Churbuck.com

If you find yourself nodding off in a post-lunch meeting about the “Corporate TPS Process Framework” and don’t want to get bagged when your tonsils and adenoids make a wet “snark” sound when you pop awake then …
Say something. Anything. Interrupt the presenter and say something intelligently inane such as, “Have you considered a continual process improvement framework for this model?”

Then shut up. You won’t be sleepy anymore. People will think you are a master of concentration. I learned this trick at McKinsey.

Okay — the umpteenth Second Life proposal just crossed my desk — and I spent 30 minutes writing my usual screed about why I don’t like it. My opinion comes down to this: I don’t like it and your mileage may vary.

Me — aka Horace Clutterbuck — in SecondLife

Here’s what I wrote with some sanitation:

1. Linden Labs has the best PR department on the planet. They have suckered the press and marketing communities like no one else I have ever seen.
2. There are no verifiable traffic numbers for Second Life. Population counts are not an indication of true engagement. Until I see verified third-party numbers that indicate time-in-world/frequency of log-ins, I will restrict my analysis of Second Life to my usage over the past eight months.
3. The hardcore user base has reacted negatively to the “invasion” of their community by brands. Particularly brands that proclaim “firsts.”
4. The most interesting activity in Second Life — which is not talked about in the press — is virtual sex. I’ll bet it is one of the biggest economic opportunities. The second economic opportunity is building stores and islands for companies like XXX and YYY.
5. YYY Island is deserted at any time of day.
6. Inviting people to “join” you in Second Life is a process which can take upwards of 30 minutes to complete registration. The press flamed YYY for holding a press conference in Second Life that required them to register. Most of the proposals I have received over the past six months from the likes of ZZZZ and others are from firms that have made a significant investment in selling Second Life services.
7. QQQ’s deck is highly misleading. It mixes Social Networks — which include MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, etc. — with MMPORGs — such as World of Warcraft. Second Life has no “objective” or “quest” mode whereas World of Warcraft is a far more rich experience and thriving global community. In other words, there is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid.
8. Second Life is ugly. Second Life delivers terrible performance and the lag times I have experienced usually result in my standing in a corner or walking underwater. I enter it with a negative anticipation, not a positive one. Integrating content with Second Life is a pain in the neck.
9. Second Life has serious IP issues. Users steal content from each other. Linden is obsessed with trademark violations.
10. Second Life’s creation tools are very arcane and difficult to use. Development firms like Electric Sheep and Crayon [correction "crayon" is not a development company per se] are making a mint off of brands needing development help. This is not a language nor development environment that is easily mastered and any moves we take would demand external contractors.

I believe virtual worlds will emerge as preferred environments, but at this point I have a hard time accepting Second Life as much more than a virtual tradeshow with a red light district. Basically Vegas without the gambling.

I have covered and participated in online communities since 1986. I wrote the first major story in the national press about “virtual reality.” Same with the web. The web was an obvious technology because it was a) open, b) intuitive and easy to code (HTML) and c) built on the concept of hyperlinks. Second Life is “free”, but not “open”, impenetrable to code, and owned by a single corporation.

So, my guidance is this:
Second Life sucks in this user’s opinion. I will only discuss Second Life proposals inside Second Life, insuring that the other person has experienced the joys of getting a dumb name assigned to them (I am “Horace Clutterbuck” and walking around the laggiest environment I’ve seen since the days of 56K modems. I hope I eat my hat on this one, but right now, I am solidly in the camp of opinion that Second Life is Get-A-Life. If you want to have a good time online, try World of Warcraft.

Marshall Kirkpatrick » Open Sourcing My TechCrunch Work Flow
Marshall Kirkpatrick share some useful tips for consuming large volumes of feeds, especially important for anyone with the task of monitoring online buzz about a brand, but interestingly some insights into the new culture of “scoops” in the blogosphere.

“The following is a description of my feed reading methodology. It’s how I break stories, if not in the first place then into the larger blogosphere. It’s a work flow that I believe can be applied in almost any sector.”

