Just read a great article on TechCrunch regarding the future of media – especially for industries concerned with digital rights management such as Entertainment:

“The only way to block the incredible ease of pirating any content a media company can generate is to couple said experiences with extensions that live in the cloud and enhance that experience for consumers. Not just for some fancy DRM but for real value creation. They must begin to create a product that is not simply a static digital file that can be easily copied and distributed, but rather view media as a dynamic “application” with extensions via the web. Read more

Lately, I’ve been feeling bombarded by the constant email offers I receive from large retailers – enough to want to simply  unsubscribe from all of them. However, when I started clicking through to remove myself from these lists, I saw something very smart and very effective – the option to remain on the list but to reduce the frequency of these promotions. I have to say, having the choice to go from receiving 2-3 items per week to once a month was enough to make me stay on each list now that I know I won’t be constantly nagged. Not to mention that chances are the monthly mailing retailers send out will have more attractive offers and will be better thought out than their weekly babble. Read more

In a world where things change daily or even by the hour there can be no perfection. Websites are not things you create, launch and ignore. They are out of date the day you launch. If you have a website or run a web business get used to the idea that perfection is the enemy. Waiting for the site to be perfect before you launch is dangerous. Launch before you are perfect and then make changes every day.

We recently relaunched our own site after months of nitpicking back and forth. Eventually we decided to just get it out there and deal with the consequences. Guess what, there were none. A few small typos here and there but nothing that we couldn’t fix in a few minutes.

In our Designer’s How To Guides we talk about excuses and myths that business development people use to justify not making the sale. Over the last few months we have heard much of the impending recession. If you a salesperson one of the most common excuses for failure is “the economy is in a slump”. Other versions of this are, “our industry is going through a slump”, or “the macro economics of our space have affected performance”. We hear these excuses all the time but there is little truth beneath them. Why is it that Warren Buffett can consistently make money investing in companies across diverse industries even during a depression? Simple, he invests in people not sectors or trends. Smart managers consistently return results and even capitalize on competitors losses when the economy slumps. It is a red flag that your underlying strategy is broken if your business falters every time the market adjusts or slows down.