When I stumbled upon the imagery below from David Armano at Logic+Emotion it really fueled my thinking about business models in general. I have often been fascinated with the “agency model.” There are those, like myself, that believe the traditional agency model is dead. Strategically, creating a business around this model is the equivalent of agreeing to be a dog chasing it’s tale. A company that operates under this model must always be re-inventing itself. It must be the perfect blend of sales, creative and execution. If any of these three pillars fall short it will impact the...

Put your gamertag here too. The XBOX 360 gaming experience is quite simply the best. Over the course of a year, as a side benefit to my [former] job at Millions of Us, I have had the opportunity to view many game titles on both the XBOX 360 and PS3 platforms. I also had the unfortunate pleasure of writing code for the Playstation 3 console itself. I can honestly say that the user experience and graphics are simply better on the Microsoft platform. That said, I am (and have been for the last 7 months) the proud owner of an XBOX 360. When I have extra time there is nothing I like better than a little...

Take a break from the normal and learn about the adventure of working on your own terms. Sound like a vacation you’d like to take? Then The 4-Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss is for you. Entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss rewrites the rules and upsets conventional wisdom about work and success in his self-help guide to the new, rich economy. It is not necessary to toil for 70 hours per week, according to Ferriss, who runs a company called BrainQuicken. Successful people, he says, have actually mastered a system of working less by outsourcing tasks, severely cutting back on timewasters such as...

Theo Jansen (born March 17, 1948, in The Hague, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals and are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering; in a car company television commercial Jansen says: “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.” [ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Jansen]

I love original marketing concepts. The team at Reactee has done an incredible job of merging custom t-shirts, text messaging and social networking. Reactee is a company that enables you to create a t-shirt with a call to action that sends a text message to get more information about a given subject. This subject is any custom message you want to place on that t-shirt. When people text a word of your choosing, they get an auto-response to their phone of up to 120 characters from you. Anything you want. You’ve got to build your own Reactee T-Shirt! This is NOT a paid endorsement by the way,...

I have never been convinced that there were compelling reasons to use any specific language over another. Specifically Ruby on Rails over PHP. RoR provides many great advantages relative to data-basing and prototyping that make it attractive to those looking to increase productivity. Would not becoming an expert in any language increase productivity? For the most part I believe that programmers should code in the language that they enjoy. This by default helps them become experts. My belief has always been predicated on the theory that the grass is not always greener on the other side. Your customers...

From the Bokardo blog today, this techno-centric cartoon that pretty much says it all. I find that people sometimes think that technology itself is the solution to business problems. In fact this is far from the truth. The application of technology can provide a solution. Often programmers (we can be a focused group) will not see the forest for the trees. We are so busy making sure that as many cool features as possible are built into a form, we forget the form just needs to quickly collect a name and email address. Bokardo.com is a blog about social design written by Joshua Porter that I encourage...

I first saw this guy on the Discover Channel show “Man vs. Wild” while working late one night.  Something caught my attention during the show. I remember thinking to myself that I had not seen this much enthusiasm and passion since the late Steve Irwin. The more I watched the more I became interested in just who this character was outside of “tv”. In addition to having an interesting tv show, it turns out that Bear Grylls (a nickname since birth) has one hell of a story. From his website, “Bear spent three years with the British Special Forces....

I have been helping companies create and execute unique and focused strategies as a technology evangelist for several years now. It is often difficult to communicate the difference between real and perceived strategies when helping companies increase the bottom line. Seth Godin delivers a fantastic explanation of the difference between real strategy and tactics in a recent blog post. Many companies get so tangled up in perceived strategies that they find it extremely difficult to execute meaningful tactics. This process inevitably results in lost revenue due to ineffective execution. Most business...