At Friday's iPhone 4 presser, aka Antennagate, Steve Jobs was tasked with bringing Apple's credibility back up to snuff after angering customers over the phone's nagging reception issues. And just as many cell phone companies such as Nokia and Blackberry cried foul when Jobs unapologetically showed how their phones suffered from a similar "death grip," it seems there is someone else calling foul: South Korea.
As if in response to yesterday's story about a Princeton scientist's hope to improve government through crowdsourcing, Washington has a series of democratic idea incubators that aim to align government action with public opinion. Taking advantage of a platform called IdeaScale, these open government initiatives enable the public to submit and vote on ideas for anything from state budgets and federal transparency to health care priorities and education. While this may sound like big step forward for the typically tech- agnostic public sector, the results, at least so far, demonstrate why crowdsourcing may be an ineffective government tool.
We all know Facebook has 500 million users--heck, it's even advertised on movie posters now. But many often forget another service that boasts more members than Mark Zuckerberg's social network: Skype. Today, the Internet-phone service announced Click & Call, its first foray into advertising. And with more than 560 million registered users worldwide, Skype's new service is almost guaranteed to be a success.
What would Facebook's 500 million active users do if the world's largest social network were to be shut down? Better yet, what would you do? That was the topic covered in a study conducted at Stanford by Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist of Amazon, who asked respondents to imagine a scenario where Facebook were shut down and all its data destroyed. Can we live without the service? The results provide insight into what matters most to users of social networks.
George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, died today of a heart attack. He was 80 years old. An icon of the sports world, Steinbrenner saw the Yanks win 11 pennants and 7 World Series. But it wasn't just about winning on the baseball diamond: Steinbrenner was also a shrewd businessman, whose dealings helped revive the struggling franchise financially. Here we present the five most noteworthy deals of Steinbrenner's career in chronological order.
The pitch: An oil company lobbyist (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shaken after his girlfriend, a local meteorologist, breaks up with him over reservations of his contribution to global warming. The split is hastened by a massive hurricane thrashing its way toward the east coast of the U.S., which would likely wreak Katrina-like damage from Maine to Myrtle Beach. DiCaprio's character, feeling guilty, soon discovers that the hurricane's path will also cross a long-dormant volcano, causing it to erupt and spew so much ash that it eventually swirls into a biological weapon that could mark the end of the world.
While it may feel like an all out tug-of-war between Blockbuster and Netflix, don't forget they aren't the only companies battling for market share. Redbox is fighting for kiosk space. Apple, Amazon, and Comcast are competing for movie download purchases. And Hulu will soon start its subscription-based service. Blockbuster is trying to fend off all these competitors, even as the company is mired in debt.
Asked at Fast Company's Most Creative People event last week about how she asks others to take risks, (RED) CEO Susan Smith Ellis offered a one-word answer. "Nerve," said Ellis, who was featured as #25 on our Most Creative People in Business list. By now you should know how (RED) partners with world-recognized brands like Apple and Nike to raise funds for combating AIDs in Africa. (Most likely, you've seen that Gap captu(red) the slogan in many of their T-shirts.) But (RED)'s success didn't happen naturally;
For Chris Barbour, the digital marketing guru behind Adidas's sports style division (and #76 on Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business list), innovation is always worth the risk, even if the consequences are entirely unpredictable. He told the tale of one such viral marketing strategy that went terribly awry--it ended up offending the entire nation of Japan--at our Most Creative People conference in New York City yesterday.
"If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference yesterday. And according to Sandberg, only 11% of teens email daily--clearly, a huge generational drop. Instead, they are increasingly turning to SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communication.