Stowe Boyd

A VC: Coworking Spaces

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:55:00 -0400

If you are launching a startup or have one that is just one or two people, you should really try to get into a coworking space. It can be more cost effective, but that is not the best reason to do it. You’ll get knowledge sharing, energy, and a lof of camraderie. And you can’t put a price on those things when you are doing a startup.

Fred is dead on with this.

via ProphecyBoy Last week we took Socialbomb to O’Reilly’s...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:34:33 -0400

via ProphecyBoy Last week we took Socialbomb to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. We held a BoF session on getting social games away from the keyboard, and ran a full-scale, 30-person game of Socialbomb with the latest rev of the hardware at the Emerging Arts Fest.
We got a response better than any we could have expected, met some wonderful people whose work and opinion we greatly respect, and had a great time seeing all of the awesome things that are going on. I’ll post more on ETech someday when I’m feeling less consumed by thesis, but for now, here’s a beautiful shot which Mike took of the new devices. I feel very proud and hugely relieved. Back to game designing!

And here’s a video of our innocent little children behaving like the proto-Cylons that they are: once they see each other and start sending data, their send/receive patterns fall into step, making their transfer LEDs blink simultaneously. We didn’t program this behavior at all, and everyone (including us) finds it vaguely threatening. Emergence at work!

Yes, I feel vaguely threatened, and I don’t know what they do.

The Original Loic LeMeur Puppet - eBay (item 270629141291 end time Sep-04-10 21:23:48 PDT)

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:26:00 -0400

The Original Loic LeMeur Puppet - eBay (item 270629141291 end time Sep-04-10 21:23:48 PDT):

Loren Feldman is tired of puppetry, and is auctioning off the Loic LeMeur puppet on eBay. currently going for $55. That’s a fair price, I think.

"The company [Microsoft] could spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing costs and payments..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:21:51 -0400

“

The company [Microsoft] could spend a half-billion dollars or more in marketing costs and payments to developers and handset manufacturers to subsidize the expense of building phones and apps, so that the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem is well-seeded at launch.

Jonathan Goldberg, a telecommunications analyst at Deutsche Bank, estimates that Microsoft will spend $400 million on marketing alone for the Windows Phone 7 launch. That doesn’t include the millions it has already committed to pay for “non-recurring engineering” costs that help offset development costs for handset manufacturers.

“This is make-or-break for them. They need to do whatever it takes to stay in the game,” says Goldberg. “It’s still wide open. They don’t have to take share from Android or Apple, so long as they can attract enough consumers switching from feature phones.”

On a visit earlier this month to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Goldberg says company executives told him that Microsoft, along with its carrier and manufacturing partners, would likely spend “billions” of dollars in the first year for marketing and development. Another source familiar with Microsoft’s manufacturer and carrier agreements says the company will spend $1 billion on the launch, half on marketing and half on other development costs.

”

- Microsoft To Pay More Than Half A Billion Dollars To Jump-Start Windows Phone 7 - Kim-Mai Cutler

And if the Windows 7 launch does not lead to a significant wedge into the market, will Microsoft drop phones? Will the board finally ax Ballmer?

"Two months after Rupert Murdoch’s decision to erect a subscription paywall around the websites..."

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:58:46 -0400

“

Two months after Rupert Murdoch’s decision to erect a subscription paywall around the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest of British media. There are many who still wish the 79-year-old mogul well, hopeful that he is at the vanguard of a cultural shift that will save newspapers. Yet elsewhere there is dismay among analysts, advertisers, publicists and even some reporters on the papers.

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”

Others have their concerns. Adrian Drury, a media analyst at Ovum who has studied the impact of paywalls, says. “Fundamentally, at a brand-value level, you are killing the idea of times.co.uk as a channel choice for news online. That is something that is very difficult to recover.” There is also a widespread lack of enthusiasm for the new look Times website. “The most disappointing thing for me is that there doesn’t seem to have been any strategy to create unique, compelling content that would differentiate the online product,” says Paul Bradshaw, a specialist in new media journalism.

