Do-not-call - sometimes

Did you sign up for the national do-not-call list when it came out a couple years ago? I can't say whether it really made a huge difference or not. My wife has always seemed to get most of the sales calls for some reason. Are you on any do-not-call lists you didn't even know about? Say, for example with prospective employers?

As much as the big tech companies are known to compete for and lure over competitors' top executives (i.e. Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker), it's hard to believe that there is a need for the Department of Justice to eliminate gentlemen's agreements between them when it comes to poaching other companies' employees in general. But six of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Adobe and Pixar, recently agreed, with a little encouragement from the DOJ, not to continue their no-cold-call-recruiting arrangements.

In times of record unemployment, this sort of collusion may sound like an urban myth (like Congressman Phil Hare considers the national debt). No, big companies really have been playing by these rules in their hiring. Contrary to the free market they esteem for their products and services, this defensive agreement has been considered a mutual advantage among the big players. It's an even bigger advantage to sit on boards of more than one of these companies, or have your CEO sitting on another firm's board, but that habit has come under scrutiny recently as well.

Along with the new corporate hiring glasnost, according to a new SIM survey in eWeek, most executives plan to increase IT salaries in 2011, with a specific focus on business intelligence.

VW is having fun with video marketing

In "The Illustrated Man," Ray Bradbury describes videos and beer becoming the new ersatz for books and wine.

A year after its debut, YouTube was acquired by Google. Three years later, traffic is at over a billion videos - per day, that is. At the top of the list is: Charlie the finger-biter (here's an article with a complete list of the top ten).

What does this mean for business? The world's biggest company (VW) has undoubtedly made some significant investments in marketing distribution, but what about a shift toward content? What if, instead of investing a much smaller amount in creating a one-page ad (paying the graphic designer, photographer, and copywriter) and then paying Car and Driver to print it, the distribution were free? The savings could go toward a more elaborate message like "we are all about using 'fun' to influence people's behavior," and then depend on the viral spread to get over three million views in its first week at no cost.

Good idea.

Do you trust the mob?

One of my son's (jr. high) teachers told him he wouldn't be able to use Wikipedia as a reference source for his term paper.

The footnote was substantiated with citations, but an open-source reference couldn't be considered entirely legitimate for pedagogical purposes. OK, I can understand where this thinking is coming from, but the truth is I'm tending to trust mob-sourcing over traditional sources on some topics.

It does seem cheatingly easy to have such ready access to information and answers on any imaginable topic. When I was a kid I had to bike to the library (ten miles each way in the dead of winter!), head for the card catalog and start writing down the shelf numbers. Now the question is whether to look it up on your laptop or your phone.

What about the general legitimacy of "crowdsourced" information? Depending on what kind of information you need, there's a litany of different venues popping up where you can get a decent answer very fast, even if you still can't use it in your doctoral thesis.

Especially on questions where you are specifically looking for consensus or a majority vote on the "best answer," the web comes through in a pinch. How to decide when you need new tires? What dogs are good with kids? How do I simplify this equation on my homework? Sources like Yahoo! Answers, Aardvark, or even throwing it out to your twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook network may get you a better answer than your first pair of searches on Google or Bing. Write and tell me if you agree.

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What's that snazzy new icon?

I understand some people are just going to be loyal to one browser.  For better or worse, I'm finding things that work better on each of three or four now.  The new Google browser has some easy-to-appreciate smoothness and seems to be at least as fast as Safari - and it comes with its own nifty (if a bit lengthy) cartoon...

I like the idea of rolling this out and having a mammoth userbase for a more thorough beta.  Possibly an idea to be adopted with the release of the Android phone.  There's a great article by Ed Catmull in the September Harvard Business Review about how Pixar realized that operating different areas of its business with differing standards was "bad for its soul."

The Business End of Social Networking - Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook

A day after the launch of the new Facebook, is COO Sheryl Sandberg focused on growing revenues? No. The emphasis is still on user growth, particularly outside their core demographic, and outside English as the core language.

Facebook's revenue stream, she says, is built more around the networking nature of the application, things like the recent ad design contest on Facebook for the Mazda 3. In spite of the monetizing of click-ads that now appear on each page, Sandberg holds that Facebook's objective is not to compete with direct-response advertisers like Google (where she worked for six years prior to taking the COO position), but on viral and brand ads.

See the interview here.

A Smartphone for the Mensa Pro

For the Mensa crowd out there, Palm has just announced a really smart new smartphone called the "Pro" this week. And if you're in that market, you know who you are.

I suspect that, like the credentials of PhD's who consistently say "for him and I" and have three points in their four-point presentation, this may be something to hang on your e-mail signature ("sent from my new Palm Pro") rather than a huge jump in thinking power.

When the latest delay in the Google Android was announced, I decided to go ahead with Palm's Centro which had just been rolled out for Verizon users. Palm had quietly sold over two million of these by the end of July at $99 each. I'm not jeans-and-sandals enough for an iPhone yet, and I'm not ready for a phone that cooks breakfast for me, so the Centro is a good fit.

I'll leave the technical details to those above my pay grade, but there are some very handy improvements in the way I use the phone every day over my old Treo. It switches smoothly from MMS to SMS, copies and pastes from one application to another, has easily accessible "stacked" text conversations, creates a customizable drop down menu for any function (i.e. "text Joe," "e-mail Sue," or "GoogleDocs"), and it runs mobile versions of applications like Facebook, YouTube, TripIt and GoogleMaps very nicely. The "pTunes" audio player works for me and offers a bevy of web-radio stations. The keyboard is smaller but very usable and fast and I prefer it to the virtual version.

See if you can save yourself a couple Ben Franklins - and if you edit your signature to say you're e-mailing from your Palm Pro, I'll never know the difference.

Googling The Future

The headlines around firefighting over rights to copyrighted material in an online society are shifting from iTunes to YouTube with Viacom's billion-dollar suit with Google. Here's a recent video interview about the "master plan" for Google's future with Google's VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer (German site, but the interview is in English).

Another Google Release

Google Desktop 5 debuts today... another step in the asymptotic pursuit of perfection.