MentalGator

Stowe Boyd (100 unread)

• "@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt..."

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 7:11 pm

  “@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt Big Data Analytics; Lack of E… [t.co] ”
  
  - May 15, 2012 at 08:55AM via [twitter.com]

• The Walking Dead?

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 4:00 pm

  The Walking Dead?:

  TV advertising is up, but it’s a Ponzi scheme, like the increased revenue in movie theaters: in both cases, they are losing viewers but charging more.

  David Carr via NYTimes.com

  According to estimates reported by Reuters, in the coming week the big four broadcast networks and the CW will book some $9 billion in advertising revenue, with the big four up 2 to 4 percent from last year. And cable networks, which surpassed broadcasters for the first time last year in total advertising booked during the upfronts, are expecting a payday of more than $9.6 billion, an increase of 4 to 6 percent.

  Part of what keeps legacy television in the game is that it is the last refuge of mass and reach. For retailers who want to flag a sale or an entertainment company with a weekend movie opening, a commercial on a broadcast network or a highly rated cable station can still hammer a message into a lot of noggins. In this targeted age, it’s breathtakingly inefficient — you pay to reach everyone, even the millions not in the desired age group — but making a big television buy is a kind of comfort food, easy and familiar.

  Yet by losing audience, networks and cable stations have been able to force advertisers to buy more commercials to reach the number of viewers that they want.

  “They have an interesting business model predicated on losing viewers,” observed Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. “It can’t last forever.”

  At some point, the laws of both gravity and economics will begin to pull down the upfronts, and with them, the fundamentals of the television business. Jeff Gaspin, who used to head entertainment at NBC, told Bill Carter that he and his son recently decided to catch up on a particular series and so assembled episodes from a variety of sources — iTunes, Netflix and the DVR. They saw all the past episodes in time to watch the final one live on AMC but found that commercials interrupted their experience.

  So what show demonstrated to the former television executive that the old way of watching television was losing relevance?

  “The Walking Dead.”

• "Anything with a screen is a TV set, as far as I’m concerned."

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 3:48 pm

  “Anything with a screen is a TV set, as far as I’m concerned.”
  
  - Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, via NYTimes.com

• MixMedias - Montreal

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 7:51 pm

  I’m doing the closing keynote at MixMedias - Montreal next week: Curation In A Liquid Media World

  

  Curation In A Liquid Media World
  
  The rise of several mutually-reinforcing trends — ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, web-oriented operating platforms and apps, and the explosion of the social revolution online — are converging to transform the fundamentals of media. I characterize that as the transition into liquid from solid, and so, we are seeing the emergence of liquid media. This will change everything, and will raise the role of curation to a new, central importance. We are seeing this first in the open web, in blogging and other media forms. But the greatest impacts will come when media companies adapt to these changes, and then, subsequently, as curation within the business becomes as critical as external community management is now.

• Tympathy: Getting Into a Shared Tempo At Work

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 6:40 pm

  Had a fascinating talk yesterday with Deb Louison Lavoy as a part of my work on a new book, The Business Of Social Business (I hope to be done in June).  Deb mentioned a term that she’d read in a David Brooks column, of all places. He reels off a bunch of terms that he thinks are critical skills for the new world we are entering (I leave the others for other posts, perhaps). One was not like the others, in that he attempts to repurpose a term that is in common everyday use, but cast into a new meaning: sympathy.

  The New Humanism - David Brooks via NYTimes.com

  Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

  First, I think that we do need a term to represent the ability to share a tempo with others. I think it *is* a key skill, or trait.

  However, I don’t think it is easy to extend the meaning of existing and commonly used terms, and to basically shoulder aside their established meanings.

  So I am proposing tympathy for this purpose (‘tym’ for time (sort of), and ‘pathy’ for sensing). (Note that I considered and rejected ‘tempothy’.)

  Tympathetic people can naturally get into a groove with an established group, they find the natural rhythms of cooperation, and seem to sense the right time to ask a question, offer some insight, or shift course. And when this scales up to those connected in some shared activity, coordination feels frictionless, and collaboration seems less strained.

  Effective groups will move toward a shared pace, either organically, or by following the tempo of a leader, or because of the explicit actions of some sort of metronome. They are also attuned to the tempo of the larger work context in which their work is embedded.

  Work media tools — like Yammer, Chatter, IBM Connections, Podio, and Jive — are being rapidly adopted in the work context for a wide variety of reasons, but one major benefit is that they lay down a beat for people to build their work tempo around: they engender tympathy, which we all want.

  My sense is that the very best work media solutions will support a polyrhythmic work environment. They will work at different tempos for different layers of work, ranging from the fast twitch pace of posting updates on today’s to do list, to the slower, deeper cycles in the business, like long-range strategic planning.

  I also believe that organizations that are moving toward greater autonomy and distributed leadership will put a high premium on tympathy as an personal attribute. My bet is that tympathy has been important forever, but we just didn’t have a name for it and it has gone unexamined in the workplace.

• "@Rafe: Author Daniel Suarez (“Daemon,” “Freedom”) at Augmented Reality..."

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 10:23 pm

  “@Rafe: Author Daniel Suarez (“Daemon,” “Freedom”) at Augmented Reality conference: “A lot of what I write now doesn’t stay fiction very long.””
  
  - May 08, 2012 at 11:54AM via [bit.ly]

• A Web That Forgets

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 6:37 pm

  Megan Garber writes about a new iPhone photo app that will only share pics for a certain period of time — Snapchat — and suggests that the persistence of the web has it’s downside in that it cannot forget, and so we can’t either:

  Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains - Megan Garber viaThe Atlantic

  Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, “save all” is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers. And that doesn’t just mean that the comment you left on that Joss Whedon fan site that one time is still sitting there, emoticon-ed and gif-ed and captured for posterity within the all-knowing neurons of Google. It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die … there, still, we are. 

  So when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents — things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers.

  And: That’s great! It’s what makes the Internet the Internet! The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically. We wake. We sleep. We have beginnings. We have endings.

  I am intrigued by the poeticism of a time-stamped and eroding web, one that degrades and ages. Of course, unexamined in this piece is the truth that the web we have today *is* emphemeral and is fading all the time. Web sites go down, links get broken, domain names go unrenewed. Perhaps it isn’t happening fast enough for Garber, and its also true that some services on the web go to great lengths to fight entropy. That’s the sales angle of a Flickr Pro account, for example.

  The way the web ages, though, is erratic and extremely heterogeneous. It’s like my recent 30 year high school reunion, where some of my compatriots could pass as 40 while others appeared to be septuagenarians. Time wounds all heels, as Groucho observed, but not at the same pace.

  Garber mentions another service that is built around the notion on intentional transience, News.me’s new Last Great Thing, which sounds like fun, although the impermanent side of it may be more of an annoyance than high culture:

  Last week News.me, Betaworks’ social news service, launched Last Great Thing, a time-limited version of Getting the News that asks participants to share just one worthy thing they’ve found on the web that day — permalinks not included. The product’s point is awesomeness-without-archive. But it’s also ephemerality-as-service. It allows us to do what our minds are, actually, optimized to do: to experience, to forget, to remember, and then forget again.

  Not mentioned is the tiny webpage posting app, CheckThis, that formerly defaulted the expiration date to one month. They seem to have amended that to ‘never’ but the option to expire a post still exists. But clicking the button to select ‘one week’ seems like a form of asceticism, rather than accepting the ephemeral.

  Might be better if I could simply sign up to a ‘erase.me’ service, with all my logins for all my accounts online, and to stipulate how I would like my web trails to be managed over the weeks, years, and decades.

  I certainly would like a tool that would automatically sweep the files on my desktop into a timestamped folder every week, and to delete those folders several weeks later.

  Sure, delete old calendar entries after a year (or maybe two?) Shred my email after five years (or maybe ten?). Retire my tweets after a few months? Keep anything I’ve favorited until I unfavorite? Keep all blog posts until I pass on, and convert into some version that is obviously the memoirs of a dead person?

  It seems just as sensible as life insurance, and almost as sobering.

• Could These Start-Ups Become the Next Big Thing? - NYTimes.com

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 5:26 pm

  Could These Start-Ups Become the Next Big Thing? - NYTimes.com:

  

  I voted for Dropbox. See Why haven’t Microsoft or Apple built Dropbox-style sharing into their OS’s?

• "@panklam: Collaboration tools exacerbate centrality of those already central @robcross #Ansummit"

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 4:52 pm

  “@panklam: Collaboration tools exacerbate centrality of those already central @robcross #Ansummit”
  
  - May 08, 2012 at 06:45AM via [bit.ly]

• via futuramb

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 3:08 pm

  
  
  

  via futuramb

• The Fall Of Facebook Social Readers

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 3:05 pm

  John Herrman dissects the news about the declining popularity of social news readers on Facebook, and points out the key observation:

  Sharing isn’t really sharing if you don’t mean to do it.

  He also suggests that Facebook’s rejiggering of ‘trending stories’ so they are segregated and pulled to the side of actual posts by actual people could be a devastating blow to companies like the Washington Post. Ryan Kellett, the WashPo engagement producer, agrees.

  Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth.

  — Ryan Y. Kellett (@rkellett) May 7, 2012

  No surprise that the social platform shapes discourse, but it’s a hard reality for the papers who were holding out their Facebook stats to advertisers as confirmation of a social strategy and now they are collapsing.

  Here’s the crash for Washpo:

  

• OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” | Lean Back 2.0

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 9:24 pm

  OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” | Lean Back 2.0:

  OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” - Emma Gardner via Lean Back 2.0

  Has OgilvyOne London seen any evidence of people “leaning back” when consuming ads or creative content on their iPad?

  [OlgivyOne London Chief Executive Annette] KING: It’s interesting because we were having a debate between lean forward and lean back before we got on the call with you. There’s a time and a place for both. The Economist app is a good example of a ‘lean back and consume’ type of situation. As an ad agency, though, we’ll always be trying to lean forward. We’re always trying to get people to take part in the app and engage with the ad. By definition, it’s an immersive kind of approach.

  We’re really interested in the dual screen experience right now. By dual screen, I mean sitting in front of the TV with a tablet. You might be watching one thing on the TV, but doing something else on your tablet. And we want to start connecting those two things. If Jamie Oliver is making a special truffle recipe on television, you can use your tablet to find out where truffles grow in the world, or how to make Jamie’s recipe. You can get people involved through the second screen.

  I wonder about ‘always trying to lean forward’: isn’t there a place for ambient advertising? Ambient awareness of other people (through Twitter or other social tools) is a back of the mind sort of attention scheme: you know what people are up to based on their updates moving by while you are doing other things.

  I conjecture that ambient advertising could be very effective on the second screen. Imagine that as I am watching a cooking show, and I’ve enabled a second screen gear applet on my tablet. As the chef’s use various kitchen tools, the gear applet streams pictures and descriptions of the gear: this knife, this sauce pan, this stove. You might think that this is a lean-forward set up — that I am dedicating foreground attention to the gear streaming by — and I might do that the first few times I use the app. However, as I habituate to the app, I will begin to treat it as a lean-back stream of information, so my perception of the products being featured is more additive or cumulative. It’s just as much about brand building as a call to action.

  Yes, there will still be times when I want to buy that particular knife, right now. But in general I think it will lead to a collection of brand associations built over time, so that when I get to the point when I want to buy a new knife, a few brands are in my head, and I choose between them at the store, or online.

  If there is one thing that advertisers can do, though, to make lean-forward intimacy with products more likely on the second screen, it would be to make it easy to share product information and images with other people: wire it deeply into the social dimension of TV.

  (For more on Social TV and The Second Screen, download the free Work Talk special report on that subject, here.)

• Is Bezos Crazy Like a Fox, Or Just Crazy?

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 4:58 pm

  Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He? - Farhad Manjoo via PandoDaily

  Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He was being a bit modest there; Amazon is not merely “willing” to be misunderstood, it often tries to actively sow widespread misunderstanding. This works it its advantage; if competitors don’t know what Amazon is up to, if they can’t even figure out where and how it aims to make money, they’ll have a harder time beating it.

