« August 20, 2006 - August 26, 2006 | Main | September 3, 2006 - September 9, 2006 »
September 1, 2006
September 1 innovation linkage
Creating mass market experiences [Metacool]
How bloggers cope with summer vacations [Wall Street Journal Online]
Tracking down 'infectious agents' [Information Week]
The next Japanese toy sensation: paper robots [Wired]
70% of teens want to start their own businesses [Fast Company blog]
Interview with Adam Somlai-Fischer [We Make Money Not Art]
Lost and found: Edvard Munch's "The Scream" [BBC News]
The PC at 25 [Globe and Mail]
In 2006, age 60 is the new 45 [Yahoo! Health]
In 2033, age 70 is the new 30 [Douglas Rushkoff]
[image: Ping Genius Loci in Budapest]
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Massively multiplayer management innovation
The current issue of strategy + business magazine (Autumn 2006) has a fascinating profile of "venture activist" Joi Ito, who is currently working on a vision of turning massively multiplayer online videogames into a new model for organizational design:
"World of Warcraft is an immensely popular role-playing simulation, released by publisher Blizzard Entertainment (a division of Vivendi), based in Irvine, Calif. Set in an intricately rendered fantasy world, it pits two immense virtual societies of elves, trolls, wizards, dwarfs, and other creatures against one another in a series of quests, battles, and trading encounters. WoW (as it’s known on the net) has about 6 million members worldwide (more than a million each in China and the U.S.). It amounts to a parallel universe, with clearly delineated political and economic roles, drawing thousands of people from across the globe at any moment to encounter superhuman foes and to form collective “guilds” via their personal computers. Spending countless hours in imaginary warfare may be simply a diversion for many people, but Mr. Ito insists that World of Warcraft is nothing less than an emerging model for organizational design. Given his track record as a venture capitalist and a catalyst for computer-based socially oriented innovation, powerful decision makers are paying attention."
While most of the s+b article focuses on Joi Ito's globetrotting quest to cross-pollinate the world with cool new ideas, if you skip to page 7, there's more on Joi Ito's involvement with World of Warcraft:
"He has no money invested in Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft’s creator, but the hours he has invested in rising through the game’s rankings would probably have sufficed to produce a doctoral dissertation. And he is constantly in touch via e-mail, online chat, and cell phone with the 250 members of a guild that he cofounded — a diverse body of game characters whose creators are scattered around the globe, across demographic groups and age levels. His “raid leader” is an emergency room nurse; another important player is an unemployed bartender with attention deficit disorder who has gone off his medication; and lately, the 9-year-old daughter of one of his CEOs has been taking part. Keeping these folks on the same page and happy takes a great deal of time."
Then, on page 8, there are a few insights from Joi Ito about massively multiplayer online gaming:
"Long frustrated by the fairly conventional hierarchies in even the most innovative technology companies, Mr. Ito says he sees in his Warcraft guild a new way to organize, manage, and motivate people. With his guild doubling in size every month, he does a lot of learning on the fly. “Every week or so, I have to add a new rank, build a whole bunch of new rules, and throw in kind of ad hoc structures,” Mr. Ito says. “I’m playing with all the different kinds of management ideas I’ve had for companies with a bunch of people who are actually very dedicated. They will set their alarm clocks for 3 a.m. to run a raid of 40 people. They are committed to each other like people in a normal company wouldn’t be committed to each other. So as a test bed for these ideas, this is actually pretty amazing.”
Mr. Ito calls himself “guild custodian,” rather than leader, and he resolutely refuses to exercise power, instead letting solutions bubble up through the guild’s membership. He says he finds that people of widely divergent ages, cultures, and education levels make equally valuable contributions to the guild, and that his authority as founder is used best when used least. And he is absolutely confident a company can be run this way as well."
Tags: Joi Ito innovation management gaming WorldofWarcraft
[image: Joi Ito]
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Fly me to the moon in 2020
In a battle between aerospace giants for a lucrative NASA contract to build a manned lunar spaceship, Lockheed Martin emerged as the winner:
"NASA on Thursday gave a multibillion dollar contract to build a manned lunar spaceship to Lockheed Martin Corp., the aerospace leader that usually builds unmanned rockets. The nation's space agency plans to use the Orion crew exploration vehicle to replace the space shuttle fleet, take astronauts to the moon and perhaps to Mars. Reusable and like Apollo and earlier spacecraft, it is perched atop the rocket."