The past two weeks cemented the role of the cellphone camera in citizen journalism. I was noodling around YouTube when I caught the video of a student getting Tasered for refusing to leave the library at UCLA. I’ll bet you’ve seen it. It’s agonizing to watch, to listen to some poor soul shriek as he gets zapped through two barbs implanted in his flesh, but the telling thing about the whole affair came at two points. One was the videographer — who I assume was capturing it on a cell phone — caught other students capturing the incident on cell phones. The second was the comments, when one viewer complained that the video sucked and the cameraperson was too much of a coward to get up close and personal and really show what was going on. That struck me as highly instructive — is there a simple guide to what to do when one sees news being made? Can a citizen simply wade into a confrontation and start taping? Look at the importance of the Zapruder films and ask yourself, if news is being made, are you ready to capture it?

The second event was the taking down of Kramer — Michael Whathisface — who launched into a racist attack and essentially got bagged by the same device.  This leads me to the question, in a society under surveillance, who is more likely to catch a misdeed? The security camera screwed into the streetlamp by The Man or a mob of Verizon wielding everymen? Cool stuff.

Beijing Boyce

Just left a comment on my May post about Beijing Nightlife and automatically earns a place in my Beijing expat blogroll as a service to my buddies in BJ who need a guide to the local scene.

“Stay home on Saturday night after a full day of staff training and before a Sunday in the office, or answer an SMS from Eddie O and go out for “just one drink.” I recklessly chose the latter and was soon riding shotgun on a high-speed Sanlitun pub-crawl. Here are the highlights.”

Busy week

11.27 – Monday – Boston to NYC for two meetings then to RTP

11.28-12.1 – Tues. to Thurs. – RTP, NC
12.2 – Sarasota, FL

12.3/5 – Cotuit

Light blogging this weekend due to the holiday, a house full of teenagers, college application assistance for one of those teenagers, lots of kitchen time, and a persistently wrenched lower back which sends me to the muscle relaxants and long stints of lying on the floor.

Black-and-Blue Friday was spent as far away from the Temples of Mammon as possible, as family and dogs boated to the barrier island at the head of the harbor and marched from end-to-end in a little under two hours. I needed some soft sand trudging to help my back and the walk helped quite a bit. (If the back doesn’t sort itself out in 48-hours my travel schedule next week may be at risk since hotel beds are not helping this two-week old rowing injury solve itself.)

The walk was gorgeous following Thanksgiving’s rainy gale. Bluebird cloudless skies with a howling 35-knot breeze out of the north that drove the sand off of the dunes in whirling sand-devils. The dogs went into their usual pre-walk mania, wife and children were swaddled in layers of wool and fleece, and so off we set, the dunes to our left, Nantucket Sound to our right, down a beach remarkable for bearing absolutely no footprints save those of a Great Blue Heron which hopped ahead of us a safe 25 yards away, squawking its annoyance.

Dead Neck is a macabre name for a gorgeous, 2-mile long island that is home in the summertime to a population of nesting Arctic and Least Common Terns. It was formed from two islands — Sampson’s Island to the west at the Cotuit end, and Dead Neck to the east on the Osterville side. The main entrance to Cotuit Bay used to separate the two islands through what is now known as Cupid’s or Pirate’s Cove (my favorite place on the planet). One hurricane or major storm in the early 20th century closed that channel and married the two islands together. The inside, or harbor side is very tranquil and calm, and hence popular in the summer months for picnickers and swimmers. The outside is a lot more wild, with the surf audible here at my house on stormy nights. The interior is a great representation of coastal flora — beachplums, bayberry, cedars, and small copses of forest where all sorts of critters make their homes. The birds nest throughout the interior, so the Massachusetts Audubon Society fences those nests off in the late spring to keep the local foxes and coyotes (which swim across the Seapuit River) from wiping out the more endangered species like Piping Plovers.

An end-to-end walk seems like a rare thing and my wife remarked several times during yesterday’s march that we should walk it more often. Summer-time marches are hot Saharan affairs that involve crossing other people’s beach blanket turf. Late fall and winter walks are special events when you know there isn’t another soul sharing the place and the only footprints are your own.

A feeble effort to take a Christmas card photo failed when the eldest pointed out the utter cliche of such a pose. The annual taking of the photo (aka the “Afternoon of Tears”) is the low point of the holiday and this year the eldest is invoking his 20-year old status as an exemption from participation. Little does he know ….

