November 29, 2011
November 26, 2011
November 24, 2011
Awesome: The Umbrella Man
NYTimes: ‘The Umbrella Man’
http://nyti.ms/rXT0R4
// Typed on a phone // +1 530 727 8277 // amol@peek.ly
NYTimes: ‘The Umbrella Man’
http://nyti.ms/rXT0R4
// Typed on a phone // +1 530 727 8277 // amol@peek.ly
November 23, 2011
A Trip to the Moon (Part 1)
Scorsese and Selznick's source
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbGd_240ynk&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Amol
Carved in cuneiform and sent via tablet
Great news: F.C.C. Seeks Review of AT&T Merger With T-Mobile
I think it is dead.
From The New York Times:
F.C.C. Seeks Review of AT&T Merger With T-Mobile
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission will request an
administrative hearing on the proposed $39 billion acquisition.
http://nyti.ms/u5jUYg
I think it is dead.
From The New York Times:
F.C.C. Seeks Review of AT&T Merger With T-Mobile
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission will request an administrative hearing on the proposed $39 billion acquisition.
http://nyti.ms/u5jUYg
November 22, 2011
A wise, weird man
"It seems that the burning heart of this question is really the curiosity
about what it is that motivates any human being to do something out of the
ordinary, and my short answer to this is usually a simple, because I had
the idea and I chose to do something about it."
http://paraag.posterous.com/carl-warners-food-lanscapes-genius-and-making
"It seems that the burning heart of this question is really the curiosity about what it is that motivates any human being to do something out of the ordinary, and my short answer to this is usually a simple, because I had the idea and I chose to do something about it."
http://paraag.posterous.com/carl-warners-food-lanscapes-genius-and-making
The economic lesson from Japan: the problem is aging
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/11/lost-decades
November 21, 2011
The phone cloud
This is a welcome development. These guys are selling cloud-based arms
to app makers in the smartphone world, a force we see starting to happen
in the mass-market phone ecosystem at Peek.
http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/06/combined-urban-airship-simple-geo-take-15-million-series-c/
The Startup Curve
Seems right to me
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caseorganic/6247592885/
November 20, 2011
The Mexico Border. All is quiet.
from the Economist:
It’s quiet most days in the El Paso sector, as the Border Patrol dubs this 268-mile slice of the border. Back in 1993, agents arrested 285,781 people trying to enter America illegally. In those days, the holding cells in the processing centre, explains Scott Hayes, a Border Patrol agent, were full to bursting. In 2010, however, agents picked up only 12,251 illegal immigrants in the area—a 96% decline. Much the same is true of the border as a whole: last year’s tally, of 447,731 arrests, is barely a quarter that of the peak year, 2000, when 1,643,679 people were intercepted. This year’s figure will be under 350,000; a fifth of the peak.
The drop in arrests reflects not laxer enforcement, but stronger. There are over 17,000 Border Patrol agents on the border with Mexico, a fivefold increase over 1993. They patrol in cars and all-terrain vehicles, on bicycles and horses, in boats, planes and helicopters. When there are no agents around, cameras, reconnaissance drones and three different types of sensors—seismic, magnetic and infra-red—keep tabs on things. A third of the border is fenced, and most of the rest is in areas so remote or rugged as to make fences pointless or impractical. Some parts of the fence are 17 feet high, with metal plates extending ten feet below ground to prevent tunnelling.
It’s quiet most days in the El Paso sector, as the Border Patrol dubs this 268-mile slice of the border. Back in 1993, agents arrested 285,781 people trying to enter America illegally. In those days, the holding cells in the processing centre, explains Scott Hayes, a Border Patrol agent, were full to bursting. In 2010, however, agents picked up only 12,251 illegal immigrants in the area—a 96% decline. Much the same is true of the border as a whole: last year’s tally, of 447,731 arrests, is barely a quarter that of the peak year, 2000, when 1,643,679 people were intercepted. This year’s figure will be under 350,000; a fifth of the peak.
The drop in arrests reflects not laxer enforcement, but stronger. There are over 17,000 Border Patrol agents on the border with Mexico, a fivefold increase over 1993. They patrol in cars and all-terrain vehicles, on bicycles and horses, in boats, planes and helicopters. When there are no agents around, cameras, reconnaissance drones and three different types of sensors—seismic, magnetic and infra-red—keep tabs on things. A third of the border is fenced, and most of the rest is in areas so remote or rugged as to make fences pointless or impractical. Some parts of the fence are 17 feet high, with metal plates extending ten feet below ground to prevent tunnelling.
November 18, 2011
Gladwell is a dummy on Jobs (and other stuff)
Some people -- most people? -- can't get their heads around the idea that "innovation" doesn't mean "creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts".
