In the past 48 hours, I’ve seen no less than four front page articles from newspapers across the world, referring to the Instagram deal as “ushering in the age of mobile.” In other news, I’m going to write an article about the coming age of jet travel. Are you kidding me? The Instagram deal has NOTHING to do with “the age of mobile,” it has EVERYTHING to do with the age of CUSTOMER CHOICE. Mobile isn’t new. You think that just because we now have the ability to take crappy sepia toned pictures of crap, 24 hours a day, that “all of a sudden, we want to be a mobile society?” We’ve ALWAYS wanted to be a mobile society. The [...]

In general, “the rules” fall into two categories. “For our safety,” or “for gain.” By “for gain,” I mean for a company’s gain – i.e., “We can’t give out more than one sample because we’ll lose money.” In general, the rules make sense. Except for the TSA. Their rules never make sense. But – Part of succeeding in business has to involve knowing when the bend, or even break the rules. There will never be a rule that can be designed for every single situation without fail. Every situation is different, and anyone in charge of enforcing the rules needs to understand that. No business will thrive (or even survive) if they don’t know when to bend or break a [...]

Hey gang – Five minutes from boarding a flight to Hong Kong, wanted to get my thoughts down on the unbelievable news about the Instagram acquisition before I took off. Long story short: Invested users will ALWAYS beat financial investment.

So in 2 days, this will happen:     That will be almost 16 hours of uninterrupted writing. Blog posts, my new book (due out in January, being published by Palgrave/MacMillan), emails for my newsletter… Heck, perhaps even a note to my future child (not that there’s anything in the works yet, calm down, mom…) But there will be writing. It seems that planes are the only place lately where I can write uninterrupted, without the real world, or the Internet, or my mobile phone, or my cat distracting me. (Squirrel!) Planes are my last bastion of creativity. I’ve got a handful of new blog posts to write, including… A true story of how a six year relationship with a [...]

A bit over a month ago, I was contacted by Facebook, asking if I’d like to “merge” my “fan” page (I’m STILL not comfortable calling it that) with my “personal” page on Facebook, and turn my “fans” into “subscribers.” Facebook’s logic there was that I’d only have to post all my content in one place, and could determine which content was “public,” (i.e., subscribers, the world, etc.,) and which I kept only for my “friends.” I volunteered to give it a shot, even after being told there was no turning back – i.e., my “Fan page” would disappear, and I couldn’t bring it back. After asking a ton of questions (and to Facebook’s credit, the person who reached out to [...]