The walk made us feel virtuous, wind burned, and entitled to multiple slices of left-over pumpkin and pecan pie. The dogs passed out, exhausted from the excitement and effort. I think this single walk will rank as the highlight of the holiday for me. With the weather forecast to be even better today and tomorrow, we may have to do a repeat.

Knowledge management is a fuzzy IT challenge that feels like it will soon become as tired as Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, but finding new life online under a few new labels, such as co-creation, collaboration, and innovation networks. What I know about knowledge management systems and tools comes from my participation in McKinsey’s Business Knowledge Services initiative in 2000-2001, my strategy consulting with Richard Lusk in the go-to-market strategy at the online collaboration company, Foldera, and reading of Thomas Davenport’s Working Knowledge and Thomas Stewart’s The Wealth of Knowledge and other desultory scans of the business theorists.

I’m going to focus the next few weeks on the concept of external knowledge management — the practice of seeking and managing intelligence from the market versus managing what lies within the organizational wall. I wrote an article in 2004 for Forrester Magazine with Navi Radjou on his research into corporations that constructed networks within and outside those walls to increase their time to market and improve their portfolio of innovations (I hate the term innovation on principle, having seen the term abused by makers of everything from candy to pickup trucks. I define “innovation” as invention made commercial). Those networks have tended to emphasize the connections between an organization’s internal resources and contractors or partners.

The extension of knowledge management to include outside contributors and participants leads to the point of this post: what tools can facilitate the collaboration? The old models of using enterprise solutions such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange have crumbled under the rise of PHP forums, commercial (and open) wiki structures such as JotSpot and MediaWiki, and now Office 2.0 plays such as Zimbra, Foldera, and 37 Signals’ Backpack, and Google’s moves into online applications such as spreadsheets and word processors.

IBM’s announcement last week that it was moving its online innovation activities — such as its lauded “Innovation Jam” — to Second Life sparked some interest, but I remain reluctant to endorse Second Life due to the more significant account set up issues that confront new users. Some press beefed about the PITA factor when a competitor of ours held a press conference in Second Life, but I can’t completely throw the metaverse play to the dogs just yet, even after spending an hour in “Amsterdam” yesterday ogling the virtual hookers …

But I digress. Online collaboration tools seem to be focused on point to point collaboration plays such as 37Signals which extend an organization’s reach beyond the constraints of its enterprise tools – aka Lotus Notes. Opening a Notes account or granting a non-employee VPN access into a corporate knowledge management system is much more trouble than its worth, so solutions such as Basecamp are filling that niche. Foldera’s tool offers a lot of promise and when it comes out of beta next year, the proof will be in its adoption. I have not played around with Zimbra, but my buddy Dan Lyons at Forbes has been experimenting with it and gives it high marks.

For public collaboration — inviting the masses in to comment and play — there are of course blogs and their comment structures, but as I have noted in an earlier post on the mechanics of blogging and community development, they ultimately give too much amplification to the power of the blogger’s voice and little to none to the commentary.

That leaves wikis — a solid platform for collaboration as the Wikipedia attests — but not one without a significant amount of parliamentary processes to control vandalism and defacement.

And so I shall experiment, downloading the installer for MediaWiki and building out an instance here on Churbuck.com.

Vacation has commenced from now until after T-giving. Will be the first time the immediate nuclear family has been together since early September — the college student arrived tonight, the prep school student tomorrow morning — so much cooking, gardening, clamming, and beach walks for the next ten days. Received approval for one of the most cool projects in my career earlier today, so I will be online and blogging through next week trying to build a project plan and budget.

Thinking of a Plimoth Plantation visit early in the week due to curiosity from what I read from Nathaniel Philbrick last summer in the Mayflower. My family has lived in Southeastern Massachusetts since the middle of the 17th century and I don’t know much about those antecedents, swamp Yankees from around Bridgewater and Middleton down to Wareham.

Once the fish leave and the weather goes nasty, weekends tend to focus on “educational” road trips to the assorted whaling museums and other historica around the area. That and forced marches through the salt marshes and beaches of the Cape.
Whereabouts:

11rom now till the 26th of November: Cotuit

11.27 NYC

11.28-30 RTP

12.1 Sarasota

12.2-4 Cotuit

12.5 Atlanta

12.6 Newport Beach

etc.

IAB Press Release – Internet Advertising Revenues Surpass $4 Billion for Q3

Yee-haw. Check out the chart.

