Welcome to our site

Earlier this week, I worked from a Starbucks (my second office) with one of my best friends, Larry Hooper. He’s a musician, and as I designed websites he worked on song lyrics. At some point, his songwriting transitioned into haikus about our Starbucks experience. I thought they were worth sharing. So here you go:

Hey Blue-tooth Talker,
you look like a crazy guy
talking to yourself.

People talking loud
At a table dead center.
Oh so important.

e-mail, myspace, aim
twitter, flickr, MSN
blackberry cell phone

Guy there on brown couch
posing very seductive.
Inappropriate.

Time to leave here now.
Goodbye Starbucks people
and expensive drinks.

Have a happy Labor Day, folks.

Ugh.

I’m feeling dichotomous (read “Bad attitude”).

I saw a special on TV about these new hangers that are made from 100% recycled paper. They are provided free-of-charge to dry cleaners who want to save money and save the planet by nixing their old wire hangers. I love the concept. It made me giddy at first. Then my No Free Lunches – Not Even for the Planet – Radar™ started tingling.

Right on time, came the catch. Someone is paying for those hangers to be manufactured, and they want something out of it. They want our eyeballs, and they want them in our bedrooms.

To pay for the cost of manufacturing, they are selling what used to be the open air inside the old wire hangers as ad space. Now, when you are browsing your dry cleaned wardrobe in the morning, you’ll be presented with coupon ads for various products from face cream to copy paper.

“This is a billboard in the bedroom.”, says the owner with spot-on huckster smarm in the NBC Nightly News story featured on their site. But it feels less greasy than the self-congratulatory expression on the face of Revlon’s VP of Marketing while he quoths “How I grew our business while helping to save the planet.” from the huge ad on the Hanger Network home page. That said, he has flawless skin and I can’t take that away from him.

Bad Attitude Alert: I’d rather spread carbon paste directly on the atmosphere if being green means letting marketers pry even further into the quiet moments of my life.

I wonder which came first in the concepting of the product: solving the problem of the un-green wire hanger, or solving the problem of the increasing irrelevance of traditional media. I love my DVR (read “TiVo” like tissue reads “Kleenex”) but I’m ready to go back to responding to traditional media if it will lessen the insidious creeping of marketing communication inching into every other corner of my life.

Despite my more negatively weighted comments, I am actually torn about it. I do like the Green move, but I don’t like the intrusive price. I’m about 72% sure I’ve got a bad attitude about this. So, talk to me about it. Am I full of buttermilk?

The Filene podcast

Trey and I spent last week in Madison, Wisconsin with The Filene Research Institute.

We were visiting because in the very near future, Filene is going to kick off a podcast (Update: The first podcast episode is live here). We were fortunate enough to help them get it going.

Filene is an idea factory and one of the major innovation catalysts in the credit union industry (for example: later this week they’re hosting a colloquium on ‘large-scale credit union collaboration’). Their podcast will make for a fascinating listen for anyone in the financial industry.

Also, George Hofheimer, Filene’s Chief Research Officer and the show’s host, has a first-rate radio voice.

Podcasting tools

In setting up the podcast, we integrated several tools that came together to make a nice little podcasting system. If you’re looking to get into podcasting yourself, here are a few tools/services we used in their setup:

Evoca -

Filene’s podcast will be interview-driven, and Evoca is the perfect tool for recording conversations and managing audio files on the web. Evoca integrates with both Skype and your standard phone line, and allows you to record conversations straight to the web.

You can manage the audio files with albums and control if a file is public or private. Evoca also generates an RSS feed of your public audio files.

Also, it’s really cheap – $5/month for a bucket of 200 minutes of collective recording time, which renews each month.

PrettyMay -

PrettyMay is a Skype plugin, also for recording conversations. We chose this as the primary recording tool and Evoca as the file management tool because PrettyMay kept the audio quality a little better.

The interface is very easy to use. You click “record call,” and go. It saves the calls as mp3s on your computer. It also manages recorded conversations by timestamping and labeling who you were talking to.

Audacity -

Audacity is very awesome open source (read: “free”) audio-editing software. It’s great for adding music, editing out any unwanted dialogue, splicing together text to make interviewees say things they didn’t really say, and generallypolishing up your show.

This site has tutorials of some of the most fundamental things you’ll need to know to use it.

Trey is a convict, or how the story ends

Also, Trey should have gone to jail this weekend.

Friday, on our way to the airport to go home, Trey was pulled over by a police officer for speeding. As Trey cursed and I snapped pictures with my Macbook’s built-in camera, the officer ran his information in the cop-car. We braced for the ticket. We were pleasantly surprised when he returned and said “I’m going to let you off without a citation.”

“Thank you so much,” said Trey.

“Well, the reason is – because of how fast you were going, I’m legally obligated to arrest you, and I’d rather not right now. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

I’d bet that’s the first time anyone has ever gotten out of a ticket by going way too fast.