Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Mindshare Technologies CEO John Sperry Addresses Your Complaints
Got a beef about the bathroom in your local Arby's? Tell John Sperry. He's up to his ears in customer complaints. So why's he still smiling?
Recession, schmecession. John Sperry can thumb his nose at the sluggish economy. The CEO of Mindshare Technologies just celebrated 100 months of consecutive revenue growth--all powered by customer complaints. No, clients aren’t whingeing about Mindshare. Instead, the company provides real-time survey and feedback solutions to the likes of such national chains as Great Clips and Café Rio Mexican Grill.
The way it works is simple. Participating companies will be notified immediately if there’s a problem that needs addressing. For example, you walk into a bathroom in an Arby’s location. It’s a mess and there’s no toilet paper. You, the customer, can report that via phone or online. The local Arby’s manager is then sent that feedback in real-time so he can mop the floor and replenish the rolls ASAP. Using Mindshare allowed Café Rio to snag the No. 1 spot among Quick-Serve Restaurant (QSR) Chains in the nation, beating out Chipotle, In-N-Out Burger, Chick-fil-A, and Pei Wei--all known for their attention to service.
“The core focus is in the value of one,” Sperry tells Fast Company, and too often customer experiences are averaged. But if you take your significant other out to dinner and don’t have a great experience, “How many times does that need to happen to you to make it statistically accurate?” Sperry answers his own question: too many times. The sample size of one is a way to connect customers directly with the store manager, Sperry maintains. “Corporate doesn’t matter. Money is made at the store level so greater involvement is needed in the store delivery equation.”
To that end, Mindshare has 250 clients and collects about 200,000 pieces of feedback per day, bringing the total to over 1 billion customer insights and more than 60 million surveys.
It's more impressive, considering the company started during a time when Sperry, like so many other tech entrepreneurs, was pounding the pavement after the dotcom bust. Both he and a friend refinanced their homes and took out balloon mortgages to pool together about $40,000 of their own savings to start Mindshare in 2002. Their first 10 employees went without pay and even chipped in some of their own funding.
"We went from gluttony to the starkness of no money," Sperry says. "But innovation comes from starvation. It’s not something you buy, it's something you earn."
Now that the 85-person shop is on track to post $18 million in revenue for 2011, the painful bootstrapping years are in the rear-view mirror. Sperry says that while Mindshare is just as focused as ever on being a leader in the customer feedback industry, retailers and service providers are just beginning to understand the need to listen.
Sperry says the service sector experiences a 300% turnover in staff, which makes delivering consistently great customer experiences difficult. Mindshare’s platform is working to disrupt that by providing even more analytics with voice recognition software akin to that used by Watson, the supercomputer that competed on the game show Jeopardy! earlier this year.
"We are making leaps with predictive technology," Sperry says. By merging that with single comment analytics, Mindshare presents a finely honed picture of what a business should offer its customers to maximize revenue. It makes it easy, for example, for chains to customize product and service mixes based on location. "You would have a different store in a college town that you would in an [urban] downtown," he explains.
Says Sperry, "The customer is king right now. They will take you to the promised land if you can listen to them."
[Image: Flickr user ]
How The Department Of Energy Plans To Wean The U.S. Off Rare Earth Metals
Rare earth metals--a group of 17 chemical elements found in solar panels, wind turbines, electric car motors, lithium-ion batteries, and more--are critical to a future reliant on clean energy. The problem is that China has , and it has used that leverage to slow exports and raise prices. The U.S. is working on building up rare earth production sites, but the Department of Energy is sinking millions of dollars into an alternative: rare earth alternatives.
The DOE $156 million in clean energy technology funding this week, including 15 research projects that focus on what the organization calls Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies for Energy (REACT). The projects include electric vehicle motors containing little or no rare earth metals, a manganese-based replacement for rare earth magnets found in wind turbines and electric vehicles, a cerium-based replacement for rare earth magnets, and a carbide-based composite replacement for rare earth magnets.
Why so many magnet replacements? Small, light, and powerful rare earth magnets are found in most audio speakers, computer hard drives, wind turbine generators, electric cars, and even self-powered flashlights. In other words, if our supply of rare earth elements gets cut off, we're in trouble.
All of the funding comes from the DOE's ARPA-E program, which invests in high-risk, high-payoff clean technology (the program is based on DARPA). Post-, many people may be skeptical of the DOE's investments. But without rare earth metal alternatives, the U.S. won't just lack new clean energy technology; it one day may not have the infrastructure to even support today's gadgets.