“I think it’s ‘business as usual’ – which probably betrays that this is really about protecting the print product rather than establishing a genuine business around online content.”

Rupert Murdoch’s biographer, Michael Wolff, who runs the news aggregation site Newser, is deeply unimpressed by The Times’ online offering: “It has the look of 2004 about it.” He is unconvinced that the paywall, or Rupert Murdoch’s recently expressed enthusiasm for the iPad, are signals of cultural change within the News Corporation empire. “Knowing News Corp and News International as well as I do, I’m sure that the investment they have made in technology has been minimal. There just is not a culture, a business discipline or philosophical interest in truly embracing technology.”

”

- Has Rupert Murdoch’s paywall gamble paid off? - Ian Burrell

The short answer is: No.

iTunes Ping: Social Music

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:26:00 -0400

Apple has rolled out the long-rumored and much awaited social iTunes in the form of Ping.

Ping is a streaming, social network-based suite of capabilities that has been integrated across the world of iTunes, in a way that is reminiscent of early versions of Last.fm, and using the now standard open follower model popularized by Twitter.

To use the service, an iTunes 10 user has to click on the new Ping label in the left sidebar of iTunes, in the STORE area. Then there is some setup, basically geared toward what should be presented to followers and privacy controls on followers:

Once this is set up the user has a minimal profile with location, bio, name provided by the user and some musical genre categorization offered by by iTunes, along with streams of actions taken by the user, like buying music, liking albums, and purchasing tickets for concerts:

(I did include an avatar, but Apple is still ‘processing’ it. I wonder if humans are eyeballing it for nudity or something.)

I followed a few celebrities, like Dave Matthews, and I sent out a call on Twitter, and got a few followers and following set up, for experimental purposes. Now when I look at ‘recent activity’ there are actually posts and activities from inbound stream (=those I follow).

(mostly everybody is following, and not doing much else yet.)

The integration of concert information associated with artists is very cool, and suggests how Apple expects social commerce to be a main source of revenue:

The instrumentation for Ping is spread throughout the store, so anytime you are looking at music for sale you will be able to ‘like’ it, rate it, buy it (d’uh) or write a post (stream based) or review (album based).

In the future, all online commerce will be socialized.

I find the fact that reviews and posts aren’t the same thing sort of strange. But we’ll have to see what gives after some more rooting around.

Lastly, everything I am saying about music could be extended to the other sorts of media that iTunes markets: TV shows, movies, books, whatever. But it hasn’t been at this point.

I have only fooled with Ping for an hour or so, so my empirical analysis will have to be delayed for a few days, at least. However, the largest glaring gap to me right now is the fact that my own music — the stuff I have on my hard drive — isn’t part of the Ping experience. If I want to ‘like’ or post about something I am playing on my local iTunes instance I would have to open the store, find the song or album there, and then make my gesture. This is just a pain, but could conceivably be remedied when Apple allows me to upload my music to that enormous cloud server park they are building. Then all my music will be indexed, cross tabulated, and sharable.

Recall that a few weeks ago a new release of iDisk that included the tantalizing capability to stream audio from the cloud to my iPhone or MacBook (see Apple Takes A Baby Step Toward iTunes In The Cloud). There is no doubt in my mind that we are headed in that direction.

Imagine a future release of Ping where I could share playable playlists, or live stream a Stowe Boyd radio station, or I could listen to a new track recommended by a friend and comment on that streaming recommendation. Or imagine streaming movies in sync with my son Keenan, with Facetime heckling superimposed so it is like a living room experience, although he is in his bedroom at college.

Apple is on the threshold of something fundamentally transformative. It turns out that some commentators agree:

Om Malik, Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

I agree with Om, and obviously Amazon will have to rethink its ‘enormous catalog’ model for commerce, and scramble to make it all social. And Apple and its competitors will have to provide hooks so that I can take my Ping stream and embed it in my blog, direct it to Twitter, and so forth.

I have been saying for years that ‘in the future, all online commerce will be socialized’, and Apple is showing how this is going to be realized.

