From the About Us page of the site: “Overlawyered.com explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability.”
Hey, some of my best friends are lawyers.
Baseball players are using their iPods to do their pregame video studies. According to a story by Jayson Stark at ESPN.com, Astros pitcher Jason Jennings thinks his iPod turned his whole season around. Stark predicts: “One of these days you’ll see a pitcher take a walk behind the mound during a key at-bat, pull out his iPod and take a quick video-refresher course before launching the big pitch of the night. Heck, if NFL quarterbacks can get plays radioed right into their helmets, why not?” [Thanks, Barb]
Unrelated sports note: I’m guessing I might be one of the few people on the planet that has NO idea which two teams are playing in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
“My brother Adam isn’t a geek – and he’s never written to me about any other device (from Apple or any other manufacturer). It’s not even out yet and I already hate the iPhone… largely because someone else didn’t make it four years ago. Seriously. Apple gets the consumer in ways that no other company ever will. It makes my new Smartphone seem so… ancient.”
Despite the fact the product isn’t even out yet, Apple says its upcoming PC-to-TV device is the fastest-selling item on its website, even beating out iPods. Apple TV is poised to become a surprise hit, says analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research. “If Apple were to convert 1 percent of those iPod owners to Apple TV owners, it would be a success. That would be a million units,” he said. [LostRemote]
I ordered one, too. Supposed to ship in February. I’ll report here once it’s up and running.
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 first quarter, ended December 30, 2006. The Company posted record revenue of $7.1 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.0 billion, nearly double last year’s profit. These results compare to revenue of $5.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $565 million, or $.65 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.
Apple shipped 1,606,000 Macintosh computers and 21,066,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 28 percent growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. [Podcasting News]
“It’s just a fad. I can go down to Target and get a perfectly good MP3 player that will do everything an iPod will do and only pay $30. And why do a need an MP3 player when I can listen to music for free on the radio?”
Jeff Jarvis reports: “Last night, ABCNews.com called asking for me to make a video at home with comment on AppleTV. I taped it, edited it, and FTPed it in and now here is the finished product.”
If you are a reporter in 2007 and you have no idea how to do what Jarvis did, your days are numbered.
That is one of the lessons of Web 2.0, according to AdWeek’s Bob Greenberg:
“Long before they became global behemoths, the great (advertising) agencies of the past were small businesses built around people of uncanny creative ability. What’s amazing is that our competition in the future will come from exactly where we started: small teams of creative geniuses with ideas galore on how to capture the hearts and minds of consumers. Only now they probably don’t work in agencies. At the same time, they have a fully democratized means of content distribution that doesn’t rely on captive audiences. Lesson No. 2: Talent is more important than size.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports (subscription) that a single iPod vending machine sold thousand dollars worth of iPods in one month. A VP of Business Traveler Services is quoted as saying, “We’ve done about $55,000 in a month in gross sales just for the one on Concourse A.
From usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com. I’ll plead guilty to #2 and #5 on a few of our sites. I’m iffy on a couple more. If you have a blog (or any kind of website), this is a handy check-list.
1. Bad Search
2. PDF Files for Online Reading
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
4. Non-Scannable Text
5. Fixed Font Size
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
8. Violating Design Conventions
9. Opening New Browser Windows
10. Not Answering Users’ Questions
“Instead of sitting in chairs, workers stand in front of a raised workstation and slowly walk on a treadmill. Normally Levine keeps to a one-mile-per-hour pace, which requires little effort or concentration, allowing him to focus his attention on work. But the speed is fast enough to do some good, burning an extra 100 calories an hour – 8,000 calories over a 40 hour work week.”
“The researcher behind the project, Dr. James Levine, says his recent research shows that thin people tend to be on their feet an average of two and a half hours a day more than people who are overweight. Getting office workers up out of their chairs led him to build a prototype ‘treadmill workstation’.”
[ConsumerAffairs.com]