Any time I have a chance to share my story to a good listener, I get to reinterpret the narrative thread that ties it all together. The story I would have told you of, say my Apple work experiences at age 25 would be different than the stories I will pull out now after nearly [...]
Did you know that Google intends to shut down access to Feedburner’s APIs on October 20? A banner note on the Google Developers Feedburner API page makes that intent clear, so it was time for us to update our tools over at nilofermerchant.com. This means you have action items. My web advisor, Todd Lohenry of [...]
As you might have noticed, I took the summer off. Well, not quite off. More like away. I went to Scotland, and gave a talk at TEDGlobal on the topic of openness. I also finished a new book (my 2nd title) on the #SocialEra that Harvard Press releases next week. Yet, I also managed to [...]
People buy two categories of things. The distinct. And the generic. The distinct items are the things that have a limited commodity, that are artisan in nature, that are worth paying a premium for. They stand out for some reason. The generic items are, well, the things you find on Amazon. If I start to [...]
When I was growing up, I looked for a savior in just about everyone. There were too many fruitless visits from child protective services. There were too many police cars that arrived to “quiet things down” only to let them flare up again the next day. There were too many visits to the hospital ….The [...]
Richard Florida, the Atlantic editor recently wrote: “Cities are our greatest invention, not because of the scale of their infrastructure or their placement along key trade routes, but because they enable human beings to combine and recombine their talents and ideas in new ways. With their breadth of skills, dense social networks, and physical spaces [...]
I’ve been so busy synthesizing 10 years of thinking on Social Business Models, and writing up these ideas for an upcoming HBR magazine article that I have been remarkably behind on posts, and engaging the Yes & Know dialogue. (I’ll catch up soon.) Coming up from this heads-down focus to share a few ideas spurred [...]
Twitter lets people find nuggets of ideas, gather and share sentiment, and –most importantly – helps people to find one another. It’s become customary to do “Follow Fridays” (in twitter language that gets reduced down to #FF) to help each other. I’m afraid I will sound a bit marmish in making this observation, but I [...]
Anyone who wonders why we don’t have more start-ups hasn’t noticed that it is the hardest job in the world. You start from nothing. One team I was working with in the spring of this year just oozed joy when they had earned their first $49 from someone they didn’t know. Getting to this point…building [...]
The quiet and art-filled office space overlooking majestic oak trees, the joy of working with Mike Mace, the significant source of income for our family. These were things I thought of when I thought of what I was losing when shutting down Rubicon. What I didn’t think of until it happened was this: when you [...]