If all goes according to plan, the first test flight of Orion will be September 2014 and astronauts could return to the moon by late 2019 or 2020. However, as the New York Times points out somewhat skeptically, just because Lockheed Martin won the NASA contract for an Apollo-like capsule, doesn't mean people will be flying to the moon anytime soon: "The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed Martin was in 1996 for a spaceplane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and the ship, called X-33, never got built because of technical problems..."
Tags: space innovation Orion Lockheed Martin
[image: New York Times]
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August 31, 2006
The lunatic fringe at Texas Instruments
The current issue of FORTUNE magazine features a great story about the "lunatic fringe" and the culture of innovation at tech industry pioneer Texas Instruments. Apparently, the key to innovation success at the company has been the ability to create an environment that is supportive of "managed chaos." As Peter Lewis of FORTUNE explains, it all started with "a small group of crazies" (the lunatic fringe, if you will) who are convinced that giving free rein to "wild-eyed optimists" is the secret to innovation success:
"Gene Frantz [a business development manager in the digital signal processing group] is the dean of an informal and amorphous group of TI engineers (and their peers and contacts outside the company) who call themselves the Lunatic Fringe. They are senior people who have been given free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. "There's this continuum between total chaos and total order," Frantz explains. "About 95% of the people in TI are total order, and I thank God for them every day, because they create the products that allow me to spend money. I'm down here in total chaos, that total chaos of innovation. As a company, we recognize the difference between those two and encourage both to occur."
Basically, the ideology of the Lunatic Fringe can be distilled down to two basic concepts: (1) Look everywhere for good ideas and (2) Worry about turning them into products later. Anyway, if you're like me, it's impossible to hear the phrase "lunatic fringe" without thinking instinctively of the chart-topping rock anthem released by Canadian band Red Rider in the early 1980s.
With that in mind, I've linked to this cool Sin City montage featuring the "Lunatic Fringe" song. As an aside: if you're looking for a DVD to watch over the Labor Day weekend and are a fan of film noir and highly stylized graphic violence, check out Sin City. Not only does the film feature Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro - it also includes some unbelievable eye candy in the form of Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Devon Aoki and Rosario Dawson (as a "machine gun-wielding Dominatrix-Hooker-Godmother").
Tags: lunatic fringe TI innovation Sin City
[video: Sin City's "Lunatic Fringe"]
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The new OVO innovation seminars
OVO, the innovation business unit of NetCentrics, is launching a new web seminar series on innovation, with the first web seminar scheduled for September 6:
"OVO is announcing today a series of web seminars focused on helping teams get started with their innovation initiatives. Over 70% of CEOs interviewed in a recent Boston Consulting Group survey indicated that innovation was one of their top three priorities, but we find that that vision often does not trickle down into meaningful, actionable direction. To that end we've put together a series of webseminars to help focus and frame the innovation work at the outset."
The OVO web seminars will be organized around certain themes, such as building a business case for innovation, getting started on an innovation initiative, and understanding the processes and tools for innovation. These seminars are free and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. (Remember to sign up online!) Each seminar will last approximately 40 minutes.
Tags: OVO innovation business case strategy
[image: OVO "Innovate on Purpose"]
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The innovation equation that made IBM millions
After analyzing ten IBM case studies of innovation at work, Palo Alto-based innovation consultant Michael Osofsky has constructed a mathematical equation for innovators that takes into account the importance of market insights and technological know-how. As Osofsky explains, IBM demonstrates this equation empirically through 10 examples.
For example, consider Cemex, ranked #451 in this year's FORTUNE Global 500. The company understood that a key business driver was the amount of idle time for its expensive equipment. By leveraging a satellite-based technological solution as well as state-of-the-art scheduling software, the company was able to reduce its cement delivery window from 3 hours to 20 minutes.
Tags: innovation equation
[graphics: Michael Osofsky]
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Social networking for baby boomers
This week's Springwise trendwatching newsletter featured Eons, a social networking site for baby boomers:
"Eons is a new, full-fledged social network and information portal for baby boomers, encouraging them to celebrate life, get things done, learn and connect with other people over the age of 50. The company was founded by Jeff Taylor, who also created Monster.com.
