• Gigabit broadband is becoming more readily available, and man does it sound awesome. Gigabit! But is it actually useful? Maybe not quite yet. Even streaming video has a hard time filling a broadband pipe that fat, thanks to high-quality compression.
• Attention marketers (or consumers suspicious of marketers): the 5 most persuasive words in the English language.
• The Kindle Fire’s mission: get your kid hooked on watching content they already love. How? Unlimited access.
• Seth Godin on what eventually happens to many organizations as they grow: “The first step is people who care making a product for people who care. The second step is people who care making a product for people who don’t care – the mass market. And the third step, so difficult to avoid, is that the growing organization starts hiring people, not necessarily people who care, to grow their ever-industrializing company. And since they are servicing customers who don’t care, those employees who don’t care can get away with it (for a while).”
• Apparently Facebook is serious about building its own third-party ad platform to compete with DoubleClick. Hence its interest in buying Microsoft’s Atlas platform. (By the way, Microsoft paid $6 billion for Atlas and the rest of aQuantive in 2007. If FB pays any billions for Atlas, I’d be surprised. I mention this really just as an excuse to once again chortle at Microsoft’s expense. Hahaha.)
• And finally, the graphic of the week, courtesy of the Institute for Economics and Peace via the Economist: