Finnish mobile giant Nokia today released its fourth quarter financial results, posting a €1.07 billion ($1.4 billion) loss as sales declined by 21% year on year with smartphone sales and mobile sales down 31% and 1% respectively. Whilst it shows Nokia still has a lot of work to do, it sold 19.6 million smartphones and 93.9 million mobile devices, meaning that over the quarter, sales were up 17% and 5% respectively on the last quarter.
(via thenextweb)
Form Letter Template For Acquired Startups
By panicsteve via Github
Dear soon-to-be-former user,
We’ve got some fantastic news! Well, it’s great news for us anyway. You, on
the other hand, are fucked.
We’ve just been acquired by:
[ ] Other: _________________
As you are aware, we’ve always provided a free service, and have never even
tried offering a for-pay option. This means we’ve never had any income and
have been operating at a loss for our entire existence. Since any schoolchild
can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you
from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a
few cents per-click, or that we’ve always intended to be an acquisition target.
You can do the math on that one.
Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business
will be deleted:
[ ] Immediately
[ ] Within a week
[ ] Within 30 days
We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with
solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement
as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the
moment we genuinely believe this horseshit. In reality, you will never hear
about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up,
like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.
Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much
larger company with more money than sense.
Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,
Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
Connecting people with solutions
“Shit.ly loves you!”
@sandymaxey: Anil Gupta defining grassroots: “Minds on the margins are not marginal minds” http://t.co/9fysU9ng
@stoweboyd: Doree Shafrir of Rolling Stone to oversee culture coverage at BuzzFeed http://t.co/ZUxaiaPx Joining Ben Smith from Politico
A Momentary Flow: Study shows that kids, unlike adults, think technology is fundamentally human
Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Growing up with the Internet gives today’s children a very unique view on the way the world works — one that is vastly different from that of older generations. These kids, the ‘digital natives,” are raised with modern technology deeply…
Passed on by Seb Paquet (@sebpaquet), dreamed up by Mike Arauz, Simone Lovati and David Carr.
This seems to lack the added dimension of the social scenes we are embedded in. Specifically, it lacks the impacts that individuals can have when they influence others, and those others carry on ideas to yet another set of others. So it is possible that you don’t know of Stowe Boyd, but you’ve heard the term ‘social tools’ that he coined. So people can be influenced by others before direct awareness of their existence.
The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture. But as with all things Internet, we’ll just identify the damage and route around it. It’s just too bad we have to do that, and in the long run, it’s bad for Facebook, bad for Google, and bad for all of us. (BTW, Google also doesn’t show Twitter or Flickr results either, or any other “social” service. Just its own, Google and Picasa.)
- John Battelle, Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World
Once again, Google steps in a pile of doodoo with its maladroit efforts in trying to absorb the social web. Unwilling to simply index things and offer them up as search results, Google wants to ‘socialize’ search. What this means is that search is just another battlefield for Google to fight the war for the future against Facebook, Twitter, etc.
On one hand, you have to admit that Google faces a new world, one that is increasingly social, and the search company has to get in there. But this is not the way to do it.
I continue to be amazed that Google doesn’t look at its email and calendar apps as a good place to build social, instead of dicking around with search.
@ballardian: Swedish cities could connect via bike superhighway: http://t.co/BIdFjpL2 | via @sustaincities
To pivot is, essentially, to fail gracefully. While the term has been in the start-up lexicon for decades, it is coming up more often in the current Internet boom, as entrepreneurs find that many investors are willing to keep the money flowing even if a start-up takes a hard left turn.
“Ideas are like lightning in a bottle, so if the company is small enough and didn’t seem to capture lightning on their first try, it makes sense to try again,” said Ben Horowitz, one of the founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “The art of the pivot is to do it fast and early. The older and bigger the business, the harder it is to change directions.”
Mr. Horowitz speaks from experience: A decade ago, he went through a pivot of Loudcloud, a publicly traded enterprise services firm that he founded with Marc Andreessen, into Opsware, a networking software company. “That was very public and very scary,” he said. “We dropped down to 35 cents on the Nasdaq, and although we went back up to $14, it took awhile. When you’re a small company, no one really notices if you make a big change.”
- Jenna Wortham, For Some Internet Start-Ups, a Failure Is Just the Beginning - NYTimes.com
The use of the term ‘pivot’ in startupland is the corollary to the now commonplace notion that you may have to fail in order to learn a life lesson. While this has become conventional wisdom, startup founders are reluctant to admit their baby is ugly, or that massive success is not going to come with the next release. The adoption of pivoting is a great metaphorical headshift, and it’s one great example of ambient innovation: the startup scene has adopted, applied, and spread the concept of pivoting, and that has had major impacts on founders willingness to junk weak ideas.
(via underpaidgenius)
@joshsternberg: RT @hueypriest: “Hollywood’s right to make bad business decisions stops at the point where it threatens our freedom of speech” @evanatwired
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
