September 2018

Mailchimp Rebrand

They’re based in Atlanta… The email marketing company Mailchimp, which today is announcing a complete rebrand, could have easily given up the quirkiness that defined its branding as a young company the way many other giants have. Instead, with the help of branding agency Collins, Mailchimp is doubling down. It’s keeping its logo-cum-mascot Freddie the …

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NASCAR’s Marketing Decline

I’ve been a fan of NASCAR since I was a small child (runs in the family) and got to experience the peak of the sport in the early 2000’s. Sponsors and money and TV deals were rolling in and it was just an exciting time to follow races despite the gimmicks that NASCAR leadership started …

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History of Auto-Tune

I still remember the first time I heard Cher’s “Believe” while in college … I didn’t like the song, but it felt like something important was happening musically at a time that innovation was needed on the radio as we recovered from mid 90’s pop-rock in the post-grunge / machine-rock / neo-reggae era… Rihanna is …

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Walking Away from $850 Million

Fascinating story of morals, standing up for your beliefs, and watching others ruin what you created… Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he’d helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from …

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Instagram is Dead

For starters, this is the end of Instagram as we know it. Systrom and Krieger were deeply involved in day-to-day product decisions, and retained an unusual degree of autonomy over the company. For years, they were careful to the point of being obstinate. Even as they began to expand Instagram’s suite of offerings, they remained …

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74% of Facebook users say they have changed their usage in the past year

Wow, these are astonishing numbers… Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one …

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Will the internet split in two?

Not to mention the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the web and our daily lives within the next decade (which China is investing in much more heavily than the US Government)… Speaking at a private event hosted by Village Global VC yesterday night, tech luminary and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that …

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Live News on Twitter

Nice work by Twitter to have live video of local press conferences and local news up top of the feed (as we wait out the slow arrival of Hurricane Florence here in Columbia). I’ve always used Twitter for live news and updates in text form, so it’s interesting to see them move more into the …

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Do Facebook Ads Really Work?

Within the advertising industry, the debate about whether advertising works on Facebook is not new. A survey last year showed over 60 percent of small business owners felt advertising on Facebook was ineffective. The lawsuit takes it a step further, saying Facebook is misleading advertisers. Source: Does Facebook Really Work? People Question Effectiveness Of Ads …

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Saving Lives with Apple Watch

“I participated in the Heart Study too. Like Perlow, I forgot about it for long stretches. I’m fortunate that I didn’t receive the sort of alert Perlow did, but in September, Stanford sent me a notification that my participation in the study was ending. It turns out that over the course of 188 days, Stanford …

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Current Theme Song

“There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.” Great associated podcast here.

“There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.”

“There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.” Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service — Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2018/09/04/medium-domain-name Shouldn’t be surprised but John makes a great point about the long term value of owning your own domain name and links. We freely give away too much content and work to commercial companies like Medium …

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Links Are (Still) Dead

I first wrote that “Links Are Dead” in 2006, and pretty much got shouted out of the blogosphere. I kept up the mantra over the years. Looks like Google agrees with me now… But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. As web functionality has expanded, URLs have increasingly …

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