Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

LEGO gets customers involved

I absolutely love this story from Think by Peter Davidson. LEGO is allowing customers to download software, design their own building set, and then upload the design for competition against others. LEGO is going to put the winning designs into production. Winners will be awarded with design credit on the box, free sets of their design, and royalties.

Talk about getting your customers involved!

Love it!
Love it!
Love it!

It is all about speed.

I really like this post from Concrete Covina called Slow Down to Speed Up.

Fast Company has explored this topic a couple of times. Check out Time to Slow Down? (May 2000) and Slow Down, You Move Too Fast (Feb. 2001). It seems to me it was a cover story too. Hmmm...

Liars, Liars

Seth has a new book coming out in May - All Marketers Are Liars. Here is my post from the 800-CEO-READ Blog.

BzzAgent: Be Open

I am a little behind on my feeds, but I wanted to point out an significant change at BzzAgent.

In the past, BzzAgent has asked its BzzAgents to "Be Discreet" about their involvement with campaigns. I was a BzzAgent on a couple of campaigns, because I wanted to see what the process was like. I was always a little bothered by having to keep a secret identity, but didn't have a thoughtful response for an alternate course.

Dave Balter announced a change about two weeks ago. BzzAgents are now requested to:

Be Open

BzzAgents should be entirely open about their identity. As long as you’re sharing your honest opinion, being candid about your involvement with BzzAgent actually helps create better Bzz. If you like a product or service, it doesn’t matter where you found out about it, so don’t feel as though you need to be anonymous or stealthy. Just be open and honest and let your opinion count.

I think this is a great change. I think this will give their efforts even more validity.

Collins on Mergers

Jim Collins on the Sears/Kmart merger - "you cannot buy your way to greatness."

[via Tom Peters]

Web 2.0 summary

I know this is a little after the fact, but this is an outstanding summary from the Web 2.0 conference.

Lots of interesting things on trends and ideas...

Carnival of Capitalists

The Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Lachlan Gemmell's Software Startup.

Holiday Music - Barenaked for the Holidays

I am a big fan of Barenaked Ladies and they have a new holiday album called "Barenaked for the Holidays". It is a combination of old and new material, and has all the fun of a typical BNL album. You'll find "Do They Know It's Christmas", "Green Christmas", and their "God Rest Ye/ We Three Kings" medley with Sarah McLaughin. My favorite of the new is "Elf's Lament". They brought in Michael Buble to help with it.

I am going to direct you to the BNL site to buy it. I got a strange message from iTunes today that I could no longer purchase the item off their site (and I could not find a way to contact them to tell them I had a problem).

Wiki Spam

I am starting to have problems with people coming along, deleting the bizblogdirectory, and put in a bunch of crap. I knew it would be a matter of time before this would happen.

Is anyone else having the same problems with their public wikis? What does Wikipedia do to combat this?

Gamesmanship in the Air

I think the commercial aviation space is an interesting one to watch. It is interesting to see Boeing and Airbus joust with each other. Boeing has chosen the route of speed and efficiency with its new 7E7 development. Airbus has gone with making really big planes with its A380.

The latest is reported today in the WSJ [sub. needed]. Airbus unveiled a revised plan to develop a plane to compete with the 7E7. The A350 will supposedly have more capacity and a longer range. The design for the A350 has already needed to be updated once, after fleet managers didn't see any real advantage to it over the A330. The A350 is basically a A330 with new wings. Any pilot certified on the A330 will be able to fly the A350.

Both companies are bickering back and forth about whose plane will be better, but the importance of the story is in the broad strokes. Boeing wanted to have 200 planes sold by the end of the year. At this point they have only sold about 50. Merely announcing a potentially new plane, Airbus slows down any traction Boeing was getting. They probably threw some engineers at the A350, but they essential spent no money to create a huge story - one that matches nicely with being the leader in aircraft sales last year and most likely this year.

I think this a brilliant move on Airbus' part. They have market leadership and they make announcements to cement in people's minds that they are the market leader.

P.S. Stuck right next to the A350 story on A10 is an American Airline story stating they are going to defer delivery of 54 Boeing jets. Rough PR day for Boeing.