MJJ

Hi - I'm Matt. "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter" -Pascal

After years on the cutting edge, Daft Punk has reversed course with its new album. Spurning the digital audio software that empowers the electronic dance music generation, the album is an analog flashback to the era of live musicianship.

In the era of Big Data and user profiling, panels no longer have the upper hand.

Over time, your digital fingerprint will become more and more precise. Until then, the set of four cookies is independent from each other. But the analytics firm compiles all the patterns in single place. By data-mining them, analysts will determine the probability that a cookie dropped in a mobile application, a desktop browser or a mobile web site belongs to the same individual. That’s how multiple pairing works.

Obviously, Google is best positioned to perform this task on a large scale.

The content mindset is about putting the content needs ahead of the marketing needs. Most marketers wrap content inside a marketing message. Good journalists do the opposite. We need to think like them, with the reader’s needs ahead of our own in the creative process. It’s about being servant.

He’s the man who said that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and that “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born” and that “If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.” And when I first saw Microsoft‘s Surface tablet last June, a Kay maxim helped me understand it: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware

For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.

When Mark talks about surfing big waves, he as often as not talks about how stress releases adrenaline, increases galvanic skin response, causes the eyes to dilate for greater acuity of vision, and causes the liver to release certain chemicals that increase endurance, certain other chemicals that decrease the perception of pain, and certain yet other chemicals that enhance fast-muscle fibres. This is not how other surfers talk about big waves. Mark says things like “Breath-holding duration is inversely proportional to energy expenditure, which means oxygen consumption.” He gives the impression, in other words, that he actually knows what is going on physiologically in situations of abject terror—that he knows, say, what it really takes in the way of oxygen denial to cause a blackout. This scientific approach to the subject is, I think, essential to his ability to control fear in big surf.

—[Playing Doc’s Games longform.org]

The Havas Media Lab published some research that suggested most people wouldn’t care if 70% of brands disappeared. Brands need to create real value in order to be meaningful and distinct. That means we have to think less about what our brand says and more about how a brand can be useful and helpful.

One analysis shows that from 1997 to 2007 more than half of the companies that made it onto the Fortune 500 before their 25th birthdays—including Amazon, Starbucks, and AutoNation—were business model innovators.

You can get away with an accidental culture for the first 20 or 30 hires – but then culture takes on a life of its own. You’re better off locking yourselves in a room and thinking it through.

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.” What an insight. He continued to talk about the power of questions. Questions are your mind’s receptors for answers. If you aren’t curious enough to want to know why, to want to ask questions, then you’re not making the room in your mind for answers. If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow. Questions are the currency of your mind. Invest in questions and you’ll be rich with answers.

The good creators have their own distinct voice and consistently provide content in ways that no other outfit does. Red Bull Studios is a great example. The content it makes is epic, at times outdoing the guys who make extreme-sports films for a living.