Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the first powered vehicle is 1768. It was steam powered. A fellow Frenchman, François Isaac de Rivaz, built a hydrogen powered vehicle with electric ignition in 1808. It wasn’t until 1886 that Karl Benz built the first production vehicles powered by gasoline and the 20th Century that cars became widespread. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world where cars don’t exist and easy to forget how much they have changed over the years.

This crash test, between two cars produced 50 years apart, is a vivid illustration of some of the benefits of innovation in automotive technology in the second half of the 20th Century.

Lake Superior University have just announced their 41st Annual List of Banished words and phrases. A collection of letters that when combined, produce sounds and meanings so heinous, they don’t deserve to be uttered any longer.  Some of those listed were ‘vape’, ‘manspreading’, and ‘break the internet’ which frankly, is fair enough. Unfortunately, Lake Superior missed one phrase, and the record needs to be set straight.

What is the most overused, and ultimately meaningless phrase in the world of marketing today?

The 5% Problem

Interesting angle on the problems at Evernote that considers their ‘5% problem’. Of course, there were plenty of other issues for the business many of which, according to people inside, or once inside, the business would point to, many of them relating to the gigantic inflated egos of the founder and senior team, that came with increasingly large valuations. (I predict that 2016 is going see more than a few of these stories).

Content provider. (n).  One concerned with filling media properties with content, any content, keyword rich, SEO friendly content.

Content providers are limited to two main sources of ‘Content’.

• What is in their own heads regardless of sanity or veracity.
• What has been written by other people that can be copied and pasted.

Easily confused with: leech.

Not to be confused with: journalist, writer, human.

Inbound Marketing is a great concept with a fatal flaw.

Inbound Marketing, like other technology developments, often promises the prospect of something meaningful. Inevitably, things go horribly wrong.

The world is flat. The Four Humours. Geocentricism.

These are all examples of paradigms which have since shifted once thoughts moved on.

In a similar way to these paradigms, Joel Spolsky’s writing in the early 2000’s on joelonsoftware.com shaped thinking in the software business – some could say even forming paradigms of their own.

Top of the list of all of Joel’s 1113 articles* is ‘Things you should never do, Part 1’. This article states the worst strategic mistake you could ever make is ‘rewrite the code from scratch’.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and Co-Founder of Basecamp, disagrees with Joel. Rewriting should be an option.  

Duane grew up in childrens’ homes in the East End of London, left school with no qualifications and ended up serving a 5 year prison sentence for drug trafficking. He served time in US and UK prisons.

It is not in the interests of any investors or entrepreneurs to talk about bubbles. They are too profitable for some. Besides, ‘this time it’s different‘, is the stock response to anyone who question the increasingly high valuations of some companies.

It is in everyone’s interests to understand the implications and what this means for other companies.