We were the first to tell you about HP's massive layoff. Now that HP has come clean with some details, we'll be the first to tell you why it's not going to fix HP. HP says that by getting rid of 27,000 jobs (9,000 of them by October), it will save about $3 billion a year. This will supposedly fund "innovation." But HP could do a lot of damage with this layoff, too, by getting rid of some of its best employees. We're hearing ... 1. HP is laying off the wrong people, employees who still work at the company tell us. Management is targeting people purely based on salary, not skills or performance or the profits employees generate for the company.Plus, HP is full ... Continue reading →
Patient research work involving more than 5 thousand photographs resulted in a 1 minute film that AlmapBBDO created to advertise Getty Images, the world leading image database for creating and distributing visual contents. The film is surprising when showing 873 images in 15 images per second, sufficient speed to transform the series into a video that, without any text, tells a beautiful story. All photos, without any exceptions, are from the Getty Images archives.Copywriter Sophie Schoenburg and art director Marcus Kotlhar worked 6 months researching images, improving the script and building each scene so they would not only be understood, but would also touch viewers. Sometimes, for example, a scene would look perfect on paper, but the images chosen to depict it were not sufficient ... Continue reading →
Last week, an entrepreneur and writer named Marco Arment trashed us in a blog post, which was then picked up and forwarded around the Twitter-sphere. Marco accused us of lots of horrible things, including "scraping" his content without permission and making it look like he wrote for us. He also complained that we didn't send enough visitors to his web site. Well, when we read Marco's post, we were initially confused, because we actually don't do what he said we did, at least not deliberately. So we launched an investigation of sorts. And, eventually, we finally figured out what happened. We thought that, by now, Marco's frustration was last week's news, so we weren't going to take your time explaining what happened. But then Felix ... Continue reading →
Meg Listening to the Hewlett Packard earnings call was an exercise in the surreal today. CEO Meg Whitman started the call with a cheerful anecdote about some really neat-o gizmo she saw at HP. Just the sorta whiz bang stuff that’s gonna get HP back on its feet in no time! She’s never been more optimistic about HP’s future! Gonna invest more in that innovation stuff! Then she proceeded with all sorts of other happy talk about the business stabilizing and yada, yada, yada. And oh, by the way, to realign costs with the business we’re going to throw 27,000 people out the window. This is where things get awkward. See, for years, HP embraced the cocktail of massive acquisitions and job cuts. Starting with ... Continue reading →
Time spent on Facebook on desktop computers in the U.S. has peaked and now it's falling according to data from comScore, via BI Intelligence. BI Intelligence analyst Alex Cocotas attributes the drop to a "shift to mobile" as well as the rise of rival social networks like Tumblr, and Pinterest. The shift to mobile is better than losing out to rivals, but it's bad for Facebook's business, because it makes significantly less money from mobile users than desktop users. As for those rivals, take a look at Pinterest, which seems to have its own engagement problems. Our guess on what's happening there: The company got a lot of buzz, had a crush of new users, which inflated its numbers, and many of those people left. ... Continue reading →