Links for 09-16-2011

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company - "The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
• Bill Poole's Creative Abrasion: Business-IT Alignment - A nice feedback diagram.
• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
• The Agonies of Picking a Product Name - Fog Creek Blog - "Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy. It’s also a giant time-slurping vortex. And in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter."
• How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories
• R&D is Important, But For Whom? – tecosystems - "What the above suggests, however, is that R&D is relatively independent of financial performance for companies that conduct it, with the caveats that this is merely a five year sample and that the selection of vendors is arbitrary and cross-industry. Which in turn implies that Palmisano is correct, and that we should consider research and development separately, because the two may actually have little to do with one another."
• The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - "TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read."
• Photos, Copyrights, and the “Mechanical Representation of Facts” - I lean towards the narrower view of copyright here. Anything else strikes me as a very steep slippery slope.
• Fountainhead: IT-as-a-Service: Models for Consumption, Operations, Technology - "The market is equating virtualization with cloud, and worse, equating cloud with IT Transformation."
• Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT - Perspectives: CA Technologies corporate blog - CA Technologies - "Consumer-driven IT extends beyond the enterprise (fire)walls too. Like all consumers, your customers are rapidly becoming used to accessing cloud services whenever it suits them; they are connecting with product and service vendors online; they are interacting with businesses through social media and portable cloud-connected apps. Yet none of this means that employees are inherently correct in their sourcing decisions."
• CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD - "By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time."
• Be warned: cloud, virtual apps can magnify the cost of wasted software licenses | ITworld
• Red Hat's Aeolus to 'out-Linux' Rackspace's cloud • The Register
• Nikon: we don't need mirrorless cameras | News | TechRadar UK