February 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Hilarious. And true.
http://cgi.ebay.com/SesameVault-Online-Video-Platform_W0QQitemZ160405185640QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item2558e4e468
http://www.streamingmedia.com/press/view.asp?id=17020
Lamps →
1 tag
Bookshelf Feb 15 2010
Shelfari:
Book reviews on your book blog Find new books and literate friends with
Shelfari, the online book
club.
January 2010
24 posts
2 tags
3 tags
Social is technology
The stereotype of technology innovation is that it gets realized by a private genius who works independently to envision and then implement a breakthrough product. Innovation is thought to be a solitary pursuit owned by the few, diametrically opposed to social pursuits, friends and partners. Steve Wozniak worked alone 16+ hours/day to assemble smaller and smaller circuit boards and innovate the...
2 tags
Software is green
I’m both jealous and relieved not to be John Ive.
Ive gets to design 3-dimensional, physical products for Apple. A few of his most recognized creations:
With the exception of some home projects, like the tanzu on my previous NYC loft or the headboard on my new Los Gatos bed, I design 2-dimensional items—user interfaces for Web, desktop and Mobile technology services. My work does have an...
1 tag
Context is window to genius
James Cameron’s Avatar invents a new vocabulary of futuristic technology and alien biology. The mixture of imagery, special effects and action is fantastic and convincing. But seamlessly woven into the mesh of that world is something much simpler and even more inspiring: the notion that a change of context can morph simple human to genius.
Avatar’s hero, Jake Sully, is introduced as a 2nd-rate...
2 tags
Typekit is not a standard
In the case of Typekit I find myself pining for open source.
With the service, founder Jeff Keen created another hosted Javascript API. This one renders hundreds of native fonts as text on any site. Web designers have dreamed of such opportunity outside of Flash, native to the browser for years. Any font, cross-browser, cross-system, pre-loaded from the web page, easy to design, easy to manage...
The Web is a sandbox
Early-stage bugs aside, the strategy and experience executed thus far by Boxee is impressive and promising. To paraphrase Boxee founder, Avner Rosen, they intend to be the FireFox of Internet video. A way to help users find and interact with video. But tethered to the Web and computer, that doesn’t quite achieve the lean-back TV-watching user experience. Enter “Boxee Box.”
Avner’s original...
1 tag
Open source is religion
Does Darwin’s theory of evolution conflict with the myth of Christianity? Of course it does. But to get you to attend church, a priest will reconcile the two based on “faith.” Likewise, survival of the fittest in capitalism conflicts with the benevolent force of open source development.
The faith placed in the ideals of open source creates a moral fabric to motivate developers. I cannot question...
2 tags
Revive Push, email
With a wealth of chatter on industry blogs about the problem of email morass and need for information reduction (e.g., Fred Wilson, A VC ), it’s a problem I’m exploring as a product. New services like Hunch and WolframAlpha suggest more intelligent, computational search is a growing market.
The original killer app and yet still primitive Internet channel is email, because it’s an established,...
2 tags
Tinker
As Taleb’s “The Black Swan” notes, “The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.”
Brilliant you think you are, but you cannot engineer success. Neither could Larry and Sergei.
The message is to silence the ego, drop the genius complex and get to work.
3 tags
WatchHaving tested Aardvark for a few weeks now, I find the answers are not usually high quality because the social network connections are too remote to provide specific and trusted answers. The IM interaction, however, is addictive. I feel compelled to answer users even more than ask questions. It’s a simple, fast distraction with another regular human that you can regulate (modify settings for...
2 tags
Internet video is broken
The economics of Internet video is broken. Independent estimates suggest that after 5 years of operation YouTube still loses $.5 billion /yr after the balance of relatively meager revs and massive infrastructure/bandwidth costs. Google execs have made many comments that “it’s not working, and they are exploring ideas.” But Google has already pursued and abandoned “paid content” once offered via...
2 tags
Social vs. Self
Two prevailing methods of search and discovery are social vs. self. Sometimes you want to know what others are reading to serve as a guide to discovery and to stay abreast of popular trends. Other times you are purely interested in discovering good articles, regardless of social trends. Self-discovery is the seed of trends, and those who tend to read that way are more likely to be the...
