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.
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.
Is Crispin Porter + Bogusky a small source of profit for MDC, or a large one? After reading my article from yesterday (Why MDC Will Never Love an Ad Man Like It Loved Alex Bogusky), MDC CEO Miles Nadal e-mailed to dispute figures I’d been given by Deutsche Bank analyst Matt Chesler.
"We need more young women starting companies," Soraya Darabi told me last month, and after sharing onstage and offstage conversations with her, Ray Kurzweil, Jesse Dylan, and Scott Belsky at our Most Creative People event, I left convinced that she was on the brink of her next step.
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.
Everyone grouses that seniors are a bit shaky at the wheel, but the data are surprising. When you compare those 65+ to those 15-20, the two groups are both nearly as accident prone, as this infographic by frequent Fast Company contributor Gavin Potenza shows....
Aside from the twenty-four foot tall wooden box of Kraft Mac & Cheese hovering in Crispin Porter + Bogusky's foyer--its latest client win--there wasn't much indication that anything at the hottest ad agency in the country had changed. "It's no big deal, nothing's happened," Alex Bogusky reassured me a few weeks ago in Boulder, several months after ditching his chairman role at Crispin for a job upstairs as "Chief Creative Insurgent" of MDC Partners, Crispin's parent company. "There are 1,000 other people that work there."
Earlier today MDC Partners, the parent company of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky (“ad agency of the decade,” according to Advertising Age), announced that Alex Bogusky, perhaps the most influential figure in American advertising today, has resigned from MDC. The announcement, in the form of an innocuous press release, shocked the ad world. Indeed, Bogusky told me this morning, "I have severed all ties with MDC and Crispin." Elvis has left the ad business.