BBC Sports reported this afternoon that 1) fabled cyclist and inspirational uber-achiever Lance Armstrong   will surely NOT repeat as the winner of this year’s Tour de France, but 2) in even bigger news: “Lance Armstrong will compete for Team RadioShack as a cyclist, runner and triathlete in events around the world, including the 2010 Tour de France.” [...]

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos has just released a long video in which he rhapsodizes about the history of Amazon.com – including early troubles with technology… and even elecricity. At 8 minutes plus, this DOESN’T qualify as an elevator pitch. Then he eventually gets around to announcing his company’s all-stock aquisition of online shoe retailer Zappos.com. [...]

Coffee giant tries to get mojo vibrating again Once, Starbucks was just a local coffee shop in Seattle. Then it became a mega-brand, standard-bearer for the premium coffee category worldwide. But lately, the “star” has been fading, and even the “bucks” are drying up. So now the chain will be re-launching a few of its [...]

So as I write this, the newly re-christened SciFi Channel is ringing the bell at the NASDAQ to celebrate their name change to “Syfy” (Siffy?)  and the Twitter hash tag #syfy is alive with unanimous pans of the new name: “Worst. Re-branding. Ever.”  That might be a stretch, but so is the new name. Wired magazine [...]

Maybe I’m a bit slow, but I just came across the term “crowdsourcing” – the process of solving business problems using social media (not to be confused with another term I recently picked up: “FLASHMOB” – the process of creating absurd but strangely compelling YouTube videos with your friends). The image above is from my experiment [...]