Apple apparently considered integration with Facebook, but couldn’t come to terms, according to Kara Swisher. Strategically, Facebook is likely to become a direct competitor with Apple, so Jobs is playing go with Zuckerberg, and has won this game.

Amazon might make the devil’s bargain with Facebook to counter Jobs, but that’s a matchup that might just not do much. We’ll have to see if Bezos is impatient.

But there are many doubters out there too:

Sam Diaz, Ping: Apple should leave social to Facebook, Twitter

Ping is an interesting idea and music is something that we have been sharing with friends for the longest time. It strikes me as interesting that Apple has come up with a way to allow people to “share” their music tastes but not the music itself - which I never would have expected Apple or the record labels to do. Is this one way to make “sharing” music OK?

Apple is good at what it does - hardware, software, design and, of course, marketing. But social networking? Even if it is tied to music, I just can’t see widespread adoption of Ping - even if it’s forced on us through iTunes.

Man, Diaz will regret this a year or so from now. Maybe he missed the experiment with streaming via iDisk? Did he miss the launch of the new Apple TV? Can’t he imagine a Flipboard channel based on what’s happening in your iTunes network, with embedded videos, photos, music samples?

Another oddball take on Ping:

Chris Matyszczyk, How Apple’s Ping dings Twitter, Facebook

Ping picks at the nice parts of Facebook and Twitter—friending and following—and offers these benefits to its users without the generalists’ pains.

Unlike Twitter, for example, these are all real people. Unlike Facebook, you can just wander around and see who or what you like without having to become someone’s friend and without having to like anything at all.

This is real people with a real enthusiasm meeting in a bar and talking about a subject they love, rather than about a subject they often hate—themselves. There’s very nice music playing in the background, too.

How many truly passionate, fundamental enthusiasms do large numbers of people share? Movies and sports, probably. Books and food, perhaps. (I wonder if there really are all that many.) Right now, these are often all being talked about on Facebook, each fighting with another for sufficient attention across very mixed groups.

It might not happen that hundreds of niche social networks will suddenly become enormously successful as people decide to fragment themselves across their various enthusiasms. But there are a few core subjects that arouse passion, conversation and the spending of money. Music is one. Apple is another.

Why do the passions have to be shared by large groups of people? Isn’t it sufficient that there are many small groups of people sharing passions? Oh, and don’t leave out TV, which is an enormous passion, as are sports. And yes, people will tolerate — or even seek out — fracturing their social being across multiple services: the post-modern identity is a network of identities, a multiphrenic sense of self.

Are these tech mavens completely missing where this is headed?

Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network (readwriteweb.com)
Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce (gigaom.com)
iTunes 10 Is All About Ping, Apple’s Social Network for Music [Ping] (gizmodo.com)
10+ random thoughts on Ping and iTunes (ouriel.typepad.com)
Will iTunes’ Ping Be a Success? (mindjumpers.com)
Ping Is the Last Nail in the Coffin for MySpace (mashable.com)

Another Facebooking: June Siple Is The Most Recent To Be Dooced

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:29:00 -0400

Yet another person is fired for expressing unpopular or impolitic opinions: a high school teacher who was not looking forward to coming back to work in the fall, and said so on hre facebook page.

H.S. Teacher Loses Job Over Facebook Posting

On her Facebook page, (June) Siple called the residents of Cohasset “arrogant and snobby,” and said that she is “so not looking forward to another year at Cohasset schools.”

As the high school supervisor for math and science, Siple was making more than $92,000 a year.”

I think that’s pretty ungrateful, taking that much of the town budget going into the schools, filling up the position, teaching kids when her heart wasn’t in to it,” said resident Sam Green.

In a telephone interview, Siple said she is not apologizing for her comments, but that she is sorry that they went public. She said she was referring to the political situation in the school, which she called “very stressful,” and she said she thought she was only blowing off steam with friends in private.

But back in February, when Siple got sick, she wrote on her page, “Now I remember why I stopped teaching kids. They are all germ bags.”

Siple said her Facebook friends knew it was a joke.