[Image: Flickr user ]
Reach Ariel Schwartz via or email.
Jesse Middleton Juggles Three NYC Startups, Makes Jack Dorsey Look Lazy
There's serial entrepreneurship--when someone starts company after company, handing over the reins at a certain point to focus again on the early stages of building a business. Then, there's simultaneous entrepreneurship, which involves starting and running several, not-necessarily-related ventures at once.
Two famous examples of the simultaneous startup CEO are , with Twitter and Square, and Bill Gates, who ran the photography business Corbis alongside Microsoft. Now, a host of upstarts (like a company we wrote about in August) are trying to make this method work, sometimes financing one business with profits from the other.
Jesse Middleton is the CEO and cofounder of three emerging startups in New York: , a subscription-based, product delivery service for guys that's frequently compared to Birchbox; , a service that helps seniors, or anyone, adhere to their medical regimen through phone and text reminders; as well as , a co-work space which New York Magazine recently called the "Best Shared Office Space" in New York City.
Leisure, it would seem, cannot exist in Middleton's world. But for the 25-year-old CEO, running simultaneous startups is not a sign of workaholism; it's a way of allowing his small businesses to collaborate, and share some resources, thereby saving him time and money throughout their stressful early stages.
As a result, Middleton says he's free to indulge in his lifelong passion, sailing. (He has a 27-foot Catalina and sails mostly off the coast of Maryland.)
Fast Company caught up with Middleton in San Francisco recently, where he was meeting with potential investors and business partners. Here's what Middleton revealed about the benefits of entrepreneurial multi-tasking...
FAST COMPANY: You came up with the idea for GuyHaus in March and it's already funded. How did it pick up steam so quickly?
: There are many reasons, but it really comes down to the people involved and whether there's an existing interest for the product. Investors invest in the early stage, when there's no product to be seen. But if they see that an idea is part of an emerging group-buying trend…investors will come along and say, "You guys are a solid team, and other people are doing this successfully, so I believe in it." Subscription commerce is an area people are very excited about right now. Companies like and are starting up and succeeding. So, by taking that model and grabbing another vertical, you create an exciting spot to invest in.
We believe that out of the $21.7 billion men's grooming industry, there's a very large subset of consumers that don't really want to have to think about their shopping needs on certain essentials. As more people streamline their lives, live on their smartphones and spend more time online, shopping will change to follow suit, becoming simpler and more effective to just subscribe to and buy these goods online.
How is GuyHaus different than BirchBox?
Men don't like to shop. We like to be in and out. Where Birchbox delivers a variety of different samples for women to test and try out, GuyHaus focuses on essential items. Men come to GuyHaus and say, "I need shower stuff, skin-care stuff, and shaving stuff." They don't want to experiment with 15 sticks of deodorant. Even though taking a few trips a month to [the drugstore] may not sound like such a big deal, it does take time out of your life. It's a stress point. And it doesn't have to be.
What's the response been so far?
We raised our first round of funding just three and a half months ago. Michael Oliver, Andrew Sternthal, and myself cofounded GuyHaus and raised our first round of funding about four months ago. We raised $250,000 from a great group of angel investors including Michael Yavonditte, Charles Smith, Jason Yeh, and Michael Edwards with .
We haven't had any cancellations from a customer yet! I assumed everyone would get their boxes the first month and say: "What the hell is this?" But that hasn't happened. The feedback we're getting tells us we're on the right track. But we're not there yet.
You have described yourself as a "lifehacker." How does your interest in personal efficiency apply to your other business ventures?
In my own life, I'm always looking to make certain experiences better and easier. I'm definitely not like , author of The Four Hour Body, who went so far as to embed censors in himself to monitor his every move. But what I look for is: What are the repetitive, mundane tasks in my life that I can improve? Years ago, I wrote an app called HitMeBack. You text us something you need to remember in a number of hours, and then we hit you back at that time with the message. Sounds simple. But those are the sorts of things that excite me when it comes to technology: the simple ways that we can improve our life.
Where does WeWork Labs, which opened officially in April, fit in?