  But all this misunderstanding can’t be an unalloyed good. Amazon is so opaque, with so many mysterious businesses and revenue streams, that you’ve got to wonder whether the people who work there even understand what it’s up to. In business, simplicity often wins. Selling me a device to get me to buy a membership in order to get a book for free. Is Bezos crazy like a fox? Or is he just plain crazy? We have no idea.

  But Bezos is involved in a land grab: he wants people to use Kindle and buy books from Amazon long enough to become a default standard. If he has to extract value from the publishers and authors of books to do so, he will.

  Bezos is looking over his should at Apple (and more distantly at Google) who are developing the most dominant mobile devices on the planet, and he knows it is all converging. People — given their druthers — would rather have a single mobile device to do everything: read books, surf the web, write email, blog, social network (yes, I am using that as a verb).

  So the only question is, why doesn’t he put a phone on the Kindle? It’s already a (bad) browsing device with an embedded whispernet data connection, so perhaps he is planning to give away phone service to Amazon Prime subscribers, too.

• Web, City, Cars, Parking

  Posted: May 6, 2012, 3:52 pm

  As the web and urban continue to collide and build on each other, post-industrial concerns like parking will be managed in very different ways. Instead of the 20th century hunter/gatherer model — where people search for empty spaces to park — we’ll see hotel reservation models, autonomous vehicles parking themselves, and dynamic pricing algorithms:

  The Networked Urban Environment - Jan Chipchase via design mind

  Urban infrastructures are increasingly being equipped with sensors and other means of collecting information and channeling our everyday actions, from energy use to parking patterns, into software and networks that analyze data and act upon it. Cities—and communities— are becoming “smarter” as “the internet of things” evolves. What this means is that more and more people and things, including parking spaces are becoming connected, allowing for better prediction models of traffic and energy usage thanks to real-time data flows, leading to better awareness of current resource statuses and more practical matters such as more dependable payment mechanisms.

  The smart-parking scenarios will arrive more quickly than you think—in fact, they’re already nearly here. On the most basic level, anyone can get free driving directions and an instant, estimated time of arrival from Google Maps, when they agree to share where they are at a given moment via GPS. Throughout Europe now, you can reserve public parking spots via SMS messages. In San Francisco, you can time a meeting so that you don’t pay peak-prices for parking, determined by a dynamic market pricing system launched as a pilot program this fall (and running through summer 2012) by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to help alleviate congested streets. It uses real-time data tracking to determining the cost of parking at 7,000 of San Francisco’s 28,000 metered spots, as well as 12,250 spaces in three-quarters of the parking garages owned by the cities.

  And then there are much more intricate examples, on epic scales. In September, the technology company Pegasus Holdings announced it  is building a $200 million test city on a city scale in New Mexico—from scratch, where it will try out networked parking and transportation systems among other infrastructure innovations. In Asia and the Middle East, smart cities are being built from scratch: Tianjin Eco City in China; Songdo, South Korea; and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. In each of these examples, developers are working to implement traffic-solutions that will make use of new, networked technologies, all as part of creating more energy-efficient communities.

  These optimistic visions aren’t just about making parking a more pleasant experience. They’re largely about solving urgent problems in a time of economic and sustainability-related challenges. According to a report by IBM, the economic impact of traffic congestion is $4 billion per year in New York alone, in terms of estimated lost work hours, pollution-related costs, and wasted fuel. In the United States, traffic congestion losses are growing at 8 percent a year, the most recent estimate being $78 billion in 2005. Worldwide, in both developed and developing-world cities, traffic congestion-related expenses represent between 1 percent and 3 percent of most cities’ GDP.

  And on a larger scale, beyond parking and traffic, a recent report by Ericsson (published earlier this year) found that the more networked, or “smart,” a city is, the more that city sees benefits to its “triple bottom line” (its financial, societal, and sustainability-related successes). For every 10 percentage points increase in broadband penetration, the report found, the isolated economic effect on GDP growth is approximately 1% of GDP.

  

  Hiriko stackable electric car

  As I wrote about not long ago, the percentage of major cities given over to parking (and cars in general) is preposterous. All these schemes for dealing with parking of cars are transitional, because ultimately the payback for eliminating parking is so high that cities will eliminate cars, or change them into something so different they drastically diminish parking (like stackable, foldable, autonomous cars).

• "from: noreply@plazes.com to: stowe boyd email date: may 4 2012 subject: News From Plazes Hi..."

  Posted: May 5, 2012, 3:21 pm

  “from: noreply@plazes.com
  to: stowe boyd email
  date: may 4 2012
  subject: News From Plazes
  
  Hi stoweboyd,
  
  Thanks for being part of Plazes. We hope you enjoyed the journey, past or present.
  
  The time has come to say farewell, and next week, Plazes will go out of service.
  
  From next week, you can go to Plazes.com and move your history to Nokia Maps. Your plazes will become favourites on Nokia Maps for your PC or Mac. Shortly after next week, you’ll also be able to sync your favourites with Nokia Maps on your phone.
  
  If you like, you’ll also be able to download and save a history file containing all your activities and plazes.
  
  With Nokia Maps, you can search for interesting places and find your way there with walking, driving and public transport directions. And if you find somewhere new on your travels, you can add it to the map, write reviews, post a rating and add photos.
  
  If you have any questions, please contact Nokia Support.
  
  Kind regards
  
  Your Plazes Team”
  
  -

  via email

  Email yesterday from Plazes (Nokia, now), announcing they’re shutting down the service, one of the pioneers in the geomobile check-in arena. Just another example of a big company trying to buy into a new market, and screwing it up. Of course, the Plazes guys really stalled the company’s trajectory in 2007 with a terrible redesign, but — like Dopplr — a bunch of interesting ideas and smart designers were scooped up by Nokia, who failed to do anything with them at all.

  

• The New iPhone: Size, Screen + New Connector (Plus iPod touch)...

  Posted: May 5, 2012, 1:56 pm

  
  
  

  The New iPhone: Size, Screen + New Connector (Plus iPod touch) By Jeremy Horwitz

  Whether you call it the “iPhone 5,” the “iPhone 6,” or the “iPhone 4G”—well, maybe not the last one thanks to international regulators—the new iPhone is coming this fall, and we have some details to share. They match and expand upon details we received back in March, suggesting that Apple is abandoning the long-rumored “teardrop-shaped iPhone 5” in favor of another glass-bodied design.

  What we’ve learned: the new iPhone will indeed be longer and thinner than the iPhone 4 and 4S. Approximate measurements are 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm—a 10mm jump in height, nearly 2mm reduction in thickness, and virtually identical width. According to our source, Apple will make one major change to the rear casing, adding a metal panel to the central back of the new iPhone. This panel will be flat, not curved, and metal, not ceramic. Our artist’s rendition provides a rough idea of what this change will look like; it echoes the current-generation iMac design, to be sure.

  Going from 3.5” to 4” is a really big step.

• Lean Back 2.0, from The Economist — How tablets are...

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 10:51 pm

  
  
  

  Lean Back 2.0, from The Economist — How tablets are accelerating the liquefaction of media, and the rise of a new global psychographic: the mass intelligent.

• A Quick Peek At Invy: A Calendar Coordination App

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 3:35 pm

  Coordinating times for meetings or calls is one of the most persistent headaches, and one that wastes time and energy. The best strategy is the following:

  1. An organizer picks a bunch of possible times — presumably times when she is available — and sends those to others she wants to attend
  2. Each of the invitees indicate which times they can make (perhaps penciling in the options to avoid later conflicts)
  3. The organizer picks a time that all — or as many as possible — can attend, and sends out the chosen time to the invitees
  4. The invitees and organizer put the appointment on their calendars (deleting the penciled in appointments).

  This is theory, but in practice all sorts of wrinkles come up, and even in the best case the organizer is left leafing through a chain of emails trying to figure out who can make what times.

  Invy is a sleek looking and easy to use iPhone app that is designed a mobile-first solution to this problem, or at least most of it. (Note that there have been a long series of other solutions, like Outlook, but leave that to one side).

  The organizer has to use the Invy app, but the others do not: they can be contacted via email that links to the Invy website, where they can do their part of the dance.

  Here’s the landing page on the iPhone:

  

  I’ve created a Invy with two possible times to another of my email addresses to test, one not registered with Invy. I acted as both sides of the negotiation, turning down one time and selecting the other, and tried the chat: discussion is essential in these cases if you want to avoid email. At the end, on the iPhone side as the organizer, I picked the final time.

  Here’s the web UI:

  

  Invy added the event to the calendar on my phone automatically, after I — as organizer — selected the time/date for the meeting. I also received another email as the invitee with an .ics calendar file as an attachment, so invitees without Invy could import that to their calendars.

  It all worked perfectly, aside from some minor UI issues. For example, when presented with just a single option for a meeting, it wasn’t clear how to say no. Turns out you have to agree to the time/date by clicking on a checkmark, and then unchecking it. Otherwise, smooth.

  I would like to see a slight enlarging of the use case, if only for those with Invy installed. If I have proposed a variety of dates for a pending Invy I’ve organized, or if I have said that some time/dates are possible in an Invy I have received from another user, I’d like those to appear on my calendar as being ‘penciled in’. I use the convention of putting a question mark at the end of the event’s title, like ‘Dinner with Carlos?’, as a way to indicate penciled appointments. This would help me avoid booking something in one of those penciled spots while the Invy negotiations were still in process.

  Also, there is no way as yet to indicate any preference across various time/dates, which is very common in coordinating meetings. Yes, a lot of that could be embedded in the chat, but a simple way to click on ‘better, good, worse’ on each might be helpful.

  At any rate, leaving that elaboration aside, Invy is great, and I will be using it immediately. I am involved in a series of interviews for a project, where I am trying to schedule times with a long and growing list of brainiacs in the social business field, all of whom are just as busy as I am. This will help me immensely, although it’s a use case where the penciling feature would be extremely helpful, so I can avoid double bookings.

• "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 2:04 pm

  “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
  
  - Simone Weil

• Being There

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 1:43 pm

  Marc Andreessen is the Chauncey Gardiner of the tech world, and has managed to juggle being there at the invention of the first browser into billions. But let’s not confuse luck with smarts, as Felix Salmon says (in a long-winded way):

  The problem with Marc Andreessen - Felix Salmon via Reuters

  It’s easy to admire Andreessen, a man whose disarming and engaging blog was a must-read during the financial crisis, when he would provide some very smart perspective from the point of view of a wealthy man, thousands of miles away from the epicenters of the crisis, who had some very sharp insights into what was going on. He then launched Andreessen Horowitz, and the blog became more of a public seminar in how to be senior management, which is great if you like that sort of thing. And it’s true that the five big ideas in the interview are all pretty revolutionary things, although I don’t think he actually had them all first.

  But Andreessen has never really been a public intellectual. His single greatest achievement — the creation of the world’s first web browser, Mosaic — took place under the auspices of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. But ever since then he’s been a red-blooded capitalist, founding and funding a long series of for-profit companies, and becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Silicon Valley in the process.

  And when you look at Marc the capitalist, rather than at Marc the ideas guy, the hero-worship becomes a bit more difficult. I certainly like the way that he’s dragging Silicon Valley into the world of philanthropy, where it’s historically been very weak. But a lot of my own Wired story, last month, can be read as a push back against the IPO culture which Andreessen, almost more than anybody else, has managed to create.

  “Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. His first company, Netscape, lost the Browser Wars and ended up getting sold to AOL. His second company, Loudcloud, was (to be charitable) too far ahead of its time, so it “pivoted” into something called Opsware; eventually Andreessen managed to sell it off to HP. His third company, Ning, was even less successful, and ended up buried somewhere in Glam Media. None of them exist today in any recognizable form; none of them ever made much money; and none of them even really made it as far as building anything approaching a permanent income stream.

  Salmon takes his time dismembering Andreessen’s mystique:

  Andreessen Horowitz does provide a bit of expert advice and name recognition, but at heart it doesn’t make anything at all; its sole predictable income stream is the management fee it skims off while investing other people’s money.

  […]

  I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL, or that HP gained much from buying Opsware beyond getting Andreessen to sit on its famously-dysfunctional board.

  […]

  While Andreessen is very good at making money, then, he’s much less good at creating lasting value for the long-term shareholders of his companies. In his world, buy-and-hold public shareholders are the patsies, the people left holding the bag when the fast money has long since departed. He’s smart; the rest of us are chumps. I guess it makes perfect sense that he’s recruited Larry Summers as a Special Advisor.

