May 2013
10 posts
Project Snow Fall →
parislemon:
Om Malik arguing that the New York Times should fight the scrappy news upstarts not by playing their game, but by rising above:
Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is...
Our Commitment to Culture and Clients | Blog @... →
He covered my spreadsheet with his hand…… Then he explained to me the only criterion that mattered for picking a job was — Fast Growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies slow down or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to do them. Politics and stagnation set in and everyone falters.
Mailbox’s Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should... →
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart,...
Noah on Social →
In the end they all add up to a need to systematize their approach for a new world where content abounds and the old 22-week production cycles no longer make sense. While most of these shifts are focused on message the medium delivers to consumers, there is also one big message that the platforms deliver to brands: To compete in a social world they need to think and build marketing products that...
“I remember Jim saying once — and partly I think it relates to some of his...”
– Steve Case on Risk-Taking, or Lack Thereof, in Business - NYTimes.com
How to choose the right UX metrics for your... →
Design Staff — The product design sprint: a... →
Video is hot.
rickwebb's tumblrmajig: RIP, Photoshop Pirating →
rickwebb:
I have a confession: when I was a child, I pirated software. I began pirating Photoshop from version 2.0, 1991 or so, on. I would use those bit-by-bit binary disk duplicating apps, with two 3.5” floppy drives attached to a Mac. I never read a manual. I taught myself Photoshop by patiently going…
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design →
Just revisiting this article, which is one of the best articulations of a “vision” out there.
In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer’s early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display.
Alan saw those 256 glowing orange...
April 2013
15 posts
The Perfect Tee →
A better product page. For sure.
Cover Story: Savages | Features | Pitchfork →
Oh man. The design for this is so hot.
How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the... →
“It is the neocortex, and people who fill up too much of their neocortex with concern about the approval of their peers are probably not going be the next Einstein or Steve Jobs.”
Spaceship →
This structure may seem obvious to those working in small companies, but it’s completely unheard of in large companies. The nearest comparison to this structure is a military organization. There you have Infantry, Armor, Aviation etc. These groups are assigned (in a combined fashion) to a particular effort or battle and then go back to the barracks when done.
How the ‘Father of Advertising’ Wrote and Designed... →
“I asked an indifferent copywriter what books he read on advertising. He told me none, relying on intuition. The willful refusal to learn the rudiments of the [advertising] craft is all too common. I cannot think of any profession which gets by on such a small corpus of knowledge.”
/purpose →
This is an amazing tool for strategy.
Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success →
Keith B. Nowak: Investment Advice From My 16 Year... →
keithbnowak:
For me, being online is using a browser or apps to access information on the internet. My cousin and her friends don’t think like this. It’s not there they are always online and don’t consider a state of offline. It’s that they see no need to go “online”. To them online is a browser on a computer. It’s what they use to do research for school projects. There is no other use for being...
Second Story Interactive Studios →
This company seems baller.
Second Story is an innovation center pioneering new interactive experiences. We push the boundaries of storytelling for brands and institutions across
digital channels—web, mobile, and installations—empowering audiences to connect and share.
Scaling Agile @ Spotify →
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design →
This is beautiful:
My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.
This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful...
The Silent Partner →
Product managers are sometimes said to oversee discrete components of a company, like feudal lords in a kingdom. But for many P.M.s, Goldman’s assessment is closer to reality. “Everybody says the project manager is the C.E.O. of their project, and I think that’s total bullshit,” says Josh Elman, a former manager at Facebook and Twitter, the latter under Goldman. “The...
Net wisdom - FT.com →
Businessmen and politicians make the worst bloggers because they do not like to tell what they know, and telling what you know is the essence of blogging well. They also fear to be wrong; and, as Felix Salmon, Reuters’ finance blogger, insists and sometimes demonstrates: “If you are never wrong, you are never interesting”.
EA and the Future | BizPunk | Mitch Lasky is a... →
March 2013
11 posts
Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe... →
The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate, little more than discourse abbreviated into tiny little chunks; Facebook was a horrible way to experience human relationships, commodifying them into a list of friends whom one pokes. The Arab Spring changed the story somewhat. (BuzzFeed is another example—let...
Three eras of currency
cdixon:
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
A loose rant on motivation and evaluation by Jason... →
Deciding What to Make
The most common problem facing clients: what do we make?
Large companies are not new to making digital things. IT organizations and feature pipelines have existed for decades. “What to make” involved intensive planning, vision through surveys, investment prioritization, and business cases.
This worked when the thing to make was faster, better, easier than the competition. A product...
GroupMe Blog: How we built the prototype for Split... →
groupme:
Hi I’m Neil, a Ruby engineer at GroupMe, and this is a guest post.
One weekend last October my friends Cam and Joey and I hacked together an app for collecting money from a group. We started Friday at 6:30pm and by 9pm Sunday night, we processed our first end to end transaction via the app and website
Introduction: Making Things
This is why it’s hard for large brands (i.e., end-ups, rather start-ups) to make digital things.
New problems
The nature of what brands make has changed.
For years, making company websites or marketing campaign microsites was easy for brands, a straightforward task for their agency or IT department.
But brands want to start building the same sorts of things as startups: entirely new...
“PCs are going to be like trucks” - Chris Dixon →
Borrowing from the (Apple) notion that technology continues to fragment industries.
Open, Shut, and Pwned →
parislemon:
John Gruber absolutely eviscerates this article by Tim Wu of The New Yorker.
Wu made the all-too-common mistake of reaching a conclusion first and then trying to contort facts to make his thesis work. It does not. In any way. The “open” vs. “closed” nonsense Wu is trying to sell falls almost immediately with the very existence of Linux and well, even the history of Apple itself —...
Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success |... →
From age 30 to 36, he’s living in an apartment in White Plains, NY trying to get something — anything — going, while his wife Jane supports the family of four (they also had two young children) on her modest salary as a microbiologist. He spends every day at home, working on scripts, raising the kids, doing the cooking. That’s a six-year span — six years! — filled with dashed hopes and...
February 2013
11 posts
How to make things
There are so many questions facing a strategist when it comes to making things. How do you pick your designers and developers? Should they be from the same shop? Should you do freelancers? How far should you go on UX before making the hand-off to an expert?
The biggest question for me, right now: how do you manage a feature roadmap?
Two articles recently came on my radar: (1) a feature addition...
“PCs are going to be like trucks" →
Steve Jobs in 2010:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.
PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people…
When I am going to write that 35-page analyst...
The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated... →
Why I don't wireframe much : Cennydd Bowles →
“When are you going to start your own company?” —... →
“The need for relevance will drive consumer demand and shape advertising supply....”
– Jacques Bughin - Advertising in 2020: The demand for marketing on-demand
What technique does the military use to make sure... →
The Combat Maneuver Training Center, the unit in charge of military simulations, recommends thatofficers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions:
If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________.
The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.
Collaborative Filtering at Spotify →
The “No Update” Update | Eric Friedman →
The Making of Arduino - IEEE Spectrum →
January 2013
5 posts
Knack is the easy web app builder that enables... →
Sara Donaldson Stylebook Girl Next Door |... →
Gorgeous.
