Musings of a Marketing Maven

I just paid the last phone bill for my fax machine. Sidelining the fax… It feels like the end of an era — yet another unintended consequence of email and web-based services on a small business like mine.

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I often work with an extended team of experienced designers, writers, web producers, developers and so on. Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to [...]

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When you live near Microsoft and Amazon.com’s corporate campuses, you can run into some amazing people while grocery shopping, enjoying a latte, or exercising. Today I had one of those serendipitous encounters.
While power walking in the late afternoon sunshine, I heard about a cool new company that a colleague launched a few weeks ago at [...]

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I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the experience of using it is so pleasurable, so much of the time.

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Yesterday I was reminded that interfaces, if untested for a critical use case, can have potentially disastrous consequences.
In this case the interface was between the rubber friction pads at the bottom of a long extension ladder and the rain slick Trex surface of a deck. While cleaning gutters vigorously after a recent windstorm, my husband [...]

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Several years ago IDC presented a segmentation model for mobile device users that included a cluster called “minimalists.” Minimalists routinely use technology-based products for home and work, but want products without complexity or unnecessary features. Minimalists want a phone to be a phone — not a camera, game console or FM radio. They want a [...]

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