In the same way I like to streamline my life, WeWork Labs helps early stage entrepreneurs streamline the creation of startup businesses. There are all these tasks that go into building a company, from software development to fundraising to marketing. If you're a few people in an office, you don't want to think about things like how to clean the space every night, or how to bring food in. If you're a developer, for example, you're concerned with finding someone to teach you about PR, or how to negotiate fundraising. WeWork puts all these people together.
The space is half membership-driven and half sponsor-driven. Our sponsors not only provide money to offset the cost of the space--so we can charge just $250 a month for members--but they also bring in services. For example, the WilmerHale law firm is providing free legal support to all 50 entrepreneurs in the space right now. Two of the partners are just there hanging out, in case anyone has any questions.
What else are you working on?
I spend time advising other little startups. I'm no expert, but I've been through the fundraising process, so I help out where I can. My main focus these days is GuyHaus, but I still work on Getminders, a [business] focused on medication adherence. The idea there is to leverage phone calls and text messaging to help people stay on track with their medication or health in general.
My grandfather doesn't have an iPhone, but he still needs to manage his medication regimens for his diabetes and Parkinson's. It works according to the same pattern: Getminders streamlines health management the way WeWork streamlines the startup process and GuyHaus streamlines e-commerce.
What are the benefits to this kind of simultaneous entrepreneurship?
Well, we don't pay ourselves out of WeWork at all. We reinvest the money back into the community, which can involve anything from launching projects to throwing parties. At first this may not make sense. But the amount of support WeWork has given GuyHaus has paid back a hundred-fold. Since we work out of the WeWork space, we have access to dozens of friends and connections and resources. Other companies have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their first design pass, usually. We were able to design our current site for less than $1,000 [with the help of WeWork friends]. That was huge.
Apple Rumor Patrol: Two iPhones, Or Not Two iPhones, That Is The Question
It's just four days until Apple's "let's talk iPhone" press event, and we still don't know if we'll be seeing one new iPhone or two--and no idea if they're called 4S, 5, or just 4 and 4S. There's a good reason for this, namely Apple's , which must've been dialed up a notch or two since the inafmous Gizmodogate affair before the release of the iPhone 4 last year. There is, as you might imagine, a lot of discussion about this online, ranging from pure speculation to genuine hardware clues, so we've dug through the dross to find some diamonds for you.
The Invite Logo
Some of the silliest speculation this week, leading to headlines like this one, "," centered on the graphic that Apple used as an invitation to the members of the press it selected to come to its Cupertino headquarters next Tuesday. The time and date, 10 a.m. PT on October 4th, were evident clues, but excitement about the Maps logo was off-target: Getting freaked that Apple's campus at Infinite Loop in Cupertino, which you have to get to via Route 280, is shown is irrelevant--because that's simply the icon Apple's had.
And then there's the fact Apple used the phone image with a "1 missed call" flag in the corner, which has some thinkers we'll only be seeing a single new unit revealed next week, coupled with the use of the phrase "iPhone" in the singular. Let's debunk this: Apple refers to its devices like this nowadays, to support the branding notion--it's "iPod" and "iPad" and "iPhone" when mentioned singly or in groups. And why would Apple go to the bother of telling pundits we're only going to see a single phone? In our mind, two iPhones are still a distinct possibility.
AT&T's Cases
This may be the most concrete evidence yet that the new flagship device really is the iPhone 5 and that it has that radical new metal-chassic teardrop design we've heard about: have already shown up in AT&T stores, and numerous other "iPhone 5" cases are showing in the store's inventory computers.
AT&T and Apple may not be the exclusive BFFs that they once were, but you know that the two firms will have worked closely on the iPhone 5--to test how the device works on the network under controlled situations in the lab and on the street. With AT&T likely to sell millions of the things for Apple, you'd expect that Tim Cook or Steve Jobs would've told them if there was no iPhone 5, no new design and so on, before letting them order many an accessory for the device.
Then there's this video...
[youtube TU7iCNIumpc]
Inventory Items
Over the week numerous Apple SKUs have started showing up in store inventories. First up came the iPhone "4S" accompanied by what seemed to be a of a box label that confirmed the name and that it was a world phone with both CDMA and GSM powers (thanks to the fact the label shows both an IMEI for GSM and an MEID for CDMA device identification).
then suggested a codenamed N94 device, the new iPhone, is showing in store inventories with both 16GB and 32GB storage capacities. A separate "N90A" device is also in the systems, which has been identified as possibly a reduced capacity 8GB iPhone 4--based on previous Apple stock codes, and the fact it's a lower number than the new N94 units (which come in both black and white SKUs).
