@sdp

Mandrill operates as a startup within MailChimp. It’s a product that’s both complementary and potentially disruptive to MailChimp, and we think the best way to deal with that tension is to press into it as hard as we can. So we cannibalized our own engineers and isolated them from the MailChimp team, allowing them to focus all their energy on this big new opportunity. As a result, Mandrill is evolving fast.

— I have to say I warm to this frankness hugely.

(Source: mandrill.com)

McDonalds, as with most large multinational enterprises, pursues a strategy of being ‘environmentally friendly’ in order for consumers to view the organisation in a positive social context. In essence, being an environmentally friendly organisation can range from having a concern over the state of natural resources to being concerned over the way in which the organisational activity affects environmental pollution.

McDonalds have four major aims and objectives as far as the environment is concerned:
- ‘Conserving and protecting natural resources’
- ‘Encouraging environmental values and practices’
- ‘Effectively managing solid waste’
- ‘Ensuring accountability procedures’

There are four technical ways that an organisation can be seen in, in an environmental context, and these include socially obstructive, socially obligative, socially responsive and socially contributive.

— Extract from a 2003 gap analysis for McDonalds by Financial Times Research.

(Source: andidas.com)

A few years back, before all this internet/smartphone/ubiquitous stuff, I worked for a media development NGO, helping to strengthen public-interest media in the developing world. One of the ways we used to articulate why it was important to support these independent, public and community media was “imagine a world without media”… Unthinkable.

Now, with the space for individual communication and agency expanding and affecting so many facets of our lives, a flotilla of sites “going dark” is a critical action that demonstrates where we might all end up if this kind of legislation, which seeks to protect archaic modes of production and value creation, at the behest of entrenched lobbies and interests, is not stopped in its tracks. SOPA and PIPA must be stopped.

[And, if laws such as these pass in the US, then these flawed and failed legal standards will then be exported to other nations, with drastic results for free speech, and the creation of value (cultural, economic, and network) worldwide.]

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff.

— Louis CK shares the results of his direct download experiment in a crushingly funny letter to fans.

When there are five or six conferences held in closed locations every year, where telecommunications companies, surveillance companies and government ministers meet in secret to cut deals, buy equipment, and discuss the latest methods to intercept their citizens’ communications – that I think meets the level of concern. They say that they are doing it with the best of intentions. And they say that they are doing it in a way that they have checks and balances and controls to make sure that these technologies are not being abused. But decades of history show that surveillance powers are abused – usually for political purposes.

— Chris Soghoian talking to The Guardian for their jaw-dropping piece on how Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens (Nov 1st, 2011)

Ethics in Business panel at the Carnegie Council in NYC, featuring Yahoo!’s Ebele Okobi-Harris and YouTube’s Abbi Tatton on the new challenges of global information-sharing as they run into human rights concerns. (via the WITNESS blog.)