Divided into seven categories -- Fun, Love, Money, Body, Goals, Obits and LifeMap -- the website is highly focused on being active and realizing dreams. The goals section, for example, lets members publish the top 10 goals they'd like to accomplish before they turn 100, much like 43things. So far, 50,000 goals have been posted by over 7,000 people, including celebrity 50-plussers like Jane Seymour..."
There's no guarantee, of course, that members of the social networking site will ever be able to add Jane Seymour to their list of "friends," but hey, you can always hope.
Tags: social networking Baby Boomer
[image: Jane Seymour]
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August 30, 2006
Slo-Mo Home Depot
What happens when hundreds of customers show up at a store and start shopping in slow motion? In this YouTube video clip, check out what happened when 225 Improv Everywhere Agents shopped in slow motion at a Manhattan Home Depot on August 19. The Improv Everywhere site includes extensive photos and videos of the "mission," including a detailed description of what happened during a 15-minute period when time stood still at Home Depot:
"After everyone had assembled [in a park near the store], I revealed the mission details. We would sychronize our watches and then walk over to Home Depot and shop. At exactly 4:15 we would all begin moving in slow motion. We'd do that for five minutes, and then shop normally for five minutes as if nothing had happened. At exactly 4:25 we would all freeze in place for five minutes. When that was over we would go back to normal and eventually leave the store.
This particular Home Depot location has a ground level, a lower level, a balcony, and a contractor services area. I divided the group up by months of birth and spread everyone out equally among the different sections, ensuring that we'd be spread out over the entire store. I also divided the group up by year of birth, instructing the even numbered birth year folks to approach and exit the store from Sixth avenue and the odd years to approach and exit from Fifth. I did this to make us seem less like a parade of people and more like random individuals entering and exiting the store."
Tags: Home Depot Improv Everywhere
[video: Improv Everywhere]
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Insights into the innovation competence process
In an extended post about harnessing the innovation capabilities within an organization, Alex Osterwalder of the Business Model Design and Innovation blog explains the inner workings of the Innovation Competence Process. As Alex points out, the Innovation Competence Process consists of five basic steps:
(1) Appreciate: the most important basic principle of this process is the true appreciation of everybody's capacity to contribute to innovation - from the secretary to the CEO;
(2) Self-Assess: Once the basic principles are set, the group seeking to improve its innovation competences should proceed to a self-assessment done in an open participatory discussion;
(3) Prioritize: The outcome of the self-assessment is the recognition of strengths and weaknesses in the innovation process of a group or organization;
(4) Reach Out: After constituting the action plan and prioritizing the group should reach out in order to find others that can share their experience;
(5) Connect, Share & Learn: After finding interesting countreparts based on the self-assessment of one's innovation competences the energy should go into connecting, sharing and learning.
Tags: innovation competence strategy knowledge
[graphic: Innovation Competence Process]
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Google and Apple: a double top-secret plan to take over the world?
The blogosphere has been buzzing with the news that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined the board of directors at Apple. The official spin coming out of Apple HQ is that adding Eric Schmidt to the Apple board is one way to bolster the culture of innovation at the company: "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead..." Is that all there is to it? (After all, both Al Gore and Arthur Levinson of Genentech are already directors at both companies, and nobody made a big fuss out of it)
Or is there more to this story? According to Om Malik, for example, Apple + Google = worries for everyone (and especially Microsoft). Similarly, TechCrunch hints that the appointment of Schmidt to the Apple board could be the precursor of "some fascinating collaboration" between the two companies:
"As the battle heats up between Google and Microsoft for online services and between Apple and Microsoft for media (not to mention computing) this is an important move that signals an alliance between the companies... Everyone is watching to see how Apple will bring new media content online through iTunes and the company already dominates the portable media market. Could close collaboration between online giant Google and Apple hardware pose the most viable threat yet to Microsoft’s long held personal computing leadership? It certainly seems possible. Google alone is frightening enough for Microsoft. One way or the other, this could mean exciting things in the future. Granted, you’ve got to give a nod to the “Google is Evil” perspective and this budding partnership might end up being awful - we’ll see! I at least can’t help but be intrigued."
