My Stream
Unpolished short posts, statuses, tweets, links, videos, and brief thoughts.
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Just came across this talk by Malcolm Gladwell telling a story of how the food industry learned about the need to identify different types of tastes rather than looking for the “most popular”. This ties in neatly with some of the ideas I have blogged about before about the need for anyone developing a product or service to find out your user personas and decide which ones to target, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Brand new buses in Montréal
It seems a lot of money is being invested in public transport in Montréal at the moment. Not just the roll-out of hundreds of pickup stations for Bixi (the community bike scheme) across the city, but 300 new STM buses as well. I got to try one out tonight when we were catching the 535 at Guy Concordia. There was an STM official who stopped the queue boarding the 535, flagged it on its way, and beckoned up a brand new bus which was approaching behind, which we all boarded. I think we may have been literally the first paying passengers to board, it was completely spotless and everything was shiny and clean. I don’t think I’ve been in any city where they invest as much in public transport – and not only is there a really good network, it runs on time too. I can catch the 51 to Snowdon metro from the end of our road every 6 minutes at peak times, and the timetables are so accurate that I can plan journeys down to the minute even when changing from bus to metro to bus and back again. Enjoying the public transport lifestyle very much, and it seems to be helping me lose weight as well.
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Québec local music promotion
On Sunday evening we rented a car from Communauto (a great alternative to owning a car in Montréal). I noticed that each Communauto car comes with a Québec-government sponsored CD of local emerging bands & musicians. There were actually some really good tunes on there. Just thought it was interesting, there seems to be a strong trend of supporting anything local here. Which is fine.. just not something you always see.
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Google making use of Web History Data
Just spotted this, first time I have seen Google actually doing something with the “Web Search History” data. Could be actually quite useful. Although depending what you search for, you may now not want to check Google News with friends/colleagues around!!
BBC News – Air disasters timeline
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/2008892.stm
I think they missed an incident in 2001.. around september time
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