David Lidsky's Blog, page 4782

Anatomy of a McNugget

McDonald's has spent a lot of time and money trying to up its sustainability status. Chargepoint EV Charging Stations, special parking spaces for hybrids, LEED-certified restaurants--you name it, if it's sustainable and doesn't have to do with disrupting the actual food supply chain, McDonald's is all for it. 

Okay, that might be a bit unfair, since McDonald's does buy stock from sustainable fisheries. The company also recently agreed to ask potato suppliers to cut down on pesticide use...

Honest Tea, Santa Cruz Organic, Steaz...Top Greenopia's List of Green Beverages

If you really want a sustainable beverage, turn on the tap. But if you're craving something a bit sweeter, check out Greenopia's updated list of eco-friendly drinks. The top beverages on this year's list include Honest Tea, Santa Cruz Organic Sodas, and Steaz's tea and energy drinks.

Greenopia's rankings are calculated using the same four-leaf system that the website uses for its other categories, which include beauty products, fast food, and wineries. Drinks are rated from zero to four...

Old Media's "Next" Innovation and the Unauthorized New York TimesRoulette

If you're a gambling man, I would put a fiver on a lot of Web-based April Fool jokes tomorrow being ChatRoulette-related. Andrey Ternovskiy's idea has, over the past three months, made a lot of pervs very happy indeed--not to mention the general public.

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And, where pervs, comedians and the general public go, so newspaper execs follow. First of all it was The Guardian, where, following a chat by Internet guru Clay Shirky, a Guardian Online software developer called Daniel...

Jared: The Power Story

What's more interesting, that Subway offers seven sandwiches that are under six grams of fat or that those sandwiches helped a guy with a 60-inch waste get off the fast track to heart attack station? Answer: The story of Jared, of course. In this installment of Made to Stick, Dan Heath explains how stories about triumph over adversity make for better brand messages than ... math. Watch and then go find your own company's Jared.

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Is there anyone...

The Smart Branding Story Behind Haiti's Brightly-Painted Buses

One service to resume quickly after Haiti's earthquake were its privately-owned buses, which are cheap, reliable and, amazingly, painted with intricate murals featuring everyone from the Virgin Mary to Kobe Bryant. Adam Davidson reported on the curious economics of Haiti's wildly-painted buses, called tap-taps, for the PBS show Frontline, which aired a special about the earthquake last night.

The story is an incredible tale of branding, entrepreneurship and, yes, simple economics. Keeping...

AT&T Helps Apple Curb iPhone's Data Hunger, Mobile Web Users Still Ravenous

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AT&T has come under an extraordinary amount of pressure from its subscribers and the media over its allegedly poor network performance, mainly due to all those millions of iPhones. But apparently Apple has tweaked the phone to help.

The information comes once again from the possibly deliberately leaky Apple news-pal, the Wall Street Journal. This time there's no doubting it though, as the person in question is AT&T's CTO John Donovan, revealing how AT&T tech experts spent time at Apple HQ...

Yale University Panics, Gets Cold Feet About Switch to Gmail

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Yale had made the decision to move from its own Horde email system to Google Apps for Education (a suite which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs), but when presenting the plan to its administrators and faculty members, the Information Technology Services department immediately encountered resistance, reports the Yale Daily News.

Said computer science professor Michael Fischer:

Concerns about the switch to Gmail fell into three main categories:
problems with "cloud computing"...

Twitter's Redesigned Homepage Shows It's Not Just for Status Updates Anymore

Twitter's new homepage, aside from being simply more aesthetically pleasing than the old one, does a much better job of showing new users what the service is actually about. The first thing you'll notice upon visiting the new page is that Twitter has put its most popular topics, tweets, and users front and center.

Right in the middle is now a "Top Tweets" section that dynamically updates. Twitter uses a custom algorithm to decide what these are, often due to popularity or general interest...

Digital Due Process Coalition (Including Microsoft, Google, and More) Call for Tougher Online Privacy Laws

Including heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, eBay, the ACLU, and AT&T, Digital Due Process is aiming to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, reports the New York Times. As they say, a 25-year-old law could not possibly be adequate to protect citizens in a world as fast-paced as today's. The chief complaint is that currently, law enforcement agencies need only a judge-approved subpoena to search a suspect's online data, rather than the full search warrant required for...

Foreign Journalists in China Suffer Hacked Email Accounts: Yahoo, This Time

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The AP reports that at least three journalists and one analyst working in China, all of them foreign, were greeted with a brusque "We've detected an issue with your account" when trying to log in to their Yahoo email accounts. The puzzled users were told to contact Yahoo, and Yahoo technicians informed one that his account had indeed been hacked before restoring access.

These are just four examples, and it's not clear how related they are, but anecdotal evidence suggests a more widespread...