From 50,000 Feet

The chairman of Countrywide, Angelo Mozillo, must be a frustrated high school English teacher.
Amid waves of foreclosures wrecking the financial fortunes of his customers, Mozilo zeroed in on the most important problem facing these soon-to-be ex-homeowners: Lack of originality.
Apparently clicking “reply” when he meant to hit “forward,” Countrywide Financial Corp. Chairman Angelo Mozilo ignited an […]

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Scott Berinato, who blogs for Harvard Business School, is mighty impressed with the online press release Delta and Northwest airlines created to launch their recent merger:
Think of it as a mini-site, or temporary site, almost like a booth at a trade show. It’s a combination of marketing, investor relations, and customer service. The content here […]

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I disagree with the premise behind this recent post on Pajamas Media — that America will soon have a glorious future of news without reporters. I hope the writer, news futurist Steve Boriss, is wrong, and if he’s right, I’m not so sure it’s a gain.
However, there is no doubt that the web has […]

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That’s how marketing theorist Seth Godin described the music industry in a recent talk to its executives. Emphasis on “was.” The industry now appears to be headed by CEOs who not only bemoan the loss of a time when a few companies controlled the music industry and could count on free marketing […]

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Think of the untold billions Coca-Cola, Nike, Kraft or AT&T have spent on image advertising and PR to develop memorable brand identities.
In just ten years, and without spending much of anything on buffing its image, Google has surpassed them, according to Millward Brown’s Brandz report.
Umair Haque explains how that happened on Harvard Business School’s Edge […]

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If you’re in the US, you can no longer look at wikileaks.org, the wiki site where whistleblowers could post leaked documents, after a California court ruled in favor of a Swiss bank accused of money-laundering. The court ruled in spite of the fact that Wikileaks did not attend the hearing due to […]

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Actor and writer Eric Bogosian has an insightful take on why the AMPTP is taking such a hard line against the WGA that I’ve seen yet. He e-mailed his hypothesis to top entertainment industry reporter Nikke Finke, and it’s up on her blog.
Bogosian says, in essence, that entertainment producers are worried about how […]

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Okay, yes, I’m being sarcastic, but you have to understand. All too often when I was a youngster, my father would come home from work to find my brothers and me lying on the floor, watching “The Three Stooges” or “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” whereupon he would ask in a sneering tone, “What intellectual, […]

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Here’s something I didn’t know:
Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, […]

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You’ve got a room full of venture capitalists in Half Moon Bay, Ca., not too far from Silicon Valley.  What do you do?  Guy Kawasaki, tech marketer and a VC fund CEO himself, decided to torture them with the personal testimony of four hugely successful web entrepreneurs who did it all without any VC money! […]

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