In a scant four years, Hamdi Ulukaya has built something that even Silicon Valley types should covet: a $700 million business that’s profitable, dominant and growing at a furious clip.
Even more incredible: Ulukaya makes yogurt. YOGURT. The stuff comprised of milk and culture. This is the ancient food that must be produced, packaged and shipped to grocery store chains who, if they feel like stocking their shelves, finally disseminate it to consumers. It’s perishable (like software rot, but worse). And the yogurt market is competitive, stocked with old stalwarts such as Yoplait, Dannon and Fage, the king of Greek yogurt before Ulukaya showed up.
Friday, September 9, 2011
The $700 Million Yogurt Startup - Forbes
On cigarette packages, QR codes reveal a nearby place to smoke | Springwise
On cigarette packages, QR codes reveal a nearby place to smoke
Ronhill has begun to use QR codes on its cigarette packaging to help consumers find a nearby place to smoke.
8th September 2011 in Lifestyle & Leisure.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The Case for Humanizing Business | Social Media Blog by Michael Brito
Social media has succeeded by being more human.
Social media succeeded by abandoning the traditional mindset and assumptions of our machine-based organizations, and instead embracing ideas that are much more consistent with what it means to be human. In social media, relationships matter. So does trust. So do things like meaning, humor, transparency, authenticity, and creativity. Social media is built on the principle that control is a thing of the past, and that the results you get are not always the ones that you were seeking when you started. Those principles are much more aligned with what it means to be human, than with what makes machines work well. That is fundamentally why social media has been so explosive. We like being human. We can’t help it. When we get access to something that lets more of our humanity come out, we are drawn to it. That is why we are flocking to social media.
Building Better Software Through Collaboration: Whose Job Is It, Anyway? - Smashing Magazine
how do we break down the artificial walls that keep us from creating great things together? How can organizations foster environments that encourage natural, unforced collaboration?
There are no quick fixes, but these are far from insurmountable problems. I propose the following five-level hierarchy as a solution:
There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.
Let’s look at each of these levels.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The proliferation of #mobile platforms | asymco
Amazon’s entry is only rumored but I think the description of it is detailed enough to be credible. The day after the scoop with Amazon, Baidu announced the Yi platform. Baidu is the sixth most visited site in the world, so it’s not a bit player and it makes as much sense for Baidu to have a mobile platform as it does for Google.