Jeff Nolan's take on innovation, entrepreneurship, tech and stuff that interests me
Applying analytics to twitter remains a challenge. I had breakfast with a senior executive from a fortune 50 (actually, a Dow 30) company today and this topic came up. There are a lot of point solutions that help you discover interesting things about what is happening on twitter, but none of these tools provides you [...]
I could make a career writing about how much suckage the Sony PS3 represents. Almost 2 years ago I wrote a detailed list of things that were wrong with the PS3 and it still applies today, except Sony was forced to accept market reality and drop the price from $600 originally and there are much [...]
Theories like The Long Tail regularly get taken to extremes in this business, often elevated to the stature of law on the basis of will power alone. What is happening now is a natural correction that pulls back the scope and reapplies the learnings for a better outcome. I think we all intuitively know that [...]
Toyota is brilliant, their success as branding themselves as the “clean and green” car company and leading people to dismiss General Motors as some wheezing dinosaur of the rust belt is just about as big a marketing success as getting people to buy tap water in a plastic bottle. Furthermore they have done this while [...]
Look out comScore, Nielsen, and Hitwise. Anytime a company like Google puts out a product that is functionally rich and does it for free, the companies that sell something similar are going to suffer. This happened when Google Analytics came out, it will happen here. What will be interesting to watch is how companies that [...]
I love observing how data is presented for maximum effectiveness. Today I saw a slide that came out of the Congressman Roy Blunt’s office detailing how competing policy proposals would impact the price of gasoline. I am NOT posting this to highlight partisan issues but simply to highlight how the presentation takes advantage of a [...]
Baskin-Robbins is launching soft serve ice cream to, I guess, better compete with a resurgent Dairy Queen. In one of the more mystifying marketing plans I can recall hearing, they have pregnant celebrity Tori Spelling pitching the stuff to pregnant women today. I say mystifying because OB/GYNs consistently advise pregnant women that soft serve ice [...]
Here’s a sobering look at the organic food industry and what’s interesting to consider is that the myths debunked here are simply not questioned by consumers, who almost universally believe that organic food is better when in fact it appears that the only certainty about organics is that it is a reliable strategy for boosting [...]