  Salmon suggests that we read Chris O’Brien’s 2009 piece sparked by the launch of Andreessen Horowitz, and I agree, because even more than Felix, Chris makes a compelling case that Andreessen’s mystique says more about the Silicon Valley mindset than Andreessen:

  Innovation can’t be sustained by creating a venture-backed Ponzi scheme where one money-losing start-up is sold to another, which is then sold to another. 

  Losing money indefinitely isn’t just a financial failure. It represents a failure to truly understand how a service or product is creating value for a customer, how to communicate that value, and how to persuade the customer to pay above and beyond for that value.

  That, all too often, is where the valley still falls short: Failing to innovate around the business to same degree it innovates around the technology.

  This isn’t Andreessen’s fault. But his ascension as the valley’s leading light embodies that ideal. And that shows the valley is no where near ready to change its ways.

• courtenaybird: The Decline and Fall of ‘Draw Something’ - The...

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 12:55 pm

  
  
  

  courtenaybird:

  The Decline and Fall of ‘Draw Something’ - The Atlantic Wire

  I never used it. It’s a fad, a hit single: Draw Something is the Vanilla Ice of mobile apps.

• The Immutable Laws Of Finance And Facebook

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 12:44 pm

  This column reads like a basin of ice water thrown in the faces of all those hoping to hide the coattails of Facebook’s IPO to riches, or perhaps it reads like Ecclesiastes.

  Lex in depth: Facebook - Robert Armstrong and Stuart Kirk via FT.com

  Before turning to the future, remember the immutable laws of finance. Stratospheric growth never lasts. Returns fade. New threats emerge.

  Stratospheric growth never lasts. Returns fade. New threats emerge.

  Hence that first big question: can Facebook burrow into all aspects of computing and stay there, as Microsoft did – or will it give way to the next new thing? Clearly, social networks are unstable in their early years. But once they reach a certain scale they become more resilient. Any communication tool that is already popular has an advantage in attracting new users – the “network effect”. Software designers will aim their best new stuff at the biggest platforms – a phenomenon from which Apple and Android are benefiting in mobile computing.

  With 900m active users, Facebook looks dominant already. But investors must consider the possibility that, like most products, its usefulness will peak and decline. Many of the connections users have formed could cease to be of interest. The network starts to carry more noise than information. People look for something more interesting. Social networks have inherent stabilisers as they grow but may also have a big destabiliser: boredom.

  This problem is compounded, it seems likely, by the ever-increasing probability that your mother (or father or teacher) is on Facebook. That is, as user numbers increase, it becomes less cool. The company would argue it does not need to be cool. Once its user base reaches a certain size, it becomes irreplaceable. Should Facebook attain a stable monopoly on social networking, it would be easy to dream of a time when searching for information, reading news, watching television, writing a document or talking on the telephone are activities conducted on the Facebook platform or given a social dimension imported from and controlled by Facebook. It is this picture that makes some analysts think the company could be worth $100bn or more. Certainly, the potential revenue pool is enormous.

  But users may not stay loyal for ever. True, all the data that make up a user’s identity – comments, pictures, likes, connections with friends – are in effect owned by, and trapped on, Facebook. The company has carefully made it costly to leave. The question is whether the costs are high enough to prevent flitting among the networks and tools that have not been invented yet. It is hard to quit using Microsoft’s software or Google’s search engine, not just because of network effects but also because almost everyone needs to do things those tools make possible. Competitors are more expensive or not as good. Facebook simply is not essential to life or work in the same way.

  And remember that Facebook was developed at the tail-end of the PC era. As the smartphone ascends, the company is already playing catch-up with competitors born and bred on mobile devices. Naturally, Facebook could survive without monopolistic control of the social dimension of computing. But it would need to spend aggressively to protect market share, implying lower margins.

  Making a Google-like buy of Instagram for $1B just before the IPO? The only thing that would have been more Google like would have been to shut it down after the founder left to start something else.

  (via Fred Wilson)

• kirklove: david: The squares marked A and B are the same shade...

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 6:10 am

  
  
  

  kirklove:

  david:

  The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray

  One of my all-time favorite optical illusions. It seems completely implausible and yet it’s so. Simply put a small white stroke around isolated colors in each box (pictured below) and it breaks the illusion, showing clearly they are the same value. Incredible how our own brains trick our own eyes!

  

• A fascinating UI concept for getting stuff from device to...

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 1:05 am

  
  
  

  A fascinating UI concept for getting stuff from device to device.

  (via Co.Design)

• "We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead."

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 9:49 pm

  “We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.”
  
  -

  - Eric Johnson

  via stoweboyd.com

• The Next Big Thing Is Eating The Lunch Of Something That Was Big A Decade Ago

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 9:33 pm

  Someone who hasn’t fallen for George Orwell’s trope ‘whoever is winning now will always seem to be invincible.’

  Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years - Eric Jackson via Forbes

  In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:

  1. Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
  2. Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),
  3. and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).

  We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

  With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings.  Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion.  Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it.  Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
  
  When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections.   MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially.  Facebook got college students.  LinkedIn got the white collar professionals.  Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.
  
  Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users.  Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm.  Why has Amazon done so little in social?  And Google?  Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
  
  Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world.  These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application.  They don’t even think of launching via a web site.  They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
  
  We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
  
  Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm.  Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies.  It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization.  Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience.  It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year.  It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.
  
  The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social mobile as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.
  
  The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time.  This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.
  
  Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete?  They’re still growing.  They still have enormous audiences.  They also have very talented managers.
  
  But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline.  What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up.

  People forget how indomitable AOL seemed, and the promise of Netscape and MySpace, before they fell into the dustbin. As I have said before, Facebook is the new AOL, although Johnson is making a different case for that. I have been presaging the rise of social operating systems — which would invalidate Facebook’s near-monopoly on people’s social inclinations — while he points to the rise of mobile, and says

  Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social.

  And that’s is not a good place to be.

  I agree with Jackson: the rate of change is not slowing, so the monopolies of today are likely to be shorter-lived than those of even a decade ago. And the new world beaters are possibly companies that don’t even exist yet, but whenever they crop up we will first notice them when they start stealing users, market, and attention from the formerly indomitable killer apps of the preceding era.

• futurescope: sFly Quadrotors Navigate Outdoors All By...

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 9:23 pm

  
  
  

  futurescope:

  sFly Quadrotors Navigate Outdoors All By Themselves

  […] What makes the sFly project, led by ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab, different is that the sFly quadrotors don’t rely on motion capture systems. They also don’t rely on GPS, remote control, radio beacons, laser rangefinders, frantically waving undergrads, or anything else. The only thing that sFly has to go on is an IMU and an onboard camera (and an integrated computer), but using just those systems (and a “very efficient onboard inertial-aided visual simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm”), sFly is capable of navigating all by itself. And if you have a fleet of sFly quadrotors, you can use them to make cooperative 3D maps of the environment. […]

  [read more] [sFly]

• What Do Babies Know At Age 1?

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 9:20 pm

  Elizabeth Spelke studies human cognition in babies, and has discovered some universals in what babies know by the age of 1:

  Insights in Human Knowledge, From the Minds of Babies - Natalie Anger via NYTimes.com

  They know what an object is: a discrete physical unit in which all sides move roughly as one, and with some independence from other objects.

  “If I reach for a corner of a book and grasp it, I expect the rest of the book to come with me, but not a chunk of the table,” said Phil Kellman, Dr. Spelke’s first graduate student, now at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  A baby has the same expectation. If you show the baby a trick sequence in which a rod that appears to be solid moves back and forth behind another object, the baby will gape in astonishment when that object is removed and the rod turns out to be two fragments.

  “The visual system comes equipped to partition a scene into functional units we need to know about for survival,” Dr. Kellman said. Wondering whether your bag of four oranges puts you over the limit for the supermarket express lane? A baby would say, “You pick up the bag, the parts hang together, that makes it one item, so please get in line.”

  Babies know, too, that objects can’t go through solid boundaries or occupy the same position as other objects, and that objects generally travel through space in a continuous trajectory. If you claimed to have invented a transporter device like the one in “Star Trek,” a baby would scoff.

  Babies are born accountants. They can estimate quantities and distinguish between more and less. Show infants arrays of, say, 4 or 12 dots and they will match each number to an accompanying sound, looking longer at the 4 dots when they hear 4 sounds than when they hear 12 sounds, even if each of the 4 sounds is played comparatively longer. Babies also can perform a kind of addition and subtraction, anticipating the relative abundance of groups of dots that are being pushed together or pulled apart, and looking longer when the wrong number of dots appears.

  Babies are born Euclideans. Infants and toddlers use geometric clues to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, navigate through rooms and locate hidden treasures. Is the room square or rectangular? Did the nice cardigan lady put the Slinky in a corner whose left wall is long or short?

  At the same time, the Spelke lab discovered, young children are quite bad at using landmarks or décor to find their way. Not until age 5 or 6 do they begin augmenting search strategies with cues like “She hid my toy in a corner whose left wall is red rather than white.”

  “That was a deep surprise to me,” Dr. Spelke said. “My intuition was, a little kid would never make the mistake of ignoring information like the color of a wall.” Nowadays, she continued, “I don’t place much faith in my intuitions, except as a starting place for designing experiments.”

  These core mental modules — object representation, approximate number sense and geometric navigation — are all ancient systems shared at least in part with other animals; for example, rats also navigate through a maze by way of shape but not color. The modules amount to baby’s first crib sheet to the physical world.

  “The job of the baby,” Dr. Spelke said, “is to learn.”

  Apparently, babies rely very heavily on accent and language:

  In guiding early social leanings, accent trumps race. A white American baby would rather accept food from a black English-speaking adult than from a white Parisian, and a 5-year-old would rather befriend a child of another race who sounds like a local than one of the same race who has a foreign accent.

• Special Report: Social TV and The Second Screen

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 11:11 pm

  Special Report: Social TV and The Second Screen:

  I am happy to release a special report I’ve recently written, Social TV and The Second Screen, developed cooperatively by Work Talk Research and The Futures Agency. Gerd Leonhard from The Futures Agency wrote the foreward, saying

  The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society.

  The report addresses the transition from the old world of TV into a new era, changed from top to bottom by the social web and the emergence of today’s always-with-us mobile devices: the second screen.

  From Old To New TV

  The term TV carries many meanings.

  TV is broadcast in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a wide variety of devices have been constructed to operate around the transmission and decoding of signals in those frequencies, and so the term TV can in fact refer to that spectrum. It is the device in the corner of your living room that captures those signals, and decodes them for you, or, nowadays, is more likely to get a signal transmitted through a cable network, and from coax screwed into the back.

  In general, when people talk about TV they are referring to the medium of communication that the physics of TV broadcasting makes possible. And, although our civilization might have come up with dozens of forms that medium of communication might take, principally it is a form of entertainment, showing news, sporting events, sit coms, and reality TV shows, in a swirling, kaleidoscopic hodgepodge. And on free TV — broadcast or paid — TV involves a relatively large proportion of ad minutes per hour.

  We are at an inflection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years — at least in the advanced economies of the world — the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways.

  

  For more information and to download, click here.

• "@dangillmor: RT @6: As, I believe I have stated before, but am willing to restate for clarity and..."

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 8:07 pm

  “@dangillmor: RT @6: As, I believe I have stated before, but am willing to restate for clarity and consistency, no - an (cont) [t.co] ”
  
  - May 02, 2012 at 06:11AM via [bit.ly]

• Twitter's New Discover Is Still Losing Me

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 5:35 pm

  Twitter releases a new Discovery tab — yes, the tab you never click on because it is basically useless. Is it still useless? Mathew Ingram says its been despammified, but not much else:

  Mathew Ingram, Twitter’s big problem: It still needs better filters

  In my initial use of the upgraded one (which is being rolled out to all users over the next few weeks), I found things somewhat improved, but only in the sense that the obvious spam was gone.

