully simple growth strategies on paper, but in reality they involve emotion, history […]
Google’s free websites are great for the micro business out there who’s not online at all. They’re going to hurt those digital firms who’ve built a consultancy around helping getting such SMEs online. Well, putting a positive spin on it, perhaps it’ll just put more fish in the digital pond and those newbies may get […]
I went to a very mediocre business event recently that sold itself as, “A fast-paced, cutting-edge day, tailored to the needs of SMEs.” It was more like a school leaver’s guide to the Internet, at least, that was, until the final talk of the day. They’d clearly saved the best until last as Penny Power […]
When someone is in need of a gardener (or a dentist, or plumber, or hair dresser…) and finds a competent practitioner for that role, at a reasonable cost, they tend to stay with that person or organisation for their future needs. Providing cost doesn’t inflate massively or become prohibitive for other reasons (like losing your […]
The first email I read in the day is Chris Brogan’s and it’s usually before breakfast. He’s very revealing in a business sense and within that honesty you’ll often find gems of practical advice. His advice can be a little left field as he expounds about far more than just marketing per se by getting […]
The biggest news in tech this week is that Yahoo! finally appointed a replacement for their known-to-swear-a-lot and former top-dog, Carol Bartz. They’ve appointed little-known Scott Thompson from PayPal. But the much more fun/entertaining/frightening tech news is Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter. Really joined. No spoof account (that was his wife’s). No digital sidekick thumbing his […]
Amazon in America is offering $5 off a purchase if the user orders via their mobile app. As of Saturday, if you go to Macy’s or Toys R Us and physically scan an item’s barcode with the Amazon App, Amazon will give you up to $5 off that item if you add it to your […]