People are so two-faced. Does everyone who is damning Siple believe that they themselves have never made a disparaging remark about work, their customers, or boss? No, obviously not. So the only issue is whether it is made in a private or public forum: not the actual feeling involved.

Once again, people are mistaking morality with etiquette, putting appearances before realities.

Where is it written that you can’t publicly complain about your job? Do we have to pretend that everything is sunshine and flowers?

Radical transparency does not mean that people are invited to share the good things going on in some business or wing of government: it means that we should be free to see into organizations and understand what is truly going on in them.

Tax payers have a right to know what is really going on the schools they pay to support, but that shouldn’t mean that everyone should be mumbling bland platitudes. If a senior teacher like Siple is not looking forward to work the reaction should not be to kill her, but instead to open up what is going on in the school and the relations between kids, teachers, administrators, and parents.

However in our hothouse, accusatory, and reactionary realm of social discourse, anyone like Siple — who expresses discontent with the current system — is burned at the stake, and all the folks with the torches and nooses pat each other on the back and consider themselves good citizens.

Teacher Calls Pupils ‘Germ Bags’ Stands Down (news.sky.com)
Facebook Comments Cost Teacher Her Job (abcnews.go.com)
How to Fall Flat on Your Facebook (pcworld.com)
Teacher Calls Parents ‘Snobby’ on Facebook (foxnews.com)

Disqus Analytics Will Give Us More Insight Into Our Audience - MG Siegler

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:36:00 -0400

Disqus Analytics Will Give Us More Insight Into Our Audience - MG Siegler:

There are nearly 150 million people around the world now that use Disqus on a monthly basis.

Siegler profiles Disqus’ new analytics features. I will have to take a look.

Google’s Earth - William Gibson

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:30:00 -0400

Google’s Earth - William Gibson:

Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

Gibson wonders about Google’s role in our world, and how it is a reflection of us, a tool that shapes us as we use it.

Facebook is the new AOL

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:33:03 -0400

Facebook is the new AOL:

Jason Kottke made the same statement I’ve been shouting recently, back in 2007: “Facebook is the new AOL”.

However, he did not suggest that social primitives would be built into our future operating environments. He simply stated that the Internet is richer than an app can ever be, so he definitiely had one side of my argument down way back when.

9-Bits: I Want a Stupid 7-inch iPad

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:13:04 -0400

After using the iPad as my sole device last week in Ireland, I could imagine a small iPad, too. Especially with a bluetooth keyboard, which could also be scaled down.

9-bits:

Lance Ulanoff thinks The 7-inch Apple iPad is a Stupid Idea:

Kidding aside, I have not heard one good argument for the existence of this device. What’s more worrisome to me is that some companies like Samsung appear to be carving out this space as if 7-inch tablets are the “new black.” Why are they doing this? Was there some consumer outcry for a 7-inch device that I missed?

The rumor of a smaller iPad has been floating around for the past couple days and I have to say, I’m psyched. Honestly, the first thing that came to mind when on that glorious Saturday when the iPad arrived was, “Huh, bigger than I imagined.” Why? For me, it’s all about the keyboard. In its current state, the iPad keyboard is oafish in landscape orientation. It’s simply too big to be comfortably used as a soft keyboard. Portrait mode is even worse: Stretching your thumbs to hit keys like “T” and “Y”, all while delicately cradling your iPad in a near top-heavy manor. At 7 inches, a smaller iPad would be far more comfortable to type on, in either situation. A smaller iPad would also be easier to store, easier to carry, and less intrusive in places like restaurants.

So, then, what’s to lose? I don’t want to make a career out of analyzing screen resolution, but think about this: If you upped the pixel density on a 7-inch iPad (132ppi) to that of a non-Retina iPhone (163 ppi), you get almost the exact same number of pixels. Put it this way: You could double the number of pixels on the current iPad, and still comfortably fit them in a Retina-display, 7-inch iPad. The current iPad’s battery, which constitutes the bulk of it’s weight/size, also lasts much longer than I need. With a smaller display, the loss of any battery space would go unnoticed.

