Good overview of four different strategies at Harvard Business Review (September 13, 2012) Shaping strategy:
Some environments, as internet software vendors well know, can’t be taken as given. For instance, in new or young high-growth industries where barriers to entry are low, innovation rates are high, demand is very hard to predict, and the relative positions of competitors are in flux, a company can often radically shift the course of industry development through some innovative move. A mature industry that’s similarly fragmented and not dominated by a few powerful incumbents, or is stagnant and ripe for disruption, is also likely to be similarly malleable.
Apple updated scripts to include movies on user's web pages. Old scripts apparently are now archived and are no longer updated by Apple. New scripts generated in the Save for Web (QuickTime Player 10.0) apparently work as intended only on Safari browser. Browsers (Mac) Firefox 3.6, Opera 12 and Chrome 20 all failed to display the video. IE9 (PC) failed to display video with the QuickTime Movie Controller as intended. Format tested is QuickTime Movie Controller.
Nice graph illustrates a viral highway of breaking news at MIT Technology Review.
Click below to see another graph representing the viral spread of a single tweet posted during last summer’s riots in Britain.
"UltraViolet is another feeble, doomed attempt by some dinosaur brain Hollywood execs to restrict the use of your legally bought digital purchase," wrote reviewer John Dettingmeijer. "UltraViolet is NOT a digital copy that resides on a device of your choice to be used on a device of your choice. It is a streaming service, for which you have to sign up and maintain an account, at the expense of your bandwidth, compatible with some but not all mobile devices."
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"Hi Scott, this is Steve," Steckley recalled hearing from the other end of the phone.
"Steve Jobs?" he asked.
"Yeah," Jobs said. "I just wanted to apologize for your incredibly long wait. It's really nobody's fault. It's just one of those things."
"Yeah, I understand."
Then Jobs explained that he expedited the repair. "I also wanted to thank you for your support of Apple," Jobs said. "I see how much equipment you own. It really makes my day to see someone who enjoys our products so much and who supports us in the good times and bad."
Money - A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do. It's broken out into "dollars, thousands, millions, billions, trillions".
In "six pillars of Steve Job's design legacy" Isaacson writes:
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; it we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
In a review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Malcolm Gladwell says that Steve Jobs was much more of a "tweaker" than an inventor.
Jobs's sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him-the tablet with stylus-and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, "Your commercials suck."
"Well, what do you want?" Vincent shot back. "You've not been able to tell me what you want."
"I don't know," Jobs said. "You have to bring me something new. Nothing you've shown me is even close."
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. "He just started screaming at me," Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, "You've got to tell me what you want," Jobs shot back, "You've got to show me some stuff, and I'll know it when I see it."
Stasi spy wearing a giant bear costume appears at a sports festival in Berlin.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, criticised Bitcoin in an article in the New York Times in September:
"What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin. Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded – but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation."
Writing in the September/October edition of Technology Review, the New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki noted that Bitcoin might indeed be trapped in a deflationary spiral:
"With ordinary currencies, though, there's a limit to how far down the spiral can go, since people still need to eat, pay their bills, and so on, and to do so they need to use their currency. But these things aren't true of bitcoins: you can get along perfectly well without ever spending them, so there's no imperative for people to stop hoarding and start spending. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which the vast majority of bitcoins are held by people hoping to sell them to other people."
A very passionate post by former Amazon employee and current Google employee Steve Yegge in which he reflects how Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right:
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
And more on Chrome:
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.
Spies from former communist East Germany demonstrate the art of disguise by donning fur wigs, fake mustaches and dark glasses in a Berlin exhibition of recently uncovered and once highly classified photographs.
The exhibition runs at Morgen Contemporary in Berlin until August 20th and you can try try poking around the Stasi archive yourself if you understand German.
An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear". Read more
Netflix's streaming content licensing costs are predicted to rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $1.98 billion in 2012.
Business Insider has a nice selection of photos by Danny Lyon of Brooklyn in 1974.
It appears that Skype as we know it very soon will be over.
Microsoft Corp plans to buy Internet phone service Skype for $8.5 billion in cash, a rich price as it seeks to regain ground on growing rivals such as Google Inc.
Microsoft's interest in the money-losing but popular service highlights a need to gain new customers for its Windows and Office software. Skype has 145 million users on average each month and has gained favor among small business users.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week.
E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 "among all categories of trade publishing" that month -- the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.
Microsoft says that Google has put in place technical measures that restrict Microsoft's Bing search engine, as well as other search rivals, from "properly accessing" YouTube for their search results. It claims Google uses that otherwise restricted data to index YouTube videos in its own search results.
Above all, fellow cinephiles, we can’t have both $1 movies (like those you rent at Redbox kiosks) and instant access to the newest releases. You can pay $4 to Apple or Vudu the day the DVD comes out, or you can get it for $1 from a Redbox machine a couple of months later. And let’s not even mention Netflix’s streaming-movie collection, most of which seems to date back to the Carter administration.