So we know how coffee is promoted these days – there are all kinds of inventive ways. Three cool versions are shown here. But how was coffee promoted and regarded in 1650s London? Well, there’s this description which I found via Bryant Lillywhite’s 1963 London Coffeehouses (George Allen & Unwin), while reading an interesting biography of the great Christopher Wren: “in …
Earlier this week I had the good fortune to meet a friend at his club – one of those nice, 100+-year-old, private clubs that give off an air of gentility and professionalism. Over the years, I’ve been to this club numerous times for events, lunches, and drinks, and always felt refreshed by the quiet, stately atmosphere. The food is good …
DC TechDay was invigorating yesterday. Better put: the more you engaged in it, the more you got out of it. Talking with so many marketers, designers, founders, and coders yesterday made me grateful that we live during the exciting world of smartphone-centered, cloud-based technological power. Prior to 2007, it was never so much fun as it now is to be …
Like a lot of people, I’ll use hashtags to accent a social media post, notably among friends on Facebook. The hashtag serves as sort of a tongue-in-cheek addition to my main message. Yet while the hashtag has been around for a while, I still see people misusing it, notably on Twitter. Well, maybe “misuse” is too strong a word, but …
World-renowned wine expert Jancis Robinson, in this morning’s particularly fine FT Weekend, is refreshingly honest about the changing role and status of “experts” like herself in today’s society and economy. A couple quick quotes by Ms. Robinson succinctly state today’s new reality: “In the 21st century, the internet and now, particularly, the smartphone have changed everything.” “I have gone from …
Just came upon some of these commercials from ’93-94 – I barely remember them. Amazing to see how much of this became true (and how some of it didn’t – at least in the exact ways the commercials are phrased). Remember that the Mosaic web browser came out in early 1993, the Netscape browser a year or so later, and …
“We care about the environment” … “Let’s preserve our world” … “Help us go green” … Hotels all over the United States push their green credentials using varying terminology, but in the end it all comes down to those little cards you find in every hotel bathroom, inviting you to hang up your towel after your shower. But I just …
Today I just published a new post to LinkedIn as a reaction to Paul Mason’s article on the emerging post-capitalist economy in The Guardian. Mason discusses three interesting, emerging aspects of post-capitalism: The nature and definition of “work” The market’s price-setting mechanism in the emerging “economy of abundance” The spontaneous rise of collaborative production My reactions to his article as …
We are surrounded by sameness in our lives. Commercial institutions (you could call them “companies”) of all kinds succeed in delivering the status quo: hotels, airlines, banks. The list is endless. Embracing “conventional wisdom” appears to be the conventional wisdom. So what makes a market? Or rather, makes a new market – breaking old markets? You could say it’s someone …
