Avitania Bronstein

I’ve  been a longtime user and huge fan of Yelp. I’ve used it to find restaurants, dentists, auto dealers, and dog kennels. Thanks to Yelp, I didn’t have a single bad meal in the UK (where bad meals abound), and found some awesome off-the-beaten-path places to shop in Paris. I’ve also made lots of great friends (yes, offline!) through Yelp Elite  events and, in Yelp parlance, UYEs (Unofficial Yelp Events). For me, Yelp is absolutely indispensable.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Yelp lately, thanks to its recent IPO. I’m not one to speculate on stocks (at least, not publicly), but I find Yelp as a business quite fascinating. Business Insider posted a really interesting article about Yelp’s business model recently.  Essentially, BI argues that Yelp’s failure to achieve strong network effects in markets outside of San Francisco, coupled with considerable strategic threats from Google (among others), calls into question the sustainability of their business model. As much as I love Yelp, I’m inclined to agree that their business does have a number of shortcomings. My impression is that Yelp currently has a problem with scalability, both on the community management side as well as the sales side.  Additional capital from the IPO will help address this, but I think their costs are too high to ensure profitability in the short run.

That’s not to say I’m not hopeful, though. I love Yelp’s platform, and I hope that they survive. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but with a uncertain eye towards their future.

When I was little, I used to play a “game” in which I would repeat a phrase over and over again until the words lost their meaning. Have you ever tried it? If you haven’t, and you’re in a place where you can sound like a complete goofball without someone carting you off to a mental hospital, you should try it. Take any word or phrase (like “big dog,” or “canoe”) and repeat it aloud without interruption, at least 30 times. Eventually, you’ll begin to feel like the words are just meaningless sounds (even though it sounds completely normal to someone who might be listening). Recently, I learned that this phenomenon is called semantic satiation: “a subjective and temporary loss of the meaning of that word” that is produced through repetition.

Cliched buzzwords suffer from a form of this, too: Monetize. Synergy. Outside of the Box. They’re words that are thrown about so frequently and cavalierly that they no longer carry any weight.

More recently, the phrase that seems the most in danger of falling into the “meaningless buzzword” trap is the word social. It’s everywhere: social media, social business, social commerce. But what does “social” really mean? Is a website or app “social” because it enables us to share, tweet, link, like, pin, blog, or post? Or is there more to it than that?

Lately, I’ve been preferring the term “pervasive communications.” It’s a term by which social media is really just a single piece of a much larger shift in the way that people connect and communicate. Not only are people using social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, and LinkedIn (to name a few), technologies such as Skype and SMS provide additional ways for people to get connected in real-time. The challenge for businesses, then, is understanding how all of these channels (individually and in aggregate) impact the organization, both internally and externally.

Obviously, that’s a lot of information to cut through. I really liked this clip from 2020F that talks about the ways our world is changing as a result of pervasive communications, and about how we can extract value from these new opportunities.

What do you think? Is “social” just another buzzword?

I love infographics — done well, they’re an eye-catching way of conveying data in a way that anyone can understand. I particularly like this one by Jess3, an agency that specializes in creative data visualisation, on how the average person interacts on Facebook. I find it interesting that the average age of someone on Facebook is 38 — that’s far older than I would have guessed. If Facebook is now the domain of us old fogies, where have the kids moved off to next?

(click the image below to view full size)

Infographic courtesy of Jess3.

“It’s remarkable how much work companies (particularly start-ups) can get out of people when social norms (such as the excitement of building something together) are stronger than market norms (such as salaries stepping up with each promotion).

If corporations started thinking in terms of social norms, they would realize that these norms build loyalty and — more important — make people want to extend themselves to the degree that corporations need today: to be flexible, concerned, and willing to pitch in. That’s what a social relationship delivers.”

- Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational

From the moment I received my first modem in the late 80′s and heard the squeaky, screechy, snap-cracky sounds that established my 300 baud connection to the Rest Of The World (or, more accurately, a BBS somewhere in my area code), I was hooked. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with the Internet, including everything from its technical underpinnings to its mass adoption, from its power to enable communication across diffuse groups of people, to even its seedy underbelly.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to channel these curiosities and interests into nearly ten years of professional experience in the digital world. My current areas of interest are strategy, e-commerce, the convergence of social networks and the enterprise, and digital marketing. I’m obsessed with understanding and measuring the ways that people digitally connect and collaborate, and how we can use these tools to make the most of our relationships, both online and off.

Currently, I am a full-time graduate student at the Rotman School of Management in the University of Toronto. I’ll graduate in June, 2012 with an MBA concentrating in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. After receiving my MBA, I plan to return to my adopted home of Seattle, Washington, with my husband of 12 years and our two bulldogs, Penny and Sid. If you’d like to learn more about me, visit my home page at http://avitania.com, or give my interactive resume a clickety-click at http://re.vu/avitania (mind the dust, it’s a work in progress).

I’ve created this blog in order to share information, generate ideas, and spark conversation. Or, I might just post cat pictures and memes pilfered from Reddit. You’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.

I know, it’s been awhile. But I couldn’t let the holidays pass without another picture of my awesome pooch. Recently, we won a giveaway hosted by @ValTorontoGal for a very fashion-forward Canada Pooch jacket.