  The twitter Engineering Blog spells out what is supposed to happen:

  Behind the scenes, the new Discover tab is powered by Earlybird, Twitter’s real-time search technology. When a user tweets, that Tweet is indexed and becomes searchable in seconds. Every Tweet with a link also goes through some additional processing: we extract and expand any URLs available in Tweets, and then fetch the contents of those URLs via SpiderDuck, our real-time URL fetcher.

  To generate the stories that are based on your social graph and that we believe are most interesting to you, we first use Cassovary [Cassowary?], our graph processing library, to identify your connections and rank them according to how strong and important those connections are to you.

  Once we have that network, we use Twitter’s flexible search engine to find URLs that have been shared by that circle of people. Those links are converted into stories that we’ll display, alongside other stories, in the Discover tab. Before displaying them, a final ranking pass re-ranks stories according to how many people have tweeted about them and how important those people are in relation to you. All of this happens in near-real time, which means breaking and relevant stories appear in the new Discover tab almost as soon as people start talking about them.

  My take?

  At this moment nearly all the stories in the Discover tab make sense. I wrote about American Football yesterday (see Should College Football Be Banned? Or Just Ban The Armor?) so the sports story about Eric LeGrand, a Rutgers defensive tackle who was paralyzed by a game injury is reasonable. But the Montreal Canadiens getting a new manager, no.

  All the tech stories — Spotify, Caterina Fake, iPad, Pebble Watch, Moz — fit my profile, and so does the story about sardines, because I write a lot about food and the environment at Underpaidgenius.com. Online black markets? A good fit. Even the story about London mayoral elections fits because I wrote about Boris Johnson a few times (like this freakish accident video, showing a truck almost killing the mayor).

  I will now officially look at Discover daily, like I do Flipboard, News.me, and others.

  I wish there was a way to help it learn faster, though, like voting a la Zite and Prismatic.

• "@jmacdonald: Holy cow…how google drive terms compare to dropbox and Microsoft. ..wow...."

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 4:53 pm

  “@jmacdonald: Holy cow…how google drive terms compare to dropbox and Microsoft. ..wow. [t.co] ”
  
  - April 25, 2012 at 09:17AM via [bit.ly]

• Debunking A Debunking By Alistair Rennie

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 3:33 pm

  Debunking A Debunking By Alistair Rennie:

  I admire Alistair Rennie, and agree with most of the points he’s made in a recent piece about social business myths, but I disagree (over at Work Talk Reports) when he says that the idea of social business is not new:

  Stowe Boyd, Alistair Rennie: Social Business Myths Debunked

  I buy all that Rennie says about tools. Yes, social business is more than social media and the use of open social networks. Social business is much more than rolling out a work media solution, or even rolling out a bunch of social tools. But social business is not really old wine in new bottles, as Rennie argues:

  Social behavior is not a new concept – it simply implies living and working in a community instead of being isolated. What’s new is the emergence of platforms to create a setting and values that are intrinsic to a community. Values such as: sharing of ideas and expertise in real-time, establishing a sense of purpose and trust, and developing assets that can be reused for years to come through enablement of a collective intelligence.

  Business is inherently a social discipline. Every day we collaborate and share information with colleagues, customers and partners. The question is how effectively are we carrying out these practices? Through social business, companies can evolve cumbersome daily operations into dynamic and efficient practices that move the needle on any project.

  […]

  We have only a few years experience in working through and with these solutions: we are learning on the job how to work out loud.

  This is what I call the ‘business has always been social’ argument. Yes, we have always lived in social groups, and companies are made up of people. But trying to argue from that that business has always been social, is like saying that any group of people is a choir because everyone knows how to sing, a bit.

  Basing the communication patterns of business on social networks is radically new. First of all, we didn’t have technologies to support it, really, until quite recently. Perhaps more important is the transition from work being principally channeled around relatively fixed and top-down business process and organizational structure, and being supplanted by relatively fluid and bottom-up creative work and social ties. And just as critical is that we have only a few years experience in working through and with these solutions: we are learning on the job how to work out loud.

  Read the rest.

• "But I am never going to optimize short-term revenue at the expense of user experience or long-term..."

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 2:32 pm

  “But I am never going to optimize short-term revenue at the expense of user experience or long-term goals. If people think we are going about this too cautiously, they can think that and I don’t care.”
  
  -

  - Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, cited by Michael Copeland via Wired

  love @dickc’s clarity about what’s important

  (via bijan)

• Neowin uncovered the first mockup of a real Windows 8 tablet....

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 4:04 pm

  
  
  

  Neowin uncovered the first mockup of a real Windows 8 tablet. It’s called the HP Slate.

  It’s a business computer, and the specs include an Intel(not ARM-based) processor, 10.1-inch touch screen, a promised 8 hours of battery life (Intel had been suggesting 9 hours as a minimum spec), and “multi-touch or digital pen” input. (Let the scoffing about digital pens begin.) It’s also supposed to be 9.2mm thick, which is a hair thinner than the latest iPad.

  (via Business Insider)

  So, that’s what the next Nook will look like!

• Just In The Nook Of Time?

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 1:12 pm

  Microsoft settles some patent disputes with Barnes & Noble’s Nook division by investing $300M into the company. The market cheers. Am I missing something?

  Microsoft’s Nook Deal, Aiming at Amazon, Sets Up Battle in E-Books - Michael De La Merced and Julie Bosman via NYTimes.com

  Microsoft agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division on Monday, giving the bookstore chain stronger footing in the hotly contested electronic book market and creating an alliance that could intensify the fight over the future of digital reading.

  The deal, which gives Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake, values the Nook unit at $1.7 billion — roughly double Barnes & Noble’s entire market value as of last Friday — and bolsters the bookseller’s efforts to make its digital business the linchpin of its future growth.

  The announcement was the latest surprise in an unpredictable and rapidly shifting e-book market, which is crowded with technology giants trying to chip away at Amazon.com’s dominance. Amazon once had close to 90 percent of the e-book market, but since then, a handful of players, including Apple, Google and now Microsoft, have edged in.

  So, B & N is a bookseller, with hundreds of stores. Remember when Borders went bankrupt? And Tower Records? The days of blazing a new trail in retail by undifferentiated sales are done.

  Stowe Boyd via stoweboyd.com

  Successful retail in the US is falling into two categories: companies selling their own products, like Apple, and focused specialty providers, like Trader Joe’s and Uniqlo. Otherwise: a wasteland. And soon we will be dismantling all the big box stores.

  So, this is a bail out. B & N needs big cash to compete against Kindle, because Amazon is underpricing the device to hold onto the market in the face of growing market penetration of iPad and iPhone as better mobile reading devices. Microsoft, who completely missed the ereader market and who is fighting Apple and Google in the smart device marketplace, hope that a strategic partnership with B & N around the Nook can help, but how?

  Unmentioned is the idea that some soon-to-market version of the Nook will be a Windows 8 device, instead of running Nook’s proprietary OS. And a spin-out of the Nook division into a new company, called Nook, with even more cash from Microsoft. Otherwise the whole thing makes no sense.

• "@tacanderson: Congrats to @MarcusNelson! Leaving Salesforce to do his own startup...."

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 11:52 am

  “@tacanderson: Congrats to @MarcusNelson! Leaving Salesforce to do his own startup. [t.co] ”
  
  - May 01, 2012 at 01:16AM via [bit.ly]

• Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through Burgers | Food Tech Connect - StumbleUpon

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 11:16 pm

  Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through Burgers | Food Tech Connect - StumbleUpon:

  A simple distinction across 10 leading social tools, from the viewpoint of a burger joint:

  David Ciancino, Social Media For Restaurants Made Easier Through Burgers

  • Twitter – I am eating a burger
  • Facebook – I like burgers
  • FourSquare – This is where I eat burgers
  • Instagram – Here’s a vintage photo of me eating a burger in a blizzard
  • Youtube – Here I am eating a burger
  • LinkedIn – My skills include burger eating and blogging
  • Pinterest – Here’s a burger recipe
  • LastFM – Now listening to “burgers”
  • Google+ – I am a Google employee who eats burgers
  • Foodspotting – Look at this burger I am eating
  • Untappd – I am drinking this beer with a burger
  • Tumblr – When I’m not eating a burger, I’m doing this
  • Wikipedia – The burger was created by and when
  • Flickr – Here are pictures of the burgers I’ve eaten

  Simple.

• "Design is moving centre-stage in the eternal human quest to make beauty out of necessity"

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 11:10 pm

  “Design is moving centre-stage in the eternal human quest to make beauty out of necessity”
  
  - Paola Antonelli, The World in 2036: Design takes over, says Paola Antonelli via The Economist

• How To Make Panels Not Suck

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 5:50 pm

  Panel session at conferences are very uneven, and often they suck. Why? The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the moderators, who often don’t do enough to make the panels great. Charlie O’Donnell offers details in a great post:

  Charlie O’Donnell,  Why do panels suck and how can we make them better?

  I spoke on a SXSW panel in 2011 that didn’t suck.  I know it didn’t suck because the first person to ask a question told us that our panel was worth the whole price of admission to the conference and we got the same sentiment echoed on Twitter.  The panel included myself, Emily Hickey, Ben Lerer, and Christine Herron and we spoke about startup mistakes.

  The panel didn’t suck because it was engineered not to suck.  Here are a few things we did:

  1. First and foremost, the panelists were carefully chosen.  They aren’t the biggest VCs and entrepreneurs, but they’re some of the most thoughtful ones.  Some of the most successful people simply haven’t tought much about why they got where they are—and even if they have, they’re just wrong about it because they’ve only scratched the surface.  These panelists have seen both success and failure, and they’ve seen it from multiple perspectives—and on top of that, because I knew them well, I knew they’d be able to share those stories.  Not everyone is a good storyteller, so choose carefully.
  2. The moderator had a sense of the story that should come out of the panel.  I knew what I wanted to cover and what I wanted the audience to leave with.  Panels are, or at least should be, stories, and a story is supposed to leave you with something.  You should remember them because they make sense in a structure.  Too many moderators pick something broad like “The Future of the Present” and ask vague questions like, “So what happens after now?”  You’ll never get a tight story that people can leave with if that’s what you do.  People either need to leave with a specific story or a sense of “If I believe x, this will happen, if I believe y, this will happen.”  Moderating is hard and not everyone can do it.  Respect the craft.
  3. The questions were discussed among the panel ahead of time.  We vetted a bunch of topics and decided on the questions that would output the best answers.  That also gave the panelists time to think about their answers.  In fact, they were given a specific format by which they should structure their responses—to think about the tweets that we wanted to see before further explaining.  So, when the question was “How can you tell what makes a good hire?”  Someone would say a one line, tweetable, comment-worthy sentence as an answer before diving in further.
  4. Not everyone answered every question.  Don’t you hate when they go through everyone in order and the last two panelsts basically say, “Yeah, what she said…” but they still take 5 minutes to say that.  Some of the questions simply aren’t relevent to everyone.  With our panel, each person was asked to answer only 2-3 of the questions, so the answers bounced around the four of us and no more than two people addressed any given question—unless they really had something ridiculously awesome to say.
  5. The panel talked amongst themselves.  We disagreed on a few things, asked questions of each other.  It was like we were real humans sitting next to each other discussing a topic.  Amazing.

  I think Charlie’s hit it on the head, but let me add a few thoughts.

  Interviews are underutilized at conferences. In many cases, people who really don’t present well — despite having great ideas or being quite accomplished — are great when interviewed. Small panels — a moderator and two panelists, for example — can be great, especially when handled like a parallel interview by the moderator.

  And panels should have no more than one person for every ten minutes: 50 minutes = four panelists max and one moderator, for example. That means in today’s fast twitch conferences, a 30 minute panel would/should/could have only two panelists and one moderator.

  Last summer, I led a Future Of Work seminar series in five cities, and although we were allotting 45 minutes, I held the panelists to two in all cases but one, and that worked well. The time I had three panelists was a bit cramped, in comparison.

• click the magnifier to expand Almost unexplained in the @Work...

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 5:07 pm

  
  
  

  click the magnifier to expand

  Almost unexplained in the @Work State Of Mind report (via Forbes Insights/Gyro) is this powerful infographic, which is going to require some noodling. For example, what do the authors intend by ‘cause’ in the upper left hand, at the intersection of Personal Point Of View and Organizational Psychology? Is it cause, as in a just cause? It seems to be that it must.

