Gearheads: The Sterling Communications Blog

The 15 Minutes of HOPE

Andy Warhol continues to extend his 15 minutes of fame. San Francisco’s de Young Museum and the San Jose Museum of Art are both hosting major exhibitions this spring, albeit with slightly different themes. San Jose is focusing on prints, while the de Young offers an overview of the music, movies, dance and fashion that influenced Warhol in creating his art — which in turn has influenced the cultural zeitgeist of the last half-century.

What struck me as I wandered these exhibitions is that Andy Warhol makes a great case for the defense of Shepard Fairey’s work. Fairey is the graphic designer responsible for the Obama “HOPE” poster that everyone wanted when I did voter registration last year. (It was recently named design of the year in a U.K. competition.)

A Sad Week for Journalism

I always wanted to be a broadcast journalist.  But the college I wanted to attend, Western Washington University, didn’t have a broadcast journalism program.  But I was in love with the town and the college, so I decided to go to that school anyway and study to be the next best thing—a reporter (which, obviously never happened).

I did several stints on the university paper, The Western Front, both as a news writer and editor.  I really enjoyed learning AP Style, interviewing fun and interesting people, covering opinion pieces and writing interesting news--basically everything about it.  What I found so fascinating was that in a world that can be so deceptive and based on skewed perception, news writing was all about the facts.  The pure ethics involved in writing for a newspaper.  Rules ingrained in my mind forever: cite no fewer than three sources (unless an opinion piece), always fact check, make sure you do your research before the interview, don’t accept bribes or favors, and so on and so on.

Why didn’t I stick with journalism?  In a way, I did…I went the PR route in the journalism department. And, even in college, we knew newspapers were dead (OK, that was only a couple of years ago).  Everything was online, news, blogs, and magazines—and my personal favorite, tabloids.  So why would you pay for news that you can receive for free?  Doesn’t make any sense.  Which is one, of among many reasons that Tuesday, March 17, 2009 was not just St. Patty’s (Paddy’s, whatever) Day.  It was a sad day in newspaper history--The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s  last day in print.  And now, they are going to be America’s first newspaper to be fully online.

Twitter Celebrity Invasion Highlights Questions of Authenticity and Cost

It seems like Twitter-talk is really everywhere you turn these days. Even my Dad asked me what the deal was with this “Twittering thing” over the weekend. Everyone from parents and companies, to journalists and young professionals are tweeting, and even celebrities are using the outlet to get a bit more of the spotlight and attract fans in the form of followers. On Friday’s Ellen Degeneres Show, she announced she’d joined the infamous micro-blogging site and was now officially tweeting . She wants to hit one million followers, a lofty goal to say the least, but more near-term, Ellen wants to take down fellow “celebrity” MC Hammer (he is actually one of the most popular celebrities on Twitter, with currently more than 227,000 followers). This bit of healthy competition points to a larger trend of more and more celebrities joining the tweeting community. Celebrities are obviously people like everyone else, but they are also a public image and a brand in some ways, so they are a good example to use in looking at the larger Twitter picture.

Trading in My PR “Toolbox” for the Real Thing

I coordinate many of our agency’s volunteer activities and this past weekend, seven members of the Sterling family (including employees’ significant others!) spent a day helping Habitat for Humanity build homes in San Francisco’s Bayview district. We were given a tool belt, a hard hat, safety goggles and gloves. And even though we had access two storage sheds of power tools and measurement utensils and other strange whatchamacallits with engines and handles, the hammer proved to be the tool of the day for me and two others, who were assigned to frame out a wall.

We got the job done at the end, but the day was full of “lessons learned” (hehe… we did a few tasks twice), and at every turn, there was a new tool, a new resource, a new perspective, to help us complete the task. I’ve walked into a Home Depot before, but I had no clue there are tools to help the tools you need to undo the mess you made when trying to use another tool the first time. By the end of the day, our group was thankful the hammer wasn’t the only tool available.

Can Your Organization Afford Not to Participate?

We are in the dark -- we don’t know what the economy is going to do, noted Chief Research Officer and Senior VP John Gantz, IDC, at least week’s Annual IDC Directions Conference. His advice? We need to learn to run in the dark, that with everything crashing down around us now is the time to take risks. This is a period of opportunity. Bart Perkins agrees, in an article he wrote for Computerworld: “The recession provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo, eliminate ineffective systems and services, and make changes that management has previously refused to consider.” Now is the time to pitch executives on something new when they’re at a point where they’ll try anything in order to compete.

A Tale of 2 Switches; Hard Times?

In the past two years – let’s say, before the R-word dominated our collective minds – the computer networking industry enjoyed ever-growing demand from large and small companies (not to mention consumers). The pervasiveness of the Internet, and the mounting number of bandwidth-intensive yet business-critical applications, made it necessary for companies to invest in their infrastructures – from minor to full “forklift” upgrades. Even when FORTUNE-listed companies stopped spending as much on IT, the SMB market was a boon, as smaller shops required enterprise-class performance at thrifty price points. What’s more, the concept of “future proofing” came into existence prompting many to invest in the NOW to get ahead.

Let’s skip ahead to today and look at what industry prognosticators have to say. Dell’Oro Group analysts have forecasted a sharp decline this year (10%) for network equipment vendors, especially for Ethernet switches, which are veritable backbones for a networking architecture connecting different devices and managing data traffic. And it make sense, after all, IT is not cheap!

The Cleantech Crackdown: California’s Mission to go Green

I attended the Cleantech Group’s Cleantech Forum XXI last week in San Francisco and witnessed an excellent turn out of industry leaders in the clean technology sector. Investors, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and influencers from all over the world came together to engage in discussions and share ideas about how the momentum of clean technology is becoming an “upside driver in a downside market,” this years conference theme as a matter of fact. Topics at the forum covered multiple types of technologies in the clean tech market segment, including promising opportunities in water, smart grid, green buildings, thin film solar, synthetic biology and more.