MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
NY City Transit Strike Links
- Most Inconvenient Commute Contest
- Transit Work Strike Blog
- New Surreal city
Word of Mouth Study – Every Day
What percentage of all our conversations include talk about an organization, brand, product, or service?
Based on my research with college students (18-29 years of age) the answer is about 17.5%, on average. This is a little higher than the 13.5% I found in an earlier study (see “March 2005” results in the chart and below for details).
Via Ben McConnell
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly on Competition
But the 35-year-old airline is feeling its age, with labor costs rising along with expenses related to maintaining a fleet of more than 400 planes. As its fuel-hedging benefits begin to erode, Mr. Kelly must continue to tighten spending while maintaining the famous warm-and-fuzzy Southwest culture that has generated some of the most loyal employees in the industry. His ability to do that will be severely tested next year when Southwest must negotiate a new labor contract with its pilots union. The airline’s financial strength and its long, unbroken string of quarterly profits could make it harder to keep a lid on salaries and benefits.
Long Now Foundation Podcasts
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very lon g term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/bet ter” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Podcasts of many seminars are available on the Long Now Foundation’s website.
Venture Capital Investment Trends
If you want to find out what’s hot for the enterprise, follow the money: the venture capital money, that is. Interest in old-school business models and applications has waned, but startups that offer enterprises innovative, secure solutions at low cost are attracting big money.
Top Ten 2005 National Geographic News Videos
Killer hurricanes, swarming sharks, and wildlife fighting for survival headlined this year’s most popular videos from National Geographic News. Replay the year in science, nature, and exploration with 2005’s top ten videos.
Outdoor Christmas Lights!
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Driving around on these cold December evenings provides one aesthetic benefit: Madison’s prolific Christmas lights. Here are a few scenes I’ve snapped recently.
The State of IT Outsourcing to India
The biggest problem seems to be that the talent pool of skilled workers will not able to keep up. Currently there are about 700,000 people working in IT and outsourcing, which is likely to grow up to 2.3 million by 2010, but only 1.05 million new graduates will qualify from local colleges in the next 5 years leading to a shortfall of 500,000 workers! All this despite the fact that almost 2.5 million students graduate in India each year.” From the article: “In IT the growth in Indian exports is expected to come both from the software market, and from ‘traditional IT outsourcing’–such as the remote management of whole systems, a market now dominated by the big global IT consultancies. This is expected to rise from 8% of Indian sales now to about 30% in 2010, while software-development’s share will fall from 55% to 39%. In business-process-offshoring, the big industries will remain banking and insurance. But rapid expansion is also expected in other areas, like legal services.”
Slashdot. discussion.
Selling the News: Advertising, WIBA and Local Newspapers
WIBA is receiving some grief from the Capital Times (part of the $120M advertising enterprise that is Capital Newspapers) over the sale of naming rights to its newsroom to Amcore Bank.
The agreements reflect the proliferation of corporate sponsorships in recent years — think FedEx Field and MCI Center — and the pressure many newsrooms feel to boost revenue. Close alliances between companies and news enterprises, however, raise a special set of issues related to journalistic integrity, ethicists say.
With journalism still under a cloud from some high-profile scandals, newsrooms must go to the greatest lengths to convince the public of their independence and credibility, said Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism training center.
“This undermines all the efforts we’re making to protect our credibility,” she said. “It creates the perception that the newsroom is for sale to the highest bidder.”
An informed society must understand that advertising, sponsorship or underwriting will always include influence. The real solution, from my perspective, is the ongoing disaggregation of media, with many, many more choices and a number of aggregators.
I wonder how sponsorship of a newsroom is any different than wrapping the daily newspaper in a sponsor’s first thing visible full page ad? See a local example here.