admin

Apr 01 2008
0

Why the Cool Gadgets Come out in Japan First

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

A great article on why Japan still leads the US in terms of Gadgets.

There are a variety of reasons posited, but the main one is that gadgets are not dominated by males in Japan.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fact that Myspace’s growth came from its male/female balance, caused by teenage girls attraction to alpha males in bands.

Perhaps this gender symmetry helps achieve viral growth since hubs and key influencers are more likely to connect male -> female -> male etc.

Thanks to Keith for the article.
ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap / Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?

Dec 20 2007
0

The Lane Hartwell Problem

Posted by | media | No Comments

Arrington’s post about photography and copyright is excellent. Of of all the media wars: Video; Music and Images – photography is the most important. The reason – everyone is now a photographer with unlimited film and photographs can’t be quoted as a snippet. 1. Zero cost trial and error creates professional looking results. The photography marketplace is decreasing. The zero cost ubiquity of digital images mean that the sum total quality of amateur output is often better than the sum total of professionals. Search on Flickr for something that you would normally buy from a stock library. The professional photography market is moving from a craft dominated industry of recording events to an artistic one with room for a minority of top creatives, in the same way that it did for painting in the 19th Century. The same number of photographers are fighting for less dollars. 2. The Internet creates…

Read More
Dec 14 2007
0

Amazon launches grid database – final component for a zero hardware startup

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Amazon SimpleDB has just been released as a Beta, its like S3 but for databases, allowing structured queries. What this means is that you don’t need to worry about database clustering or possibly backup (although I have never gotten a decent answer to the question of whether you still need to backup S3 data). This potentially provides a beautiful solution for startups – EC2 as application servers, SimpleDB for structured data and S3 for binaries. It is not clear whether SimpleDB can be used, somehow for efficient full text search. If only S3 had a front end like Squid to enable automatic cache on demand for binaries, and there were a better front end to instantiate, configure and manage EC2 instances, then Amazon would be the default choice for most startups.

Read More
Dec 12 2007
0

Newly released map of the Internet with accurate statistics, by Amazing Britney S. Crotch and Top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

There seems to be a worrying trend of people who actually believe that the Internet is benign. That it contains primarily useful information and will make stars out of people who make wooden educational toys or sincere bands from Portland. Those of us that have been working in the Internet since before the Web, know a different story. Here is a Newly discovered map of the Internet with accurate statistics. And here are the names of the authors to help you find it in future: “Amazing Britney S. Crotch and top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911”: Internet traffic and content by percentage: The World Wide Web: Porn: 22% Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan, Ron Jeremy, Eric Estrada: 21% Finding Porn or Paris Hilton: 14% Trying to Find other stuff: 8% Information about how to build web sites without tables and with rounded boxes: 7% False Apple rumors: 6%…

Read More
Dec 11 2007
0

Liberal America is growing old and dying in Woodstock

Posted by | america | No Comments

Woodstock is a curious place. It is famous for a concert which it never held and as the spiritual epicenter of free thinking in the 60’s. Yet despite the occasional sign saying ‘hippies welcome’, on a snowy December evening before Christmas it looks more like a Republican fantasy of small town America. The setting for ‘A wonderful Life’, perhaps. The hippies are old now, and they line up to protest the Iraq war as the bus to New York passes through. In the background, an apathetic youth with hoodie and baseball cap perches on a mountain bike: gormless, slack-jawed and vacant. If young people are less radical than their grandparents, society is abnormal compared to historical trends. More importantly, the historical precedent is that this kind of society is more likely to stumble into large scale conflict.

Read More
Nov 19 2007
0

Anne Zelenka is right to be skeptical of Kindle

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

My gut tells me that Kindle will go the way of poopy brown Zunes and Segways. 1. Expensive hardware. 2. Cheap looking hardware. 3. Expensive content. 4. Un-innovative software. 5. A name that sounds like firewood. I like Amazon – a lot. I think its really hard for a startup to come along and beat a company that has so much infrastructure and logistics nailed, and I like the innovation in S3 and EC2. But the Kindle has dog written all over it. Amazon needed to do something really disruptive here and this is not a disruptive product. Ebook readers have not taken off, and the difference between laptops and readers is narrowing. I suspect a market slice is needed to gain traction and that education could provide that in a way that would be world changing. What I’d like to see is a Kindle like product for schools and…

Read More
Oct 27 2007
0

Digital Curation, the opposite of Social Media

Posted by | technology | No Comments

The Curate’s Web Jason Kottke points to an excellent review by Alexander Bohn of Ffffound, a newer visual bookmarking site based upon the same principal as Wists, but with a supremely visually literate, design focused, community rather than a craftster one. Social Media When we developed the idea of visual bookmarking in 2005, it was fashionable to look at publishing as being purely democratic – all readers were publishers and everything was ‘social’. We created the term Social Shopping (hip word meets $$$) as a joke, and people took it seriously. Two companies did versions of it, and one sold for $40M. And the very best of luck to them, too. But there is something fundamentally wrong with sites that are driven by a passion for the business model at the expense of the content. In the long term these don’t work as businesses. Digital Curation Something different and much…

Read More
Oct 24 2007
0

An antidote to the Watson contoversy

Posted by | science | No Comments

Geneticist, Steve Jones interviewed in 1994 during the controversy over the book, The Bell Curve. Something that is very relevant today, given that one of the most famous living scientists claimed that black people were less intelligent. (as an aside – I’ve finally figured out how to embed videos so that they start at a specific timecode point – do a view source on the video linked to here, if you want to now how.) Steve Jones Interview – (in light of the Watson controversy) | smashing telly – the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day

Read More
Oct 09 2007
0

Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful

Posted by | science | No Comments

Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful. My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don’t talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing. My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn’t flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the…

Read More
Oct 02 2007
0

Shit shitty shit shit. Ned Sherrin Dies

Posted by | diary | No Comments

Intravenous tea, Radio 4 and doctors calling themselves Mister again, when becoming surgeons, are the lifeblood of a particularly understated and delicate cultural facet that, along with aggressive guitar music and appropriate use of swearwords like cunt, are the things that I miss about the UK. Even when I worked in an office designing rock concert sets for bands like the Rolling Stones, all we actually listened to all day was the calming sound of BBC Radio 4. My favorite show was Loose Ends, presented by Ned Sherrin. He died Sunday. Bugger. Ned Sherrin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Read More
Sep 16 2007
0

USS Ponce

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

I wonder if anyone pointed out to the people who named USS Ponce, that in the UK it means ‘flamboyantly gay’. USS PONCE (LPD15) “The Proud Lions!”

Read More