John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

I'm sorry, but this meal doesn't fit within our budget

I've worked independently a couple of times during my career, and can relate to the humour in this video, although I think it will be even more biting for the independents (the graphic designers, the web developers, the writers, and so on) that have astonishingly frustrating conversations with clients about pricing. 

Inside Foursquare

Yes, they're sponsored by American Express, but I find the series of videos the company has been producing on business and innovation to be pretty interesting. The latest features Dennis Crowley and the crew at Foursquare. Have a look. 

Naming a company

This is one sample of a larger set. Have a look. 

The Ikea 'nursery for men'

Not having an Ikea store around, the question of how to get through a shopping trip there is not much of a deal for me. [I have, though, called the seating near the exit at Winners the "widowers' bench."]

This report all the same made me chucke.

Timely cover from the New Yorker

Yes, the New Yorker's current cover was designed well before, and reflects an economic reality that's been in our midst for ages, but it really seems prescient today with the dive-bombing Dow and markets in turmoil. I spotted it on the magazine's Tumbr feed.

The smell of money

I heard the most interesting thing earlier today: a documentary called The Smell of Money on BBC Radio 4. It's about cash, in the physical sense: how paper money feels, why coins still matter, and whether they're as doomed in the digital era as you might be led to expect.

I learned plenty, including that British monarchs face in a direction opposite to that of their predecessor. More importantly, early monarchs (i.e., the Romans) figured out quickly that coins were pretty much the only way most of their subjects would ever know their likeness. The coin as PR, in other words.

You can stream the show for the next week here.

Scarcity

"People will buy anything that's one to a customer."
- Sinclair Lewis

[I've been collecting quotations for years. Click on the tag below to see some past gems.]

Joe Camel goes to Brooklyn

Kudos to Brand Flakes for Breakfast for noticing that Camel's is giving its cigarettes a hipster appeal: packaging that plays up Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the 80s, Joe Camel got a douchey but youthful makeover, all pushed up jacket sleeves and Miami Vice-style hair. The camel is only missing now the ugly glasses, the manpurse and the ironic T-shirt. 

 

Do you really need business cards anymore?

I keep reminding myself I need new business cards at work. The thing is, though, that I seldom get a request for one, and I often make do with an email with my .sig file attached. My wife made some cool ones for me to use personally, but most of them are still in the box.

Over at The Next Web, check out an article on apps that are sounding the death rattle for business cards. So to speak.

 

Quotation: Lord Beaverbrook on business

"Business is more exciting than any game."
- Lord Beaverbrook

Quotation: Scott Adams on stupid questions

"If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?"
- Scott Adams

Ancient land: The Labrador tourism video

I saw this ad for the first time on Wednesday night, when it aired during the Republic of Doyle. It's the latest spot in the series of ads for Newfoundland and Labrador's tourism campaign, and it's awesome. Torngat Mountains National Park is very remote; I wonder how many people will now invesigate how they can get there.

Web trends of the year

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how the internet gets used, and how web-based technologies are evolving; in fact, it's hard keeping up with everything. This slide show by Richard McManus is an excellent composite of things, particularly on how the web is now about organizing data than a collection of separate web pages, and also of how real-time factors are changing content delivery and management.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends in 2009

View more presentations from Richard MacManus.

A thought on opportunities

"If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade."
- Thomas J. Peters

What the customer really wanted, revisited

This cartoon has been through various changes and additions over the years; if you go to the Project Cartoon site, you can make your own revisions, or print own versions for your own office in a variety of languages.

I can has synergistic, cross-pollinating web empire

Time magazine profiles Ben Huh, who is making a mint from a bunch of sites and blogs, from the Fail blog to GraphJam to I Can Has Cheezburger.

(Before we continue: Aside from the Lolcats trend that has kind of overstayed its welcome by, oh, many moons, I think Huh has something to answer for because of the Fail meme. I've quite had it with teens and young adults, with no practical life or work experience, instantly and angrily labelling something as "FAIL!!!" - not because it doesn't work, but because they simply don't like it.)

Huh's sites (more than 20 of them) are making a mint:

These spellbindingly inane blogs were built with the kind of user-generated content that has made Facebook and YouTube tremendously popular. But unlike these bigger sites, Huh's company has been in the black since its first quarter. Pet Holdings managed to haul in seven figures from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales during the first six months of this year, according to a report given to Huh's investors.

Laugh at that, cats.

Donald Trump and the swings in the marketplace

Mood swings, that is. It appears that mood, for Trump anyway, is a determining factor of monetary value.

A thought on writing and following rules

"It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy."
- Steve Jobs

Corporate leaders, from another point of view

Good magazine surveys the corporate world for employers who think differently, from unleashing employee creativity and to spurring meaningful environmental change. Have a look here; click at the link at the bottom to see the spread in a larger (yet scrolling) format.

Oil Drum

Plenty of people around St. John's are in the oil business, and plenty more are following it. Here's another source you may want to check: the Oil Drum blog. Not much about Canada, but frequently updated on global trends.

Braniff Airlines, revisited

I'm too young to remember how Braniff Airlines reinvented itself in the 1960s, with day-glo colours draped not only over the stewardesses, but right across the planes themselves. The campaign obviously didn't stick forever (Braniff itself collapsed in the early 1980s), but it does speak of a completely different era, when an airline would actually brag about being fun and even indulgent.

I learned about the campaign several years ago, when I read Mary Wells Lawrence's memoir, A Big Life in Advertising; she was one of the first women to run an advertising agency, and her company launched one iconic campaign after another. (Plop-plop, fizz-fizz; Quality is Job One; I Heart New York ... her company coined them all.) She also wound up marrying the head of Braniff, at the expense of losing a major client, as this vintage Time report from 1968 points out.

Here's one of the TV spots, which seems in retrospect to come from a very different world:

National debt clock: still ticking upwards ...

We were in New York City for several days last week, a belated gift to ourselves for our 20th wedding anniversary. When I saw the National Debt Clock off 5th Ave., I asked Martha to snap this picture. You may remember recent reports of how the clock's tally has become so vast, they ran out of digits and had to fix a "$1" to replace the "$" symbol ... when it was erected, it wasn't anticipated the U.S. national debt would grow that much.

The clock is almost 20 years old. It's a potent symbol ... but it certainly didn't change how Americans have managed their debt, an issue that pretty much all of us have in front of us right now. We stood near it (it's close to Times Square, if you're ever in the hood) for a few minutes, and I was astonished to see tens of thousands of dollars pile up in no time at all. I wonder if we'll see the tally start to drop at some point.

Raising the barcodes

Why should barcodes be bland and predictable? This post on the AdMad blog tips its hat to a movement in Japan to breathe a little life and humour into barcodes; after all, as long as a scanner can read them, why can't them be a castle, a zebra or pretty much anything else?