Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com In the business world enough is truly never enough. Comcast isn’t satisfied being the biggest cable provider in the country, so it acquired NBC and is moving into the broadcasting business. PepsiCo doesn’t just produce soda, it also owns the entire line of Frito Lay potato chips, Quaker Oats, Gaterade, and Tropicana. Clorox, a company whose bleach you might use every weekend, also owns KC Masterpiece barbeque sauce, Hidden Valley salad dressing, and Fresh Scoop kitty litter. What do any of these companies and product lines have in common? Very little beyond these companies strive for diverse revenue streams, and the tech world is no different. This week’s example: Verizon purchasing AOL Inc for $4.4 billion. I know what you’re thinking, “America Online? Didn’t that company die with the dial-up modem?” Well first off, the dial-up modem is still used by 3% of US internet users so back off. Second, AOL may no longer be the jugger...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The last two decades have been rough for traditional brick and mortar businesses. Prior to the rise of e-commerce, finding commercial success meant juggling quality products, store location, correct pricing, supply, demand, and much more than could possibly be squeezed into this column. Now with the internet firmly in place as the number one destination for buying goods, it seems the only variables that matter to consumers are price and shipping. This seachange in consumer motivation hurts business owners big and small, but if you actually crunched the numbers I wouldn't be surprised to discover the big box stores are hurt the most. Consider for a minute the overhead of a Best Buy or Target. Both stores operate roughly 2,000 stores across the country, each with dozens of employees, thousands of pieces of merchandise, and other expenses just to keep the lights on. Now imagine the internet comes along and rising with it is Amazo...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Imagine you wake up tomorrow in Des Moines, 1985. Nevermind searching for plutonium to power your flux capacitor, how would you figure out a good place to eat? There’s no facebook to bounce ideas off your friend (who coincidentally are probably infants in the mid-80s), there are truly only two options: look in the newspaper and asking strangers for their local favorites. Thankfully, there’s no need for you to find a way back to the future as we already live there. In 2015 recommendations and opinions abound virtually everywhere; on Facebook, Twitter, online circulars, blogs, and pretty much everywhere else that has the www prefix. Still the majority of online review seekers turn to one site over all the rest: Yelp.com. Since 2004 has been the online site to discover public insight on practically any storefront; restaurants, bars, grocery stores, pet shops, barbers, hardware stores, and probably a handful of lemonade stands. Ye...

I have a distinct memory from my junior year at Iowa State where my adviser asked "What are your workplace goals?" It wasn't a question I had ever been asked and certainly not something 21-year-old Pat had every considered. Everyone's been asked about their dream job or their career goals, but I had never heard the specific phrase of "workplace goals." Being someone who likes to reflect on interesting and unexpected encounters it took me a bit to come up with my dream workplace criteria. See workplace doesn't mean employer. I could fire off a list of dream employers in a heartbeat, but that wasn't the question. Second, goal isn't the same thing as dream. Goals are things you work towards and achieve, dreams are things that magically happen, e.g. lucky happenstance. There's also the possibility of dreams turning into nightmares, whereas goals are personally crafted and continually rewarding. After a minute of thinking out-loud about wha...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There is a weird phenomenon in technology where all too often an innovation doesn’t fully get its due until the second, third, or fourth iteration. Whether it’s filesharing, ecommerce, or online video so many revolutions are delayed. Currently the latest old technology-turned new is live video streaming with the mobile application Periscope. Saturday, May 2 the sports world was entirely focused on the “fight of the century,” Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather. For $100 viewers could watch the boxing match via pay-per-view. Now maybe you think $100 to watch two idiots pound the snot out of each other is stupid, but for over three million Americans the price was right. But for thousands of others, it was $100 too high, that is to say while three million fools paid to watch the fight, 10,000 watched it every jab, uppercut, and haymaker for free on Periscope. If the internet age has taught us anything, it’s why buy the cow w...