In Over Your Head

Category: trends

  • 9 Ideas About the Future

    Edit: I seem to have pretty good at predicting things accurately here. I may end up updating the post. Stay tuned. Here are a few ideas about what the future could look like. I wouldn’t consider these holy writ; more like provocations to think about. A. Bitcoin becomes extremely popular, replaces gold as a stable […]

  • Your marketing job is about to become an engineering job. Get used to it.

    There is so much happening, so fast, in the world of marketing that I would never have guessed as a “social media guy.” First, the rise of the growth hacker. This is a term familiar to basically all people who work at startups, but few outside of it, as of yet, yet it means that engineers […]

  • Coming Soon: A Totally Mechanized City

    I’m totally fascinated by this imaginary article from the future on TechCrunch about Uber. It’s moments like these when you realize what cities will become in the future. Seriously. Driverless cars– no drivers will ever be able to compete with the lowering of prices that will occur when you make robots drive cars. The margins skyrocket, the […]

  • The 6 Shifts of a Kindle Dominated Marketplace

    Every little while, technology is democratized to a point where everyone is once again put on equal footing. It happened at the printing press. It happened with blogs. It happened with podcasting, and it happened with Twitter. It happens a little bit at a time, and as it does, I’m amazed by the average person’s […]

  • The Future of Blogs is Paid Access

    Update: Aaron Wall left an epic comment here which adds significantly to the discussion. Click here to see it (it’s #55). Pay attention. This will be on the test. I remember having a conversation with Chris, sitting in Café Méliès in Montreal one time, talking about business. We had an idea for a private forum. […]

  • Cop Bots vs Robber Bots

    A simple metaphor for an important phenomenon. I’ll explain. Cop bots are the enforcers. Google is an organizing algorithm but, more importantly, it’s also an exclusion robot. It says “you’re in,” and “you’re out.” It has to be very good at this, or it makes no money, and the robot gets shut down. Spammers are […]

  • The End of Bookstores?

    I wonder: Is this the last time I’ll visit a bookstore? It’s about two weeks before the release of the iPad in Canada, and I’m at Indigo reading Do More Great Work (it’s crazy good btw). I saw it on Amazon and wanted it right away, so I picked it up here because I wanted […]

  • Why Things Need Twitter

    So, as I asked yesterday, what happens if every object has a status message? You never again leave the oven on– it sends you a message when it’s on with nothing on/inside it. You never get up to go to the washroom in a restaurant and see the bathroom is occupied. Is the milk off […]

  • What are we going to do about the BA?

    I was discussing with someone last night about the uselessness of the basic university degree. I compared it to an arms race– when one group has a BA, the other needs the BA to compete with them in the job marketplace, but when both sides have them, they no longer provide any employment advantage whatsoever. […]

  • Invisible = Impotent

    In other words: Out of sight, out of mind. Ever wonder why Sally Struthers needs to show us little Ethiopian babies before we’ll give away a bit of dough to them? Easy; it’s because we don’t care– until it’s right in front of us. Would those Ethiopian babies need feeding if their plight was broadcast […]