Tags: Google Apple innovation
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Yahoo discovers the next generation of innovation
The "Edible Interface" was one of 10 different innovations featured at Yahoo's University Design Expo, an annual event that explores how humans interact with technology. By tapping into the unbridled creativity of university students, companies like Yahoo are developing an innovation framework that can anticipate future changes in technology:
"They are really wacky, creative ideas that make us think about the future,'' said Joy Mountford, a senior director of the expo who launched the event 17 years ago at Apple Computer. At the time, Mountford managed Apple's Human Interface Group. She needed creative, technically adept people to develop the next generation of computer technology. Skilled engineers were not hard to find, but Mountford was looking for brilliant geeks who were also artists.
She began holding the expo to identify talent and promote new ways of thinking about computers and design. Over the years, she estimated, 1,800 students participated. Some ended up at tech companies like Apple or Yahoo. Others ended up teaching at places like the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. [...] While the ideas may seem far out, Larry Tesler, vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo, said they can help Yahoo employees see where technology could be headed...
Anyway, for additional pictures of the Yahoo! event, be sure to check out University Design Expo 2006 on Flickr.
Tags: Yahoo innovation
[image: A Design Expo at Yahoo]
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Three ways to profit from the long tail
In a brief piece for Advertising Age (and cross-posted at Micropersuasion), marketing strategist and blogger Steve Rubel offers several suggestions for marketers interested in developing a Long Tail playbook. Since the future of creating demand lies not at the head of the curve (i.e. the most popular hits created by Big Media) but rather down the "Long Tail" of niches, marketers need to adapt their strategies accordingly. Translating Chris Anderson's Long Tail thesis into action requires three basic steps:
(1) Rethink reach;
(2) Fund niches;
(3) Demand more from Big Media partners.
Tags: long tail marketing strategy innovation
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August 29, 2006
Neuroscience and the scientific link to creative genius
In a Q&A with USA Today, neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen discusses her book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius and then offers four tips on how anyone can develop and nurture their inner creativity. Apparently, it's possible to build a better, more creative brain in only 30 minutes a day:
(1) Explore an unfamiliar area of knowledge. For example, people who use a lot of math on the job should sign up for a painting class;
(2) Spend time each day thinking. Don't censor your thoughts, but allow your mind to go freely to a problem and see what kinds of solutions or ideas surface;
(3) Practice the art of paying attention. Look for and really observe a person, an object or something in your daily commute that you hadn't really noticed before. Try describing or drawing that object in a journal or sketchbook;
(4) Use your imagination. Spend time each day imagining a different world. What would it look like? What would you do there?
Don't worry, nobody's expecting you to become the next Van Gogh or Picasso while working on an Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation. In fact, as Andreasen points out, there is such a thing as ordinary creativity: "Creativity is not limited to the masterpiece work of art but can be found in everyday tasks such as cooking or gardening. A cook who changes a recipe or even makes one up using ingredients he or she has on hand is using the creative process to create novel taste sensations. A gardener who picks out colors and a pattern for a flower garden also is tapping into his or her creative potential..."
Tags: creativity innovation inspiration
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How to turn a deserted steel town into an innovation hub
In Australia, a town once known for its steel mills and a migrant arrivals center is being transformed into a world-class innovation hub, thanks to a collaboration project between Wollongong University and the New South Wales government. As The Age explains, the new $300 million innovation campus could become a center of breakthrough research in areas ranging from biotechnology to artificial intelligence:
"About an hour south of Sydney, along the coast, lies a big paddock. The 33-hectare site, once home to a migrant arrivals centre, is an inauspicious place for a technology rejuvenation, but it is this greenfields site on which Wollongong University pins its hopes to revitalise an area once known for its beaches and steel mills.
The institution is preparing a blueprint to build a $300 million innovation campus to attract the best and brightest minds from across the country and around the world to research and commercialise technology in areas as diverse as image recognition and artificial intelligence, biotechnology, intelligent materials, polymers, superconductors and information and communications technology. The director of the innovation campus, David Fuller, is charged with building an environment in which researchers, innovative companies and postgraduate research students can work together and create the world of the future..."