Doesn’t Penny look smashing? Thanks, Val and Canada Pooch!

A new addition to the family has been keeping me busy.

Meet Penny!

After Ripley died earlier this year, C and I thought we wouldn’t be ready for another dog for awhile — at least, ’til I finished my master’s degree in May. But my birthday came around, and summer found us with some extra time on our hands… and so, we started looking, and found a puppy ready to go at a breeder several hours away in Dashwood. Of course, the rest is history. I’d forgotten how difficult it is to raise and train a puppy. My pockets constantly have kibble/treat crumbles, and I’m constantly cleaning up dog messes. But we’re still having fun.

Keeping with the tradition of naming our pooches after geeky/odd characters (Ellen Ripley, Sid Vicious, Mr. Peabody), Penny is named after Felicia Day’s character in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. Officially (at least, for her kennel club paperwork), we’ve named her Penelope Pitstop, after the old Hanna-Barbera character. Though Dr. Horrible or 70′s cartoons usually aren’t the first assumptions that people tend to make after finding out the pup’s name is Penny. No, she’s not named after Penny in the Big Bang Theory. No, she’s not named after Inspector Gadget’s daughter. She’s also not named after Tux the Linux penguin’s female counterpart. And no, she’s not named after porn star Penny Flame.(Though, admittedly, those Pennys are cool too!)

Needless to say, Penny and school seem to be taking up much of my time. Photography is on hold for now, but I’m hoping to get out and shoot next weekend — provided the weather holds.

Wow. I just realized that my last 365days post was way back in March, and this blog has been sadly neglected since. Not that I haven’t been taking photographs, of course. Just not as many as I would like, and unfortunately every day. However, since my last post in March, I’ve:

• Completed the first year of my MBA, which was the most academically challenging thing I’ve ever experienced. It was all kinds of crazy. Rewarding, but crazy.
• Spent several weeks following my last final exam on the couch in front of the television, alternating between naps and catching up on 9 months of television and movies.
• Spent nearly 4 weeks in Europe, sightseeing the Brittany and Normandy regions of France (with a quick stint in Paris), as well as driving around England and the  Scottish Highlands.
• Went back to L.A. to visit my mom and brother, who I hadn’t seen in months
• Attended San Diego Comic Con, which I hadn’t done in six or so years. It’s changed so much!

While in L.A., C and I visited the La Luz de Jesus Gallery (highly recommended if you dig contemporary art!) and really dug this piece by Max Grundy. So we had to take it home, where it’s now hanging above our television. :) It’s our second purchase from La Luz and our third Max Grundy original. I really dig his retro-style apocalyptic/propagandist images. To say the least, the new piece definitely makes a statement in the living room. ;)

So, we’re home now. At least, for the time being. I’m looking forward to spending the next few weeks just hanging around and enjoying time off before school starts in September. Maybe roadtrip with C and the pooch to the Maritimes. We’ll see. In the meantime, I definitely hope to be getting back into photography and updating this blog more often. Stay tuned.

I can’t remember the last time I received a letter in the mail that wasn’t a bill, advertisement, or something I bought over the internet.

Marie is a dear friend whom I met pen-palling when I was in my teens (before this new-fangled internet thing). She sent me a postcard, along with some old photos from a visit back in 2003. I don’t think her penmanship has changed since we started exchanging letters more than 15 years ago!

C has decided to try the Paleo Diet, and since he cooked dinner tonight, I went Paleo by proxy. The salmon and roasted green beans were delicious, and I was so full I didn’t really miss not having anything carby.

I don’t think I can eat like this full-time; I don’t have the willpower (I’ll fully admit to being a slave to the carbohydrate monkey on my back) — but I’ll take this for dinner any day.

Trying to get back on track with the 365days posts! I won’t be posting all the ones I haven’t blogged yet, but if you want to take a gander at the photos thus far, they’re here.

I just realized that it’s been one month to the day that Ripley died. I still catch myself thinking I hear her bark when I turn the key to get in my apartment. Sid has been quite the snuggly dog since her departure, which is really quite sweet — until you realize that a 45-pound bulldog is constantly trying to climb in your lap. I wouldn’t trade him for anything, though.

Drat! After weeks of not syncing from Posterous to WordPress, Posterous decided a couple of days ago to start doing what it was supposed to do. In the meantime, I’d been behind on posting photos from my 2011 365days project from Flickr to WordPress, only to find out that half the stuff I’d been intending to post here had *already* been posted by Posterous.

Duh. Anyway, I must get a handle of where my posts are being sync’ed, because it’s starting to get a bit ridiculous.

In the meantime, here’s one 365days shot that hasn’t been posted: some lovely cupcakes from a bachelorette party I was asked to shoot over the weekend (78/365, to be exact).

Aren’t they pretty?

C scored comp tickets from some guy on Twitter, so we made our way to Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell The Guvernment to see the show. Not that I actually saw the show, mind you — too many people, not enough places to see, douchebaggery all around. The night wasn’t a total loss; much fun was had hanging with Renata and Fabio (our favorite Brazilian supergeeks) and at the very least I got to *hear* Royksopp live. But, seriously, folks — have me committed to the nearest mental institution if I ever willingly go to the Guvernment ever again.