Neil Wehrle

It’s been a couple of days since Apple released their latest product, the iPad. Given the denouement, its not surprising that there is a fair amount of disappointment. I’m not talking about the name, but the feature set.
I see it this way – when the fastest-growing areas of your company are your media outlets (iTunes [...]

William Poundstone unravels a great example of how businesses use “nudges” to direct user (customer) behavior to make choices they otherwise might not.
“Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, [...]

Sylvia and I worked on a fundraising site for our daughter’s school, PS29 in Brooklyn called 5days4arts.org. It was conceived of and launched in an incredibly short period of time, but it managed to meet the fundraising goal of $40,000 in just about two weeks. It was a great lesson in using social media for [...]

I was at the Wired Store a couple days ago. Its filled with all manner of (mostly) electronic gadgets, televisions, a Camaro, and a drop of camping gear. Leaving, I felt nothing. In years past – actually a good 20 or more years ago, I would have been excited at the sight of all that [...]

A short but interesting article in the WSJ goes into the use of “nudges” and social pressure to encourage people to modify their behavior. The basic idea is that people don’t always behave rationally or in their best self-interest. While this wasn’t big news to the rest of the world, apparently it is for many [...]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “Black Swan” offers tips for life and accept randomness: http://bit.ly/a2ni
Taleb’s top life tips
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know [...]

I’ve been out of the educational space for a while, but I’m still fascinated by the possibilities for using technology to help advance student achievement. Most of the effort that I’ve seen has been well-intentioned but ultimately doomed to fail due to a few simple issues. Early efforts focused on hardware – wiring schools and [...]

johnborthwick:
As announced this am, Twitter is acquiring 100% of Summize. Deals between two private companies are easy to consider and hard to close. In this case we had both companies on a tear and the teams on both sides who were interested in a partnership — the hope here is that what [...]

Virginia Heffernan in the Times Sunday Magazine writes about emerging talents on Flickr, and how the medium – specifically the social aspect – has shaped the work of artists. 
Her description is provocative, especially the notion that Flickr as a whole may constitute a new medium. There are elements of performance (interacting with the audience via [...]