  This diagram was dangling almost as an appendix, with this as a caption:

  This framework depicts the individual in the middle of the whole @Work State of Mind. The highlighted area in lower left is where most business marketing activities have been focused historically.

• Social Networks Will Kill Email?

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 4:31 pm

  Skimming a Forbes Insights report, and this popped out:

  The @Work State Of Mind Project via Forbes Insights (download here):
  

  Social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But business- related networks are clearly more important than ones more focused on personal life. “Highly focused tablet/smartphone apps with closed social media built in will replace email,” says Warren N. Bimblick, senior vice president of strategy and business development for Penton Media.

  First, I followed Bimblick on Twitter (@wbimblick).

  Then I thought about this prognosis. One of the aspects of email that has made it universal is that anyone can can send anyone else a message given their email address. It’s open at a fundamental level.

  A social network like Twitter is both open and closed: anyone can mention me — send a public message — but only those that I follow can send me a private message (a direct message in Twitterspeak). This is a powerfully subtle aspect of Twitter: the only means for the unfollowed to reach me is through public discourse.

  I think there is a place for a Twitter client that fronts as an email client too, as a transitional stepping stone away from inbound email, and also to deal with the reality that not everything worth being said can be compressed into 140 characters (see Liquid Email). I wonder if Twitter is going to build this, or not?

• I get a bang out of being a top contributor on Tumblr’s...

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 2:53 pm

  
  
  

  I get a bang out of being a top contributor on Tumblr’s Tech thread, as a lowly, lowly soloist in the midst of The Atlantic, The Verge, Fast Company, CNet, and IBM’s Smarter Planet.

  Curation is increasing in relevance. I think I need to start a regular salon on curation in NYC. Any interest?

• "Any company that isn’t primarily delivering its service via mobile five years from now will probably..."

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 2:40 pm

  “Any company that isn’t primarily delivering its service via mobile five years from now will probably be irrelevant.”
  
  - Keith Teare, cited by Hamish McKenzie in  Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile via PandoDaily

• You Belong To Us

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 2:35 pm

  Google Drive is making people think about privacy and ownership all over again: ownership is not onlyship, folks.

  John Herrman, You Don’t Own Anything Anymore

  In a world where sharing a photo is strictly a matter of getting another copy made and mailing it, or getting it published, copyrights are pretty easy to keep track of and these laws hold up pretty well. Sending a physical photo to your grandmother goes like this: you either put the picture in an envelope and send it, or you get a copy made yourself and send that.

  Sending your grandmother an email photo, though, might involve copying your photo five or six times; first to Google’s servers, then to another server, then to an ISP’s CDN, then to AOL’s servers, then to your grandmother’s computer. As far as you’re concerned, this feels exactly like dropping an envelope in the mail. As far as copyright is concerned, it’s a choreographed legal dance.

  

  And so these sites have to get your permission — a license — to copy and distribute the things you post. Just to function as advertised, they need your permission to “use” and to “host,” to “store” and “reproduce.” What they don’t necessarily need is the right to “modify” and “create derivative works,” or to “publicly perform.” That is, unless they need to make money. Which of course they do.

  It’s a little easier to understand why Facebook needs to license your content for your profile than why Google needs such a broad license for Google Drive, since Google Drive is supposed to a private locker, not a public page. But it doesn’t really matter that much. In terms of copyright, they’re more similar than they are different.

  A terms of service that gives an online company enough leeway to operate will legally give them permission to do a lot of things that most companies know better than to do. Pinterest suddenly selling prints of its users’ pinboards would be a terrible PR move and a dumb business plan. But they could probably get away with it if they wanted to. Facebook Beacon was terrifying and stupid (which is really just a deluded way of saying “five years too soon”), but probably wasn’t illegal.

  We are definitely not needed for a world where terrifying and stupid won’t be made illegal, but it would be nice if things that should be illegal were at least difficult. And it’s obvious that copyright laws are not helping, because I don’t want to grant those kind of rights in order to store photos in the cloud.

• "When they look back at this era, Internet historians will mark Facebook’s Instagram acquisition as..."

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 2:03 pm

  “When they look back at this era, Internet historians will mark Facebook’s Instagram acquisition as the symbolic moment when the Great Shift was confirmed. Significantly, it also came soon after Steve Jobs’ death. The device that Jobs created had, within the space of five years, allowed a 551-day-old company with 14 employees to become worth $1 billion. On April 9, 2012, Web 2.0 lost its mantle as the most important Internet paradigm. We are now starting the Age of Mobile.”
  
  - Hamish McKenzie, Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile  (via courtenaybird)

• david (via fred-wilson) Considering taking the Phone app off my home screen.

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 1:42 pm

  david (via fred-wilson)

  Considering taking the Phone app off my home screen.

• "We will hit the point, likely soon, when the cost of starting a business is offset by the high cost..."

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 1:40 pm

  “We will hit the point, likely soon, when the cost of starting a business is offset by the high cost of getting traction and keeping it. I am most wary of this when investing today.”
  
  -

  Is it a Tech Bubble?…NO…Just too many Wantrepreneurs - Howard Lindzon

  fred-wilson:

  i said the same thing up at HBS last month. i think we are there now. maybe we’ve been there for several years. but it takes time to wake up and smell the roses.

  Too many wannabe VCs, too.

• Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A Guide For Workplace Revolutionaries

  Posted: April 29, 2012, 6:04 pm

  Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A Guide For Workplace Revolutionaries:

  My friend Venkat Rao has collaborated with Todd Barr of Alfresco on an ebook, called Death By Powerpoint, Resurrection By Tablet: A Guide For Workplace Revolutionaries. Here’s a smaple:

  Ordinary technologies conform to existing realities. Disruptive technologies reshape them. It is already clear that tablets are a disruptive technology on par with others that have invaded the workplace over the last century — typewriters, photocopiers, personal computers, email, laptops and smartphones. The only questions that remain are when and where the revolution will start. Our candidate? Meetings. Today, PowerPoint rules. Tomorrow, the tablet will.

  read more at Work Talk Reports…

• Nokia Bonds Are Junk

  Posted: April 29, 2012, 5:00 pm

  Nokia’s declining fortunes lead to it’s bonds being rated as junk, after falling to No 2 mobile phone maker, behind Samsung:

  S.&P. Downgrades Nokia’s Bonds to Junk - Brian X Chen via NYTimes.com

  S.& P.’s announcement came as Samsung dethroned Nokia as the world’s No. 1 maker of mobile phones, which includes traditional cellphones and smartphones. Samsung sold 92 million phones over the last quarter, and Nokia sold 83 million, according to estimates by IHS iSuppli, the research firm. It is the first time since 1998 that Nokia is not the No. 1 phone maker in the world.

  In the smartphone category, Nokia slips to third place behind Apple, the leader with 35 million phones shipped, and Samsung, with 32 million devices, according to iSuppli. In that category, Nokia is slipping faster than Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. The smartphone segment is the only part of the handset market that is showing any growth.

  Nokia’s long-term rating was dropped to a noninvestment rating, BB+, from the investment-grade rating BBB–, with a negative outlook, S.& P. said. Its short-term rating dropped to B from A-3, S.& P. said.

  Nokia has been struggling to reverse its declining fortunes with its Lumia smartphones, which include Microsoft’s newer operating system, Windows Phone 7. In the United States, AT&T and Nokia have been aggressively promoting the Lumia 900, a $100 smartphone that has been a strong seller on Amazon.com.

  Trying to be the world’s leading maker of Windows mobile phones is like being the world’s tallest midget.

• "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no..."

  Posted: April 29, 2012, 4:25 pm

  “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
  
  -

  - William Strunk

  The best advice for would-be writers: make every word tell. And read Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style.

• "You are a mashup of what you let into your life."

  Posted: April 29, 2012, 4:06 pm

  “You are a mashup of what you let into your life.”
  
  -

  - Austin Kleon

  (via Brain Pickings)

• "@catherinecronin: Great post by @sharonlflynn on #pelc12: All about connections http://t.co/SRof1EoU..."

  Posted: April 29, 2012, 2:07 pm

  “@catherinecronin: Great post by @sharonlflynn on #pelc12: All about connections [t.co] « happy to be a part of them, Sharon :)”
  
  - April 28, 2012 at 03:40AM via [bit.ly]

• This is beachfront real estate. Buy In Now.

  Posted: April 28, 2012, 6:08 pm

  Lisa Hsia, EVP of digital media at NBCUniversal’s Bravo channel, is cited by Amy Chozick and Nick Wingfield in In Search Of Apps for Television:

  I’ve told my bosses, ‘This is beachfront real estate. Buy in now.’

  This quote is great, but the piece it’s in fails to touch on social TV and the rise of the second screen: people talking via mobile devices about what they are watching.

  Here’s an excerpt from a report I am going to be releasing very soon, Social TV and The Second Screen:

  The Rise Of Social TV

  TV users are increasingly likely to be using multiple devices at the same time. For example, watching a conventional TV screen while texting a friend on mobile phone, or discussing the show or game with friends on Facebook. The transition to a multi-device user experience — allowing timesliced viewing of TV content and socializing — is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV. And, as it turns out, more time is spent looking at the other screens than watching the TV, which changes everything.

  We are witnessing a rapid, technological and societal transformation of the medium of television. The combination of several recent skyrocketing innovations — particularly always-on connectivity and the use of increasingly capable mobile phones and tablets — have led to a profound shift in the way that people experience television. This transition is closely tied to the rise of the social web, and the behaviors and expectations that web-savvy television users bring to their rapidly changing relationship with television.

  As just one example of the ways that these advanced communication tools are shifting our understanding of the experience of television, note that I use the term television ‘users’ instead of the more conventional ‘viewers’. As these super smart mobile devices and social tools come into the context of TV ‘viewing’ the experience becomes social, and the images flickering on the TV screen become a backdrop to the users social interactions, and no longer the dominating center of attention.

  This shift lines up with the transition of TV from a rivalrous to an increasingly non-rivalous medium. Most media — when initially invented — are rivalrous, meaning that they conflict with others, and as a result people would experience one at a time. When radio first came out, people would listen to it in a group, silently, as if in church. After a decade or so, youngsters had shifted to running the radio in the background while doing other things. The same relaxation has happened with TV viewing.
  TV had become fairly non-rivalrous at least a decade ago, and the emergence of the social web and the use of extremely capable mobile devices — such as smart phones and tablets, typified by the iPhone and iPad, respectively, has led to the phenomenon of the second screen. TV users are increasingly likely to be using multiple devices at the same time. For example, watching a conventional TV screen while texting a friend on mobile phone, or discussing the show or game with friends on Facebook. The transition to a multi-device user experience — allowing timesliced viewing of TV content and socializing — is the single most revolutionary aspect of social TV. And, as it turns out, more time is spent looking at the other screens than watching the TV, which changes everything.

  This shift from TV content as the center of the television world, to a supporting role in a social TV era lines up with Kevin Kelly’s observation, that

  The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships.

  And what is happening in the transition to social TV can be viewed as a shift to a new economy, and how that is manifested in the new form factor of social TV.

  I will have more information on the report soon.

• "@stoweboyd: Bijan Sabet • Thanks John. http://t.co/AAOgr2mR John Maloney stepping down from CEO role..."

  Posted: April 28, 2012, 4:41 pm

  “@stoweboyd: Bijan Sabet • Thanks John. [t.co] John Maloney stepping down from CEO role at Tumblr, and founder David Karp steps up”
  
  - April 28, 2012 at 06:34AM via [bit.ly]

• TV networks’ dominance of the delivery of TV content is...

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 3:05 pm

  
  
  

  TV networks’ dominance of the delivery of TV content is rapidly collapsing, as alternatives expand and people build up their libraries:

  Primetime Mystery: Where Did All the TV Viewers Go? - Derek Thompson via The Atlantic

  The networks’ share of primetime TV audience (dark blue in the graph below [above in this post]) has declined from 45% in 1985 to 25% in 2009. Basic cable ate the networks’ lunch post-dinner audience, and now it’s technology’s turn gobble up what’s left.

