Nothing comes free with a purchase. The idea of the bundle is concept of behavioral economics that persists because people seem to so readily relate to it an enjoy it. If you pay $5 for a sandwich and get a soda for “free,” the soda and the sandwich cost a total of $5. They wouldn’t give you the soda for [...]
Last night, I was on the floor of the NYSE for the Silicon Alley 100 party, and it continues to strike me that the trading floor is a theater set. Today, less than 10% of trading volume happens on the floor, and they’ve closed 3 of the 5 trading rooms. It’s not the place it was when on my middle school [...]
This morning on my way to take my twenty month old to swim class at the Y, I stopped off to buy some cables for the office at Best Buy on 86th Street and 3rd Avenue. I booted up Shopkick on my way to the register, because the discounts had appeared broad and generous in the past. After struggling to [...]
Last night at our NY Viral Meetup, Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry spoke on his ITP project from years ago: The Dog Island. The project was part of a class taught by our own Jonah Peretti. Paul and a partnered designed a fake site and company operating an island where: Over 2,500 dogs are already enjoying a better life at [...]
Last night Jonah spoke one a Fast Company panel with Gary V and some others. I thought the Q&A style elicited some good answers, so I grabbed my phone and recorded. The first video does a nice job of explaining how we work with brands. The overriding message is try lots of ideas, measure with data, test, and refine. This [...]
You are not currently permitted to spit and mail a genetic sample in the State of New York. The NY State Department of Health says that spitting in a tube and mailing it to 23andMe without a doctor and license is against the law. Not surprisingly, there was also debate or discusion about the benefits of home pregnancy tests when [...]
BuzzFeed is built largely on Perl. I'm not a connoisseur of languages, but when I've asked the team, why, I've gotten a few simple and reasonable responses: When BuzzFeed was in its early experimental days Perl was the new hottness Perl is a great and flexible language It's not about the clubs it about the golfer Following on the point above, [...]
When you used the old Duane Reade Dollar Rewards Card, you got one point for every dollar you spent. Once you hit 100 points you got a coupon for $5. It was a pretty solid system that encouraged use of its rewards card. 5% to give up all your purchase information. Next thing I know, the program becomes rebranded as [...]
Beginning today, you’ll see an interview that Jill and I did for CBS. You can click below to play it. Link to Video It’ll play this week all over local news stations. On a flyer, like many of you, I ordered two 23andMe DNA kits on World DNA Day. Jill’s came back with the BRCA1 mutation, which drastically raises [...]
In last night’s episode of Mad Men, Don Draper drafts a full page letter ad that runs in the NY Times titled, “Why I’m quitting tobacco.” Draper makes a moralist argument, but it’s largely bullshit. The truth, as his secretary puts it, is to convey “he didn’t dump me; I dumped him.” Sterling Cooper is in a bad spot. In [...]
