From a week in the mountains and plains of Colorado…

• Larry Bowa reacts to Brad Penny:

  Put that on the (expletive) dot-com.

• Jan Chipchase, Lubing the Edges of the Internet:
  

  There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It’s largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed.

• James Gardner, What kind of innovation does your bank do?

  My comment (highlighted by JJ Hornblass):

  Whether you’re driving incremental or breakthrough change, they are both innovation. Honestly if it’s delivering value (short-term financial, long-term strategic positioning, etc.) it doesn’t matter what it’s called.

  The bigger problem is when we mislabel our efforts to try to position incremental innovation as breakthrough “Play to Win” innovation; the two types of innovation (although I admit it’s more of a continuum) require different operational, financial and strategic commitments. We’ve got to be honest about what bets we’re making and how we’re playing them, or we run the risk of tremendous intra-organizational resource misallocation.

• Lynette Luna in FierceWireless, A Nokia-Facebook combo is a no-brainer.
• Phil Goldstein in Fierce Wireless, Android’s absence: where was the platform at Mobile World Congress?

  There were conflicting opinions about the absence / abundance of new Android-powered devices at the recent Mobile World Congress. It’s interesting to watch handset manufacturers and carriers balance their product development, handset replacement and hardware and service rollout plans in an industry undergoing massive infrastructural and consumer usage shifts.

• Duke Stump, Building a Bonfire Brand. My comment:
  

  The odd thing is that if attempting to water down products and messages for the “mainstream” never creates the desired mainstream appeal and usually angers the core. I try to hold the phrase “Be Undeniably Good” in my head whenever I’m making a product, business or life decision, and it’s impossible to be “undeniably good” to everyone, especially the broad swath of the mainstream.

  Attempting to be everything to everyone is a guarantee of being nothing to nobody.

• David Hornik, The Evolution of TED.

  I wonder, as TED evolves and continues to grow, will it spawn a conference to replace the “old TED”?

• And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention:

  1) Umair Haque at the Daytona Sessions, “Constructive Capitalism” (video on Vimeo).

  2) Umair Haque, The Responsiveness Scorecard:

  Who can develop better kinds of ownership that create value for everyone? Advantage will flow inexorably to those economies – and companies – who can.

  … Whoever can invent better kinds of contracts for the 21st century will realize a tremendous advantage.

  …Responsibility, accountability, and transparency aren’t just buzzwords – they’re the keys to radically altering the costs and benefits of management.

  Organizations, incentives, compensation structures, measuring and valuing “externalities”: until we can change these underlying institutions and constructs then any stimulus will be vastly misdirected.

  We can’t go forward by trying to fill the holes of the past.