Christopher Carfi

A very interesting ethnographic study from our friends over at CreateWithContext.  Key findings include learnings on:

• Browsing behavior
• GPS/Map usage
• Gestures and navigation
• UI Best Practices
• App store pricing do’s and don’ts

View the whole presentation

RSS readers:  Click here.

Great people make all the difference.

Sweet.  If you have an iPhone, you now have free wifi at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots.

Related:  Even if you don’t have the iPhone, it’s easy to get free wifi there with their "loyalty" card thing.  Use the card once a month, and you get free access.

Also Related:  If you have an iPhone, these look great, by the way.

Nice liveblog here of Day 1 of the Social Media Strategies conference in San Francisco.  Rajiv, Darius and I had a blast on the "Thinking Vertically" panel, which starts at 1525.

From BrandWeek:

"Don’t be surprised if a comment left on Twitter gets a faster
response than a call to customer service. Companies are
increasingly monitoring social media sites like Twitter, Facebook
and blogs for negative customer comments and then responding
directly, even publicly, to those comments within minutes.

Companies including Southwest Airlines, Boingo wireless and
Edmunds.com have developed speedy, informal response teams to deal
with the fact that consumers are happy to air brands’ (often
entertaining) dirty laundry in public."

I just voted!  If your state allows you to do so, you can, too.

For San Mateo County, CA, the early voting locations are here.

Heh.  Looks like Dave voted today, too.

We all get tied into the the things that we "know" are right.  Those are the safe options.  (Back in the day, these were the things like "no one ever got fired for buying IBM.")  We may tweak things a little bit, here or there, but we never venture far afield from our comfort zone.

Had a great exchange with Nicole Lazzaro, a couple of weeks back, that really brought out the fallacy of that logic.  Our exchange:

nicolelazarro: Sounds like this conversation is a step backwards from efficient vending machine purchase to a shared cup of tea before buying a rug in the bazaar.
ccarfi: is that really a step "backward?" it’s transaction v. relationship. Relationship is more valuable.
nicolelazzaro: Exactly. A step forward is actually back to our roots. Fond memories of Istanbul, where merchants and customers have not yet forgotten the art of conversation.

The key here is that things that look like a "step backward" may be exactly the things you need to do in order to get out of a rut.  You may be near the top of the hill, but the next feature over might be a much higher mountain.  You need to go down the hill in the short term (away from what locally looks like the "best" answer), in order to get to the real best answer.

Related: Tabu Search

I’m just back from the Future of Talent (note: sound) retreat in Tiburon, California, where I facilitated a session entitled Community…The Real Deal.  The retreat is the effort of Kevin Wheeler and his great team at Global Learning Resources.

As always, a huge highlight was the opportunity to work with Eileen Clegg, a visual journalist who creates real-time murals of sessions such as this one.  (N.B. She’s also working on a very, very cool project for O’Reilly Media, chronicling the career of valley legend Doug Engelbart.)

Here’s another version of the mural with all of the details visible.  Click on it to expand.

Angel Island Fire – October 12, 2008
by Christopher Carfi