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In light of my post about the irrelevance of phone books (but especially in light of the passion surrounding some of the comments there), I thought about the new ad campaign from Yellow Book.

Have you seen it yet?

 

 

I am not sure, but I don't know that I see Yellow Book as a 1,000 Year Brand. In fact, I don't know that they will be around for another 10 years... or at least be anything of any real significance unless they change their business model. If yellow book doesn't have all the information now, how can we expect them to have all the information when there is 100 fold available by then. continue reading...

Ken comments at my post on loving Walmart that big business is becoming soulless. He provides examples of Apple, Target and Google being better brands from a more caring perspective. But, I wonder if the problem that Walmart really has is the fact that as a company gets larger they are simply more of a target.

Let's put the size of Walmart into perspective.

   

Here are the annual revenues of the four companies mentioned above.

Apple Computer: $19,314,000,000

Google: $10,604,000,000

Target: $59,490,000,000

Walmart: $378,799,000,000 continue reading...

I was reading my mail in my Gmail Interface... clearing out a little bit of the spam folder when I noticed that ad for Spam recipes.

[Click image to enlarge]

I don't know that you can assume when someone is in their spam folder they are really all that interested in Spam... but maybe I am wrong. continue reading...

Last week I was very excited to have found DocSyncer... providing me the ability to synchronize my local MS Office Documents with Google Docs.

I was pretty pleased with the ability to upload my files from my desktop in one fell swoop and then manage the files either on my computer on on Google Docs.

The problem was, it didn't really work. All my files got loaded up, but I learned that they didn't synchronize at all... once they were loaded, the versions no longer matched up.

I thought that I would take a few minutes today to see if I could figure it out and get it to work... because it is really cool.

When I went to the DocSyncer website, I found this note. continue reading...

Interesting... as I wrote a couple of posts on my personal brand, I found a trailer for a documentary by Jim Killeen.

This is just fascinating. What do you find when you google yourself? continue reading...

A few weeks ago, I moved my email services to Google Apps.

My main motivation was I wanted to find a good alternative to an Exchange Server. Since I left corporate America a few months ago, I have missed the synchronization that an Exchange Server provides. I can't justify the costs of one, so I needed an alternative.

Google Apps provides free email hosting for up to 100 email accounts on your domain. You can petition for more without paying extra. The shared calendars are pretty cool, too. Recently, they added IMAP support which allows the users to have their email in their favorite email desktop client sync with the Google Gmail interface... so you can have the best of both.

If you are used to the way that your client handles email in a POP3 or Exchange environment, it takes a little getting used to (for example, you can't hit delete in Outlook, you have to drag and drop to the trash and identifying something as spam or not as spam is a little more complicated). But, once you get used to it, it works really well. One of the things that I really didn't like very much was that I couldn't synchronize my calendar. I still prefer to use Outlook for my email. I do because it is so well used. But, I really like the idea of having a web interface to modify my calendar. continue reading...

Be the best. Be the top. Leave your competition in the dust. And they'll come for you. Microsoft and Yahoo are teaming up (or rather Microsoft is buying Yahoo for $44.6 billion). From the press release, Microsoft said:

Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers.

Who do you think they are talking about? Of course, they are talking about Google. If you are number one, people will look to you as the person to beat. That is not necessarily bad, but once you get to number one, you have to do more things, new things, innovative things to stay on top. Although, Microsoft does have a long way to go since Microsoft and Yahoo combined market share was half of Google's. Microsoft hasn't historically been a very innovative company, just a company who copies then either sues or buys to increase market-share. So, we'll see what happens. Corey Smith Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free.