Blogs

After the closure of The Bulletin by ACP in February 2008, Anthill staged a PR stunt, offering to buy the publishing icon for one dollar. Not surprisingly, our offer was dismissed.

Recently, I was sharing the history of my business, CheckinLine, with Anthill founder James Tuckerman. As we talked about typical startup struggles, I was reminded...

I was at an event the other day when I met a very smart, respected, and likeable business owner, named Ron. We got to discussing LinkedIn, and I asked him how many connections he had. He mentioned he had around 300, and then went on to proudly proclaim that he knew “all of them personally, save three or four”. That's great for taking care of your existing customers, I thought, but what about attracting new ones?

In his previous article, Roger La Salle challenged innovation practitioners to examine the rate of return on their innovation investment. Here, he explains how to set a time scale to obtain this return: "If you can have an early win with innovation then you can be sure more budget will be forthcoming and still greater achievements can be obtained." To find the low-hanging fruit (and the lowest risk) for your startup, the best place to begin is with Process Innovation.

The Big Pitch is back again this year, and this year it’s even more exciting. Big Pitch is looking for tech startups with big ideas,...

The web is no longer a digital version of print. It is the space where conversation is facilitated. Websites are becoming applications that feed information out to various social-based platforms. This means that most brands need to start thinking about their website as a database that organises and distributes information and features to specific groups within the world of social media.

Can you remember the winner of TIME magazine's Most Influential Person poll in 2009? Was it Barack Obama? Oprah Winfrey? The Dalai Lama? No, it was Moot, the pseudonym of 21-year-old Christopher Poole, a college student and founder of online community 4chan.org. So, why the long winded introduction to this year's Cool Company Awards Readers' Choice Award? Did we get gamed?

So while this $US32.5 million US Government funding for UltraBattery is certainly a tremendous validation for the technology and the CSIRO researchers who developed it, the international licensing option pursued means that Australia will, in all likelihood, only receive couch change from what stands to be an extremely lucrative venture for the foreign companies (Furukawa Battery Company and East Penn) that are actually doing the commercialisation.

Whatever your stance on deliberately-fast clocks, you have to love this clock designed for tardy time-shifters by Italian design house Fabrica Design. The long hand on On-Time clocks deviates three minutes ahead to encourage you to get a move on.

In early February, Facebook announced that it had 400 million users and All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill is predicting that the company should near the 600 million user mark and surpass $1 billion in annualised revenue by the end of the year. But the growth of Facebook is evidence of something more than a fad.

That's why we launched the 30under30 Awards in late 2007. And that's why we invite you to nominate yourself or a worthy young entrepreneur. The top 30 will be profiled in the Jul/Aug/Sep edition of Anthill Magazine. To nominate, click here.

Over the past two weeks, we have published the Sun Newspaper’s parody of the iPhone ads (and other mobile alternatives to print newspapers), Time Inc's prediction of what magazines of the future might look like and a fake (or real) leak of Apple's new Tablet Mac (aka MacTablet aka TabletMac aka iPad aka Apple Slate). But this concept piece put together by design collective BERG certainly has wow factor.

Jason Cunningham tells us he is a CPA – a “car parking attendant.” Wait, he means “certified practising accountant.” That’s more like it, eh? Seriously,...

Inconsistency is what most influences an organisation's decision to invest in R&D and the extent of its R&D investment. This is because a company cannot budget and minimise risk if it does now know the extent to which it is likely to be eligible for a tax concession. The proposed reforms to the R&D tax concession not only conflict with their stated purpose but offer no consistency to organisations already engaged in the complex task of commercialising innovation... whether novel or risky.

Two MIT students have developed software that uses an algorithm to analyse friendship associations on Facebook and predict whether users are gay.

Last week, we asked our readers to help us re-design our slightly-outdated Cool Company Awards logo. Via this site, Twitter and Facebook, we asked you, dear Anthillians, to define what images you think epitomise the concept of cool. We've shortlisted the best. And the best of the worst. We're now seeking your input. Help us choose the logo for Anthill's Cool Company Awards.

I know myself well enough now to succumb to the rush of a new concept 'that has never been done before', before heading back to the here-and-now. I figure that this sort of activity, although no help to my current workload, is good for keeping my mind active, rather than feeling guilty about never being able to put these ideas into action.

Every year, at about this time, we take greater pleasure in assembling and releasing the outcomes of our annual DUMB REPORT, a selection of goofs, gaffs and groaners from the world of business, politics, media and marketing. As we've said in the past, making mistakes is all part of growing a business. According to the wisdom of Kerry Packer, "If you get things right 60 percent of the time, you will rule the world." It's just a pity that not all mistakes are created equal.

In the seventh post in this series, Nigel Malone shares the contents of another of his favourite business keynote slides, drawn from a cross-section of sources that includes some of the great business, brand and military planners of all time.

Having a strong market-based business is great. You are a power broker and can often profit from both sides. But how do you get over the chicken and egg problem? From my experience working with more than 12 market-based businesses, there are two things you need to do.