The inspiration for the new innovation campus in Australia is a similar type of facility in Canada's Saskatchewan province - a site that is "300 kilometers from anywhere."
Tags: Australia innovation economic development
[image: The Age]
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In Finland, frustration with modern innovation
A big hat tip to Lassi Etelaetalo of Finland, who won the World Mobile Phone Throwing Championships in Finland by tossing his handset 89 meters (97 yards). For those of you keeping score at home, the world record for mobile phone tossing is 94.97 meters, set in 2005. Anyway, this kind of event - offering participants the opportunity to vent their frustration with modern technology - is apparently becoming quite the international rage:
"Phone throwers can compete in the "original" category, a straight over-arm pitch where length is the main factor, and in "freestyle," where points are also given for style, costume and character, as well as general sobriety. (emphasis added) Organisers say the event is "the only sport where you can pay back all the frustration and disappointments caused by this modern equipment." Numerous countries now organise national events but at this year's world championship the large majority of competitors were Finns, apart from a few from Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden."
Anyway, as Reuters points out, "the inventive Finns had already given the world the Sauna World Championships and the Wife Carrying Competition before coming up with a new way to make mobile phones even more mobile."
Tags: mobile phone Finland technology
[image: Yahoo! News]
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George Clooney and Michael Eisner on innovation
If you're interested in the future of the entertainment industry, check out this 57-minute video clip of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and George Clooney on The Charlie Rose show on PBS. This video segment, taped back in March, is the first part of a four-part "Road to Innovation" series hosted by PBS. [Part Two of the "Road to Innovation" series features Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg and Google CEO Eric Schmidt] Michael Eisner, of course, is hosting a similar type of talk show on innovation on CNBC, so I assume his appearance on the Charlie Rose show back in March was part of a scripted plan to make him an authority on innovation during the launch period of his new show. Interestingly, Charlie Rose was sick during the premiere of this "Road to Innovation" segment, so it was actually introduced by Anderson Cooper of CNN, who explained in the first few minutes of the show that Conde Nast - publisher of titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ - is a big sponsor of the show and will be publishing excerpts of these innovation interviews in several of its publications.
So, if I get this right - PBS, CNN, CNBC and Conde Nast are joining forces to tell us the future of the entertainment industry. Which means, of course, that it's very unlikely that any of this will unfold as we're told it will. Case in point - Michael Eisner explains during the video segment that the record, movie, and TV businesses will emerge stronger than ever within the next few years.
Tags: Michael Eisner George Clooney entertainment innovation
[image: Google Video]
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Buy your wedding gowns at... Kohl's?
Following in the footsteps of Target, the low-cost retail store known for its design savvy, Kohl's has inked a deal with celebrity wedding gown designer Vera Wang to develop Very Vera, a "premium lifestyle and fashion brand" that will include sportswear, intimate apparel, handbags, leather accessories, jewelry, footwear, linens and towels. While some of these deals involving fashion designers (think Martha Stewart and K-Mart) don't always work out as planned, it does seem like more and more low-cost retail stores are working closely with celebrity designers to develop the sort of boutique items that appeal to the masses. H&M, for example, regularly offers cheap, off-the-rack clothing designed by world-class fashionistas (e.g. Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney). The bottom line: if you're a retail store selling to the masses, maybe it's time to start thinking about making design a more important part of the product innovation process.
[image: Admiring Vera Wang fashions]
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August 28, 2006
Imagine a more creative Toronto
Sara Diamond, president of the Ontario College of Art & Design, explains in an op-ed piece for the Toronto Star that Toronto needs to embrace creativity and innovation if it plans to remain competitive on a global basis. As Diamond points out, a recently released report called Imagine a Toronto: Strategies for a Creative City provides "an articulate blueprint from which to build the energetic, imaginative and powerful city that many of us imagine..." While Diamond's focus is primarily on the arts and culture, it's clear that a creative Toronto linked together by Wi-Fi and social media would also have an impact on business innovation within sectors such as gaming, media and even biotechnology:
"Cultural and scientific innovators need face-to-face engagement. Let's create a networked Imagination Laboratory — an action-oriented innovation hub that invents attractive and sustainable technologies that we will love to use; sensitive, affordable health care; ecologically wise architecture; and new business methods. We need to ensure that Canadians are culture makers as well as consumers; game designers as well as players.