  Even with this long trend line (and despite the fact that viewers often unplug in the spring), there is a sense that we’ve reached a tipping point thanks to what Gaspin calls “built-up libraries.” There is more good stuff to watch not-on-live-TV than on live-TV, and even the head of entertainment at NBC knows it. Television technologies are dragging us away from live television, to a world of smaller screens, shifting “windows,” and no more ads. In 2000, a company called Netflix was experimenting with movie rentals. Now they have more than 20 million streaming customers. In 2005, about 1% of households owned DVRs. Today, it’s more than 40%. In 2006, Hulu didn’t exist. Today it has just under 30 million monthly uniques, with more than 1 million paying subscribers. In 2009, there were no iPads. Today, there are 60 million, and most of them are in the United States. That’s a Cambrian explosion of options for “watching TV” without literally watching an actual TV.

  So people are ‘watching TV’ but not watching network programming in real time: they have defected from the ‘appointment TV’ model, or defected from broadcast and networks as the delivery mechanism for TV media.

  PS DVR is a strange intermediary technology, one that foreshadowed keeping your TV shows in the cloud. (Apple’s iTunes in the cloud is poised to destroy the market for DVR devices.)

  (h/t emergent futures)
  

• 8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future - Joanna Pearlstein via Wired.com

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 2:54 pm

  8 Visionaries on How They Spot the Future - Joanna Pearlstein via Wired.com:

  I found this piece astonishingly unrevelatory. Feels like the author sent an email out, and collated the results. Would be better to have Paul Saffo ask a tough question of Esther Dyson, and then so on, around the chain.

• Benchlearning

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 1:39 pm

  I stumbled across a new term today, a play on the idea of benchmarking: benchlearning. The notion — as I understand it — is to attempt to sidestep the top-down nature of benchmarking, and to learn through an evidenced-based, non-judgmental examination of statistical information.

  The post where I learned about this concept is like reading a Borges short story. Some of that is the translation from Dutch, but some of it is due to the alienness of the ideas lying just below the surface of the discussion.

  The author is Joitske Hulsebosch, and she describes an interview she conducted with Corline Koolhas, who is a project leader for the Dutch government, exploring benchlearning:

  Joitske Hulsebosch,Benchlearning: Juggling with figures for deeper learning
  

  Joitske Hulsebosch: What is benchlearning?

  Corline Koolhaas: Benchlearning is an innovative way of learning, and therefore difficult to explain. The danger is to explain is with an ‘old’ vocabulary, which may not fit this new way of learning. For example: an innovation [such] as the mp3 player is hard to explain with the words of the old ways of listening to music: there are so many new possibilities. We are working on benchlearning since 2009 and have yet to be developed a better language. But I will try anyway!  
  
  The goal of benchlearning is creating a better government without making a judgment about what is right and wrong. In the case of bench learning we want to create a new vision, rather than a strategy in place. Benchlearning helps to discover: are we moving in the right direction? The traditional way of working with statistics and benchmarking worked like looking in a mirror. In benchlearning you do not you look back, but you monitor what is happening around you, with no hypothesis, and without predetermined indicators. Having predetermined indicators restricts your vision. In benchlearning you have a look at information available and arrange in in new ways, but without a set first hypothesis. You go looking for patterns. This leads to a deeper form of learning than through indicators or other means. 
  
  Furthermore, the collective process of meaning construction is very important. You will look at the figures together: what does this mean? This means you work to change ideas and culture, yet without talking about ‘culture’ or ‘change’. It is extremely important that you not filter yourself but that people are going to interpret what the numbers mean. Because most people want change but do not want to be changed. They must draw their own lessons.
  
  Hulsebosch: How [what] does the benchlearning process look like?

  Koolhaas: We start by making conversation starter sheets. This is a collection of figures around a particular topic. Then we assess what figures surprise people and why. After that we organize meetings, on these subjects with a central question. It is important to not to do this in a meetings environment, but in an exploratory, different setting. People should be open and confident to share. It is important that they are not judged behind their backs on what they share. These meetings lead to new insights and meaning-making [sense-making] about what happens in practice.
  
  Hulsebosch: What are situations in which benchlearning fits well?

  Koolhaas: You have do it where you have a good breeding ground, there should be a clear problem. There must be some cracks. The method lends itself to larger organizations for internal sessions, but you can also apply to benchlearning amongst companies. It does not work when you are working with highly judgmental people who do not want to explore what is going on. If people [are] in the bargaining or negotiating modus [modes] they cannot learn. Furthermore, it is important to ensure you have participant[s] of an equal level within the organization who can inspire each other.
  
  Hulsebosch: What is the function of the data, the figures in benchlearning?

  Koolhaas: The figures provide the confrontation with the real world. Sometimes a problem is already recognized as a major problem, but the numbers make it more manageable. Figures work very well to discuss actual practices, even with people who are afraid of figures. With them you present the information just in a different way. By presenting the numbers (which are often already available!) in a different way, you get a very different conversation. Often people talk past each other. In bench learning you create common ground by the use of figures and a central question.

  After reading that, I wanted to call Corline on the phone and talk some more.

  Obviously, benchlearning is not limited to government use: breaking out of the traditional mindset about how to learn from metrics — about a financial situation, marketing campaigns, or a scientific experiment — seems to me to be quite an exciting idea. And some of the one liners Corline casually drops — ‘creating a better government without making a judgment about what is right and wrong’, ‘figures provide the confrontation with the real world’, or ‘having predetermined indicators restricts your vision’ — suggests that there are great depths here.
  

• Do CEOs Lead Innovation In American Companies?

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 10:40 pm

  Gartner CEO Survey Shows 2012 is the Year of Living Hesitantly

  The survey results showed that CEOs are advancing innovation management, but many face a digital business strategy gap. This year, Gartner probed investment attitudes toward innovation management and leadership attribution. Overall, innovation management is advancing with few CEOs cutting innovation, and approximately half the CEOs saying they are investing more. However, a quarter indicated that they still don’t address it as an explicit discipline. When Gartner asked who leads innovation in their firms, approximately one-third of the CEOs selected themselves. After that, a wide variety of executive and senior management leaders were named, however CIOs were rarely identified, and CFOs were never identified.

  “Any CEO who believes that he or she is the innovation leader of the firm must retain a close direct working relationship with the CIO in this age of rapid business digitization, or risk being blindsided,” Mr. Lopez said. “CIOs must improve IT-related competitor intelligence, and use that information to build a productive relationship with the person the CEO sees as the leader of innovation.”

  Should there be a chief innovation officer? Or does it cut across everything? Is innovation likely to be found in the IT side of things? Why don’t more companies have research and innovation labs?
  

• Apple’s Mothra Quarter Was Actually More Impressive Than Their Godzilla Quarter | TechCrunch

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 10:24 pm

  Apple’s Mothra Quarter Was Actually More Impressive Than Their Godzilla Quarter | TechCrunch:

  Apple posted huge numbers again, but the gross margin is truly astonishing:

  MG Siegler via Techcrunch

  […] the most amazing number from Apple’s Q2 was 47.4. That was their gross margin for the quarter. It’s hard to describe how ridiculous that number is, but I’ll try.

  In Q1 — again, the Godzilla quarter — Apple’s gross margin was 44.7 percent. It was so high that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted during the earnings call that the company didn’t expect to match such lofty levels ever again. Instead, they destroyed the number in Q2.

  Why?

  It was mainly because the iPhone made up an even larger percentage of overall revenue in Q2. The iPhone is Apple’s biggest money-maker and their product with the best margins, thanks largely to carrier subsidies (though more in the U.S. than other countries). The iPad also has great margins, but they’re significantly less (the iPad is not carrier subsidized anywhere). Less iPad sales (both in quantity and percentage-wise) and strong iPhone sales meant a higher margin. That’s why Apple’s revenue dipping $8 billion only equated to profit dipping less than $2 billion.

  For some other margin context, look at this chart that Horace Dediu of Asymco put together. For the first time, Apple’s operating margin (different than gross margin, but just as important) surpassed that of both Google and even Microsoft. Apple is predominantly a hardware company. Google is predominantly an advertising company. Microsoft is predominantly a software company. This is not supposed to happen.

  Going forward, those margin numbers almost have to drop. Not only will the iPad sales be big this quarter (again, the first full quarter the new iPad is on sale), but the $399 iPad 2 is apparently selling very well. That will drag margins down (but likely drive revenues up and make Apple less of an iPhone company).

  Apple stock rose 9% on this news.

• Publicy Is An Emergent Property of Social Networks

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 10:17 pm

  Megan Garber looks at some new research on privacy considerations in Facebook photo tagging by João Paulo Pesce and others, and boils it down for us:

  On Facebook, Your Privacy Is Your Friends’ Privacy - Megan Garber via The Atlantic

  The upshot? “Photo-tags can threaten privacy burdens in an indirect way,” the authors note, “by pinpointing the nodes in the social graphs on which privacy-attacking algorithms may extract information, thus enhancing their accuracy.” The social networks themselves, the researchers suggest, could work to solve that problem — by, say, creating a “hiding” feature that would allow users to disguise tags and prevent their unauthorized use without fully deleting them. Which would definitely be a nice thing to have. But the real solution, it seems, will be a social one, fit for the age of the social network. And it will start with users re-conceiving of themselves not simply as users sharing their own information, but as actors and influencers who are responsible for the network at large.

  To turn this around, away from the conventional conservation-of-privacy ideal, we can say that publicy is an outcome of the social actions of social network participants, an emergent property. As individual’s add social metadata incrementally, others — or algorithms — could explore that metadata and be able to make potentially revealing inferences, like who was with who at a bar, what Facebook friends are actually close, and what connections are romantically involved.

• Laser Unprinters

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 6:40 pm

  Researchers at the University of Cambridge have devised a way to ‘unprint’ laser printed pages, so that the paper can be reused.

  Use a laser, save a tree - via University of Cambridge

  Dr Julian Allwood, Leader of the Low Carbon Materials Processing Group at the University of Cambridge, and David Leal-Ayala, PhD student at this group, tested toner-print removal from paper by employing a variety of lasers.

  The results showed that toner-print can be removed effectively without causing significant paper damage, allowing the paper to be reused, without being discarded, shredded or sent to a recycling plant.

  Coupled with advances in low-energy laser scanning technology, copiers and printers, the research means that toner-removing devices may be a common sight in offices around the country in the future.

  […]

  The study predicts that the emissions produced by the pulp and paper recycling industry could be at least halved as a result of paper reuse. “This could represent a significant contribution towards the cause of reducing climate change emissions from paper manufacturing” Allwood said.

  The smartest thing would be to build a single device that both prints and unprints. You’d load in either new blank or old printed paper, and out would come newly printed output.

• "@ddmcd: Twitter is an Unending Stream of Tiny Billboards"

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 2:37 pm

  “@ddmcd: Twitter is an Unending Stream of Tiny Billboards”
  
  - April 26, 2012 at 04:14AM via [bit.ly]

• "@swissnexSF: Watch our event “Data is the New Oil: From Privacy to Publicy” on @foratv..."

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 8:37 pm

  “@swissnexSF: Watch our event “Data is the New Oil: From Privacy to Publicy” on @foratv [t.co] @gleonhard @stoweboyd @cascio”
  
  - April 25, 2012 at 09:49AM via [bit.ly]

• Austin Carr is dead-on: why couldn’t Microsoft or Apple...

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 6:59 pm

  
  
  

  Austin Carr is dead-on: why haven’t Microsoft or Apple built Dropbox-style sharing into their OS’s?

  Austin Carr via Co.Design

  “If it takes really long [to explain], then there’s probably a problem with the product,” [Dropbox CEO Drew] Houston says with a laugh.

  It’s that stripped-down approach to product design that’s turned Dropbox into a cloud powerhouse. The service, which offers arguably the simplest solution to accessing your files across PCs, tablets, and smartphones, has rocketed to well beyond 50 million users, and was said to be on track to hit $240 million in revenue last year. Today, the startup introduces its most convenient tool yet: the ability to share any files, right from your desktop, in just two clicks.

  Apple should take $1B of their $110B hoard, and buy Dropbox.

• "@stoweboyd: Podio Extends App Model Significantly http://t.co/npvvDhCU Big step forward in..."