Perhaps there was no consumer outcry for a 7-inch tablet, and no, being a little smaller won’t make the thing any more magical — but Apple doesn’t make products just because people ask for them. Instead, Apple tries to deliver on what you don’t know you need. In this case, a more portable, more usable device. It’s not an addition to the iPad line, it’s what the iPad was supposed to be. I can’t wait for the stupid thing.

I might move down, too, if it became available.

Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 03:19:00 -0400

Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.

The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive force on print media has been felt, and deeply internalized. Meanwhile, most of the failures of 20th century journalism remain: notably, failing to create open social discourse, and becoming entrapped in the liturgy of journalism while failing to debunk lies and expose injustice. But print media have adopted the trappings of blogging, and have co-opted much of the heat — if any — of the blogosphere.

This has been relatively quick, partly because blogging is really ‘personal publishing’ — low-cost publishing, and lines up pretty well with the one-to-many dynamics of mass publishing. Comments and backlinks are pretty weak sauce when considered in the light of ‘social media’. Blogging, in the final analysis, ten years later, isn’t particularly social. Especially contrasted with social networks and other tools.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Blogtalk was filled with talk about social networks. A representative of Facebook spoke, and was almost orgasming as he related how great all the newest features were. Facebook and Twitter’s growth rates were repeated like kabalistic incantations throughout the event, and the unstoppability of Facebook in particular — its manifest destiny as the basis of all things social on the web — was generally taken as a given.

But social networks as realized today by Facebook and others are closed worlds, silos in which vastly different user experiences are managed. I heard presentations on a variety of approaches to federated and/or open identity management schemes, which could potentially support open and/or distributed social networking models, but these are only of theoretical interest to actual users.

I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.

‘But, all my friends are on Facebook!’ That was true in 1999 about AOL, too. All my friends had AIM accounts, so it was the best place for instant messaging. Until Yahoo and MSN offered audio and then video, and blogging broke loose. And then everything changed with broadband.

And what is going to be the equivalent of broadband for sociality online? What is going to come along to destabilize the Facebook stranglehold on our ‘social graphs’? Simple: sociality has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. It’s not all the servers, the cloud computing, the data, or even the explosion of materials online: its the social dimension, and the tools we have built to explore that.

At the same time, we are witnessing an almost unprecedented era of invention around new devices, form factors, and operational premises for computing and communications. Smartphones, tablets, app stores, and the emergence of activities like geolocation, massively parallel gaming, social TV, and so on. These are leading to a deep rethinking of the operating environments we rely on, in our PCs, mobile and gaming devices, and formerly internet-deaf devices like TVs and appliances.

The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.

Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.

There will still be a place for applications to present and augment the basics of social interaction, but they will not be what Facebook is today: a huge social scene whose rules and regulations are managed by the owners of the application, for their own interests.

Clearly, The New York Times, ABC and Apple don’t want to hand the future of our social connection over to Facebook, or any other cabal of software companies. The answer is not in copying Facebook, which seems to be the goal of Google’s Me project. Inevitably, the way ahead is to take the social dimension — at least the core features that have emerged in the social web to date — down into the operating platforms. Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.

Based on common protocols, vendors of different platforms could still compete based on how they manage these new social primitives along with the other things that devices must do. But just like today’s files — which can move from Mac, to Windows, to Linux, to GameBoy — we would have the ability to network effectively; although in this case, to network socially.

It remains to be seen how quickly or smoothly this transition will be. And in the meantime the dominance of Facebook will make billions for investors. However, the fastest growing segment on Facebook is the 55+ crowd, which suggests that the young and the hipsters will start to defect to alternatives, just like they fled MySpace when the phonies and fogies came in.

Social music and social TV are the two areas that suggest the greatest pressure for a solution at a fundamental — not application, or application framework level.

Facebook’s management may be aware of this, as well. Imagine the scenario where Facebook’s valuation is so high, and the prospects seem so grand, that Facebook acquires an apparently fading Microsoft, and works to fuse Facebook into some version of Windows. Like the AOL Time-Warner merger, I bet it this would lead to smoke but no bang.