Dublin boomed when it focused on building successful cultural industries, resulting in great content and economic health. It built an internationally competitive media industry, and found cultural and educational solutions to social problems. A cultural research network will galvanize cultural post-secondary researchers, companies and non-profit organizations..."
For any readers interested in how Toronto plans to build and nurture a creative class, the Imagine a Toronto report is available as a 44-page PDF here.
Tags: Toronto innovation
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Dealing with innovation overload
In the August edition of its monthly trend briefing, Trendwatching.com suggests that even the best-informed business thinkers and management gurus are likely suffering from innovation overload: "We live in a world of absolute innovation overload: clever entrepreneurs, inventors, and marketers from all over are coming up with so many innovative ideas, that even innovation blogs have a hard time keeping track..." (Yep, that includes me!) With that in mind, Trendwatching offers three insights about the current state of innovation in an increasingly globalized world:
(1) Innovation isn't rocket science. It's an obsession with understanding or creating what makes consumers happy, what delights them, which problems they face, and then creating something that delivers to those needs.
(2) Innovation is not necessarily about serious people in white coats puttering about in R&D labs. In an experience economy... marketing innovations rule.
(3) Wherever you live, you have absolutely NO excuse to be unaware of innovations popping up in Austria, in the Netherlands, in Japan, in Brazil, in the US, in Turkey, in South Africa, as it’s all out there.
Tags: innovation overload
[graphic: Trendwatching.com]
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The revenge of the Yahoo! nerds
Friday's Wall Street Journal (link via Yahoo! Research) included an interesting article about the renewed emphasis on fundamental research at Yahoo. The company has been loading up on PhD-types from some of the leading R&D labs and academic think tanks in the country, including a handful of economists who are helping with the company's web search technology. In fact, the Wall Street Journal article makes it sound like Yahoo! is building a next-generation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) or Bell Labs, complete with teams of academic researchers engaged in fundamental research:
"A Yahoo! spokeswoman won't say how many economists or researchers the company plans to hire. A person familiar with the matter says Yahoo! aims to build a team of more than a dozen economists. In the past year, the company has snagged leading talents in microeconomics, Web search and artificial intelligence from universities such as Cornell and Carnegie-Mellon, and industrial labs including those of Microsoft and IBM. It has opened lab facilities in Berkeley, Calif., New York, Barcelona, and Santiago, Chile, and has begun scouting locations for a lab in Asia."
While Yahoo! should be applauded for its R&D efforts and expanded focus on innovation, it does seem like a return to the past -- a time of bloated R&D departments conducting fundamental research that ultimately proved to be of little or no use to the marketing and engineering functions of the company. As the Wall Street Journal points out, archrival Google has been much more careful to avoid these mistakes, by "sprinkling researchers through its product groups," rather than by attempting to create the mother of all R&D labs.
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The importance of aesthetic innovation
After reading through Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, Gordon Graham of the Broken Bulbs blog suggests that companies should consider aesthetic innovation in addition to product innovation, process innovation and business model innovation: "One of the main messages in this book is that product quality is pretty much a given these days and that aesthetics are, contrary to what some people argue, indeed valued by customers." As an example, Gordon points to GE, which is a proponent of the idea that style, craftsmanship and good design - in addition to world-class engineering and "ruthless financial expectations" - should play an important role during the development of new products. In addition, Gordon includes the example of Taiwanese computer maker Asus, which is adding leather design to its line of own-brand computer products.
Tags: style aesthetics design
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Quick, someone call the firedogs!
Last week, we mentioned the phenomenal success of Best Buy's Geek Squad and gave a big shout-out to the company's Blue Shirts. Well, as Gizmodo points out, rival consumer electronics chain Circuit City is developing a similar type of highly trained computer services unit that can respond to urgent customer demands for installing high-tech gear and equipment:
"The rumorsphere is rolling with news of Circuit City's upcoming rebranding of their services department to compete with Best Buy's Geek Squad. The new "Firedog" department will do both in-store and on-site home theatre/computer installations. Also, Circuit City is going to start carrying appliances again, which will be serviced by the Firedogs as well..."
Tags: Circuit City Firedog
[image: Firedog]
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