Michael Bierut sniffs at recurring revenue, but tells an instructive tale about when to talk clients out of over-design. [Design Observer]

Barney’s backers belittle Bloomberg blockbuster: hell no, we won’t close! [Racked]

From the department of silver (and gold) linings: savvy pet-care startup offers religious customers a service to care for Rover, should the Rapture happen at an inconvenient moment. [Consumerist]

Speaking of clouds and linings, fear not, meteorologists at ailing media empires: being part of a "weather team" may be a lucrative second career. [Tesco, British Grocer, Uses Weather to Predict Sales, NYT]

As you read earlier this week (unless you were locked up in Arkham Asylum), Disney is buying Marvel. A triumph for the current leadership at Marvel, considering past regimes have pushed the company right up to the edge (and over) of insolvency a couple times, even as arch-nemesis DC Comics trundled along, safe under the Time Warner umbrella.

The benefits to Disney are obvious: they have always understood the value of franchise characters and need to buy some revenue pronto. And Marvel, finally seeing an exit that wouldn’t result in shareholders comically running in place before they plunged into the freezing waters of Chapter 11 Ravine, must be more than pleased. Continue reading...

People used to regularly complain about the endless appending of the qualifier ‘Beta’ to all Google products. Yesterday afternoon Google proved the logic of its naming schema when its free mail service, Gmail, went dark for almost an hour, plunging most of the western world (or at least the small sliver that use Gmail) into confusion and anguish as the ubiquitous and free service was taken from them.

The jokes were barely dry on various blogs before the service had returned. Like Twitter, the lingering damage to reputation will be minimal. Not because they have a joke ‘fail whale’ (the graphic Twitter uses when its service is interrupted), but because you rightly suspect that every second the problem persisted there was hue and cry throughout their catered lunch and scooter-friendly halls. Continue reading...