Debate centered on whether the device is called "iPhone 4S" or "iPhone 5" based on these leaked details, with the suggestion that the reduced storage iPhone 4 N90A is merely all the hardware from the current iPhone 4 but at a cheaper price, with smaller internal storage.
The Replicant
Looking at engineering drawings that supposedly leaked out of Apple's China supply , an enterprising chap named took a block of aluminum and machined it to closely match the specifications, creating a faux engineering model replicant that hints at what we think is the design for the iPhone 5.
Check it out--it agrees nicely with our own Fast Company rendered imagery.
China's iPhone 5--With Speed!
China's upcoming iPhone launch partner China Unicom this week. The company gave a presentation this week at Macworld Asia and their slide for the iPhone history included a blank slot for the "iPhone 5," lending more support to the name, and a specs list that included mention of HSPA+ tech, with download speeds of 21Mbps. This is sometimes known as 3.5G or 4G tech (depending on how desperate a phone network is to make itself seem future-facing) and delivers mobile 3G speeds that European users have enjoyed for a while longer than U.S. ones. It's also much faster than the current 7-ish Mbps rate of the iPhone 4's wireless systems.
Cheap iPod Touch
, and evidence now the Shuffle and Classic are indeed being killed off by Apple. But we also think Apple will show a slightly tweaked iPod Touch at the event, adding in white paint and speedier chips. , to avoid cannibalization of the (presumably) reduced price 8GB N90A iPhone, Apple is going to drop the price of the new 8GB Touch model to $199 or possibly less, to compete with devices like the Kindle Fire.
Fast Company's Conclusion
Cards on the table: We're that Apple will show two new phones next week--a new iPhone 5 device with a new thinner, bigger-screen design, 8 megapixel camera and faster A5 CPU and a modified iPhone 4 with reduced internal storage but world-phone powers, which could be called the iPhone 4S (which may imply it could also have an A5 chip inside, in the same way the 3GS was a suped-up 3G with "S" standing for speed).
We've not seen much hints of the actual skinny iPhone 5 because Apple has learned its lesson, and locked down security tighter than ever.
But this is Apple, always mercurial, so we're also prepared to be surprised.
Chat about this news with and too.
Tiny Spanish Island To Be Completely Powered By Solar And Wind
Intermittency is a well-known weakness of solar and wind power--they're good when the sun shines and the wind blows, say critics, but what about when it doesn't? (Though there are some questions about .) The response of alternative energy enthusiasts tends to come in two flavors: better grid balancing--where reliable power sources, such as nuclear, take up the slack when needed--or improved energy storage. The trouble with many of today’s storage methods, though, is that they are either not very good or too expensive. There are several new ones, including , but none are yet ready at scale.
If you wanted to be hopeful about renewables, you might look at a project 900 miles off the coast of Spain, on the smallest of the Canary Islands. measures only 104 square miles, but it is being viewed as a model for projects combining renewable power with pumped hydropower storage--perhaps the most viable currently available storage method.
El Hierro’s $87 million scheme consists of an 11.5 megawatt wind farm (five turbines) that will provide the island's 11,000 inhabitants with the majority of their power. When the system produces excess energy, it pumps water 2,300 feet up to an extinct volcano. When there is insufficient renewable power, the water gushes through a hydroelectric plant. The closed-loop is topped out with series of solar thermal units that provide about a fifth of the overall needs.
El Hierro currently generates electricity using diesel oil imported by tanker from the mainland, and the costs and environmental impact are big. Officials estimate the island emits 18,200 tons of CO2 a year, just from power generation alone.
"We now rely on the outside, the fuel that comes on the boats, which is expensive and polluting. But with the launch of the new power station, we have our own power and profits will go to the island," says Cristina Morales Clavijo, a spokesperson for the company managing the project.
Officials are confident the new system, which is due for completion this year, will allow the island to do away entirely with fossil fuels, and allow it to invest additional revenues in further infrastructure projects. Just in case, the island will keep its diesel generators as backup. There may still be occasions when there is not enough wind or enough stored water to meet demand, and the reservoir only has enough capacity for seven days' worth of electricity. But El Hierro might just get the chance to prove that true energy self-sufficiency is possible, even on a semi-large scale.
