Just Give Me One Modal Dialog ....
Back when I was reporting the book, I remember a meeting I had with Gary Flake, then the lead technologist at Overture, now a Fellow at Microsoft running Live Labs, responsible for stuff like Seadragon, Photosynth, and now, Pivot, an experimental approach to large datasets that attempts to rethink some fundamental approaches to what we understand search to be today.   Back in 2004, I asked him

"WuzUp?"
From Biz' post on Twitter's shift: Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?" Well, regardless of spin, this is a major shift, to my mind. Semantics matter, *a lot*, when your entir

I Love It When...
You imagine something out loud in a book, and then it starts to happen.... I am sure many of you have heard of RedLaser, but I hadn't until today. I love it! Here's the text from my blog post, written in 2004 (pre iPhone, so I used a Treo...) which I rewrote into the book: What to do? Not to worry, you’ve got Google Mobile Shop installed on your phone. You whip out your Treo 950, the one with the infrared UPC reader installed, and you wand it over that bottle of 2001 Clos Du Val now lovingly cradled in your arms. In less than a second a set of options is presented

Thanks For Flying With Us. Please Give Us All Your Money.
Today I had quite an experience with United Airlines. It has very little to do with much of anything I usually write about here, save one key element: I have posited that to succeed in what I've been calling the Conversation Economy, companies must learn to have conversations with their customers at scale.   Well, here's a tale of one company failing miserably at doing just tha

Why Did Google Buy AdMob?
Look. Sure, it's a mobile ad platform, and sure, Google wants to play there, more than they already are. OK. Fine. But really. What's the play? Droid. Data. Droid. Iphone App Data. Droid. K? Data. Just to be clear. Data. About what works, on iPhone apps, so they can leverage it...for Droid. K.