Next Generation Growth

I'm here at the Harvard Business School Publishing Next Generation Growth Conference. Lucky for you, Dan Gillmor is immediately to my left working his usual magic. Kevin Marks is right next door, and Robert Scoble is to my right, and Dave Winer is one table over. Clay Christensen is up, talking about voice recognition, and how it was such a huge step backward when these products were released, for people who already were great typists. Theme is innovation and competing against consumption vs. competing against nonconsumption. Example:

Digital cameras: In order to make them attracitive, they have to be so feature rich they're only affordable to people who already have cameras. Ergo, no more film sales. And he's not impressed with the options provided by photo editing; red eye fixing and online photo albums. Business plan is predicated on customers doing something differently in the future than they do it now; bad idea. The "killer app" makes it easier for customers to do things they already do.

Question from audience asks about offering a financial upside and stock options to the work force. Not necessarily a must because of the strong pull of working in innovative areas.

Please see my colleagues' pages re the rest of Clay Christensen; I've been spacing and getting settled. Next up, Randy Komisar, Chris Zook, Scott Cook and Dick Foster.

Workin' That Mac

Anyone who doubts the utility of Macs in the workplace should check out iCal and iSync, and think again. A quick example. Kevin Marks is attending Harvard Business School Publishing's Next Generation Growth conference tomorrow. He put the conference agenda in iCal, published the calendar to the Web, and when the software asked if he wanted to send a "publish" email, he said righty-o (in that inimitable British fashion). Now people can view this calendar on the Web. Big deal, you say, HBSP took care of that already. Sure. But folks running iCal can also subscribe to this calendar. When they do, it slides right into their own calendar, pretty as a picture, no assembly required. iSync takes it from there, and, if asked, puts it on other networked machines and/or an iPod. Palm, I hardly knew ye...

Blawg Day Afternoon

Could be the fact that these franchises are multiplying faster than these ones. Could be the flesh eating bananas. My personal money is on the need to catch up on seasons I, II and III of The Sopranos in order to bring all intertextual insights to bear on Season IV. Regardless, the Blawg Patrol is in a slump. The Home Office is reduced to mining her referral logs and other known informants. Don't think there's not still time to rethink the whole year-end bonus structure, people! How about a little hustle?

So, without further ado, here are this week's culprits.

These folks turned themselves in to The Blawg Ring,
- second year law student Paul Gutman,
- Los Angeles bankruptcy lawyer Steve Smith,
- and "Insomniac Overdrive," the "blog of a practising lawyer who rabbles about everything under the sun and who occasionally asks legal questions" (sounds like my kinda blawger),

while law students Mike and math-poetically-inclined TPH hang out in all the right neighborhoods (here!), and law student Ted's "SCOTUS" blog taps turgid telegraphical timbres [via Howard's blogroll].

In other news, reader feedback suggests the men fared far worse than the women in the "typical attire" selections included yesterday. To remedy, this comes somewhat closer to the look I was trying to capture...

Party In Bounds

Memorable moments from the B-52's concert at the Coto De Caza Golf And Racquet Club, Saturday, September 28, 2002:

"Is that pot? No, it's a Cohiba."

Median age: 51.5.

Typical female attire.

Typical male attire.

Wicked Rock Lobster lyric morph:

We were at the beach
Everybody had matching towels
Somebody went under a dock
And there they saw a Zinger
It wasn't a Zinger
It was a Right Winger!

You're Only Five Once

I would suggest saving the SpongeBob 4-Pack for Fishrush, but otherwise, have at it!!

Happy Birthday, Jenna, the BabyBlogger! (Not to be confused with Babe-Blogger: "RageBoy has been very good to my family, especially our young daughter...")