"It is very important for the development of El Hierro, but also for other Canary Islands who are already working on similar systems. Internationally, there are other territories that want to know about the project because they think we are an example. The pumping system is the only solution at the moment to store wind energy, and it could be used on other islands and mainland territories," says Clavijo.
[Image: ]
This Week In Bots: Animaltastic Innovation
AlphaDog
If Boston Dynamics' gives you the willies with its amazingly animal-like skills at tromping across difficult land at speed, then don't watch the video of BD's of its military assistant robot, AlphaDog.
[youtube SSbZrQp-HOk]
BigDog was really the development prototype for AlphaDog, suffering from an enormously noisy engine and fairly limited operating range and payload powers. AlphaDog, on the other hand, is closer to a production dog droid that could actually accompany troops on the battlefield: It's quieter, can carry 400 pounds and run 20 miles without needing more gas, versus BigDog's 340 pounds and 12-mile range. Properly called the LS3 "Legged Squad Support System," AlphaDog is also smarter at autonomous navigation, can right itself after a slip or fall, and will eventually be able to leap over some obstacles. After more development, AlphaDog will be tested by DARPA and soldiers in realistic outdoor situations.
Rocket Flea Bots
The University of Maryland and the Army Research Lab may be of testing their self-propelled , with the "robot" part reduced to being a simple mass as a faked carcass for a later, more sophisticated body, but the results are already impressive. The team is testing two different systems--one that uses tiny micro-engineered silicone rubber springs to drive a piston, and the other which includes a miniature solid fuel rocket engine, ignited by a micro-engineered resistor.
[youtube hrlTwbiZmTE]
Both systems work surprisingly well to propel the tiny devices an impressive number of body lengths in the air--much like a real flea--and the on-board light sensitive trigger for the rocket version is a hint at the further sophistication possible. Ultimately these devices, as you may suspect from their army research pedigree, may find use in battlefield or police situations, acting as spy drones or perhaps investigative imaging devices scattered into a building.
Birds and Roaches
UC Berkeley has sought inspiration in the construction of cockroaches and birds for its series of biomimetic research robots, demonstrating their machines this week as part of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent robots.
[youtube 4b5sOru11Mg]
We've seen similar devices before, but it's worth pointing out that these small devices are autonmous to a certain extent, packing navigation, propulsion, power, and sensor packages into their small bodies.
Flocking Swarms
Flying robots are now a cultural norm, in the era of advanced aerial drones used to surveil battlefields--and sometimes to actually fire weapons, but they tend to be lone devices with limited payloads and tightly defined tasks and capabilities. The Laboratory of Intelligence Systems this notion with research into aerial drones that are intelligent enough to fly in flocks. Their small electric-powered fliers contain propulsion, GPS, and control electronics and a Wi-Fi dongle powered by a specially coded Linux board that lets them communicate with other drones nearby.
[youtube n_qRuHkD5lc]
The devices can take off, form a flock, and then "migrate" as a group thanks to their radio chatter. In the near future devices like this will enable cheap, detailed on-the-fly ground imaging in much more real time than is currently possible and could find uses in mapping, search, and surveillance roles. They also strike us, if equipped with advanced 360-degree cameras, as exactly the sort of smart device Google would embrace for a more speedily updated version of Google Maps.
Nurse Bot
Robots aren't just the stuff of distant dreams, don't forget: Panasonic three new nurse robots, designed for the care and assitance of elderly patients. Hospi-Rimo should let people who are stuck in bed or who have limited mobility communicate more easily with friends, family, and doctors through their screens, cameras, microphones, and wireless web connections. One edition of the new machines is actually a robotic bed that can transform into a wheelchair so that patients actually can move around without having to leave their sleeping platform, while another is designed to boost the dignity of an immobilized patient by washing their hair automatically.
Chat about this news with and too.
Facebook’s 880 Pages About You!
The social network is watching your every move, and your friends. And while it isn't as nefarious as Big Brother, do we really want our profiles to become another marketing space?
Imagine arriving home to find a package on your doorstep. Is it a surprise gift? Chocolates or something similar? Instead, you find a wad of documents, covered in single-spaced small type. As the thrill of surprise rapidly disappears, you realize that these pages are all about you. More particularly, all about your life as it exists on Facebook. Every friend you've made--and every friend you've deleted--is there. So is every event you've been invited to and invitations you've accepted. There are the log-in details of the many locations where you've accessed your Facebook account, as well as a list of who you've "poked" and everyone who's ever poked you. All this information is covered in the first 50 pages. This is not some random, futuristic scenario. Sadly, it is a present-day reality.
