Recipe for Success: Keep Up Your Connection to the Ground Level
Jyri Engeström, Product Manager at Google who found his way there by co-developing the microblogging service Jaiku and selling it to the search engine giant in 2007, says that without a hands on approach to its business on all levels of management, the company will lose its touch with the reality. Sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? But Engeström claims that the world’s biggest cell phone maker Nokia may have lost the crucial connection between what happens in the field and what happens in the managers&#

Who needs to lead advertising?
Over the past week, there have been two interesting posts on AdAge on the question whether digital agencies are yet ready to lead the planning and development of advertising. The first one by Ana Andjelic offers some good views and a provocativ

That was a great Idea!
I had a great time at Idea09 (and from what I’m hearing, so did everybody else). Thanks to the organizers and all the fabulous people - new and old friends - that I got to meet. I tweeted and took pictures and notes and drew sketches during the conference, and I’m working on putting together a deck of all those by the end of next week. It looks like several other people have already beat me to it though - peeps like Luke Wroblewski,

Too much Twitter?
Toronto was truly embraced by different conferences and events this week. There was the Information Architecture Institute’s Idea09 for information architects, social media and interaction designers, and Mobile Innovation Week for several events including Mobile Media World. There was also CaseCamp for everyone interested in social media and “the nuances of Internet culture”, as the organizers put it themselves. I spent all of yesterday and half of today at Idea09, then switched to C

User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director
I was happy to find this article by Andrew Maier at UX Booth last week. Happy because it touches on a topic that I’ve struggled with once I began working in Canada two years ago. In my past in Europe, I was a Concept Designer, and my role was very close to a UXD-oriented ACD/CD. A User Experience Designer can’t play the role of a subject matter expert within a narrow field. Like Andrew says in the beginning of his article, “because of how multifaceted User Experience is, a user experience designer begins to take on a more directorial position within a project/