Apparently the Golden State Warriors playoff tickets sold out very quickly this morning (first time in 13 years they’re competing in post-season) but some fans were frustrated at their inability to get their hands on seats:
“Tell him he treats Warrior fans like dookie,” said Rololfo Flotte
At the recent MIP TV conference in Cannes, a marketing chief at BMW explained their involvement with alternative media like Second Life with the following fact:
“In 1965, we needed three spots to reach 80% of the U.S. population. By 2004 it was 117 spots to reach the same amount of people, which is why we also have to be active with these below-the-line channels.”
So Dave Chappelle performed a surprise six hour stand-up gig in LA the other night, just a few days after Dane Cook set the Comedy Store record with a four hour routine. One has gotta believe that this was basically Chappelle’s way of very quickly whipping out his, uh, joke list and saying “No way Dane.”
Comedy has a really interesting status system and respect (or lack of respect) among standups is paramount. See Joe Rogan v Carlos Mencia for example.
Technology solves all problems: DaysAgo — a timer you put on opened food which tell you how many days ago it was opened. No more sniff or taste test.
Here’s news that Barbie might be getting a virtual world. Good for Mattel but we’ll see if it’s too late – it’s not that Barbie doesn’t have a sizable footprint but rather that the brand is about everything but technology. Well unless you count the cheap PC games they dumped on the market in 1999. Seriously, it literally killed the girl-game PC game space – releasing a large number of budget Barbie titles they took over shelf space and knocked prices down to where other software providers like Purple Moon had trouble competing.
I spent that summer in an internship at Mattel as part of a very small corporate new products group. My job specifically was working with Mattel Interactive on a video game strategy. What became apparent to me over the course of the summer was that Mattel lost their definition of core competency. Instead of saying “we’re a company that brings entertainment and education to kids ages 3-13,” they settled on “we’re a toy company and that means plastic dolls and diecast metal cars sold into specialty retailers.” The former would have left them flexible to thinking about technology as an important component of their target consumer’s experience. The latter was stagnation.
Problem was that every single part of this statement was under attack by 1999: kids were “growing older younger” and turning towards the Internet, video games, etc. Specialty toy retailers founds themselves undercut by big box stores and the online retailers. And Mattel got chomped in the middle.
An interesting side note to why Mattel was so hesitant to pursue video games: they tired it in the early 1980s (Intellivision) and it almost bankrupted them. So the organization built up this amazing fear, a loadstone that weighed them down and, ironically, almost cost them their company a second time.
If you’re visiting because of Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics post, welcome!
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wow, a bunch of interesting Second Life stuff today:
Watches are largely an anachronism. Between our computers, phones, etc there’s always something nearby with a clock. My wrists have been unburdened of timepieces for many years now (although I did go through a pocketwatch phase earlier this century).
But there is one watch I’ve always coveted – the Jaeger-Le Coultre Reverso Duo. This classic design dates backs to the 1930s when a noted polo player needed a watch which could be protected during play, hence the design where the watch crystal can fold over to expose a stainless steel back (pictured here). Although they now make fancy versions in gold and with a second dial on the back for another time zone, I love the original leather band and blank back. My understanding is that the watch gained popularity here in America with up and coming middle managers. They were still spending time on the factory floor but needed to also be appropriately dressed for the corner office. So it was steel side up for blue collar, crystal side up for the white collar. Poetic capitalism at its best.
Ok, it’s a device that projects emoticons and messages in your car window – this can’t be safe
God bless the individual inventor for without their spirit we never would have gifts like the All Edge Brownie Pan