The United Kingdom is one of the first countries to introduce a law enabling social media-users to access their historical data captured by sites like Facebook. All information is required to be supplied to the user on a CD within 40 days. Needless to say, within hours of the law being passed, Facebook was inundated with thousands of requests. It is hard to see how they will be able to comply with the "40 days" requirement.
The fact is Facebook has more than 800 million active users. More than 50% log on in any given day. Furthermore, the average user has 130 friends. More than 2 billion posts are "liked" and commented on each day. With this kind of access to personal information, Facebook probably knows a whole lot more about the citizens of the world than the CIA, MI5, and the Kremlin put together. The potential of this enormous wealth of data being used for commercial gain is shockingly close and downright scary.
Besides having a window into your private and personal world, social media networks like Google+ and Gmail take this one step further. Both are free sites--they don't require one penny to use. But, as we know, nothing is truly for nothing. To compensate for the free gigabytes, you pay by providing the site with personal information substantially more valuable than what they're giving away.
One of the most valuable areas of insight that can be determined from this linked data is patterns of influence. These 880 pages contain details about how you interact with friends, family, relatives, neighbours, employers, and colleagues. Accurate information can be gleaned about your ability to influence, and be influenced by, everyone around you.
Let's say that an advertiser posts an ad for a trip to Nice on your site. It is not coincidental that this ad appears because, over the past few winter months, you've been posting messages in which you've fantasized about the warmth of that Mediterranean city. The system is able to distinguish the place from the word "nice," and contextualise your longing for travel and a potential holiday in Nice. "Well," you could say, "fair enough. This is how Gmail generates income." But what if I were to tell you that it's also possible to monitor how the ad placed on your Gmail account affects everyone you've had Nice discussions with. How would you feel about being tagged as a "premium influencer" because people appear to listen to what you say, as well as act upon it?
Recently, Facebook added a 24/7 monitoring service that allows to allow Facebook to tell friends what you're watching, listening to, and reading as you consume it--a kind of "look at me, look at you" system, where we can all keep an eye on each other, follow one another and, of course, influence and be influenced. At first glance, it may appear to be innocent, but there is certainly a more sinister aspect that could come into play. In an experiment I describe in my new book, Brandwashed, 200 people were asked to walk randomly around in a large hall. A few moments into the experiment, five volunteers were instructed to move in a clockwise direction. They were told to do so without making any announcements or drawing attention to themselves. Within seven minutes, everyone was walking in the same direction.
Whether we care to admit it, we're all deeply influenced by each other, which leads me to Facebook's brilliant new initiative. Even though many might find it fascinating to observe what our friends are watching, reading or listening to, it may in fact prove to be the most powerful marketing mechanism of the 21st century. It will enable Facebook to systematically select those 5% who tend to lead in every trend: from movies, to fashion accessories, to snack bars, to radio stations. You get the point. Imagine movie studios, magazine publishers, and fashion outlets having access to this information. All product releases will become known for one simple thing: creating mass demand by planting information among small, highly influential groups.
Last year, I decided to get a sense for what Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple aficionados (and detractors) say about all this. I was predominantly interested in their concerns about privacy. When I told them that their beloved iPhone was sending data back to Apple about their current location, they were surprised. They were even more surprised to learn that people are rated according to their influence, and every message sent and received by Gmail was analysed for potential advertisers. What surprised me was how nonchalant they were about this clear invasion of their privacy. They weren't exactly happy about it, but they were generally accepting of it as simply the way things are.
I'm a marketing man, I admit, but I'm also a consumer. Perhaps, as a consumer, it's time to draw a line in the sand. Companies should consider sharing what they know about us up front. There should be no need for anyone to have to go through official channels to learn what a company knows about them.
Like most, I enjoy freedom of speech, the protection of privacy laws and the misguided notion that manipulation and control only exist in unenlightened countries (and books like George Orwell's 1984). Herein lies the irony. Within 200 yards of the London flat where Orwell wrote his dystopian classic, 32 closed-circuit cameras monitor the streets. It seems like we're certainly heading back to the future, only this time it's for real!
(Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best--seller. His latest book, , will be released in September. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages. More at .
Read more by Lindstrom:
For more leadership coverage, follow us on and
[Image: Flickr user ]