This past week I attended a 3 day seminar focused on creativity and brainstorming. The interesting part of the conference is that while it paid attention to the fact that creativity is important and that brainstorming can produce some fantastic results it was primarily focused on how to facilitate great brainstorming meetings. More on this subject and my review and recap of the conference later this week.
In the mean time.... When I travel I read the USA Today. Why? because the hotels I stay at leave it outside my door. Here are some of the highlights from last week.
Fairy tale sends readers on a treasure hunt. Yep, someone has written a book that gives clues for a real life treasure hunt. The contest is open for anyone to participate (the hunt will officially end on Dec 31st. 2007). If you are interested in this you should pick up the book A Treasure's Trove. By the way, what you are trying to find are 12 gold, leaf shaped tokens. The tokens can be redeemed for $1 million in Jewels.
Sopranos hits the big money. In case you did not hear the Sopranos (one of my favorite TV shows) will live on in reruns. That's right, the Sopranos the HBO mega hit has been purchased by A&E for a record setting $2.5 million an episode (78 episodes all together... you do the math). Here is the real interesting part A&E may or may not run the explicit versions of the show as they will have a choice. It seems that the folks over at HBO had alternative sense produced so that it could be run on non premium channels just in case. Very smart.
IPOD. I can not go anywhere with out hearing about ipods and the huge success that they are having. I know that they are popular and I think that their advertising and marketing is very smart. Seems as though they have really figured something out. It is a useful device with many applications and they made it very easy to use. Now the new thing is called Pod casting and if you are interested in that you might want to check out what Todd has got going on this week as he dedicates this week on his blog entirely to podcasting. Back to the article in the paper, here are some stats that I found to be impressive. Since 2001 10 million ipods have been purchased. Of the 10 million, 8.2 million were purchased in 2004. Itunes which is where you can go to download a song for just 99 cents reports that they are downloading 1.2 million songs per day. "This past Fall at Duke about 2000 incoming freshman were given ipods. Dubbed the "ipod first year experience" the program is meant to make language classes and lecture heavy courses easier by providing students with the handy audio tool." Very cool. It is certainly a story we should all continue to track closely.
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