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Showing posts from January, 2012

The Brave New World of Advertising: Back to DLD Edition

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I once again had the honor of being invited to the DLD conference . I guess no one read my post from last year. In case you are curious, my hotel was better. . . well, better is a complicated concept. There is no weather pattern over my bed, but of course there would not be as heat rises and tends to collect in the attic - or as they call it here, room 504. It may not really be the attic. I only call it that because the elevator stops on the fourth floor and I had to exit the warm portion of the building and walk up the wooden staircase to the fifth floor to get into a room with a slanted ceiling and a dormer window. My client picked the hotel and did warn me it was not the caliber of the one I stayed in last year. But with the frostbite wound earned in my five star hotel room last year still visible on the little toe of my left foot, I figured it could not be worse. The VC's behind this startup are certainly very proud of the selection, it reinforced my belief that I am ...

Amazon's Special Gift to Steve Jobs: Android's Success is the Biggest Threat to Android's Future Edition

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By now I am sure Walter Isaacson's report of Steve Jobs feelings about Android is news to no one. At one point during the interviews leading up to the greatest retelling of the monomyth since Luke Skywalker, Jobs said: I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40bn in the bank, to right this wrong," . . . . I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this. The timing of that last breath relative to the life of Android is also news to no one. What I have not seen is the realization that Google may have stolen the frame, but Amazon stole the art. And while the media continues to report on the Amazon vs. Apple battle for the bedtime and reclining market, the real battle is Amazon vs. Google. The success of Amazon’s Android running Kindle Fire and focus on the Apple battle masks Amazon’s role as the new standard bearer in Steve Jobs’ war against Google whi...