I’ve been hearing a lot about crowdsourcing lately. In general it’s a good idea, tapping the collective brainpower of your fans or customer base to generate ideas you might normally have to rely on hired professionals for. It’s been around for a long time, (think Betty Crocker recipe contests, American Idol or the 2002 vote for the new M&Ms color), but the Internet has made crowdsourcing infinitely easier and the scale infinitely larger. The … Read more »
My husband is a productivity junkie. Every week he likes to show off some new piece of software he’s found that will improve his daily work speed by nine seconds, and I usually just smile encouragingly and walk away. Occasionally, however, I try out one of these tools, and this time, I have found one that I love: Things.
Things is a to-do list/task manager for Mac OSX by Cultured Code. Now, there are a LOT of list-managing “solutions” out there, and I’ve tried many of them, but I always ended up … Read more »
Two weeks ago I did some contract production work at a kids’ toy/book company. While having lunch in the company kitchen, several employees got into a rollicking discussion about their various techniques for ripping off ideas from trade show exhibitors. Having just exhibited at my first trade show, this naturally made me very nervous and kind of angry, so I vented to friend about it.
I said, “I knew big companies had no qualms about ripping off small designers, but I didn’t know that it was the sole source of their creative development!”
“So what?” My friend said.
“So that sucks! I don’t … Read more »