Certain Habits

I was reminded last night how little it takes sometimes to create a positive customer experience. I made a small impulse buy on eBay, paid, and thought nothing of it.

This morning, this email was in my inbox:

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For further proof that Japan is, in John Maudlin’s inimitable words, “a bug in search of a windshield,” look no further than the advertising campaign the Finance Ministry launched today.

The Finance Ministry is trying to bolster native demand for Japanese bonds. How would they do this? By targeting “the untapped market”, men of marrying age and convincing them that buying bonds will make them, wait for it, more attractive.

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For your daily dose of cultural diversity, here’s 16 things Walmart only sells in China.

Checking in at the airport today for my Delta flight, I was pleasantly surprised at how efficient and courteous the service was. I know. “Efficient” and “courteous” aren’t the first words that come to mind when you think “airport check-in”. Even if you’re flying Southwest. Read the rest of this entry »

It turns out that exporting our way out of this recession may not be as easy as we’d like to believe. The Obama administration announced three months ago their goal to double US exports to the rest of the world in the next five years.

No doubt one of the reasons they chose that goal and that timeframe was due to the trend in that direction supported by a weakening dollar and economies in Asia that are growing consumption faster than we are. There’s historical precedent too for this goal being achievable.

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Staffers in the British Foreign Office learned the hard way one of the commandments of the digital age: “Write not what you would not like on the front page of this morning’s newspaper.”

In preparation for the Pope’s September visit, staffers wrote a memo proposing activities his Holiness might like to do while in Country. The top ideas?

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I’ve seen several links to this video clip from Fast Company’s “Innovation Uncensored” conference. In case you didn’t see it, Nike’s Mark Parker describes the advice he received from Steve Jobs upon becoming CEO:

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As reported by the Wall Street Journal today, the countries largest banks appear to have been systematically masking the levels of debt they maintain in their quarterly filings to the SEC.

When are the trials for fraud, you ask? It turns out what they’re doing is completely legal, and may have been standard operating procedure for many years.

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Steve Jobs announced yesterday that iPhone OS 4.0 would support multi-tasking. Yeah, I know. It’s long overdue.

He gave some examples. Pandora — the killer app for multi-tasking. And Skype. And in talking about Skype on the iPhone, Jobs said: Read the rest of this entry »

Multi-Tasking

Multi-tasking isn’t revolutionary, but it’s long overdue for the iPhone and will be a nice enhancement. Background location will make third party mapping apps and location-aware social media more effective. Expect the cost of turn-by-turn directions to converge toward zero over the next two years.

Folders will help me keep my pages of apps better organized.

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