I never thought I’d see the day:

Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Fabricland Sewing Club. The shame, the shame!
Here’s the deal: I’m building some prototypes for a new product. For inspiration, and for product design, I needed fabric. Lots of it. Apparently, you get a 40%-off discount when you’re a member.
The rest is […]

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Do you dream?
Do you believe?
I think that dreaming is an essential survival skill in business, in work, in life.
I’ve just come through a month without dreams. A month of projects, tasks, requests, work. Basically, stuff.
The problem with stuff […]

Is your business beautiful?
That sounds like a strange question - mostly because it is. But it’s a good question. It’s a question more people should ask of their business, processes, strategies, marketing, and products.
Why?
Well, think about it: what is beauty?
Beauty is the marriage of structure and function. It’s elements in careful but dynamic balance. It’s […]

I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog lately.
He’s the extremely clueful author of Ideavirus, among other books.
So in a recent post on cargo-cult marketing I found it pleasantly surprising that he states “we have no idea why some ideas spread and others don’t.”
The post is about copying things you see successful companies doing, just like Pacific […]

A company with a conference table this cool:

And one that is still bold enough to put a Flash movie as the first thing you see on their site (remember skipintro?):

… must be a pretty cool company. And indeed, if you check out their guiding principles (aka ‘frogism’), they are:

1. StrawberryFrog means working SmarterFaster.
2. We […]

… you’ve left the boilerplate text in your website after launching.

Tags: fortuitous, beta, launch, web 2.0, funny, john koetsier

The rumors had been around for some time: PowerSchool was on the auction block. Now it’s official.
But why? Why did Apple sell PowerSchool? It appears that the division was not profitable enough for Apple, and there were always rumors of issues around the development of new versions of PowerSchool.
But I think there are two […]

I take a ton of screenshots.
See something cool on the web: screenshot. See something I want to blog about: screenshot. Funky error condition: screenshot.
But it leaves a mess on my desktop: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4 … you get the picture. (Ha. Ha.)
So it was very cool to see the secret-screen-capture tip […]

Better is boring. Better sucks. Better is evolutionary, incremental. Better is moving the sticks a few more yards down the football field. Big deal.
Different is in. Different is sexy. Different is new. Different is exciting. Different is brandable. Different is attention-grabbing. Different is a pattern interrupter that breaks through the attention clutter and gets noticed.
From […]

Wired has an important article in their June issue on what they’ve dubbed crowdsourcing. What is crowdsourcing?

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.

Jeff Howe, the author of Crowdsourcing, […]