June 22nd 2008
I’m delighted to be speaking at Exact Target’s 1:1 marketing tour as it comes to Boston to discuss two of my favorite topics. 1:1 Marketing: Today, prospective customers spend much more time on the web researching their purchases before they ever speak to your sales staff. That means marketing needs to communicate more individually to prospects, […]
June 21st 2008
The Christian Science Monitor reports that as blogging has become more popular, so has the oppression of bloggers by governments. Bloggers seem particularly susceptible to political imprisonment: The vigilante tone of many citizen journalists sends them down a prickly path with government censors; and they are often one-man operations, meaning there’s no editors or company […]
June 20th 2008
The USPTO faces a backlog of over one million patent applications. To keep up, patent examiners have less than 20 hours per application to determine if a 20-year monopoly should be issued, which can determine the future of entire industries or the direction of basic research. Over the last year, the USPTO has cooperated with […]
June 19th 2008
Who’s up for some late-night technology policy banter? Take a look at Jonathan Zittrain’s appearance on the Colbert Report, where he discusses his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. You can also hear a more academic discussion of the book on the Hearsay Culture podcast, which I posted about earlier […]
June 18th 2008
The US-China Economic and Security Commission held hearings today on access to information and media control in China. There’s more than a little scepticism about promises of openness being more talk than action. IP blogging hero Ron Coleman also came right out today and essentially called China’s recent IP reform announcements a PR effort, which […]
June 18th 2008
Bain Capital has bought a 53 million stake in the social networking site LinkedIn. This would bring the total valuation for LinkedIn to just above $1 billion. Bain invests in and sell companies, so its involvement is an additional sign that LinkedIn may be headed toward a sale. So, why now? And does this raise potential privacy concerns?
June 18th 2008
Last year I wrote a brief analysis of why sports venues benefit by restricting ticket resale. It is hard to think of any other instance, perhaps other than land ownership, where the resale of your asset can be restricted or outright denied. Further, anything which makes honest people hide from police as if they were […]
June 17th 2008
Keep reading: it keeps getting stranger. But there may be something to like here, too. On Thursday, Judge Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, called on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to convene an ethics panel to investigate his own conduct. Judge Kozinski was presiding over a high-profile obscenity […]
June 16th 2008
A giant legal dope slap seems headed from Barbie to the makers of The Bratz. As you may know, Mattel accused the manufacturer of the Bratz line of dolls, MGA, of essentially stealing the idea for the Bratz from Mattel. The Bratz are estimated to generate 2 billion dollars of revenue for MGA annually. The […]
June 15th 2008
Jonathan Zittrain had been serving as Oxford University’s Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, until this week, when he agreed to return to Harvard Law as its newest tenured Professor. A ’95 grad of Harvard Law, Zittrain co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which makes him a key thinker about the kinds of topics I […]
The future of digital experiences will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialties in user experience, branding, application design, and data science are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
UsefulArts is a soapbox to discuss the front line of digital experience, and the agencies and platforms that enable it. Digital business needs a cadre of leaders who can connect c-level enterprise thinking with the ways these new interaction models can help organizations to matter more to their most important stakeholders.