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Novelty Hearing Aids
We happened to be visiting “The Shack” today looking for a sort of novelty Xmas present and next door was a hearing aid store. Quickly an idea came to me – why not novelty hearing aids? On the one end of the spectrum you could have the “hearing voices” model which records random bits of…
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Rental Cars
I know enough about business and the world to know that the rental car business is an unglamorous and difficult business. It’s hard to innovate for a fleet of reasons, but that doesn’t always mean one shouldn’t try or that one can’t succeed. One of our case studies in business school illustrated the difficulties of…
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Historical Wiki
I think that I speak for nearly everyone in the world who’s been on the internet that Wikipedia is an amazingly useful website. Just blows my mind the ways I use it and to think of what I had to do to find the same information before it came around. But while Wikipedia is a…
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What Was That Song?
I was having a chat with a friend about the effect of things moving towards free. There are cameras now that use the “free” storage space to capture photos continuously such that when you actually press the button, it can identify when you might have meant to take the picture (right before the Groom blinked)…
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Taste the Inorganic
So, first there were brands sold based on those brands with store labels hidden where no one could see them. Then store labels became brands in themselves. Now is there anything considered “generic?” So in a world that’s branding everything, where your brand can reinforce or even reimagine what your product is, why not brand…
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Rock Concerts, The Next Generation
You’ve had the reunion tours, the all-star line-ups, but what will concert promoters do next to bring in the audience attention? How about concert mashups? How about Metallica & Neil Diamond in concert together? They can take turns. That way the fan who secretely likes both can see both acts without losing any of their credibility…
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No Disclaimers
I work for a certain Financial Services firm and I see various legal and disclaimer text every day. It’s often (sadly) hilarious what requires disclaimers and how unlikely it is to release anything without it. And it makes me wonder whether disclaimer text has any unconscious effects on consumers. I am not sure that the…
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WeatherSMS
So today, was out, and it rained. Happens every day in some place in the world, right? But we’ve got the internet! So, just as my Google Calendar will send me a text message before my dentist appointment, why can’t I get the weather messaged to me? Well, that’s not too revolutionary. But what about…
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The Age of Things
You may or may not have noticed that the dates on these posts seem a little off. At least in the sense that a blog started in 2007 has posts from years before that. Well, I sometimes like to think I’ve been blogging in my head for decades now, but short of that grand delusion…
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Retro Depot
How about an office supply store which just carries leftovers from the past? Actual leftovers… old trapper keepers, Pee-Chees, etc. Would hit the nostalgia of all the Gen-Xers looking for some of their youth.