Blue is Big

  The Pantone Color Institute has decided to issue its favorite color of 2008. It’s No. 18-3943, also known as blue iris. While clothing designers, consumer branding experts and printers ponder the realm, let’s check some of the companies built on blue. The color represents nicely for financial services, insurance and automotive, as well as tech and some very big retail.  
Half of the top 10 companies in the [...]

The World’s Ugliest Website

When you’re the head of one of the world’s most successful holding companies, online presence isn’t necessarily important. Here is a website that will make you cringe.
After doing $98 billion in revenue and posting $11 billion in earnings last year, Warren Buffet and the folks at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. are clearly not worried about keeping up with the latest Web 2.0 design or [...]

How to Burn Through $500 Million

Ever burn through $500 million? A Seattle telecom startup did once upon a time. I worked for one of its competitors. We were in a bleeding-edge wireless sector known as free-space optics. Three companies in all (Terabeam, AirFiber and LightPointe) were going to hit it big with products that use invisible laser beams to tranmit data at speeds at about 500 times faster than your cable modem or DSL.
But weather (fog) [...]

What’s Your Website Say About Your Company?

I had lunch today with a web marketer I hadn’t seen in 4 years. We talked about Web 2.0 (big buttons, huh?), social media (Facebook vs. LinkedIn) and mobile applications (Japan and Europe have it over us). But what we spent the most time on was the intersection of business and web.
Open source platforms [...]

The Magic of Three

Copyblogger has a very good post about keeping lists short when writing — try to keep them to three. Why three?
Because 10 is too many, two is too short and every other combination in between throws our brains off. We’re used to three. We’ve been brought up to appreciate three. It goes as far back as 17th century Japan [...]

Shopaholics Anonymous

Just when you thought all the major shopping days before Christmas were identified, up sprouts another: Green Monday. This tag, coined by the folks at eBay (Shop Victoriously!), coincides with the second Monday of December. New data from comScore shows that Dec. 10 (I mean, Green Monday) recorded the highest online sales of any day this shopping season over [...]

Vote for Him and Her

Hillary Clinton and John McCain got valuable free airtime on Monday’s national news programs. But it’s likely only one of them will be around after the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Endorsements for Clinton and McCain from the Des Moines Register should provide a “bump” of a few polling percentage points. What the endorsements [...]

Design Agency No-No

Have you ever questioned a design agency’s invoice? Here’s one that should never have been mailed. A friend of mine in the business received a $60 bill from an agency for its “time” to pull an electronic file and post to FTP site. No CD to burn. No FedEx form to complete. No courier service [...]

So You Want to be a Writer?

I have strong memories of my first Page One byline article for the Los Angeles Times in 1988 (gasp). The thud of the newspaper hitting my apartment doorstep at 5:30 a.m. never sounded better. Today newspapers as a printed medium are dying and we’re all bylined writers in one way or another, our names attached to words: texting, emailing, blogging.
But these missives don’t carry prestige and [...]

Customer Intensive Care

Product launches are tricky – especially when you’re also a new company. The initial build-up. The reviews. The consumer anticipation. What to do when you miss the promised delivery date? Confess and keep moving. 
Walt Mossberg’s review of the Slacker Portable Player went up last week on the Wall Street Journal website. Not glowing. Not damning. 
But it lets readers know the anticipated digital music players won’t [...]