The Daily Brainstorm

Let Brainstorm serve up some ideas, content, and links to fire up your synapses.

“Every time I type a web address into my browser, I don’t need to be taken to a fully immersive, cross-platform, interactive viewing experience,” said San Diego office manager Keith Boscone. “I don’t want to take a moment to provide my feedback, open a free account, become part of a growing online community, or see what related links are available at various content partners.”

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How long you spent on it.
How hard it was to implement.
How clean your architecture is.
How extensible it is.
How well it runs on your machine.
How great it will be once all their friends are on it.
How amazing the next version will be.
Whose fault the problems are.
What you think they should be interested in.
What you expected.
What you were promised.
How important this is to you.

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fastcompany:

Judd Apatow: “…Skype doesn’t really work because the camera is above the image. If I’m looking into the camera, which makes me look kind of normal, I can’t see you. But if I look at you, I look like I’m not looking at you. It’s just a mind-fuck. We need the technology of a camera in the center of the screen, but invisible. That’s what Steve Jobs would be doing if he were alive—working on an invisible, middle-of-screen camera.”Apatow and Lena Dunham grace the cover of the newest edition of Fast Company.
Photo by Art Streiber

fastcompany:

Judd Apatow: “…Skype doesn’t really work because the camera is above the image. If I’m looking into the camera, which makes me look kind of normal, I can’t see you. But if I look at you, I look like I’m not looking at you. It’s just a mind-fuck. We need the technology of a camera in the center of the screen, but invisible. That’s what Steve Jobs would be doing if he were alive—working on an invisible, middle-of-screen camera.”

Apatow and Lena Dunham grace the cover of the newest edition of Fast Company.

Photo by Art Streiber

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When I was first at Facebook, a woman named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her kind of socially. And she called me and said, I want to talk with you about coming to work with you at Facebook. So I thought about calling you, she said, and telling you all the things I’m good at and all the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it. My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always about the job searcher, but not in Laurie’s case. I said, you’re hired. My biggest problem is recruiting and you can solve it. So Lori changed fields into something she never thought she’d do, went down a level to start in a new field and has since been promoted and runs all of the people operations at Facebook and has done an extraordinary job.

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New Rules for the New Economy

1) Embrace the Swarm. As power flows away from the center, the competitive advantage belongs to those who learn how to embrace decentralized points of control.

2) Increasing Returns. As the number of connections between people and things add up, the consequences of those connections multiply out even faster, so that initial successes aren’t self-limiting, but self-feeding.

3) Plentitude, Not Scarcity. As manufacturing techniques perfect the art of making copies plentiful, value is carried by abundance, rather than scarcity, inverting traditional business propositions.

4) Follow the Free. As resource scarcity gives way to abundance, generosity begets wealth. Following the free rehearses the inevitable fall of prices, and takes advantage of the only true scarcity: human attention.

5) Feed the Web First. As networks entangle all commerce, a firm’s primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm’s value to maximizing the network’s value. Unless the net survives, the firm perishes.

6) Let Go at the Top. As innovation accelerates, abandoning the highly successful in order to escape from its eventual obsolescence becomes the most difficult and yet most essential task.

7) From Places to Spaces. As physical proximity (place) is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space), the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-size niches expand greatly.

8) No Harmony, All Flux. As turbulence and instability become the norm in business, the most effective survival stance is a constant but highly selective disruption that we call innovation.

9) Relationship Tech. As the soft trumps the hard, the most powerful technologies are those that enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand, and develop soft relationships of all types.

10) Opportunities Before Efficiencies. As fortunes are made by training machines to be ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.

(Source: azspot)

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If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A leader with vision will crush the best manager any day of the week.

(via marksbirch)

(Source: sldistin, via marksbirch)

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Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

—― Winston S. Churchill (via donegality)

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I don’t believe in market research. I don’t believe in marketing the way it’s done in America. The American way of marketing is to answer to the wants of the customer instead of answering to the needs of the customer. The purpose of marketing should be to find needs — not to find wants.

People do not know what they want. They barely know what they need, but they definitely do not know what they want. They’re conditioned by the limited imagination of what is possible. … Most of the time, focus groups are built on the pressure of ignorance.

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Once you raise money at a certain valuation, there’s no turning back. Either you become a big company, or your write-off value becomes greater than the sum of your parts. You can’t click your heels and go back to playing tight and making a good living.

—Beware angel investors, and all VCs. They won’t let you build a solidly profitable company.

Playing for the Royal Flush | LinkedIn

(via felixsalmon)

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I think we are succumbing to the human habit of breathing our own exhaust. I think we believe our own hype. I think we’re not rigorous enough about what’s really needed. I see a lot of the same problems–that we’re trying to undo–being replicated. We want a new model for how to live and how to be in the world, and yet everybody has to have to their own business, everybody has to have their own brand, everybody has to have their own unique technology, everybody has to have their own platform. And it’s not what’s needed. In a world where we’re trying work together in a different way, we don’t hold that same standard for ourselves.

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As others scramble to fill the void left behind, some will inevitably figure out how to do the best job of offering up the best platform for sharing facilities. It will be dry, and it will make good money. And there will always be a struggle among competitors over securing the most market share.

But someone out there will figure out how to make a platform that truly embraces the fact that sharing space is about the people and not the facilities.

What LooseCubes’ Shutdown Means for Coworking” by Tony Bacigalupo

I was sad to see Loosecubes shutdown as I liked the people and the idea was hitting upon an important trend.  Coworking is not some fad, it is the future of working.  Tony is correct that there will be plenty of others entering the space that will make money.  However coworking is about people first and the company that realizes that will do very well.

(via marksbirch)

(via marksbirch)

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Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Hiring Will, Skills & Culture

marksbirch:

A few weeks back, I saw the headline “Hire the Will, Train the Skill”. It is an oft-recited phrase and most people seem to intuitively agree with. It makes sense that you would want someone in a role that showed a passion for the job, the products and the customers. Whatever ancillary skills…

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