iSightseeing: This evening, I flew to New York and will be leading a session on custom publishing at tomorrow’s B-to-B Summit. Okay, I couldn’t resist. I had to make a trek over to 5th Avenue to check it out. My pictures are here. (Which aren’t nearly as impressive as their pictures here.) The cube is cool and the details are impressive — the clear door on the elevator, for example. But the actual retail space is, well, rather Apple Storish — which is great, but not that different. One note: At about 9:30 p.m., there were, by my estimate, a couple hundred customers, many of whom were buying some really expensive stuff. The sense you have in the store is that of being a tourist and being overcome with a great urge to purchase a MacBook Pro as a souvenir. The place is a money machine. Just like the FAO Schwartz a few feet away used to be back in the day. I got out the door without spending anything.

Technorati Tags: apple, applestore

Scientific theory of the day: According to some new research, moderate doses of caffeine can make one more easily convinced by arguments that go against ones beliefs. While the researchers say it works with two regular cups of coffee, I think further laboratory experimentation will show that two Irish coffees will work even better when you’re trying to convince people with arguments that go against their beliefs.

IBM pulling ads from BusinessWeek does not a trend make: There will surely be some punditry springing forth from this news item in today’s Wall Street Journal that IBM has decided to move advertising out of McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek magazine for the foreseeable future. Advertisers (especially when they get out of an entire market — like IBM has done with the sale of its personal computer business) constantly make decisions to not advertise in a specific venue. I have no idea what this is about, but I can say for certain that IBM will not be using all of this budget for, as the article implies, “new advertising venues such as podcasts, Web sites and blogs.” For the record, BusinessWeek has been one of the most aggressive traditional magazines in its adoption of podcasts and blogs. Also, McGraw-Hill owns a wide array of business-to-business media and data businesses that IBM is still, no doubt, heavily advertising in. And finally, to measure the specific business impact of this news (that IBM isn’t advertising in BusinessWeek), one must balance it with any advertising pickup the magazine has received since the sale of Thinkpad to the Lenovo Group. I’m guessing you’ll be seeing Thinkpad ads in the magazine for the foreseeable future.

Technorati Tags: advertising, magazines

heLP Field: The stadium formerly known as Adelphia Coliseum is getting a new name today, LP Field. LP is the brand of building products from Nashville-based Louisiana-Pacific (by the way, Nashville is neither in Louisiana or near the Pacific). In the City Paper article about it, the following “observation” was made by the reporter: “It is uncertain whether Louisiana-Pacific officials considered the other popular meaning of the term LP as it relates to music. LP, standing for “long play,” is a synonym for record. With Nashville being internationally accepted as Music City, the name “LP Field” could have more than one meaning.”

Oh, yes. That would be confusing. About as confusing as the thinking the 8 yard line has something to do with 8-track tapes.

Update: Lewis Pennock (the famous minimalist) says LP Field is a swell name.

Technorati Tags: titans

666: Today’s date is rather interesting. I’m sure there will be lots of meaningless commentary (like this post) on the topic. Fear of the number even has a name: “Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.” While I don’t fear the number, I fear some wacko using today’s date as a sign they should blow up something.

Technorati Tags: 666

Quote of the morning: (From Fred Wilson) “I could care less about 10,000 fonts, tracking changes, macros, and all the other features and functions that Microsoft has piled into Word over the past 20 years. I simply care about being able to write from wherever I am and make it available to whomever I want via the web. That is the single most important feature to me that trumps everything else.”

Personal observation: While I have no idea whether Google Spreadsheets is any “threat” to Microsoft Excel, I agree with Fred on this: More and more, I’m drawn to simple web applications that I can access from any computer — with a few core functions that are (to quote a long-ago Fred term) “drop-dead simple” to understand and use.

Technorati Tags: google