Thinking Interactive

Coming in later than usual this week, but it has been a crazy week for me, but I am hoping to write a few real posts over the holidays so stay tuned. 

1. BMW Product Navigator

As somebody who has previously worked on automotive kiosk experiences, I would really like to try this out first hand. Also, it is nice to see Microsoft’s Surface technology popping up more regularly.

2. How to be a 21st Century Capitalist

Umair Haque has a nice (albeit slightly abstract) post on the redefining capital and capitalism (something Adbusters and a whole bunch of other folks have been harping on for years). It is nice to see those ideas making it into more mainstream strategy discourse.

3. Woordle

Woordle creates word clouds based on text you provide. Below is what they automatically generated based on the RSS feed of this blog. I would love to see a word cloud of a week’s worth of the words that come out of my mouth. Now imagine that tracked over a year with robust analytics. I could pinpoint exactly when certain words became played out in my mind, compare my social vocabulary to my work vocabulary (I bet there would be a lot more cuss words than I would want to see in both) and do a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. There is definitely a nice business application or at the very least a cool art project here. Somebody please do this.

4. TechCrunch’s Interview With Lord Zuckerberg

It’s always nice to hear a bit about the vision for everybody’s favourite time hole.

5. Let Me Google That For You

Now when somebody asks you a question they could probably just Google themselves, you can really step up your jerk game by using this service to send them custom Google instructions to answer their question.

I don’t really need to post about this as it has been covered just about everywhere you can think of, but since I was there, I thought I would share my thoughts on it and provide a couple updates to the story. First of all, I didn’t think Sarah Lacy’s questions were that bad. I found some of them to be quite insightful. I was just more upset at how she started off the interview by attempting to humiliate Zuckerberg (very odd considering she was hand-picked by Facebook). He clearly wasn’t totally at ease to begin with and isn’t known to be very open so I doubt embarrassing him would encourage him to open up.

Also, her conversational interview style didn’t seem to work too well for him as she ended up talking far more than I think anybody would have liked to hear, leading to the mob uprising. While the way the audience reacted was not warranted, she reacted very poorly to the situation. If she had ignored them, the interview would have likely had a happier ending. Instead, she went on the defensive, lashing out at the audience and even her interviewee.

To make matters worse, in an interview she gave at a party shortly after the fiasco (nearly 40,000 views so far), she put the blame on not only the audience, but also the organizers, implying that what she was talking about was over the heads of the audience and that SXSW isn’t a good forum for someone of Mark Zuckerberg’s stature (funnily enough, he showed up and did an open Q&A at a Facebook Develop Garage the next day to some acclaim).

This dissolved all sympathy I had for her as her reaction to the situation clearly put her at just as much fault as the audience. Regardless of who was to blame this should have been the point where she apologized and admitted to having had a tough day, instead she insults the audience that includes a number of key influencers that could have a profound impact of the sales of her upcoming book. I wonder how her publishers reacted. I would love to know what their sales projections were for the book before the interview and whether or not they have shifted and in what direction.

Related Links
Full video of the interview
Sarah Lacy’s first article for Business Week in the aftermath (still unapologetic)