Category Archives: Business

The Industry That Cried Wolf

030214_compact_disc.gif You’ve got a credibility problem when Business Week — which, to paraphrase “The Insider,” is not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment — cries foul over the numbers you use to blame your industry’s poor health on digital piracy. The music business, as embodied by the universally loathed Recording Industry of America, has just that kind of problem, as evidenced in Business Week journalist Jane Black’s scathing examination of their claim that the devastating 7.2% drop in CD sales for the first six months of 2002 can be laid squarely at the feet of, well, you and your damn computer.

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Declare the Pennies on Your Eyes

The number one lesson I’ve learned since we started Behavior is that taxes rule every consideration, task and goal. Taxes consume more time and energy than I could have possibly have imagined, and right now I am immersed in getting a year’s worth of billings and expenses in good order for the tax man. No one at design school ever told me it’d be this complicated.

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Chill Factor

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics have joined forces to produce Chilling Effects, a Web site devoted to educating the public on their rights within the First Amendment and copyright laws. ?[It] offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.? Have a look at the database of cease and desist letters sent by megacorporations to perceived violators of their copyrights to get an idea why the site has that name.

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Gain

GainHere it is, Behavior’s latest site launch: Gain, the all-new online magazine from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Gain started life in the dot-com boom as a journal focusing on the practice of experience design, but in this new incarnation it’s all about the increasingly crucial relationship between the business and design worlds. We’ve been working on relaunching this magazine for a while, and we’re pretty proud of it. Enjoy!

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Chill Factor

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics have joined forces to produce Chilling Effects, a Web site devoted to educating the public on their rights within the First Amendment and copyright laws. “[It] offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.” Have a look at the database of cease and desist letters sent by megacorporations to perceived violators of their copyrights to get an idea why the site has that name.

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Telecon

WorldComWorldCom, only the most recent company to fess up to its scandalous accounting practices, has got me thinking. First, I can’t imagine that this is the last accounting scandal we’ll see, and not just in the corporate sector. There are lots of economic numbers that the government has been churning out for the past several years that will be similarly re-adjusted, further undermining our struggling economy. Much messiness lies ahead.Second, I think this terrible economic hangover is the result of an MBA culture run amuck. We’re emerging from an age now wherein corporate officers have no idea how to run the businesses for which they are ostensibly responsible; they’re self-styled deal makers who are interested only in moving money around, cutting deals and talking in the abstract about ‘vision.’ (I know this from working at my last job at a major Web services agency, where neither the CEO nor the COO had a clue about how to run a services company, much less how to put up a Web page.)The next generation of successful CEOs will be much more hands on, will know how to use and sell their own services, will roll up their sleeves and become engaged in the development and the marketing of their own products. Less the Jack Welch-style of leadership, more the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs-style of leadership.Finally, isn’t “WorldCom” a completely ridiculous name, when you stop and think about it? It’s the kind of name they’d give a fictional, evil multinational in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

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Numerology

Citibank Virtual Account NumbersCitibank’s credit card division has a potentially great product in Virtual Account Numbers. Rather than use your real Citibank card number for online transactions, customers use a little application to randomly generate a virtual number that can be used instead. The numbers are good for one use only, so once the transaction is complete, they expire and your real card number is still safe. It’s a great security idea.

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