A research team from Durham University and the University of British Columbia is investigating magic tricks to further understand how people's minds work. The key magician's techniques that the team investigated were misdirection and illusion. For example, in the misdirection trick, a researcher dropped a lighter and cigarette while misdirecting the subjects to the opposite [...]
Take a look at what Jeffrey Gordon did with Kronomy after he read my posting about the company. Apple Computer’s life path make your own show details
Guy Kawasaki’s life path Kronomy make your own show details God help me, that's my high-school graduation picture that you see in the second frame. Showing you this picture, however, isn't the reason for this posting. The real reason is to tell you about a company called Kronomy that enables you to create a time [...]
Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do--for example, host 250 women bloggers at your house. This is a photo from the Kirtsy ("Digg for chicks") and Alltop ("aggregation without aggravation") pre-BlogHer party. If you click here, you can see many more including White Trash Mom lifting her leg, Jenny the Bloggess [...]
Voters have selected the five winnners of the Alltop badge contest. Each winner will receive a iPod Touch. The winners are: Jesse Pons Glenn Sakamoto Kristen Chase Ben Goheen Cayley Vos You can see the winning entries here. My thanks to everyone who entered and who voted.
There's nothing I like to study more than techniques of persuasion, and I want to persuade you to check out a website called ChangingMinds.org. You can think of it as Robert Cialdini, my hero when it comes to persuasion, on steroids. Here is a direct link to theories of persuasion but do spend time on [...]
A sign of PR cluelessness is writing to a reporter after an article appears because you think that it should have mentioned your product or company. There are two problems with this theory: first, the reporter isn't going to revise the original piece; and second, she's not going to write another article covering the same [...]
I recently signed up for Friendfeed, and I had a hard time figuring out who to follow. Christine Lu told me that this is a common problem, and we came up with idea of aggregating the top Friendfeeds to help people get started. Check it out: Frienderati.alltop.com. You can use this as a starting point [...]
Neuromarketing has another great blog post. This time the subject is the power of "free." Click here to read it. Apparently, a free offer has power that is far beyond what you'd think. There are many marketing and advertising implications, so go read the posting.
NowPublic bought Truemors yesterday, and I became chairman of NowPublic's board of advisors. You can read more details here. These are exciting times! Thank you everyone for contributing your stories to Truemors and for visiting our site.
Dr. Bianca Wittman of University College London found that making novel choices activates the ventral striatum of the brain. This area is associated with rewarding behavior. Thus, labeling a product as "new" may increase its sales because of this brain wiring. Also, familiar brands also cause higher levels of brain activation, so the perfect pitch [...]
I love ideas like this: bubble-wrap calendars. You pop each day when it's done. A company from Brooklyn sells them for $50--$50 for bubble wrap! I love the margins as much as the idea. Put this one in the "why didn't I think of that?" category.
My buddy David Szetela writes a new column for SearchEngineWatch called "Profitable PPC." In his first column, "PPC Advertising: Art or Science?," he mentions a book called Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. The book was first published in 1923--long before TV or online advertising. Hopkins is the inventor of test marketing, coupon sampling, and [...]
The polls close tomorrow night, July 9th, at 9:00 pm Pacific, so be sure to cast your vote for your favorite Alltop badges. The creators of the top five badges win iPod Touches. Click here to vote.
My buddies at Start Cooking kickstarted my career as a chef. Please click here to watch the video of my teriyaki sauce. I won't get very far as a chef, but I love the video style of Start Cooking. Companies can use this stop-action style to explain many product and services--it sure beats the usual [...]
Check out this great video of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) discussing the shortcomings of today's hiring practices. He cites examples of professional sports that conduct "combines" where teams measure the performances of prospects in the hopes of drafting the future stars. Guess what: this method doesn't work. Jobs--of all types--are more complex, and the [...]
Check out the Silicon Valley Moms "Summer Road Trip '08." Five mommy bloggers are driving across the United States in a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid. Other sponsors include Yahoo!, CBS News, WeightWatchers, Six Apart, and Zune. The moms describe it as "5 blogging moms, 7 days without kids, 1 car without carseats, 2,000 miles to drive." [...]
Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, is working on developing contact lenses with LEDs in them. This makes the contact lenses into personal displays--and gives a whole new meaning to "EyePod." There are, however, still issues such as powering the LEDs and the fact that the lens are [...]
"If You're Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow" should be required reading for managers and parents. It summarizes the work of Carol Dweck from Stanford. Key passage: Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those [...]
A buddy of mine found three cool inventions to share with readers of my blog. These inventions can change the world and illustrate how much can be done with innovative thinking. Pot-in-pot. This is the invention of Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria. He is from a family of pot makers and discovered a way to [...]