The Tendo View

In the News archive

• Hybrid social media

  3/27/08 • (0)

  If all the excitement around Web-based social media has you nervous about whether people can still hold a conversation in person, fear not. Social networking site Meetup.com has combined the ease and community-building capabilities of the Web with the primal need for in-person interaction.

  Meetup.com reports more than 5 million regular users, facilitates more than 37,000… Continue reading

• I want my online TV

  3/11/08 • (1)

  For once in my life, I’m an early adopter. Like a growing number of people, I consume much of my television via my laptop computer, rather than my television set.

  Sure, the image quality’s a little less crisp than real TV, my connection is sometimes slow, causing the viewer to skip or freeze, and I can’t… Continue reading

• Is the podcast dead?

  2/29/08 • (0)

  Is the podcast dead? And what is a podcast anyway? Back in 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary hailed it as the Word of the Year and described it as a “digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.” That definition has… Continue reading

• Is news more interesting if your friends are reading it?

  1/31/08 • (1)

  The Wall Street Journal thinks so. It just added SeenThis? to its online articles, which allows Facebook users to share WSJ articles they find interesting and see what articles their Facebook friends like.

  This isn’t groundbreaking; it’s just a personalized version of the article-ranking systems many online newspapers already have. But it’s more public… Continue reading

• A whopper about the Whopper

  1/14/08 • (4)

  You’ve probably seen the ads: Burger King employees tell customers that the Whopper is no more. What?? The home of the Whopper has discontinued the Whopper?? Customers freak out, and Burger King eats up—and films—every minute of it.

  One blogger says the ads are “breaking all the rules.” I’m not so sure. I thought the ad… Continue reading

• Elections and MySpace

  11/06/07 • (1)

  It’s Election Day in San Francisco and I forgot to vote this morning. Mayor Gavin doesn’t need me, but Measure D might. To assuage my guilt about not supporting the city’s libraries with my vote, I’m brushing up on my presidential candidates so I’m not in the same predicament next year.

  I consulted the MySpace Impact… Continue reading

• PDFs with video playback?

  10/29/07 • (1)

  PDF documents aren’t just for reading anymore. With Acrobat 8, Adobe’s latest, you can enhance PDF documents with audio and video clips, animated graphics, 3D images that can be manipulated by the user, and forms that can be filled out digitally—all without a live internet connection.

  This makes for some pretty cool e-brochures. But the technology… Continue reading

• NY Times abandons TimesSelect

  9/18/07 • (0)

  A few years ago I moved into a new apartment building and quickly learned about the kindness of strangers—one of my new neighbors was snagging my newspaper about once a week. After a few unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem and/or embarrass the thief, I gave up and canceled my subscription. I decided that it… Continue reading

• Marketing the Simpsons

  7/24/07 • (0)

  In a clever, highly publicized guerilla marketing campaign for The Simpsons Movie, due out this Friday, 12 7-Eleven convenience stores were converted into Kwik-E-Marts. The stores were unveiled on July 1st in the United States and Canada.

  An ABC News article quotes Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing Group, praising the promotion: “Among ‘Simpsons’ fans this… Continue reading

• The lesson from Google’s latest blog controversy

  7/05/07 • (0)

  Google is in hot water this week because an employee voiced a political opinion on a corporate blog.

  Obviously, it’s important for companies to have policies about the scope of their blog postings. But it would be a mistake to think that the lesson here is that all corporate blogs should have a Big Brother corporate… Continue reading

• Outsourcing to the outer limits?

  5/11/07 • (0)

  Two people sent me the same article this morning about outsourcing. Seems that a website in Pasadena, California, is outsourcing its coverage of Pasadena politics to two journalists living in—are you sitting down?—India.

  In this case, the decision to outsource seems to be based solely on money. The editor and publisher, James Macpherson, estimates that he’ll… Continue reading