“Now victory may be produced for your army from the tactics used by the enemy.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War China, the Middle Kingdom. Home of Sun Tzu and his war strategies; Confucius and his many proverbs (he who stand on toilet, high on pot is not one of them). Long have we wondered over our grandiose, enigmatic neighbor…
Every so often, a cultural trend becomes a phenomenon. Malcolm Gladwell called it the tipping point. General nostalgia classically refers to it as the zeitgeist. And, alas, surely as Chuck Taylors compliment skinny jeans, sometimes these phenomena meet, the wake of which leaves us in a changed world. Enter Shots of Me, the spanking new Bieber-backed, feature-packed – that’s right…
I Kissed a Girl! That was easy. I just put together a few pictures and I have the answer to my latest trivia challenge on 4 Pics 1 Song, the number 1 downloaded free app in the App Store. The admirable runner up is Amateur Surgeon. Yes, it’s exactly like it sounds, and more – the first line of the…
Maybe I’m old school, but I’ve always been suspect of watching internet video on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it, but there’s always a latent uneasiness, like I’m selling myself short but there’s no other option. I still laugh at the dancing dog youtube video a friend texted, still well-up at the facebook videos of my baby nephew…
This Week in Social Tech: Second Screen Apps Lack Luster, Vine Swinging to the Top of the App Store, and Twitter Tackles Trending Tunes The age of the argument is over. Gone are the days when pseudo-intellectual debates at the bar or coffee shop escalate to fisticuffs. Long before it comes to blows, we whip out our smart phones to…
It’s hard to forget the cacophonous bleeps, fuzz and buzz of our modem logging onto AOL in our pre-teen years. An exciting, confusing time when popular use of the internet was dawning, but so frustrating was that noisy wait to discover whether or not we had mail. There are few things we could hate so much as a kid but…
Influence is a funny thing. One never can tell just who will sway them to try the latest shoe style, iphone case, or say, social media app. There is an easy answer of course: celebrities. Who doesn’t want to rock the same styles as their favorite pop artist or movie star. But the time may be coming for celebrity influence,…
Marty McFly, 1955: “Yeah, you know we have two.” He is referring of course to the number of TV sets in his 1985 household, amazing his teenage uncle whose family just got their first. Marty goes back, of course, to the future, but I’m sure his uncle would be even more amazed by a report recently put out by Nielsen…
“OMG Walking Dead!” Yes, that was the most common post in my Facebook Newsfeed during the last airing of the hit AMC show. The hit show that I’ve never watched. But maybe now I will – a 500-friend recommendation is not too shabby. But the focus in a report recently put out by Nielsen on the climate of social media…
It is Thanksgiving eve. I stand daydreaming in a long line at the grocery store, and am suddenly yanked from my pre-holiday reverie when I notice the person being checked out is playing with his phone. His phone! In line! Egregious. Inconsiderate. Unacceptably rude to hold up a line because you can’t put your phone away. But just before I…