Corporate environments kind of freak me out. The stereotypes are awful — working in a company with thousands of other people is a soul sucking, beige on beige, cubical farmland of mediocrity.
Coming to the Corporate Communicators Conference has changed my opinion a little bit. There’s almost 500 people here, representing some of the biggest corporations in the United States, and it’s pretty much a non-stop rally for making work environments more open, more communicative, and more human. At the moment, there’s an executive on stage from one of the biggest insurance companies in the world, talking about how uncomfortable it can be to open up on a weekly blog, but how important it is to be genuine, and to respond honestly to critical feedback.
I don’t expect the universe to suddenly reorient itself, but it’s good to see some cracks in the “nameless, faceless” corporate facade.
Well, I’m kickin’ it at the Hyatt in Chicago, pimping “Chatter Mill” (our internal communication tool for large businesses). We have a booth and everything. It’s all very official looking.
First impressions — Chicago is a great place. Friendly people, clean, good food. Awesome bridges and architecture. We’re staying at Hotel 71, which has been nice so far. We flew in on the red eye this morning, so everything has been a bit of a whirlwind.
If you’re in town, come by and say hi. We’re in the Hyatt West building — follow the CCC signs and tell the friendly people at the registration desk that you’re a friend of Blue Hill Solutions. Or give me a ring at (503) 701-4135.
This is the sort of thing that freaks out vegetarians … and yet … I’m intrigued:
“The Gracie burger is one of the best things to eat in Portland right now. Like the Hurley burger, Gracie’s starts with a hunk of lean Kobe and some foie—but just keeps going. Add two quail eggs, a brioche bun basted in duck fat, bacon mayo with huge chunks of perfectly salty swine, Cantel cheese, foie gras aioli and a bed of frisée that makes the sandwich appear as tall as Yao Ming, and you have a serious food addiction. This burger represents so many distinct (and lovable) animals that it ought to be called the Petting Zoo Massacre.”
Hell yes.
(thanks to Willamette Week and Mike Thelan for the fine review)
If you’re particularly fond of delightfully twisted animations, “Rejected” is a great way to start the day.
Happy Thursday.
(thanks, Skrentablog)
I had lunch yesterday with some of the fine folks at JanRain, and one of our discussions was about Amazon’s S3 … can a business actually save money, using it for file storage and distribution? It turns out there’s a few pretty good cases for it, the most impressive being SmugMug saving half a million bucks vs. their DIY approach.
But things are changing in June. Amazon unveiled a new pricing model for S3, which is a little more complex than the previous $0.15 per gigabyte stored per month, with $0.20 per gigabyte transferred (simple, ‘eh?).
The storage cost is the same, but transfers have been lowered and put into a tiered structure, and there’s an additional charge for each request:
- $0.10 per GB – all data uploaded
- $0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
- $0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
- $0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
- $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
- $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
I’m not a big fan of complexity, but Amazon seems to think it’ll save most of us some money:
“If this new pricing had been applied to customers’ March 2007 usage, 75% of customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.“
Fair enough, I suppose.
