Both companies are trying to significantly change how the world sees them.

Facing fierce competition from Amazon.com and Wal-Mart, the Minneapolis-based Best Buy wants to extend its relationship with its customers outside of its stores.

(…) TiVo, for its part, desperately wants people to stop thinking of its technology purely as a way to pause and record live television.

As part of the deal, Best Buy also plans to use TiVo to offer advice and guidance on products like HDTVs and digital cameras and provide ways to buy these products via the television remote control.

via NYTimes.com.

Google with an operating system (Chrome OS) and Microsoft with a search engine (Bing).

What makes this battle all the more interesting is both the scale of the companies involved and the extraordinary differences in their ways of going about business. For all its size — and its occasional arrogance — Google still retains a willingness to experiment and risk failure in many directions at once. Microsoft, on the other hand, is unbelievably tenacious and holds an almost insuperable lead in market share. (NYT)

11 Canadians living in the United States share what they miss most about home in Our True North.

I miss people minding their own business. I miss the politeness and courtesy. I miss the lack of drama and not taking oneself seriously. I miss the shades-of-grey world that is downtown Montreal. I miss Montreal’s food and its summer.

A debate at NYTimes.com

my advice to you

is simple: find out what you are meant to do

and do it, and

find out who you really are,

under all the junk that has been attached to you

by those who would make you

everybody else,

and be that.

(…)

what you are meant to do

and who you really are

are not the same thing:

what you’re meant to do is learned, discovered,

but who you really are has always been there –

it is a matter of unlearning

who you have been told to be,

or told you are,

or should be,

until all that is left is the knowledge

of who you are and always were:

nobody but yourself.

via How to Save the World.

a town full of people steeped in politics but short on substance

via The Economist

In a world where businesses and friends often depend upon e-mail to communicate, scholars want to know if electronic communications convey ideas clearly.

The answer, the professors conclude, is sometimes “no.” Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems.

1. E-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well;
2. The prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness; and
3. The inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.

via CSM.

Powerful visuals are indeed worth a thousand words…

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

via NYT

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