The Longest Run

Funny story about the source of the maple syrup smell that has periodically occurred in New York City: Map of the Day: NYC's Official Maple Syrup "Odor Reports" . Most interesting to me is that the mystery was ultimately solved by overlaying calls to the city's 311 line on a map with dates and prevailing weather patterns (check the link for a detailed picture). Related articles by Zemanta Maple Syrup Smell Mystery Solved! [Metro] (gawker.com) NYC's Mysterious Syrup Smell Tracked To New Jersey (cbsnews.com) LIVE: Maple Syrup Smell...is FROM NEW JERSEY (gothamist.com)

As I mentioned in yesterday's post , we had some interesting outside speakers, including an executive from Nokia named Annsi Vanjoki. Mr. Vanjoki shared a video called The Fourth Screen, which tracks the evolution from tv screen to movie screen to computer screen to portable device screen; it's worth watching. One of our afternoon speakers shared a video called The Break Up which captures the ways in which advertising is changing as consumers change their media consumption habits.

I've had a great day in Stockholm; very busy and very thought-provoking.  The theme of our conference is growth through innovation. We started the morning with a presentation by Bertelsmann's CEO, Hartmut Ostrowski, who talked about why innovation and growth are important for Bertelsmann. Following Hartmut, there were presentations on managing innovation (by a professor from HBS) and on the evoluton of the web from Web 2.0 to Web 'New Generation' (by a board member from Nokia). Following lunch and some breakout sessions, we had two more terrific presentations, both of which addressed how technology is totally disrupting media businesses and forcing the development of new business models. Though I didn't hear anything fundamentally new, the presentations were interesting as they confirmed a lot of the ideas and issues we've been discussing in our day to day work. As I've written about before, we're in the middle of a transformation of how media busi...

Since today is an off day from training, I thought it would be appropriate to write about something which has nothing to do with running. Earlier today I read this article ( link ) from New York Magazine; it's a review of a book recently published by Random House that is a print anthology of blog writing. I also checked out a blog written by another blogging colleague (perhaps there are a lot of those....) named Kempton Mooney. The article and Kempton's blog reinforced some things I've been thinking about lately as an avid consumer of media products (books, music, movies, blogs, web sites, etc.), as an employee of a media company who thinks a lot about the future of our business, and as a person with a lot of hobbies. The first thing is that I'm constantly amazed by the incredible depth of content and information we all now have access to - typically from the comfort of our home or office. In just the past two days I've seen several examples of this: someone watch...