"The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?"

"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.

"The Movement Method Cards are a collection of strategies gathered to inspire, guide, and elevate the creative process. Use the cards to spark ideas, facilitate conversations, categorize strategies, or for designing your own design processes."

"What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups."

"Partners have little or no incentive even to investigate non-fee-producing options. Therefore, open source or lower cost, more out-of-the-box CMS solutions are rarely if ever offered as possible solutions. In fact, my experience found that more times than not, the Big 5 partner already knew exactly which CMS solution she was going to pitch before she walked through the client’s door. This was something that never ceased to amaze me, but the lesson here is to beware of software recommendations from any Big 5 firm." No shit.

"Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations. In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't."

"Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999." And so say all of us.

"Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections." What, really?

Inexpensive, fast, viral, unmeasurable, optional.

"Maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all."

"When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project."

"Ultimately, the days of sticking the online equivalent of a brochure up on the internet and calling it your web strategy are over. It’s about presence - and presence requires ongoing activity. Just like going to work, being at a party, or any other kind of social milieu - just physically being there is not enough. You have to be doing something."

Some sensible arguments here.

"An international music marketing collective offering sonic strategies for brands and their agencies, along with brand strategies for musicians, managers and labels."

"Since the big NY Times Magazine article a lot of just-starting indie musicians have been writing to ask about how I made all of this happen."

"The key to Twitter is the level of listening you do as well as talking. It is definitely supposed to be an interactive program. And, in fact, this is where you build the majority of your Whuffie (aka social capital)." Mixed feelings.

Coudal used to generate revenues almost exclusively from client work. Anyone who’s done client work knows the inherent frustrations that come along with that. But instead of merely accepting these frustrations [...], Coudal searched for another path.

"At the end of last year, I decided to give away my book, Trigger Happy [...] Thirty thousand downloads later and counting, it’s time to collate the lab results."

"The following lineup of innovation lessons emerged from a video game conference, an interview, and several experts’ comments."

"So assuming that the time is right (and it might not be), what would you do to create a brand new agency, like what they did in the 60s?"

"Among the various options [Trent Reznor] gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone."

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

"Clients complained that their agencies [...] typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area." Glad it's not just me.

What they need to do is make the store experience inviting, not so much about pushing product, but about being that Third Place (not home or work) where people can get a respite.

"It’s a clever way of using the available technology to get this music into the hands of people who might not otherwise have found it - and to promote it more strongly."

"Technology companies typically spend about 20% of revenues on R&D, is there an agency anywhere that spends even 1%?"

"The easiest way to sell the Semantic Web vision to consumers is to talk about how it can make their lives easier. When machines understand things in human terms, and can apply that knowledge to your attention data, we'll have a web that knows what we wan

"When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can't be copied?"

"Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song "Radio Head" from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the

"The idea was to collect sounds that came from all over the world to later integrate them to the song called "Going Places". So I posted a little loop taken from the song [and] 6 weeks after the post, I had received about 70 sounds." Good idea.

"Ten things Google has found to be true". Classic vision.

"The lesson learnt by MTV Networks subsidary, Comedy Central, when it made the entire archive of “The Daily Show” available for streaming online, is that Internet TV viewing can lead to more traditional television viewing."

"90% of everything is always crap. The more stuff there is, the greater the 10% pile becomes. All we need are effective filtering systems to sort what we consider to be wheat from what we consider to be chaff."

The story itself is pretty tedious but leads on to some great comments on the music industry.

"Suburban Home Records, when faced with the complexity and unpredictability of online consumer behaviour, have thrown their hands up and said ‘Oh go on… just download the album already’."

"His fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online."

"The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track."

"A network of ad-supported online record labels and blogs offering completely free music streams and downloads from emerging and established artists." Labels include Warp and Kompakt.

"Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked."

"Here's how it works: write an original Christmas song, record it, and email the song to us. Asthmatic Kitty will pick a winner, and that person will trade rights to their song for rights to Sufjan's song."

"New and interesting websites from around the internet that may be of use to independent musicians and the music business."

Great Sherburne article on the past, present and future of electronic music. "Scenes and sounds that were once strictly local affairs now have no problem connecting with niche publics anywhere on earth."

"[A] controversial session in which six teenage girls [...] discussed their music consumption practices." Fascinating stuff, especially the question from the former BPI Executive Chairman.

"If the volume of searches reflect the regional popularity of a search string, then Google Trends reveal useful information for marketing agencies, record labels, and booking agents."

Not a particular fan of Reznor but there's some smart opinions in this piece.

"As counterintuitive as it may seem in this age of iPods and digital downloads, vinyl -- the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles -- is poised to re-enter the mainstream, or at least become a major tributary."

"The music industry is evolving, and major labels are starting to develop new strategies to help adapt to the current DIY climate."

Useful comments on the last100 "Five ways the music industry can prevent its own demise." article

I'm looking for music artists (individuals or bands) who are selling their own music via digital downloads (with some specific qualifications)

"What's more encouraging about the internet and music are the ways that the smaller bands and less well known musicians can find new ways to have careers and offer their music. One lovely example is this site from Erik Friedlander, promoting his Block Ice

"A brief, twenty minute presentation to some friends in the music industry about why it’s time we pay closer attention to consumer needs when it comes to digital music."

"The future of record labels and why online battle of the band competitions produce “an endless reservoir of shit”."

"Five alternative models for selling music, many of which are actually being tested by artists, entrepreneurs, and even the major record labels themselves."

"Every different iteration of these new music strategies are uncritically assessed in the news media as an artist ‘giving away’ their music for free. When, in actual fact, mostly that’s not what’s going on."

"I've been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that--with some exceptions--they are mostly clueless."

"Rather, the user's own identity online on Facebook, would become a personalized portal through which to view the constantly shifting relationships that matter most to that individual."

"This isn't specifically about brand strategy or campaign strategy, or any other task. It's about how to go about getting a good idea for whatever you've been tasked to do."

"Successful businesses measure and count things [...] unsuccessful business either measure nothing, the wrong things, too many things, or finally, they measure the right things but they don't communicate the measurements efficiently."