Catching Up On Readings: Hollywood’s Content Crisis

The legendary Robert McKee talks with Sramana about the state of screenwriting. For this and the rest of the week’s posts, click on the full article. >>>

When Brand Is A Figment Of Imagination: “About Jenga” (Part 4)

By Guest Author Leslie Scott

[Leslie wraps up her series of excerpts from her book, “About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game That Became a Household Name.”]

Unlike Jenga, not all brands succeed in achieving so close a link between the product being marketed and the image conveyed by a brand mark. Perhaps this is because in many cases, a word or image is chosen to brand a product because of the concept that the word or image already encapsulates, even when there is no cognitive relationship between product and word. >>>

CIO Priorities: Accenture

By Guest Author Narayanan Raman

The ‘CIO Priorities’ series attempts to gain insights into one of the most serious, interesting, and challenging questions facing the technology industry, which, as you might have rightly guessed, is “What are the priorities of enterprise CIOs today?” This question is serious given the constrained nature of cash flows, thanks to the economic meltdown. It is interesting because the industry is seeing a whole new wave of technological focus in the form of virtualization, cloud computing, and the like. Finally, it is a challenging question as it has no one answer given the unique circumstances in CIOs today find themselves. >>>

Simulating The Brain: Baynote CEO Jack Jia (Part 4)

SM: Let’s get specific. How did you identify the problem itself? Did you do market research of some sort?

JJ: My market research was to identify CIOs and CTOs. I came up with a list of people I knew or people who I knew second hand. There were about 45 CIOs, CEOs, and CTOs on my list. >>>

Sept 15 2009 Positioning Roundtable on Cisco Telepresence: Recording (Part 13)

Sept 15 2009 Positioning Roundtable on Cisco Telepresence: Recording (Part 12)

Sept 15 2009 Positioning Roundtable on Cisco Telepresence: Recording (Part 11)

It’s A Successful Product, But Is It A Successful Brand?: “About Jenga” (Part 3)

By Guest Author Leslie Scott

When you first arrive as a visitor to the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya, (where my zoologist husband and I spend 4 months of each year), you are handed an information pack containing everything from an article on the history of Mpala (the 48,000-acre wildlife conservancy and working cattle ranch in which the Centre is located) to logistics and security issues. It’s a fat dossier; living and working in the middle of a huge tract of arid African bush land, where domestic livestock graze among wild animals, poses unique problems and real dangers that have to be managed with care. Part of this management relies on the time-honored tradition of branding >>>