market

Much has been made of Dell's retail makeover, but it's actually part of a larger trend toward experimentalism.

The company that has largely avoided unproven product categories is jumping all over them suddenly. Case in point: several years ago, when Microsoft was pushing tablet computing, Dell was fairly adamant that, no thanks, tablet PCs weren't something the company was interested in making.

"I think it is really unknown at this point how big the market is," CEO Michael Dell said in a 2002 interview about tablet PCs. "Dell, of course, likes to participate in … Read more

So, the other day I posted about how you can fit LinkedIn into your SEO and Web marketing mix through optimizing the links within your profile as well as linking back to your public LinkedIn profile, participating on LinkedIn Answers, and optimizing member profiles. Of course LinkedIn is built around individual members, so business interaction is very individual to individual ... there's something kind of nice about this, more personal feel.… Read more

Microsoft continues to dominate the old world of desktop computing, but the future clearly belongs to Google. As reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Google's share of the search market now tops 59 percent, with Microsoft at 9.6 percent (and Yahoo! at 21.6 percent).

A combination of Yahoo! and Microsoft would give the two a more respectable market presence, but with both Yahoo! and Microsoft trending down, it's not a panacea.

Unfortunately for Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google isn't winning by closing out competitors. It's actually winning by opening up. Microsoft, to compete, must follow suit, … Read more

The miniaturization of matter has long been a human desire, and viewing the world from a smaller perspective is the core of many novels and movies. The idea of shrinking people for the purpose of traveling inside another human's body, in particular, has been frequently used in animated cartoons, including The Simpsons, Futurama, Beetlejuice, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

One of the most entertaining pieces in this genre is Fantastic Voyage, a science-fiction movie from 1966, which -- albeit not free of some severe logical flaws -- has lost none of its original appeal. Fantastic Voyage tells the story of a … Read more

Taaz is a fun new service aimed at women who want to try out makeup or hairstyles without real-life experimentation. You simply need to upload a photo of your face and map the outlines of your eyes and mouth. It's a fairly standard process that's been used in some other services, including Budweiser's Bud2Bud service that creates customized e-mails using text-to-speech and matching facial animations.

Once your face has been uploaded and analyzed you can adjust the skin, eyes, mouth, and hair using real skin makeup products that accurately match the real life counterparts. It's completely … Read more

It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.

Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the … Read more

How do we value technology companies? Ingenuity and invention, quality of service, brand loyalty, manufacturing muscle, operating efficiency, supply-chain management, price, great place to work. There are lots of metrics.

For those unfamiliar with the wily ways of Wall Street, the stock market has its own way of expressing what it thinks of companies. It's called market capitalization or market cap for short.… Read more

It's always fun to speculate which trend is poised to "take over the Internet," as the PR people like to say, then watch as the pendulum swings back to its opposite, and so on, until things even out. This time it's "crowdsourcing," or taking a task and outsourcing it to a large group of people. In journalism or science, management or market research, users want specialists. Then they want amateurs. Then they see the value of specialists again. And so on...

For more detail, read the story in Newsweek: "Revenge of the experts&… Read more

It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.

SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based … Read more