First it was the new Mailbox app with their silly counter that will one day tell you when you can use the product. Now it is Tempoai with their daft calendar app that you download only to be told they aren’t taking new accounts right now.

Really?

To Apple, stop the idiocy and take them out of the store. Why let your customers download products they can’t use. We actually pay for bandwidth. In Australia, we REALLY pay for bandwidth.

Imagine going to Amazon, downloading a book. Being greeted with blank pages and a message saying “due to the complexity of writing a book we will be releasing it one word at a time – we would hate for the book to crash”… or, sorry, “we aren’t accepting new readers right now”.

OMG, what a great idea… I get the analogy doesn’t work totally but you get the idea. Free doesn’t actually mean free to the user. Wake up developers. You are wasting the scarecist resource on earth. Attention.

Ever wondered why you need a blog? A twitter feed? A community to spread the news via links and reposts?

Well, look no futher than the Tesla vs. NYTimes scrap. Who knows who is right or who is wrong. But what is important is they both have the power to tell their story. Power comes from two sources.

First, reach. Tesla’s CEO – Elon Musk – has more than 130,000 Twitter followers. NYTimes clearly has many. There is a difference between power and truth. The NYTimes no longer exclusively represents “truth”. That right is now with us. As Dan says, the balance of power has shifted. 

Second, and more importantly, is authenticity. Any business needs to build a capability to communicate authentically (read, without PR drivel and corporate speak).  And Tesla is doing it well. 

Beneath this is a broader and critical implication for all of us in business. How we listen has changed. Once you’d graze the NYTimes and pass the news on at the cooler. Now the news unfolds dynmically in our feeds and aggregators – every story lives in a way that is so much more dynamic than anything we have ever seen.

Brands are now not just publishers byt drivers of the news dynamic. They get to nudge the story along, set it on fire – sometimes, they get to kill it dead. They might not be telling the truth, but they have the power to tell their story — or at least their side of it — like never before. Is your brand ready?

Against a wave of media coverage — and every tech company rushing to plug their position into “Big Data” — skeptisim is well justified. The rise of data-ism isn’t a panacea to bad marketing. As Nick says, “transparent lens can also be a warped lens”.

Sure we need data. Big data, social data, small data – heck, some days, any kind of data. But data is just one piece of the puzzle.

David Brooks gets at this idea that “everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things.” Just watch the Quantified Life movement lift off to see this in action.

But this same approach will stop many marketers doing many important things. It will become a great excuse. As one marketer said to me the other day in a fit of determination – “I’m not doing social until its benefits are quantifiable and real”. Good luck with that. Not everything can be reduced to the quantifiable.

As Brooks says, data is useful in understanding some of the present and much of the past. It’s not so hot at predicting the future. As marketers we are going to need to place bets, some of which that don’t depend on data to start with. And if you are wrong. If you don’t execute well, data isn’t going to save you.

This is always be a hard day for all of us that loved Marty.

All you can be grateful for are all the incredible memories of Marty and the time we did get together — and the friends and family that helped us through that terrible time.

Wherever you are Marty, we’ll be having a beer for your today – maybe some back-yard cricket too, a little marty lark memorial game.

. Kia Kaha little brother.