Iceman and I are here in NYC for the World Innovation Forum… more on that in another post. We used the opportunity to head up to the new Apple Store.

While it looks beautiful–I wonder how they could have built in more ways to make it the center of the Apple Universe. Why not have Photo Booth integrated in to large screen displays feeding something like the fountatins at Millenium Park. They could include a web component as well–with those same photos appearing on apple.com.

Why not have products only available or customized in certain ways at the store? Why not unveil new products, outside of the convention cycle, at the store first–let bloggers spread the word pre-launch nationwide.

Other than the unique architecture and location, however, there isn’t anything innovative about the store, how customers interact with the products, or the overall experience.

A Notice From Managment:

If you’ve been hitting the site at all this weekend, you’ll notice it’s a mess. Sorry about that. I’m updating it live–so it will be going through hiccups. CSS may be cached as well, so you may want to hard refresh. There are a lot of items I haven’t fixed or have working yet–will be coming along in the next few days.

The spark for all the change came from the need to have a way to use Wordpress to keep track of books I’m reading and review them. The social book collecting sites leave a lot to be desired. I’ve got a whole rundown of that in a post coming soon.

Until then, sorry about the maintenance issues.

I’ve been lost… in the latest Murakami. I’ve been lost as a DEWNster. As well, I’ve found my time caught in Gary Benchley, Making Meaning, and The Shape of Time.

I’ve been in Lost Cities, Lost Towns, and Lost–the ARG.

Never fear. Fulminator will return. I’ve got the Intonation Festival June 24th and 25th and the Pitchfork Music Festival July 29th and 30th to look forward to. Both within a 5 minute walk from my home.

Street teams were on many corners of downtown Chicago today–handing out FREE 8oz bottles (glass) of Coke Blak. How much will this tactic do for the product? I liked the taste–I’d rather have less sugar in it. If it did, I might start to drink this on some afternoons rather than coffee (though I’ll still have my morning joe). So, if the product is appealing, will free samples be a better method to generate adoption than mass advertising or couponing?

Let’s say the cost, including labor and product, of the street team event came out to $2.00 per sample and they handed out 10,000 bottles during a two hour period during the lunch hour in Chicago. Of course, you have the 10,000 people that tried the product. Let’s say 2,000 of them liked it enough to buy. So you invested $20,000 for 2,000 adopters. A decent investment on it’s own. Then you get the network effect of me telling others. I brought the bottle back to my office–and it started a conversation on the elevator among 6 people. So it generated buzz, on the first order of 1 to 6. So in the case of positive interactions, the buzz effect was 12,000 people. There were also indirect effects. My coworkers and I saw at least 10 people walking around with the bottles in the preceding minute before we saw them being handed out. Coke Blak was everywhere during the lunch timeframe. Say that’s another 20 impressions for each bottle handed out–that’s 200,000 impressions in addition to actual product sampling.

A wise investment? Who knows? How many people are blogging about it? 1,912 “coke blak” posts on Technorati. My take? I think it’s a good move on Coke’s part. And as LP says, this should spur Pepsi on to bring Kona back.

I need to start taking photos again — and I need to replace my now ancient digital camera. Maybe if I start posting pictures here I’ll get inspired to get out and photographing again.

Here’s this picture’s question: What U.S. city am I in?

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So I hit up the family than owns/runs the subway in my building (see this post) and the movie being filmed was Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn’s — The Break Up. I have no idea why they chose to film where the did… but I’m mildly interested. Probably have to netflix it (I know–it’s still in post-production) to see.