Brian Feener

Even thought we might not be seeing any more of the Bratz toys Mattel shouldn’t necessarily be going crazy with excitement.

Now that the court has ruled that the property rights belong to Mattel they have to look at their vetting process and figure out how to never let an idea like that get away from them again.

It may also reflect a risk-adverse culture at the company who is watching electronic and video games take up most of today’s kids ‘ time. Know that if I were a shareholder I wouldn’t be encouraged regardless of what the balance sheet looked like at the end of the year.

(I haven’t posted in a while.  I figure I can take 90 seconds to get some new content up.)

I don’t know how worried I should be about the market crisis.  I’ve been purposely kept in the dark by my 401k company.  I have motivation to wonder but dont know how to take action.  Who’s fault is that?  Is there no pain because I have no idea how much $ i lost?

Collaboration is the reason we get together in meetings and talk about things.

It’s the reason we work in office parks and not in our own home offices.  It’s the reason that the home offices still need phone and web-cams and thousands of other dollars of equipment in order to be viable.

I’m actually down on the whole home-office concept for companies of more than 3 people.

• Home offices inhibit lunches with co-workers.
• Home offices blur the work-home line (obviously) and make it harder to “turn off.”
• Home offices inhibit casual communication vital in building relationships.  The water cooler is more than just a water cooler.
• Home offices make it harder to receive guests.  You have many more “road games” than you would if you had a set space.
• If you’re not in the presence of another person, you can’t have fun moments like this (some language nsfw):

(Side note: Why is it hip hop is one of the few pop music sub-genres that actually encourages collaboration? Sometimes it’s as much of a marketing tool as it is a purely artistic venture.  You never see Disturbed and Linkin Park getting together to make a single.)

The cipher is an old-school approach to making rap music.  Rappers get together with their best freestyles and rap over a beat.  It’s organic, there’s a built in feedback mechanism, and you get an audience.  There’s also a connection made in the collaboration that you can’t get by just going into a studio.  Working at home is fine, but it makes it harder to build and maintain these connections, forged in common experiences.

For the comments, what’s the best part about being able to collaborrate with another person?  Or, why am I completely wrong about the home office? Or, what did I miss that stinks about home offices?

I don’t always agree with the ratings themselves, but the system is more fun than anything else I’ve come across.

4.5 Fryes with Extra Frye Sauce

For the comments, what’re you doing that’s more fun than what everyone else is doing?

I don’t have many answers for this wondering but is there any future for shopping via mobile device?

According to a 2007 CTIA statistic, 82% of Americans own a cell phone.  More and more of those people are going to be able to access the internet on the phone and in some countries, that’s the only way that many citizens have access.

And since the prevailing idea is that eventually everyone’s going to start getting advertisements on their phone, the natural progression has to be that there will be opportunities to make credit card transactions through the phone, right?

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Enlisting the help of a 3rd Party site is worth the time and effort to upload and update content when:

• There can be a positive return on investment, including, but not limited to contacts, revenue, page views, or brand image.
• The overall image of the brand is improved.

To the peanut gallery: Thoughts?

Speed metal, hip-hop, cool jazz, and salsa all employ different rhythms to sound the way they do.

The thing that they have in common is that each typically has a drummer to keep the beat.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKQgDY0pZ68]

The fascinating thing is that each has a different style of drumming, each has a different set up for the drums, each keeps different time, but they all work.

What if your rhythm is off?

What about your business? Can you survive a missed high-hat or a errant snare? Would it be worth changing the rhythm to make things sound different than the rest of the pack? How about if you put salsa rhythms in your hip hop song? Do you want every song to sound the same? Do you want every song to stand on its own?

Rhythms are predictable. That’s why you can clap along to them. Customers like to clap along.