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Hey, check out the behavior when you link to a flicker gallery from facebook. Flickr apparently detects that Facebook is parsing out the content of the page and inserts a shameless plug, ideally formatted for Facebook’s word limit.

This is value-destorying behavior — it does not create any end-user utility as far as I can tell.

Maybe its time to try smugmug?

I’ve uploaded a new set of photos to my flickr gallery: a series from our trip up to Vermont last year.

Friends,

Tomorrow is my first “real” day at my new, post-graduation job. With my summer of decompression / perspective-seeking over, it makes sense that this blog is going to need to transition from a general-purpose ideas blog to more of a personal update and observations blog. 

Its been a terrific summer vacation, but now I am ready to get busy, learn new things and seek a different way of making an impact than the familiar routes I’ve taken over the last 10 years. My new position in the corporate consulting world is quite a change of scale for me. For most of my pre-MBA career, I’ve been pretty much the small-team entrepreneur, technologist, product manager and idea guy. Now I’m looking to broaden my perspective and skill-base to larger organizations. My new employer offers one of the most extraordinary environments to develop business skills, seasoning, and experience, as I saw firsthand from my summer internship. Despite all of my natural second-guessing of the choice to return, I keep coming back to a subliminal itch telling me there is something I’ve gotta learn, and this is the place to do it. In many ways, I see this move as an extension of the reason I started Springboard Informatics: to offer integrated technology and business insights to my clients. Onwards!

For the next week, I’m in consultant boot camp, then hopefully staffing. For anyone who had been reading this blog just looking for MIT Sloan news, general observations and photography thoughts, I apologize in advance for any upcoming “irrelevant” posts.

For micro-updates, follow me on Twitter (username=jgilbert.)

Jeremy

A baby elephant playing in Masai Mara.

Photos from my three week trip to East Africa have been posted here. Please leave comments and let me know your favorites on Flickr.

In the longstanding “kids vs. the environment” debate, one company decided to split the difference.

Actually, if you click around their web site, it does appear that they are pretty forward thinking about sustainability in Maine, but at first brush, this bottle cap appears more like a plea for help.

By the way, I re-enter the working world on Nov 6, which ought to bring an end to the “observed irony” phase of this blog.

As noted by several observers, including Gizmodo, Steve Jobs was very conspicuous about sharing the stage with other product thought leaders at Apple’s latest notebook event. This seems to support my previous post, which suggested Apple would achieve enormous signaling benefit from revealing more about Apple’s strong organizational competencies. 

Part of my team’s original research suggested that the Apple’s internal reward culture was strongly built around product quality, and that this desire to build innovative, high quality products was extremely pervasive inside of Apple’s culture. This thesis was supported by the following exchange on the Q3 earnings call, as captured by Engadget:

Update 3: Hitting harder on the price aspect of netbooks, Steve says, “We don’t know how to make a $500 machine that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA won’t let us do it.” 

Trism, a delightful and innovative game for the iPhone, has recently become one of my obsessions, especially after spending over 15 hours on an airplane. Despite netting a reported $250K since its launch and gaining over 20,000 registered users, there is apparently no definitive guide to the strategy of the game.

I’m by no means an expert at the game, but I’ve come across a number of tips that may be able to help you make the jump from a beginner to an intermediate player. 

Read on for more, and send in your ideas for v2.0 of this guide!

Read the rest of this entry »

For those looking for coverage of the US banking crisis told in plain and simple language, check out the London Daily Telegraph. While in London, I read two days of their reporting on the crisis, and was amazed about how plainly they explain the problem and its implications to their UK-based audience. Some of it is a bit oversimplistic, but at least they take the time to explain the details rather than resorting to overgeneralizations or jargon.

Plus, its always educating to read a perspective on something from outside of your own country. 

I leave it as an exercise for you, the reader, to determine if “de-jargonating” is really a word.

A Cheetah relaxing in the afternoon sun- 5:47 PM, Maasai Mara, Kenya

Just a quick note to friends that I am indeed back in Boston from my trip to Africa, unburying myself from hundreds of emails.

One curious story from my trip: BA flight 214 had an engine stall over the Atlantic on my return flight, so I got to enjoy a old-fashioned English fire brigade reception on our return back to London. 

As of today, it is Just a few weeks left before I rejoin the working world and resume being a productive member of society.

One of the great things about MIT Sloan is the rate that it punches out new startups. A buddy of mine, Jeff Vyduna, is involved with Poll Everywhere, the “do-it-yourself” audience polling tool. Jeff is one of those crazy guys who pops out of an amazing consulting company, goes to school for a year, meets a bunch of people, and within 12 months is getting buzz on TechCrunch. Poll Everywhere powered the audience awards at the MIT $100K business plan competition, and now appears to have moved into an open launch. Poll Everywhere is the ultimate Audience Response System, because it doesn’t require any special hardware. Kudos to Jeff & the rest of the Poll Everywhere Team!

By the way, participation is the key to successful engagement with any audience. They must have hit us on the head with that a million times at MIT Sloan, but if you don’t believe me, check out this photo of audience response cards from one of Howard Anderson’s talks at the MIT Sloan Sales Conference. 

I’m currently tracking a few stealth-mode startups in the MIT Sloan community — if you want to add yours to the list send me a line and I’ll help get the word out when the time is right.