Nihad Aytaman, a senior technology manager at Elie Tahari, a private $500 million-a-year maker of designer clothes for women and men, is an enthusiastic proponent of analytics technology. The information housed in the company’s data warehouse has grown fivefold in the last three years, and is constantly mined for sales trends and to orchestrate supplies and shipping. “It takes all this data and makes it visible and meaningful, so you can make sense of it and act on it,” said Mr. Aytaman, an engineer with an M.B.A. “But you’re not creating something that wasn’t there. Designers and merchandisers have to go with their gut if they are making something new. “No computer can mimic human intuition,” he said.
— Unboxed - A Data Explosion Is Remaking Retailing - NYTimes.com
As the monoculture fragments, social-media platforms and other wired and unwired communities are creating new kinds of connections — connections that are building bridges between people in ways that watching Seinfeld never could. But Nass says they’re not likely to be the kinds of connections that will hold a nation together. “The problem is, the things that tend to glue society together are people who share a number of things together,” Nass says. “It makes it easier to mobilize, to bring people together behind a cause, behind an issue” — health care, say, or war.
a recent PLoS ONE study suggests that nearly 40 percent of food in the United States is wasted.
— EcoTone » Blog Archive » Indulging in wasteful eating habits
The making of the bootleg of Avatar.
Out of the hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens has existed, we’ve been intensely physically active for all but a few of them.
— TV’s Unintended Consequences by Dave Munger (via vastandgrand)
Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Perhaps when the web was an infant, a site would be given leeway to find its legs, its voice and gain traction with readers. Now that the web is in its adolescence, there is little room for “finding one’s way.” You get just one shot with readers to show them what you can do, and you better do well enough with it to get them to come back another time.
— What The Future Will Look Like For Journalists | paidContent
When asked if he has ever responded to a National Security Letter demanding that Google turn over information to the government, Schmidt smiles. “We are subject to laws that I don’t like—you can’t sue against security laws.” Privately, however, he has told friends to keep off a computer anything they want to keep private. That is difficult, as Schmidt himself acknowledges. “In the world I’m in,” he says, “everybody works all the time.
The lesson is, if you keep making the same prediction often enough, it eventually becomes true.
— Hastings Directs Netflix In Its Star Performance - WSJ.com
Seventy-one percent of US workers are in jobs for which there is low demand from employers, an oversupply of eligible workers, or both
— McKinsey Report: Changing the fortunes of America’s workforce: A human capital challenge
Marketers also should be careful not to ditch their traditional market research, as it frequently reflects the views of consumers who are less loyal to a particular category or brand, says Mary Egan, a partner in Boston Consulting Group’s New York office. “There is a broad swath of the population that is not on the blogs, and it is important to reach out to those people and bring them into the fold,” she says.
As your online and real lives merge even further in the so-called digital age, it’s going to be an uphill battle to remove the content that’s out there. Bad news for those with little common sense.
Susan MacTavish Best, who represents Craigslist, said barter listings have risen 25 percent in the Bay Area over the past two years. “Users will barter practically anything on the site,” she said in an e-mail message, “including old junk and stuff that is collecting dust as well as services such as gardening and painting.
— Despite Economic Hardships, Bartering Gives New Buying Power - NYTimes.com
Olswang’s research, contained in its recent Convergence Survey, shows that among the wide online community, 58% of people would pay to access a newly released film online, and 40% would be happy to buy access to a digital copy of a film that’s already on DVD. But iPhone owners’ stats for the same issue are 73% and 54%—a significant jump. And while 30% of people in general would pay for a digital book and 29% would pay for digital magazines, 42% of iPhone users would buy online texts and 38% of iPhone users would buy digital mags.
— iPhone Owners Spend More Money — and Not Just on Apple Hardware | Technomix | Fast Company