“The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached an estimated new record of $4.2 billion for the third quarter of 2006. The 2006 third quarter revenues represent a 33 percent increase over $3.1 billion in Q3 2005 and a 2 percent increase over the Q2 2006 total of nearly $4.1 billion.”

Calacanis says the best is yet to be:

“How far will this trend line go? Think 20 more years of similar growth.

Will it get steeper? Absolutely.

Why? Video and audio advertising hasn’t even started to move to the Internet in a major way.

The first 10 years of this industry have been amazing, but the next 20 are going to be insane.”

Kind of cool for me to look at the start of the chart and realize I was collecting ad dollars at Forbes in ‘95 before anyone seemed to be counting. Rode the pony right to the dot.bomb peak in Q2′02, came back in Q2′05 and now am on the spend side. This is not going to slow down — I’m with Jason, just watch, it gets really interesting in the next 12 months. Makes me want to be back on the media side … wait, someone punch me.

Om demurs:

“He is right because as online video becomes more popular, the advertising dollars are going to shift to this nascent medium. Those dollars will qualify as Internet advertising, of course. He is wrong, because he is conveniently overlooking the fact that the sequential growth in advertising was essentially flat⁷. “Online advertising will be a useful marketing tool, but no trend goes in a straight line for twenty years,” writes Carl Howe, in his excellent analysis.

Calacanis overlooks the fact that a disproportionate portion of the online advertising dollars is flying into the pockets of a handful of companies. A back of the envelope calculation shows that in the third quarter Yahoo and Google accounted for $2 billion (give or take a few million dollars) in total dollars spent on online advertising in the third quarter 2006. (This is after traffic acquisition costs, and factoring in their international contribution to their total revenues.)”

I think both Calcanis and Malik assume a continuation of the current eyeball model — the gross tonnage model of advertising I’ve posted about previously. That “1.0″ world is based on reach and mass with economics measured in cost per thousands, click-through rates, cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, and cost-per-lead. Behavioral models, such as those promoted by Tacoda; or RSS models such as Federated’s, give a bit more precision and reduce the “gross” to “less gross” but the industry is still waiting for a way to monetize the long tail and give some economic value to engagement.

I can’t predict the next big thing in advertising, but will assume the next Bill Gross is working on the breakthrough that will start the cycle all over again. That assumption may be like wishing for a pony for Christmas, but I believe it is a shift in models, not the rise of new mediums — ie video — that will drive the continued growth.

I need to find where interactive now stands in the overall ad industry mix. Last I checked it had passed billboards.

How to Make Your Web Site Sing for You – New York Times

Scanning the daily headline email from the Times, I see this article by Eric Taub which essentially says that a corporate web site is important to its image and must be well written, filled with “addictive” content, and even includes the omnipresent Jakob Nielsen opining away.

WTF? Is it that slow of a news day that the Times has to dredge up the pablum we all had to endure in the mid-90s?

“Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.

Your Web site is like a digital business card, designers say, the first online look at your company that a customer gets. With luck, it will not be the last.”

There have been four or five occasions over the past ten months where I have found myself in disagreement with some corporate action and tempted to open up a new post and write about it.
So far I have resisted the temptation, but every time I do, I ask myself the question: “What would Scoble have done?” — in reference to ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who earned the reputation of being a voice of candor in an organization viewed rightly or wrongly as impenetrable with a wall of highly managed corporate communications.

This blog is a personal possession that predates my employment. I talk about my professional life here — more in the interest of disclosure and reality than promotion — but it is not a corporate communications vehicle and as such, represents an interesting balancing act for me between personal and professional opinions.

Since my job description does not include the responsibilities of an ombudsman, I am not losing sleep over any ethical cowardice — none of these issues are Karen Silkwood whistle-blower types of things. People don’t die, wetlands don’t get poisoned … but they are actions which I feel, on occasion, either undermine our reputation (which is in my job description), will annoy our customers, (customer satisfaction is in my job description), or present a picture that is less than flattering.

I do push these issues very hard internally. I just fired off an note this morning on a new issue and will work towards some type of resolution as soon as I can, but airing that issue in public — and the issue is public because we published it and are being called on it in public — is not going to accomplish anything other than to pose a rhetorical question into the ether asking for another point of view.