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 6:52 pm

  “@stoweboyd: Podio Extends App Model Significantly [t.co] Big step forward in functionality from Podio #worktalkreports”
  
  - April 25, 2012 at 08:41AM via [bit.ly]

• Diacarta Planner Update I really enjoy the analog interface of...

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 1:53 pm

  
  
  Diacarta Planner Update

  I really enjoy the analog interface of the Diacarta calendar app, and I see that they have updated to version 2.5. It’s a completely new codebase, and they now support multiple calendar syncing.

  (via Work Talk Reports)

• Google and Facebook Grow Comfortable and Complacent - Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

  Posted: April 24, 2012, 4:26 pm

  Google and Facebook Grow Comfortable and Complacent - Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com:

  Nick Bilton thinks Facebook and Google are slow to get mobile — several meanings of ‘get’ intended — because the engineers and managers there are relatively sessile (go look it up):

  Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

  I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.

  It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an all-inclusive cruise ship. The analogy is apt in terms of the luxury — and the isolation.

  An employee’s day often begins with a comfy shuttle bus whisking him or her to work in Silicon Valley. The buses have Wi-Fi, so laptops are put to work before anyone arrives on the sprawling campuses.

  Once there, dozens of free breakfast options await. Free buffet lunches break the monotony of the day. There is free dinner, too. There are free snacks for those peckish between meals. (The stuff that’s bad for you is on the hard-to-reach lower shelves.)

  All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but these perks could be stultifying. At some of these Silicon Valley businesses, there is no reason to leave the office.

  There are on-campus gyms. Day care. Massages. Dry cleaning. Car rentals. (At the Google offices, some of the toilets even have heated seats.)

  Sadly, this isn’t how the rest of the world works.

  Most people actually have to leave their offices to get coffee. While wandering out into the real world, we unfortunates tend to do a lot with our mobile phones.

  We look for new restaurants, check in with location-based apps, share short pithy updates about things we’ve seen in this outside world, and take pictures of food and sunsets.

  I’m betting that the Googlers and Facebookers don’t see as much outside, since all these perks are meant to keep people working as long as possible.

  Perhaps there is something even more powerful at work, here: the self-centered, self-important mindset that is engendered in these world-beater companies tends to encourage a strong tie to the period of time when the companies became successful, which is three to five years ago. These companies — like Microsoft and Yahoo before them — became mired in the past, like mammoths and saber-tooth tigers sinking in the La Brea tar pits.

• "@zoelazarus: Everyone wants to be creative: Global Study 75% of People Think They’re Not..."

  Posted: April 24, 2012, 2:22 pm

  “@zoelazarus: Everyone wants to be creative: Global Study 75% of People Think They’re Not Living Up to Creative Potential. [t.co] ”
  
  - April 24, 2012 at 04:00AM via [bit.ly]

• Effects of Climate Change Seen for Corn Prices - Stephanie Strom via NYTimes.com

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 7:57 pm

  Effects of Climate Change Seen for Corn Prices - Stephanie Strom via NYTimes.com:

  Stephanie Strom via NYTimes.com

  Researchers have found that climate change is likely to have far greater influence on the volatility of corn prices over the next three decades than factors that recently have been blamed for price swings — like oil prices, trade policies and government biofuel mandates.

  The new study, published on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that unless farmers develop more heat-tolerant corn varieties or gradually move corn production from the United States into Canada, frequent heat waves will cause sharp price spikes.

  More critical than short-term spikes is relatively high growth rates for food stuffs across the board, and especially for building blocks like corn and soy in the industrial food chain.

• Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong - Stowe Boyd 

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 5:05 pm

  Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong - Stowe Boyd :

  The result of a great deal of cognitive science research demonstrates that people don’t really understand how we think, how we influence each other, and the degree to which we are connected. We also lack an understanding of water, which is the most common liquid on Earth:

  Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong - Stowe Boyd via Nexalogy blog:

  […] It turns out that people — and marketers — don’t really understand influence very well, despite being embedded in social networks their entire lives: we really don’t understand the way that we are influenced by other people. For example, if someone touches you when you first meet, you are ten times more likely to remember that person. But we are unaware, later, that the touch was the reason for our recollection. We underestimate the impact of a kind word, or the chilling effects of workplace fear. There are dozens of examples of this sort coming out of cognitive science that demonstrate that we are being strongly influenced below the conscious level, physiologically, all the time. The actions of others can make us fearful, or confident, or curious, or suspicious — and it can happen invisibly. People just don’t have a great insight into the social interactions of people, despite being involved in them. Most contemporary thinking about our social interactions is derived from an economic view that considers groups as collections of individuals, where each individual makes more-or-less rational decisions intended to maximize benefits to themselves and their loved ones. I think there is a analogy with the historical physics view of how fluids work, like water, or water specifically.

  read more at Nexalogy blog

• "@mathewi: the NYT paywall is still not baling water fast enough out of the declining ad revenue..."

  Posted: April 21, 2012, 10:37 pm

  “@mathewi: the NYT paywall is still not baling water fast enough out of the declining ad revenue boat: [t.co] ”
  
  - April 21, 2012 at 11:32AM via [bit.ly]

• "@Richard_Florida: The world gets spikier - average Manhattan rent $3418, all-time high - NYT via..."

  Posted: April 21, 2012, 10:22 pm

  “@Richard_Florida: The world gets spikier - average Manhattan rent $3418, all-time high - NYT via @crampell - [t.co] ”
  
  - April 21, 2012 at 11:37AM via [bit.ly]

• Three Lightweight Work Media Tools Integrated With Dropbox

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 1:02 am

  Three Lightweight Work Media Tools Integrated With Dropbox:

  Over at Work Talk Research, I provide the first new post at Work Media Reports, Three Lightweight Work Media Tools Integrated With Dropbox. I review Chatbox, PandaDesk, and Refinder.

  Work Media: social tools designed for business collaboration, based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication derived from social networks of the open web.

  Work Talk Reports is an ongoing series of product reviews, news updates, interviews, and demos from the rapidly changing world of work, with a strong focus on work media, social business, and the future of work.

  Take a look at the Work Talk Research blog, Work Talk Talk, where I describe my research activities.

• "No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste."

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 2:47 pm

  “No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.”
  
  - Marco Arment, Time and Taste

• "I was probably being an idiot then."

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 1:24 am

  “I was probably being an idiot then.”
  
  - David Karp, Tumblr CEO, explaining the reversal of his previous statements decrying the possibility of putting ads on Tumblr. Tumblr will begin selling ad space in May. (via tpmmedia)

• A Lift 12 talk by Tricia Wang on trust in online social...

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 9:53 pm

  
  
  

  A Lift 12 talk by Tricia Wang on trust in online social networks.

  One takeaway: shared interests lead to shared identity leads to shared responsibility.

  via modernandmaterialthings

• Underpaid Genius: Is The Social Network Disrupting Social Class?

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 6:33 pm

  Underpaid Genius: Is The Social Network Disrupting Social Class?:

  Rob Horning at Marginal Utility noodles on our bonding too closely with the individualism of the ‘social graph’ (a term he dislikes at face value, just as I do). He suggests that we may have painted ourselves into a corner by rejecting a class consciousness.

  Go read the rest at underpaidgenius.

• "@RogerWCheng: Verizon CFO says data-sharing plan will come out mid-summer this year."

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 5:52 pm

  “@RogerWCheng: Verizon CFO says data-sharing plan will come out mid-summer this year.”
  
  -

  April 19, 2012 at 06:33AM via [bit.ly]

  At long last. A single plan for iPhone and iPad? Or across family members in a family plan? Or both?

• "@stoweboyd: Ditto has been acquired by Groupon. Jyri Engestrom is now director of product management..."

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 2:22 pm

  “@stoweboyd: Ditto has been acquired by Groupon. Jyri Engestrom is now director of product management there. [t.co] Ditto turns off 30 Apr”
  
  -

  April 19, 2012 at 04:11AM via [bit.ly]

  Have to admit that it seemed like Ditto wasn’t catching on, and given the 30 April shutdown of the service, this could be a talent acquisition (or ‘acqui-hire’). We’ll have to keep looking at what Jyri and team cook up there, but there is always the possibility that Jyri will wander off and do something new.

• "@AvitaniaInTO: Yes please! RT @brosevear: Says @pgreenbe already industry is dropping the s from..."

  Posted: April 18, 2012, 7:07 pm

  “@AvitaniaInTO: Yes please! RT @brosevear: Says @pgreenbe already industry is dropping the s from sCRM. Can we lose it everywhere else too? Yay! #rotmanCRM”
  
  - April 18, 2012 at 08:57AM via [bit.ly]

• Watch Out, Best Buy, Ikea Will Soon Sell Their Own HDTV System And It’s Awesome - Matt Burns via TechCrunch

  Posted: April 18, 2012, 2:56 pm

  Watch Out, Best Buy, Ikea Will Soon Sell Their Own HDTV System And It’s Awesome - Matt Burns via TechCrunch:

  IKEA has announced launching the Uppleva line of integrated HDTV and furniture: it’s genius, and completely supports my contention from yesterday that only two kinds of retailers are growing. One, like IKEA and Apple, are selling their own designs, more or less exclusively. The second are specialty purveyors of carefully curated goods, like Trader Joe’s.

  The Uppleva line is going to be very successful, I predict, and opens the TV market to IKEA, and will hasten the demise of chains like Best Buy:

  Matt Burns via TechCrunch

  The new UPPLEVA line completely disrupts the big box store’s HDTV buying process with a high-dose injection of Ikea genius.

  Ikea has yet to announce the nitty-gritty details around the UPPLEVA line including the price. The line will apparently hit key stores in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Gdansk, and Berlin in June 2012. Come autumn it will arrive at additional stores in Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway, and Portugal with a more broad launch following in 2013.

  The YouTube teaser lays out some basic spec concerning the HDTV. It seems up to the task with a 1080p LED LCD screen, 400Hz response time, and some sort of smart TV functionality — all good stuff. But the HDTV really doesn’t matter. Even though it has the specs of a high-end screen, Ikea could have employed a mid-range model and still made the same magic.

  Ikea understands that everything needs to work together. This new product line from the Swedish retailer exemplifies the notion of an all-in-one system. Sure, this probably doesn’t appeal to audio heads or A/V geeks, but it brings a beautiful system that works to the masses. Like with everything else Ikea sells, the UPPLEVA system is completely customizable with a range of TV sizes and cabinet designs. Buyers probably still have to piece them together using those dumb keys, though.

  IKEA is one of the few companies that can really battle Apple for the living room.

• "History will probably laugh at our time’s attempt to impose a mentality of industrial production..."

  Posted: April 17, 2012, 10:11 pm

  “History will probably laugh at our time’s attempt to impose a mentality of industrial production upon creative work.”
  
  - iDoneThis, The Slow Web Movement

• "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."

  Posted: April 17, 2012, 2:55 pm

  “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
  
  - HG Wells

• Photo

  Posted: April 17, 2012, 12:53 pm

  
  
  
  
  

• springwise: Artworks source designs from Google Maps We’ve...

  Posted: April 17, 2012, 12:51 pm

  
  
  

  springwise:

  Artworks source designs from Google Maps

  We’ve already seen a combination of physical art and the digital world being explored by Germany’sKunstmatrix, an online 3D gallery space for displaying works. Now, Woodcut Maps is transforming Google Maps imagery into woodcuts to hang in the office or home. READ MORE…

• "Best Buy is hardly alone in getting buffeted by choppy waters. The list of defunct big-box..."

  Posted: April 17, 2012, 7:00 am

  “

  Best Buy is hardly alone in getting buffeted by choppy waters. The list of defunct big-box superstars of the 1980s and 1990s is long and getting longer. Remember Circuit City, Tweeter, Crazy Eddie—and Borders, which thundered out of business last year?

  Even giants such as Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) are striving to adapt and are beefing up their online operations while lowering their profile in the physical world. Target’s operating margin has slipped from 8.3 percent in fiscal 2008 to 7.6 percent for fiscal 2012, which ended in January. The company is opening five smaller CityTarget locations to seek growth in municipal areas. Wal-Mart, which also seemed invincible until recently, has offset years of declining sales of general merchandise with increased sales of groceries. Last year it added 21 small-format stores and plans to increase that number by as many as 100 this year. Most of those are Neighborhood Markets, which sell a higher percentage of groceries than the SuperCenters.