3 tags
The interface is the hook
There are many services to filter and personalize news on the Web or in desktop RSS apps/plugins. But what about news delivered in email? Many people use email as their push mechanism for discovery of content from topical publishers who offer opt-in lists to be alerted when new features are posted.
One pain point I perceive is the duplication and clutter from 100s of overlapping publisher emails,...
4 tags
Web products are like onions
With a bushel of new Web products introduced every month, it’s a huge challenge to attract attention to yours. Today Web products are like onions—overabundant and offensive unless prepared and served with care.
The best “approach vector” (to borrow the phrase from a friend) is to start with a very simple, succinct expression that:
Addresses a pain point
Introduces an enticing value prop
...
2 tags
There are too many Web products
A few years back it took a suitably long time to build and launch a Web product. Founders needed a formal business plan, months to secure funding, employees, an office, formal market analysis, top-down planning, waterfall development, marketing, sales… All these difficult, expensive, time-consuming steps made it prohibitively difficult for average Joe to pursue a Web start-up. A Web-generation of...
1 tag
Bombs are green
Nature continually destroys itself to cleanse the old and rebuild anew.
Lightening storms in California ignite forest fires that burn 100 yr-old trees entrenched in mounds of brush, then grow back new, vibrant variations of vegetation. Volcanoes burst in Hawaii smothering ancient sea life with lava sediment, and old life is replaced with fertile fields for a next generation of...
3 tags
Unregulated growth creates paralysis
After 10+ years as an Internet product designer, it often amazes me how few conventions for product design and development have been established. There is not 1 nor even 10 accepted ways of building and launching a product. In fact, there are many, many more tools, processes and paths today than there were in 1999. Multiple methods, types, flavors, languages, some but not all interchangeable. Each...
2 tags
Open Source, not so simple
Building a brand from scratch as a bootstrapping start-up is much, much different than maintaining it after you’ve achieved the mindshare of Louis Vuitton or Apple. The most interesting angle for bootstrappers recently has been the very act of bootstrapping itself, that is, sourcing customers in the creation of the product, not only to save money, but to develop that mindshare. That’s the story...
Press means pay-for-play
“The press” and press coverage of companies and products is pay-for-play, pure and simple. “Pay” does not always mean payment by a company directly to its industry trade publications. That would be too obvious and break the editorial edict of “separation of church and state” (separation of editorial content and monetization of that content).
Let’s take a look at the process of press. A “press...
Only computers (and close friends) can be trusted
Seth Godin recently writes, “Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity.”
It sounds embarrassingly like “Cliff’s Notes,” but of course it’s not what he’s talking about. The overwhelming majority of “stuff” on the Internet are not classics, rather user-generated garbage en masse, yet there are morsels in the morass. What we...
1 tag
Start-ups today are like bands in the ’90s
Running a tech start-up today is like starting a band in the ’90s. I’ve done both.
I was a mercenary guitarist hired by singer/songwriter “Darwin Zoo” who called his band “The Vatican Assassins.” The music was canned and shallow. My attitude showed it and I was fired after a year. I also wrote music with Joe Suchta, a complimentary musician and true partner. Our music was true, original,...
Good artists borrow, great artists steal
Saul Bass takes credit for the logo and identity of AT&T.
Bass’s friend Ed Benguiat (my typography professor at SVA) told me that before it was sold to the multi-billion dollar corp, the globe icon was acquired from the graphic leftovers of an unknown designer. This designer accepted a few hundred bucks from Saul who secured all rights to the symbol. Then, Saul fetched 7 figures plus...
Companies are the bricks of Web 3.0
Creativity on the Internet has evolved from what used to be bricks of craft and technology to business and social applications of those bricks.
Both Web 1.0 and 2.0 saw designers and technologists building Web sites line-by-line and pixel-by-pixel, painstakingly stacking digital bricks one-at-a-time. These efforts were sometimes just experimental, occasionally garnered some commercial success and...
“The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the...”
– Mark Twain paraphrased