I get a bang out of being a top contributor on Tumblr’s Tech thread, as a lowly, lowly soloist in the midst of The Atlantic, The Verge, Fast Company, CNet, and IBM’s Smarter Planet.
Curation is increasing in relevance. I think I need to start a regular salon on curation in NYC. Any interest?
If a faster processor, more RAM, a double-the-resolution retina display, a better camera, and maybe even LTE networking make for a “modest” update, then what would it take for the iPad 3 to be deemed an immodest update? A fusion energy source? Teleportation? A camera that sees into the future?
The use of data network-based text messaging allows users to avoid text messaging fees, and it is costing telcos a lot of money:
Alan Clendenning via AP
The London-based Ovum research firm estimates telecommunications companies lost nearly $14 billion last year in text-messaging revenue as consumers migrated to applications allowing them to send messages over cell phone data networks.
Ovum said the companies still took in an estimated $153 billion, but that was down 9 percent from a year earlier.
And where’s the bottom?
Stats are astonishing, and I’ve been informed by @nik (Nick Halstead) that Twitter is now moving 1B messages every three days.
(via Every 60 Seconds 175,000 Tweets Are Sent [INFOGRAPHIC] | Twitter Tips And Updates From Buffer)
Tech coverage these days tends to be fluffy, if not outright cheerleader-y, and Betabeat doesn’t work that way. When we started, I had a tech entrepreneur complain to me that because Betabeat wasn’t afraid to be negative that it “wasn’t being supportive of the industry.” I told him that Betabeat didn’t exist to support the industry; it existed to cover it. But it says something about the state of tech coverage generally that his expectation was we only write things that would benefit our subjects. Because much of the industry isn’t accustomed to being written about in terms that are anything less than glowing (and by glowing, i mean practically radioactive), some people don’t even know how to interact normally with journalists.
- Elizabeth Spiers, Hiring! Betabeat, social reporters, commercial mortgages via spiersblr
I have to agree with Spiers, the editor of the New York Observer and BetaBeat: there is a decided tendency in the tech world to pull punches, or to never punch at all. Just consider the lovefest over the Facebook IPO.
Tumblr launches ‘highlighted posts’.
from Tumblr Staff Blog:
Introducing: Highlighted Posts
Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo.
Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!
MG Siegel thinks its a good idea. I guess I am ambivalent, and I will have to see what strange interactions highlighted posts might have with other Tumblr features, like Explore and reblogging.
Note that I don’t seem to have access to this new feature yet, or I would have highlighted this post.
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…
Photography’s renaissance rests on a few unbeatable advantages. Compared to other kinds of content—songs and movies—photos are, technically and legally, much easier to share and mash up. If you come up with a great, unexpected new site centered on TV shows, you need to get huge servers and pay for expensive bandwidth and licensing deals. If you’ve got a fantastic new take on photos, often all you need is an app. That app lives on a smartphone, which is the world’s most popular point-and-shoot camera. For the first time, cameras are connected to the Internet, they know who your friends are, they know where you are, and they can be constantly updated with new powers. The camera is powerful (Apple’s iPhone 4S is 8 megapixels) and intelligent, and the pictures keep getting more interesting.
Why photography is every tech product’s most valuable feature.
Apparently, Siri use is starting to annoy people:
Nick Wingfield, Virtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
[…]
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
This is just the normal backlash against new technology. It will dissipate in the next few years. As my fried, Jamais Cascio says, ‘technology is everything that was invented after you turned fourteen.’
The lack of B-1 visa for trained engineers is causing some fairly strange ideas:
Richard Florida, A Floating Silicon Valley for Techies Without Green Cards
America’s political leadership has turned immigration reform into a political football and appears incapable of achieving solid progress on this increasingly vital issue. The situation has gotten so dire that private groups are taking the matter into their own hands.
Blueseed, a Silicon Valley start-up, is trying to do an end run around the broken immigration systems by dreaming up a “floating startup incubator.” It would circumvent immigration laws the same way that gaming businesses once avoided gambling restrictions, by parking their clients on a ship in international waters.
Ars Technica reports that founder Max Marty and his team are “hard at work making their vision of a floating, year-round hack-a-thon a reality.” He writes:
Within the next year, they’re hoping to raise a venture capital round large enough to lease or buy a ship with space for around a thousand passengers. If Blueseed’s audacious hack of the immigration system is successful, it will not only open up Silicon Valley to a broader range of entrepreneurs, it will also shine a spotlight on the barriers American law places in the way of immigrants seeking to start businesses in the United States.
Key to Blueseed’s plan is the B-1 Business Visa, which allows its holders to travel to the U.S. for business meetings, conferences, and seminars. Clients would live and work aboard the ship and take ferries to shore to meet with potential investors.
Immigration lawyer Greg Siskind told Ars Technica that Marty’s plan isn’t all blue sky, adding that “the real problem is that such a project is even necessary.”
Page 1 of 5
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
Only in my wildest dreams would I actually own one of these beauties. At a astonishing $3650, this...
Prototyping is like thinking with your hands.
Manuel Großmann and Martin Jordan,...
Expand Unconsumption’s capacity to serve as a resource for sharing stories and ideas about creative reuse and mindful consumption.
![Stats are astonishing, and I’ve been informed by @nik (Nick Halstead) that Twitter is now moving 1B messages every three days.
(via Every 60 Seconds 175,000 Tweets Are Sent [INFOGRAPHIC] | Twitter Tips And Updates From Buffer)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m03o0wtpdL1qcz5rmo1_500.jpg)
