December 2009
45 posts
“Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or...”
– Steve Jobs
“When I meet entrepreneurs with stealth mode startups I always ask why they are...”
– Stealth mode, schmealth mode - The Equity Kicker (via rafer)
Wikipedia: Guess 2/3 of the average →
Fun and games with game theory.
"Biotech bonanza lurks in healthcare reform bills" →
“A proposal by Rep. Anna Eshoo would give developers of innovative biomedical drugs 12 years of statutory protection from generic competition, significantly extending their patent rights”.
Get Cory Doctorow on the phone!
“Apparently, a computer is now not a computer, it’s an opportunity to...”
– Seth Godin
Lazy Journalism Bingo
Every time the BBC’s Nick Robinson mentions X Factor / Simon Cowell in a report on the 2010 election debates, take a sip of whatever you’re drinking and sob quietly to yourself about the dumbing down of televised news.
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“Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly…but working for a...”
– Paul Graham (founder, YCombinator) (via amandapey & mikehudack)
I wouldn’t say this is necessarily my experience of startup life, but interesting comparison/sentiment.
“Outrage at Grazia magazine after an intern who was sent out regularly to buy...”
– Media Monkey (The Guardian)
Funny. But this sort of behaviour kind of defeats the object of kissing-up and careerism in internships though, no?
The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen →
Time management FTW.
“It is time for politicians to take seriously the emergence of a sector that...”
– The Guardian on virtual goods
Good article but even I, as someone with a vested interest in this sector, wouldn’t suggest Gordon Brown looks to Farmville to save our economy.
“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self....”
– Marcel Proust (via tmblg)
Scrubs
Carla: Are you familiar with the term 'delusions of grandeur'?
Janitor: I believe I coined the term
“Placid Casual retains an amateur status and an A&R policy of blatant...”
– Website of the Cardiff-based record label set up by members of Super Furry Animals
Forget Christmas cards, I'm sending out Little...
Friend me on Facebook if you want one…no iPhone required
:-)
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/12/14/send-virtual-3d-gifts-with-little-world-gifts/
Detroit's Unemployment Rate Is Nearly 50% →
(via soupsoup)
When my indicators of how bad Liverpool’s been hit by the recession are the length of the queue in Pret a Manger and the number of kids carrying Build-A-Bear Workshop bags, stories like this make you realise that “downturn” is all relative.
“The current leader will always try to control growth, and thus slit its own...”
– Gates’ Law
Coined by Dave Winer in reference to the Apple and Google of today and the Microsoft of the nineties.
“I found that email was appalling; there were so many ‘broken trust’ implications...”
– JP Rangaswami (BT) in a new book on how social tools are changing the way we work.
Announcing bit.ly Pro →
bitly:
As part of our initial beta program, we’re making custom URLs available to a limited number of large and medium-sized Web publishers and bloggers, including AOL, Associated Content, Bing, Clicker, The Daily Telegraph, foursquare, GDGT, Hot Potato, The Huffington Post, IGN, kickstarter, Meebo, MSN, /Message (Stowe Boyd), The New York Times, OMGPOP, oneforty.com, The Onion,...
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I've started playing with Posterous for MP3... →
Never quite been able to see the fuss over Posterous compared to Tumblr, but people keep going on about it, so I’m taking another look.
Recent posts include Neil Young, Manic Street Preachers, DJ Yoda, Four Tet, Half Man Half Biscuit and Big Black (covering Kraftwerk).
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I wrote briefly about Formspring back in August. →
I was surprised at how popular it is among teens. It seems to have come to a lot of people’s awareness on Tumblr over the past few days, so I thought it’d be worth linking to the couple of paragraphs I scrawled.
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What Matters Now: get the free ebook →
(via azspot)
Seth Godin is always ace…looking forward to reading this in GoodReader.
Macworld UK on Little World Gifts - in the App... →
Very excited.
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bryc3:
RT @bijan: @arrington it would be cool if there was an iphone crunchbase app.
I think this would only ever be used by VCs. Who needs startup/funding stats so quickly that they can’t use the (actually very good) website from their mobile device?
There’s a worrying trend of people thinking that any useful website they like needs a native mobile version. Sometimes websites are...
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The most popular Tumblr blogs
I was thinking about this earlier. No-one pointed me to a list, and I couldn’t find an existing one, so I figured out a very vague, possibly totally inaccurate one out using Compete. I basically listed the subdomains that receive most visitors, which may mean that sites with custom domains have been omitted (not sure how that works technically but I can think of some key Tumblr blogs...
“For a company, picking the wrong trends to follow can make life difficult or...”
– “Which key technology should you adopt over the next five years?” in The Guardian
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Lazyweb: is there a list of the most popular...
(Probably where “most popular” = “highest trafficked”).
Was just thinking this would be interesting (and probably surprising) to peruse. There’s no such global list in Tumblr’s exisiting tag-based directory, and while I could probably figure out a vague chartby looking at subdomains of Tumblr.com using Google/Compete, it might be a bit crude. And require...
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“Patent filings fell in 2009 for the first time in 13 years.”
– Recession’s latest victim: U.S. innovation (via davemorin)
Interesting fact, but I’m dubious of suggesting that patents immediately constitute innovation in any economic sense. They’re often the result of the work of academics - work that isn’t necessarily commercialised. But...
“So let’s talk traffic. We’ve got people who love this goddamn phone so much that...”
– The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T
Fake Steve Jobs on fire with this post.
(via bijan)
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“I wouldn’t pay a dime to play Bejeweled 2 online. But paying $2.99 to play it on...”
– Webomatica
“We live in a time of pseudo news.”
– Dave Winer
BBC: drinking coffee 'will not sober you up' when... →
“People who have consumed both alcohol and caffeine may feel awake and competent enough to handle potentially-harmful situations”.
I’m sure there’s probably some Bad Science, “this research is nonsense” critique to be made here, but my main thought was that they’ve missed the point by focusing on coffee. Surely this indicates that highly-caffeinated...
Can you recommend me some desktop wallpaper?
I’ve got this crazy idea of some sort of background that will help me learn stuff by passively gazing at it every time I load up my Macbook - flags of the world or something. Any ideas?
Leaving Post It notes around the house with things like “salle de bains = bathroom” on them worked wonders when I was learning French, so I’m trying to apply the same principle to other...
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“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just...”
– Warren Buffett, on the speed of economic recovery (via simloovoo)
I’m sure a quant with a spreadsheet would find a way…
“Unfortunately, bringing democracy to the ratings system has, in many ways, been...”
– “How to get a new iPhone app noticed” in The Guardian
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very...”
– Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winning Danish physicist (via gbattle)
“It’s sad that Apple lets its need for accessories revenue cheapen the user...”
– UX Hero on “shipping broken” - in this case, shipping with poor quality earbuds.
“Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have...”
– Top Digital Trends For 2010
“Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he...”
– Aza Raskin’s bio
Sometimes I wish I was this much of an overachiever. (But is he happy?!)
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