What I don’t want: Chatroulette is interesting. I’ve sort of refrained from talking about it until now because I hadn’t known what to say/think about it, and based on the primary use cases (I think of the “Comic Book” guy archetype looking for a good time) or teens that frequent the “Most Viewed” section on [...]
Leave it to Steve to drop some sick metaphor on you like that. Bonus points for referencing bicycles. Computers are like bicycles for our minds
Living our daily lives touched by Boxee, Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and YouTube, it’s easy to think that we are on the cutting edge of media consumption. That the business exchanges that we partake in, whether it be paying subscription fees for entertainment [Netflix], or piecemeal for atomic units of media [iTunes] will be what everyone [...]
I just listened to this 4 year old piece from NPR and found its implications interesting for designing experiences and things. When people say “The novelty wore thin,” it’s entirely possible that they’re not talking about a particular novelty, but novelty altogether. Reading You are Not a Gadget has introduced me to the user/human idea [...]
Here’s a humanistic thought to start your day. “The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network [...]
Last year, I went to FailCon and StartupSchool (they were situated around the same weekend). I could easily say that I learned way more listening to the cases of failures than the “here’s what worked for me, but probably won’t work again, and most certainly won’t work for you if you do it exactly the [...]
Okay, back. Been gone for more than 2 months. One month in India and a month working getting ready for a pilot with a group here in Chicago for BettrAt (Which is going well — my favorite part of the webinar we held yesterday: “This (BettrAt) could be the next Facebook, but actually USEFUL”. Imagine [...]
I’m surprised I waited so long to read this book by Randy Komisar, now almost a decade old, titled The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. The book is a light read, I finished it between two short airplane flights to/fro Philly. Lots of this stuff is intuitive if you [...]
Yesterday, I was helping a friend and colleague at ID work on an exciting new platform for eBooks delivered on a backlit display and was shocked and pleased with how easily I was able to provide feedback, give and receive ideas and inspiration. Not only was this (hopefully) helpful to Dan, but also to myself [...]
I loved the zefrank show (zefrank is where i got that black shirt i have with the small fuzzy black duck that people always think is a stain) I’ve now referenced this video in conversation at least 3 times so I thought I might as well post it. I saw this while I was in [...]
Tim Brown’s article in Stanford’s SSIR this month covers Design Thinking for Social Innovation. In the article, the importance of direct observation, and ethnographic inquiry, standard design staples are covered. Design thinking is defined as being “inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential”. Most of the stuff in the article is old hat to those with a [...]
I read this post a few weeks ago by Joel Spolsky about growth and the need for speed (The post is entitled “Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?”. I thought to myself for a while and nodded… and all of the examples were spot on: Word vs WordPerfect / Oracle vs Ingres. But there was [...]