I helped develop our corporate blogging guidelines — they are concise, less than two pages in length, and basically apply a Golden Rule type of guidance. They are not restrictive — they don’t hold bloggers to any standard of review or prohibition, aside from the sensible mandate not to divulge company secrets or material information that could affect the share price.

So, this is basically a disclosure statement that I am not the corporate ombudsman, nor am I going to tempt the fates by poking the hive with a stick.

After enduring the past few months of buzz and speculation about our new Duo Core Tablet, the X60s, and on the occasion of its announcement today, I strolled down the hall here in RTP and asked for one.

Two hours later I had my first tablet. I plugged it in, worked through the setup, and started experimenting with the pen. Pretty slick. Now the machine goes to IT to get fitted out with Notes, the VPN client, and to transform my data off of this machine, my X60s. So now I need work through the usual new PC migration hassles, redownload a top of weird apps and plug ins, and start committing to the pen interface.

The initial reviews have been very positive, and given the impact our previous tablet, the X41 made, I have no doubt this will be Lenovo’s high desire flagship for some time.

Installing the Zune… sucked – Engadget

The folks at Engadget decided to install a new Microsoft Zune. This iPod wannabe has not arrived under the most auspicious circumstances, now that it is out, the Engadget people do what they did best and reviewed it. In great detail with many screenshoots and some hysterical captions.

“Ok, first thing we want to do? Obviously: options! Crap, as soon as we click the options button, it crashes. (Note top bar, not responding.)”

” While we were figuring out which tag to use, we were suggested some pretty awesome(ly awful) names:

• TwinightRyan (sp)
• UprightRyan
• GrizzlyRyan
• PraisedCloud
• ScapularWorm and
• HangingCheetah
• PricyRacketeer
• GutlessStudent
• WontedSum
• PeeweeDust

Do we LOOK like a scapular worm to you? Don’t answer that.”

I don’t care about the product, what I do care about is the new world order when it comes to product reviews. No more 250-word blurb by someone at PC Magazine talking pros-and-cons. The new world is what Engadget and Gizmodo and some guy named Fred are doing. Limitless space, a digital camera, a copy of Snag-It and a ton of attitude combine to put products under the total sigmoidoscope. I see this all the time with our products. A heat-seeking geek finally has his new laptop delivered after a week long delay in customs, and what does he or she do first? They take pictures of the packaging. And then they take a picture of them cutting open the box. And they take a picture of the accessories, the manual, the shipping peanuts!!!!! A couple hundred images later and they actually turn it on.
Imagine the horror at Microsoft.

The rise and fall of the “bus plunge” story. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine

I was on this meme last winter. Now Slate has it. Thanks to Connie Mack for the pointer.

“As recently as 1980, the New York Times reserved an honored—if small—place in its pages for “bus plunge” news. Whenever buses nose-dived down mountainsides; off bridges and cliffs; over embankments, escarpments, and precipices; through abutments and guardrails; or into ravines, gorges, valleys, culverts, chasms, canyons, canals, lakes, and oceans, the news wires moved accounts of the deadly tragedies, and the Times would reliably edit them down to one paragraph and publish.”As an example of the genre, it’s hard to beat this 30-word gem I culled from the March 5, 1959, edition of the Times:

“15 Africans Die in Bus Plunge
MATTAIELE, Union of South Africa, March 5 (Reuters)—Fifteen Africans were killed and thirty others were injured today when a bus careened out of control off a cliff near the Mabusa mission station, about fifteen miles from here.

Markoff’s front page opus in the Times on Web 3.0 has blogistan infected with a serious case of the vapors over the next big thing. This time its the “semantic” web renamed with a new dot.release moniker and blessed with the pixie dust of artificial intelligence. Whatever … while Markoff has been way ahead of the curve in the past — with the first mainstream media mention of the Web in ‘93, etc. — this one seems to be much ado about nothing, and timed to prick the Web 2.0 O’Reilly conference bubble as that overwrought conference concluded last week.

“Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.”

The notion, as I understand it, is that the act of searching becomes more relevant in the returns due to some machine intelligence assembling a cross-site result that is tuned more accurately to the searcher’s intentions. Whatever.  Markoff may be onto something, but I didn’t reach the end of the piece with any “aha” moment of revelation.

