Apple Computer Inc. said yesterday that Google Inc. chief executive Eric E. Schmidt will join the company's board of directors, creating a bond between two technology powerhouses that compete fiercely with Microsoft Corp.

Google Chief Schmidt Joins Apple As Director

I lived across the street from Tower for three years. They are missed.

The storied Tower Records chain has filed for bankruptcy. Musician and Day to Day contributor David Was says he is saddened by what he sees as the long, slow death of the brick-and-mortar record business in the age of the MP3 download.

In December of last year I decided to sell a bunch of old audio CDs, most from back in my music club days. I tried unsuccessfully to sell them 'locally' at a face-to-face retail outlet; those places are dropping out of the business faster than you can speed dial them.

I called one grizzled retailer, mostly of used vinyl, who offered to take a look at my offering, but said it wouldn't be even worth my time to drive over to his shop. He explained that he was going to close his store in less than a year, because no one was buying music in physical form any more.

An Epitaph for a Much-Loved Tower Records

Chris appears to believe that in a long tail world brand fractures and fragments as customers themselves, or at least the tastemakers and celebrities among us, develop reputations as trusted advisors to help others navigate through the long tail. I hold that, in a long tail world, customer relationship businesses have an opportunity to create very powerful and scalable brands based on the proposition that they know individual audience members or customers better than anyone else and can be trusted to use that knowledge to become ever more helpful to the audience member or customer.

The Long Tail and the Structure of the Media Industry

"The police are really good at understanding someone stole my credit card and ran up a lot of money. It's a lot harder to get them to buy into 'someone stole my magic sword.'"

Do identity theft laws apply to virtual identities? Or are they property?

"Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you."
-- Dave Weinstein, Microsoft

I'm having a hard time picturing Tony Soprano raking it in on WoW.

Microsoft warning on online games

It looks like Amazon is becoming a video competitor to Apple's iTunes.

Coming Soon from Amazon: Unboxed Videos

SpiralFrog is a new online music destination, offering ad-supported legal downloads of audio and video content licensed from the catalogs of the world’s major and independent record labels.

SpiralFrog will be a secure environment where music lovers can satisfy their unyielding passion and thirst for music, entertainment, and information. Our site will be as multifaceted, smart, and current as the audience we hope to attract. An audience that we believe is the driving force behind the way music is created, discovered, and consumed today.

SPIRAL FROG [ a digital entertainment destination ]

Timothy Brown, CEO, IDEO

Not so long ago, Tim Brown recounts, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion.

At IDEO, a “design thinker” must not only be intensely collaborative, but “empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.” Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a “landscape of innovation” that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Brown dips into three central “buckets” in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively. While designing a new hospital, IDEO staff stretched out on a gurney to see what the emergency room experience felt like. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles,” says Brown, and realize the “most important thing is telling people what’s going on.” In a completely different venue, IDEO visited a NASCAR pit crew to come up with a more effective design for operating theaters.

After inspiration comes “building to think:” often a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process. Says Brown, “So many good ideas fail to make it out to market because they couldn’t navigate through the system.” IDEO counts on storytelling to develop and express its ideas, and to buy key players into the concept. Finally, IDEO relies on constantly refreshing its sources of inspiration by bringing in bold thinkers to campus, and increasingly, focusing on socially oriented design problems.

Innovation Through Design Thinking

Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year.

The UN says this is "very bad news." They also noted:

"This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium -- a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent."

President Hamid Karzai expressed disappointment at the results.

35 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product is estimated to come from the narcotics trade.

Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan

New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.

A second aim is to figure out how to fund this work through a combination of online donations, micro-payments, traditional fundraising, syndication rights, sponsorships, advertising and any other method that does not compromise the site’s independence or reputation.

At New Assignment, pros and amateurs cooperate to produce work that neither could manage alone. The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion. It pays professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards; they work closely with users who have something to contribute. The betting is that (some) people will donate to stories they can see are going to be great because the open methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

This site is getting a fair amount of play recently.

NewAssignment.Net

The New York Times, in newsprint form, with its daily 1.1 million circulation, and Sunday 1.7 million, makes between $1.5 and $1.7 billion a year (the company does not break out the exact figure). Times.com, with its 40 million unique online users a month, likely makes less than $200 million a year. Cruelly, an online user is worth much less -- because his or her value can be so easily measured -- than a traditional reader.

To replace its $1.5 to $1.7 billion traditional business with its online business ... it could look to MySpace: while the Times's 40 million monthly users generated, in May, 489 million page views -- this is the number that interests advertisers -- MySpace's 50 million monthly users, deeply entertained by its user-created content, generated 29 billion page views.

That's a whopping 580 monthly page views per user for MySpace, versus a measly twelve for NYT. Judging by the statistics for 2005, MemeStreams is more in the range of NYT than of MySpace.

Why isn't MemeStreams stickier? What will it take to get every registered user to visit the site daily and generate 20 page views? There ought to be a plan!

Panic on 43rd Street | Vanity Fair