  “I almost describe this as an Alcoholics Anonymous program,” says Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer at ShopRunner, a company that runs a two-day subscription shipping service on behalf of dozens of retailers. “It has taken a very long time for some of these companies to admit they have a problem.”

  The question is whether it’s too late for companies like Best Buy to put themselves on the path to recovery. The retailer’s business hasn’t collapsed; annual sales have been stable at around $50 billion for the past few years. But it needs to adapt in a hurry. An excursion to the Apple Store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal illustrates how much the ground beneath traditional retailers has shifted. Despite the throng in the store, buying an iPhone charging cable lasts about three minutes: the time it takes to grab the box off a wall, scan it, tap a couple of security codes into the iPhone app that popped up, and walk out. No need to wait in a checkout line—or even speak to a salesperson—and if security personnel were watching, they were invisible. It’s a process designed to remove any lingering barriers between shoppers and their money. You might call it frictionless.

  At a much less busy Best Buy two blocks away, there were no lines at the registers. Yet buying a similar cable took twice as long as it did at the Apple Store, and the experience didn’t end with the sale. A security guard posted at the front door rummaged through shoppers’ blue bags and verified receipts before allowing them to leave. Friction is overrated.

  ”
  
  -

  - Brad Stone and David Welch, The Future Retail Wasteland via Businessweek

  Best Buy surprised the market with a $1.7B quarterly loss, and will be closing 50 stores. CEO Brian Dunn, who a week earlier was trumpeting the companies prospects, resigned.

  

  Successful retail in the US is falling into two categories: companies selling their own products, like Apple, and focused specialty providers, like Trader Joe’s and Uniqlo. Otherwise: a wasteland. And soon we will be dismantling all the big box stores.

  (via futuresagency)

• "@servistree: 72% of companies use at least one type of social technology; 50% use social networking,..."

  Posted: April 16, 2012, 9:52 pm

  “@servistree: 72% of companies use at least one type of social technology; 50% use social networking, 41% have blogs, and 38% use video.”
  
  - April 16, 2012 at 11:37AM via [bit.ly]

• "I hate gamification. Gamification is to play what crowdsourcing is to open source. How can we take..."

  Posted: April 16, 2012, 9:04 pm

  “I hate gamification. Gamification is to play what crowdsourcing is to open source. How can we take this natural, cultural drive toward connection, meaning, purpose, and participation and incorporate it into the economic-growth requirement of corporate capitalism? Foursquare is the easiest example, but everybody’s doing it. I’m sure there are folks at Merrill Lynch gamifying their stock portfolios.”
  
  - Douglas Rushkoff, interviewed by Samatha Hinds in The New Inquiry, 3

• "In many ways, the enterprise software shift mirrors that of the media and cable companies fighting..."

  Posted: April 16, 2012, 8:35 pm

  “

  In many ways, the enterprise software shift mirrors that of the media and cable companies fighting for relevance in a world moving to digital content (HT @hamburger). If users and enterprises can select apps that are decoupled from an entire suite, we might find they’d use a completely different set of technology, just as many consumers would only subscribe to HBO or Showtime if given the option.

  Of course, every benefit brings a new and unique challenge. In a world where users bring their own devices into the workplace, connect to any network, and use a mix of apps, managing and securing business information becomes an incredibly important and incredibly challenging undertaking. Similarly, how do we get disparate companies to build apps that work together, instead of spawning more data silos? And as we move away from large purchases of suites from a single provider, what is the new business model that connects vendors with customers (both end users and IT departments) with minimal friction?

  ”
  
  -

  - Aaron Levie, The Post-PC Enterprise via TechCrunch

  I have to start watching Ellis Hamburger’s (@hamburger) work more closely, because the comparison of enterprise software to the shifting world of New TV is one I made for the first time last week. And Levie is asking great questions (take a look at this post about work media’s silos in the enterprise).

• Did Steve Jobs stick the then-secret iPad in Pixar’s...

  Posted: April 16, 2012, 5:51 pm

  
  
  
  
  

  Did Steve Jobs stick the then-secret iPad in Pixar’s ‘The Incredibles’? These stills — and some researchers — seem to confirm it.

• The Man With the Google Glasses - Ross Douthat via NYTimes.com

  Posted: April 15, 2012, 5:03 pm

  The Man With the Google Glasses - Ross Douthat via NYTimes.com:

  Ross Douthat watches the Google Glasses video a few hundred times, and finds a reflection of our society in it:

  Ross Douthat via NYTimes.com

  […] the video also captures the sense of isolation that coexists with our technological mastery. The Man in the Google Glasses lives alone, in a drab, impersonal apartment. He meets a friend for coffee, but the video cuts away from this live interaction, leaping ahead to the moment when he snaps a photo of some “cool” graffiti and shares it online. He has a significant other, but she’s far enough away that when sunset arrives, he climbs up on a roof and shares it with her via video, while she grins from a window at the bottom of his field of vision.

  He is, in other words, a characteristic 21st-century American, more electronically networked but more personally isolated than ever before. As the N.Y.U. sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes in “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” there are now more Americans living by themselves than there are Americans in intact nuclear-family households. Children are much more likely to grow up with only a single parent in the home; adults marry less and divorce relatively frequently; seniors are more likely to face old age alone. And friendship, too, seems to be attenuating: a 2006 Duke University study found that Americans reported having, on average, three people with whom they discussed important issues in 1985, but just two by the mid-2000s.

  The question hanging over the future of American social life, then, is whether all the possibilities of virtual community — the connections forged by Facebook and Twitter; the back alleys of the Internet where fans of “A Dance to the Music of Time” or “Ren & Stimpy” can find one another; the hum of virtual conversation that’s available any hour of the day — can make up for the weakening of flesh-and-blood ties and the decline of traditional communal institutions.

  Douthat wants us to go back to the Cleaver’s ’50s, and as a result looks as the present as a fallen era.

  First of all, having more weak ties does not lessen the strength of strong ones, but Douthat and others would rather that we don’t connect with many, but would rather that we get back into the nuclear family and commute to a soul-sucking job everyday out in the suburbs than flit around modern day hipster New York.

• Wander Blog

  Posted: April 15, 2012, 4:45 pm

  Wander Blog:

  arainert:

  I love what Jeremy and Keenan at Wander are doing with their Wander Postcard Project.

• Bijan Sabet: Which app do you miss the most? (continued)

  Posted: April 15, 2012, 4:41 pm

  Bijan Sabet: Which app do you miss the most? (continued):

  bijan:

  The other day I tweeted, “which failed startup’s app do you miss the most?”

  I got a number of interesting responses.

  One that touched my heart was Andy Weissmann’s response:

  @bijan Tower Records

  — Andrew Weissman (@aweissman) April 12, 2012

  But by far, the most popular…

  The apps I miss the most are the original Plazes and the original Brightkite.

• world-shaker: section9: mcdavis: Bump’s new method to share...

  Posted: April 15, 2012, 4:39 pm

  
  Select the photos in the Bump app
  
  
  Tap the spacebar with your phone
  
  

  world-shaker:

  section9:

  mcdavis:

  Bump’s new method to share photos from a mobile app to a computer is really clever.  

  Using simple technology (the phone’s accelerometer matched against the time the spacebar was pressed), they’re able to pull off a magical effect as the photo instantly appears on computer’s screen.  

  They’ve made photo sharing not only an intuitive process, but also into a really cool parlor trick.

  Try it out.

  Very cool.

  …brb, trying this now.

  UPDATE: OMG THIS IS SO COOL.

• world-shaker: simplifyyourlife: SIMPLIFY YOUR PHONE LIFE Now,...

  Posted: April 15, 2012, 4:38 pm

  
  
  

  world-shaker:

  simplifyyourlife:

  SIMPLIFY YOUR PHONE LIFE

  Now, through our smartphones, we have access to almost any information, anytime, anywhere. But being connected 24/7 can be both a blessing and a curse. So, what should we do? Chen shares the following:

  In a connected society, we can evaluate how to use our gadgets in a healthy and constructive way as well as how to combat behaviors that are affecting our health and our relationships.

  While there were times that I also felt like throwing my phone into the ocean, I know we can gain control by setting limits. Here’s an example: 

  Set apart a room in their homes where technology is completely forbidden so they can rest or interact with each other without digital distraction. “No cell phones in this room” would be the new equivalent of “Please take of your shoes before entering.”

  Our phones are just tools. It should help us live better lives. If our gadget is complicating or adding stress to our life (ex: by being connected to social networks or work all the time), then we should start redefining our use of it.

  How about you? Do you have any good practices when it comes to using your phone? Feel free to share. Thanks! -Danny

  An important message. Definitely working some of these ideas into one of my presentations.

  I like the equivalence of taking off your shoes — necessary and practical built objects we carry (wear) that touch the ground — and phones — necessary and practical objects we carry to touch the world.

• Digital Notes: Ben Sisario via NYTimes.com

  Posted: April 13, 2012, 4:18 pm

  Digital Notes: Ben Sisario via NYTimes.com:

  Ben Sisario via NYTimes.com

  Inside Pandora: Ever wonder how Pandora’s gnomes know that if you like Kiss’s “Strutter” you will also probably like Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”? (Disclosure: That’s from an actual Pandora playlist by this author.) The service has introduced Inside the Music, an audio-visual guide to its Music Genome Project that illustrates the characteristics of musical genres. Rock is first, with its “mild rhythmic syncopation” and “interweaving vocal harmonies.” (R&B, country, electronica, rap and classical will come later, Pandora says.) The project is sponsored by Intel, which appends a 15-second ad to each minute-long audio clip.

  I wonder if this will turn out to be obvious, or if there is a deep subtlety to downtempo versus dubstep?

• The New Suburban Poverty - Lisa McGirr via NYTimes.com

  Posted: April 13, 2012, 2:30 pm

  The New Suburban Poverty - Lisa McGirr via NYTimes.com:

  The suburban and homogenous USA has become a thing of the past, and rising suburban poverty and the flight of the wealthy to exclusive exurbs and gentrified urban neighborhoods is leading to suburban infrastructure collapse:

  The New Suburban Poverty - Lisa McGirr via NYTimes.com

  Why is poverty soaring in the suburbs? Part of the answer, according to the Brookings Institution, is simple demographics: More Americans live in the suburbs, so there are more poor people there, too. But the recent downturn has also had an outsize impact on suburbs, with the decline in certain categories of jobs and an end to the housing boom that drew many urbanites and immigrants to the suburbs in the first place.

  […]

  Chances are, however, that suburbs facing the highest burdens of the new poverty will be least able to meet them because of the economic recession and the spatial retreat of the better off. Just as many white Americans fled the cities for the suburbs in the 1960s, leaving the cities behind with declining tax revenues and fewer job opportunities, there is new cycle of exodus of the well-to-do from inner-ring metropolitan suburbs. As the better-off retreat, the provision of amenities and essentials from parks to schools to garbage pickup, heavily funded by property taxes, are bound to flounder for those left-behind.

  One recent study conducted by Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff of Stanford University documented the spatial sorting by income that is going on, with the wealthy flocking together in new exurbs as well as gentrifying pockets of urban centers. In 1970 — the high-water mark of a more homogeneous suburban America — only 15 percent of families in metropolitan areas lived in socio-economically segregated neighborhoods categorized as affluent or poor. In 2007, that figure was 31.7 percent.

  The demographic splintering in the US is likely accelerating since the 31.7% of 2007. When the majority of the country lives in economically segregated neighborhoods, that, more than the collapse of the suburbs, will be the end of the American Dream

• Books I like Around Future Thinking - Paul Higgins

  Posted: April 13, 2012, 2:03 pm

  Books I like Around Future Thinking - Paul Higgins:

  futuresagency (Stowe Boyd):

  Paul Higgins put together a great list of books and future thinkers, including one book I have just received in the mail, Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman — so go check it out.

• "@stoweboyd: During nonworking hours, people in their 20s switch their attention from one media..."

  Posted: April 11, 2012, 1:07 am

  “@stoweboyd: During nonworking hours, people in their 20s switch their attention from one media device to another 27 times/hour [t.co] ”
  
  - April 11, 2012 at 02:59PM via [bit.ly]