Meanwhile, the world will lurch chaotically forward. If cable and entertainment companies develop standards around social TV, and allow experimentation by entrepreneurs to develop social apps that augment TV, we will see some real interesting stuff arise, and the defection of viewers from non-social TV will slow, and reverse. Facebook will see its numbers falling as people start watching basketball, reality shows, or movies with friends online. Likewise, Apple could lead to similar experimentation around social music by exposing social APIs in a future socialized version of iTunes.

This will take years, if not decades, to roll forward. But I maintain this will happen, and that, as a result, Facebook is not the future, but just a very temporary present.

Pointers For The Blogtalk Attendees Re: My Keynote Today

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:12:00 -0400

Pointers For The Blogtalk Attendees Re: My Keynote Today:

Rather than writing up my notes from the talk this morning, I will simply point to the top posts here on my blog, many of which I think are relevant to my talk.

Pervasive Information Architecture » Manifesto

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:16:00 -0400

Pervasive Information Architecture » Manifesto:

5. Horizontal prevails over vertical In these new architectures correlation between elements becomes the predominant characteristic, at the expenses of traditional top down hierarchies. In open and everchanging architectures hierarchical models are difficult to maintain and support, as intermediaries push towards spontaneity, ephemeral or temporary structures of meaning, and constant change.

A deep and fascinating read.

Vote to bring the Sotropians to SXSW 2011

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:20:41 -0400

Vote to bring the Sotropians to SXSW 2011:

Borrowing on the idea of Extropianism, Sotropians anticipate that social networking will
change the course of human history, shifting the way humans function everyday on an
individual and social level and ultimately affecting such areas as government, business and education.

We’ve put together an amazing panel (our own Jodee Rich along with Brian Solis, Stowe
Boyd, Deanna Zandt, and Mark Pesce) to discuss the concept of openness and how
social networking will improve the human condition.

We’re fascinated by the thought of how we as individuals will be different in 30 years
as a result of social networking technology. And we hope to spark this conversation at
SXSW.

Even if you don’t think you’ll make it to Austin next spring, we’d still appreciate
you letting the SXSW organizers know you support the Sotroprians!

VOTE here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6934
(Voting ends 11:59 CDT on Friday, August 27)

"Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers."

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:32:22 -0400

“Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.”

- Fred Brooks

via Wired

"Knowledge is not democratic."

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:24:09 -0400

“Knowledge is not democratic.”

- Michele Lamont

Why Apple's iTV Will Change Everything -- Kevin Rose

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:05:15 -0400

Why Apple's iTV Will Change Everything -- Kevin Rose:

Rose makes some great points, especially about the market for TV apps once the stream has an API.

Apparently, Apple is designing an iMac Touch, which shifts from...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:27:00 -0400

Apparently, Apple is designing an iMac Touch, which shifts from OS X mode to iOS mode when you reposition the screen:

Jack Purcher, Welcome to the iMac Touch

First, Apple’s patent describes the transition process this way. When the iMac’s display is oriented upright and relatively far from you – the keyboard/mouse input mode could be selected and basically you’re operating in OS X mode.

Then to switch to a touch-based input, you’ll change the orientation of the iMac’s display so as to make touching the screen easier and more natural. For example, to enter touch input, you’ll want to pull the iMac’s screen closer to you while pushing the display screen down flat as if you were going to read a book, states the patent. In this orientation you’ll be able to select a corresponding UI which should translate to using iOS. In fact, the transition is really an automated process.

I am finding the iPad most interesting as a mobile device — reading on the couch, cooking in the kitchen, writing on an airplane — but certainly there are other aspects that make the touch UI attractive, like leafing through the pages on Flipboard.

New Numbers Reveal: Cord Cutting Is Real -- Janko Roettgers

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:22:45 -0400

New Numbers Reveal: Cord Cutting Is Real -- Janko Roettgers:

The business intelligence company reports that cable companies lost 711,000 subscribers, which represents the biggest quarterly loss in cable TV’s history. Six out of eight cable TV operators also reported their worst subscriber losses ever last quarter.

[…]

“the $100 cable bill is dead; the cable industry just doesn’t know it yet.” — Ryan Lawler