Cotuit – 11.13

RTP – 11.13-16

Cotuit – 11.17-26 (vacation)

Where I live, Cotuit, Massachusetts, was once one of the premier brand names in gourmand circles due to the superiority of the oysters harvested from Cotuit Bay.

The Cotuit Oyster Company, founded in 1857, is still going strong from its shed near Little River, farming oysters over more than 37 acres of grants out in the bay. The Company, arguably the oldest continuous commercial enterprise in the village, has had some hard times over the last 50 years, most, in my opinion, brought on by the decline in water quality brought on by the World War II landing craft that trained here in the 40s to prepare for D-Day out of Camp Can-Do-It; the nitrogen loading of shoreline septic systems, lawn fertilizer and dog poop; and toxic run-off from storm sewers, automobile oil, and other junk.

In 1857, Capt. William Childs returned from a life at sea to the life of an oysterman. His business became one of the biggest on Cape Cod. Oysters then were packed into barrels and carts and transported across the Cape in large wagons to the railroad depot in West Barnstable. From there, they were shipped by rail to Boston, New York and other cities in the northeast.

By 1870, six other oyster companies worked the bottom of Cotuit Bay. In 1894, Childs’ son Samuel decided to go into the business himself. He established his shanty at the present location of the Cotuit Oyster Company.

In 1912, Harry Height, an executive at the Eastman Kodak CO. bought out most of the independent oysterman and formed the Cotuit Oyster Company. In 1923, he sold his right to the Seacoast Oyster Company of New Haven, Conn.

The industry thrived until WWII, when the Army erected Camp Can Do-It above the narrows in North Bay. Landing Craft training for the invasion of France caused havoc with the delicate oyster beds, churning up the bottom and fouling the water with silt. This and the hurricane of 1944 proved disastrous to the industry.

The Seacoast Oyster Company rebuilt their shanties and had the beds producing again by 1955. In 1960, the company turned over the grants to their manager Andy Post. Three Cotuit residents bought the company and incorporated it, renting the property and the name along with the trademark: Cotuits-R-Superior, from the Seacoast Oyster Company. Andy Post operated the business up until 1973 when Mr. Nelson expressed interest in buying the company.

When I was a kid the harbor was still pretty pristine and the bottom was covered with eel grass (zostera marina L.), a crucial habitat for baby clams (known as spat), scallops, and a healthy benthic ecosystem. The eel grass disappeared over the 1970s — as it did across Cape Cod — for a variety of reasons, including a suspected blights, and the bottom has steadily degraded into a mucky mess of algae mats, inedible spider crabs, and a complete loss of the healthy marine life I knew as a kid. There is an excellent page on eelgrass, the factors that contribute to its cycles, and the threats to its survival here.

Underneath it all, still thrives the clams. Specifically the quahog and the steamer. Oysters, wild ones not caged in the Oyster Company’s pens, are rare but findable if one knows where to look.

The story of Waquoit Bay, to the west of Cotuit, is interesting in that the bay also lost most of its eelgrass over the last 50 years, saw a total collapse of its scallop fishery, and has been the object of an intense ecological survey which resulted in the area being designation a National Marine Estuary project.

The single most important action that the government could take to restore coastal water quality, in my uninformed opinion, would be to build a comprehensive wastewater treatment facility and get every home within a mile of the water off of in-ground septic systems and into a true sewer system. That single action would take away the nitrogen loading that is spawning algae blooms which in turn block sunlight from reaching the bottom where the eel grass grows. It won’t be enough though. Motorboats stir up a lot of sediment and have exploded in numbers the past twenty years as the Cape has become saturated with second homes, moorings and docks.

Anyway, I have a 5 gallon bucket filled with steamers on the deck, ready for shucking and deep frying into fried clams tonight.

Looks like fried clams are on the menu this weekend. The boat has been out of the water for the past two weekends following the gale of late October, but today I relaunch to catch the best part of the clamming season.

In the low sixties here on the Cape, unseasonably warm, so it would be a shame to spend the day cleaning out the attic or putting the gardens to bed.

Off to Babson to present on innovations in marketing at the Idea to Profit Summit hosted by the Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center. On the cell phone – 508 360 6147 — but won’t see email or IM until late afternoon.

Back. Interesting discussion and the audience (composed of senior marketing execs) had great questions, and no one sneaked peeks at their laptops.