Link to Daring Fireball re: the Gladwell article on Jobs
The irony is that Gladwell is also the author of this article -- subtitled the Myth of the Lone Inventor, claiming that all innovations are basically incremental tweaks on previous stuff and that nothing is 100% new.
Of course that article itself is ripped off from Kevin Kelly
November 17, 2011
Google vs. Bing: "specialist in civil wars"
Google: 6 results, including..."He is notoriously closely linked to the CIA and a specialist in civil wars: how to stoke them and how to end them. According to the "dogfight theory"..."
Bing: 0 results
November 16, 2011
What every VC ever says...
"We are very different from your typical (corporate) venture fund..."
followed by
"we are an X dollar fund"
"with no strict restriction on what we look for but an interest in Y"
and then some unique stuff which often seems to me accidental, like
- regional focus
- number of partners
- size of deals
But what do I know.
November 14, 2011
Intel vs. everyone in smartphones
Intel makes about $5/smartphone*.
As far as I know, they made $0 per featurephone (voicemail and SMS etc didn't run on x86)
Re: smartphones
His confidence is based on the calculation that for every 600 smartphones or 122 tablets running Netflix (NFLX) videos or Facebook updates, there's an Intel-powered server in a back office somewhere churning out data. Otellini predicts that the thirst for mobile video, audio, and other content will help push Intel's data-center chip sales to $10 billion this year--about a fifth of projected revenue--and to $20 billion within the next five. Its top-of-the-line Xeon server processors cost as much as $4,616 each, compared with around $15 each for smartphone chips. (Processors for PCs go for $90 on average.)
*Assumes about $2,000 per Xeon server / 400 phones/tablets
Intel vs. everyone in smartphones
Intel makes $2-8/smartphone.
His confidence is based on the calculation that for every 600 smartphones or 122 tablets running Netflix (NFLX) videos or Facebook updates, there's an Intel-powered server in a back office somewhere churning out data. Otellini predicts that the thirst for mobile video, audio, and other content will help push Intel's data-center chip sales to $10 billion this year--about a fifth of projected revenue--and to $20 billion within the next five. Its top-of-the-line Xeon server processors cost as much as $4,616 each, compared with around $15 each for smartphone chips. (Processors for PCs go for $90 on average.)
* Assumes $1,000 per processor / 500 smartphones = $2/phone
Switching from iPhone to Windows
Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to from an iPhone - Marco.org
I think he's wrong about the "no apps" sandtrap that Windows is in for a few reasons
- Nokia market share with WM7 in 2012 will be a very decent flow (10% of global smartphones?)
- Samsung, LG and HTC will contribute some too
- Lower end handsets with WM7 via Nokia will add more
- Cherry-picking the top 100 apps is something MS can definitely do/enable (they paid Foursquare to build a Foursquare app...)
- and from there it can start the wheels going
November 12, 2011
November 11, 2011
Eleanor Roosevelt: "great minds discuss...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Brooks at his best on society
NYTimes: The Inequality Map
http://nyti.ms/t9qZav
NYTimes: The Inequality Map
http://nyti.ms/t9qZav
November 10, 2011
Armchair skepticism vs. Apple
I do idolize Gasse for his Mac and BeOS heyday but this very smart post by him about "why Apple iTV is a dumb idea" is symptomatic of how people doubt innovation.
It's a statement of the problem -- this is why TVs suck.
But how to solve it? That's what we are all waiting for isn't it.
Steve Jobs greatest quotes, according to Kindle readers
Recently Heavily Highlighted Passages on Kindle
1.
'Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.'"
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
2.
"The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
3.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
4.
There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
5.
He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
6.
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
7.
"Picasso had a saying--'good artists copy, great artists steal'--and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
8.
It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
9.
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; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
10.
Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs's design philosophy: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
November 9, 2011
UI design, besides "easy to use"
Great article about "why Angry Birds is so popular": Link
What it really is about is "what are some of cool UI techniques they use, and what are some of the qualities they went after".
In games people do talk about fun and other experiential attributes like for storytelling.
But in normal UIs, people never do. Or product design. (They sometimes do...just not enough.)
When you make something, how does it read?
- Fun
- Simple
- Functional
- Valuable
- Delightful
- Surprising
- Intelligent....
Those are important attributes. I find software and web UI design to be the most ignorant of these aims.
November 6, 2011
November 5, 2011
November 4, 2011
Using the audio jack: UP
As Square is doing, Up is using the most universal and most-under-utilized "interface" on the phone.
November 2, 2011
iCloud, wow. This iCloud.com thing is absolutely insanely amazing. I cannot believe it.
