Seeing Forests

I occasionally rant about unforeseen substitutes and new entrants into the competitive local mix (have to get some value out of my 20 year-old Porter book). Although out for a while, OmniFocus, the GTD tool from the OmniGroup (maker of fine Mac drawing, outlining and planning tools) has the capability to do business search embedded [...]

I just got turned onto Ruba by Bowman.  Wow.  Nice work.  It’s Yet-Another-Travel-Guide creation tool but they got one thing down - FAST.  And I mean speed of guide creation.  Basic Step-by-Step process but what I really loved at first was my trying to create a guide for Amsterdam and added the Dylan Hotel.  Immediately [...]

I really liked Sebastien’s summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at YPA.  The three principle themes of framing, connectors and mavens are clearly worth contemplation.  My first reaction is normally, yeah, yeah, people who know a lot and/or know a lot of people are important.  We know that.  But when it’s put into this context (and [...]

Sebastien quotes Seth Godin: “Google is the Yellow Pages” and I’m thinking not-so-much and not-quite-yet.  Although that’s a good quote, I think the arguments behind it are a bit specious, particularly his “completeness of data” argument.  I don’t know about you, Seth, but I’ve driven around with my iPhone open to Google Maps trying to [...]

Now this is getting very interesting, according to TC.  FB is going to be a relying party as well as an issuing party.  Smart stuff.   I’ve always been a fan of YP/WP being identity issuing parties (kind of like espace perso).  Would this have been a good thing for all of those walled garden [...]

Reposting for Twitterfeed.

I think there is a train of thought that the deconstruction of the newspaper industry portends the death of print.  I kind of jumped off that train with Monocle.  I am not sure how successful this “monthly” magazine is going to be but I really like this magazine.  It’s an outstanding combination of “deep local [...]

I like Greg’s post on Perry’s point about TechCrunch’s post about following Pizza on Twitter.  It makes me wonder what businesses are more apt to have people follow them on Twitter for what purposes.  What kind of categorization we could apply and predictions we could make? Naturally, this is going to be organic.  The hipper, [...]

Suffering succotash!  Just in time for the new heads-up displays coming out from TechCrunch (HeadCrunch).  Now I can stare at my house and wait for people to drive by and tweet.  I mean, this is cool, (thanks Pierre) but what is the frakking use case (is that one k or two?)   Seriously?  Help me.

Greg’s post on Yelp iPhone Upgrade (following a TechCrunch post) got me to thinking more about the mobile-centric experience of local.  Yelp is going to allow users to post reviews from their iPhone, along with seeing “what’s nearby”, getting your “friend feeds” or just ”reviewing” your “me feeds”).  Basically, though, Brightkite users have had this functionality [...]