- Cash Cow Disease — quite harsh on Google and Microsoft for “ingesting not investing” in promising startups, then disconnecting them from market signals. Like pixie dust, potential future advertising revenues can be sprinkled on any revenue-negative scheme to make it look brilliant. (via Dan Martell)
- Your Apps Are Watching You (Wall Street Journal) — the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.’s Android operating system [...] Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies. [...] Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a “supercookie,” [...] on iPhones, this number is the “UDID,” or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can’t be blocked or deleted. “The great thing about mobile is you can’t clear a UDID like you can a cookie,” says Meghan O’Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. “That’s how we track everything.”
- On Undo’s Undue Importance (Paul Kedrosky) — The mainstream has money and risks, and so it cares immensely. It wants products and services where big failures aren’t catastrophic, and where small failures, the sorts of thing that “undo” fixes, can be rolled back. Undo matters, in other words, because its appearance almost always signals that a market has gone from fringe to mainstream, with profits set to follow. (via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter)
- libimobiledevice — open source library that talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch®, iPad® and Apple TV® devices without jailbreaking or proprietary libraries.
ENTRIES TAGGED "Innovation"
The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture
Are IT decisions building the business or hurting it?
While I believe we recognize the limiting qualities of IT decisions, I'd suggest we've insufficiently studied the degree to which those decisions in aggregate can have a large influence on organizational culture.
Four short links: 21 December 2010
Big Companyitis, Spyware Apps, Maturing Cloud, and Mobile Sync
Four short links: 22 November 2010
Syntax Highlighting, Forkability, Product Invention, Science Animations
- Snippet — JQuery syntax highlighter built on Syntax Highlighting in JavaScript. Snippet is MIT-licensed, SJHS is GPLv3.
- Fear of Forking — (Brian Aker) GitHub has begun to feel like the Sourceforge of the distributed revision control world. It feels like it is littered with half started, never completed, or just never merged trees. If you can easily takes changes from the main tree, the incentive to have your tree merged back into the canonical tree is low.
- Product Invention Workshops (BERG London) — Matt Webb explains what they do with customers. Output takes the form, generally, of these microbriefs. A microbrief is how we encapsulate recommendations: it’s a sketch and short description of a new product or effort that will easily test out some hypothesis or concept arrived at in the workshop. It’s sketched enough that people outside the workshop can understand it. And it’s a hook to communicate the more abstract principles which have emerged in the days. Their process isn’t their secret weapon, it’s their creativity, empathy, and communication skills that make them so valuable.
- OneMicron — Janet Isawa’s beautiful animations of biological science. (via BoingBoing who linked to this NYTimes piece)
Can predictability and IT innovation coexist?
IT strategies that can reconcile process and innovation often have positive and measurable results.
Predictability and innovation: It's the combination every IT leader needs to consider. Organizations that can reconcile these agendas have positive and measurable results, while those that can't often see lower levels of innovation.
Four short links: 5 October 2010
Better Mouse Trap, Node.js Tutorial, Eternal Computing Truths, and Tax Receipts Exposed
- Nooski Mouse Trap — I have one, it is fantastic. This man built a better mouse trap. Now please beat a path to his door.
- Introduction to Node.js (video) — Two weeks ago, Yahoo! hosted a BayJax meetup dedicated to NodeJS (since the meetup coincided with Cinco de Mayo, we named it ‘Cinco de Node’). Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS, gave a talk on the project and was very kind to let us record his presentation for YUI Theater. (via anselm on Twitter)
- Living With a Computer (Atlantic Monthly) — a 1979 blast from the past about what it was like to get your first computer. So much of this article remains as true today as it was then: upgrade fever, impatience, more dependencies, etc. Yet another hazard is that recommending the right computer is a little like recommending the “right”‘ religion. People tend to like the system they’ve ended up with. The most important point about computers, more so than about religions, is that the difference between a good one and a bad one is tiny compared with the difference between having one and not. (via pomeranian99 on Twitter)
- Why You Can’t Have a Receipt for Your Taxes (Clay Johnson) — In the end, this is because our dollars are not packets.
Be innovative, but don't use that word
Author Scott Berkun revisits the "Myths of Innovation" three years later.
Scott Berkun challenged popular assumptions about innovation and greatness three years ago with "The Myths of Innovation." Now, as an updated paperback edition is published, Berkun revisits the book and its themes.
Four short links: 17 August 2010
Stemming Demo, Mapping Service, Value of Data, and The Magic of the Valley
- Demo of Stemming Algorithms — type in text and see what it looks like when stemmed with different algorithms provided by NLTK. (via zelandiya on Twitter)
- Crowdmap — hosted Ushahidi. (via dvansickle on Twitter)
- Opinions vs Data — talks about the usability of a new gmail UI element, but notable for this quote from Jakob Nielsen: In my two examples, the probability of making the right design decision was vastly improved when given the tiniest amount of empirical data. (via mcannonbrookes on Twitter)
- The Next Silicon Valley — long and detailed list of the many forces contributing to Silicon Valley’s success as tech hub, arguing that the valley’s position is path-dependent and can simply be grown ab initio in some aspiring nation’s co-prosperity zone of policy whim. (via imran and timoreilly on Twitter)
Opening the doors of government to innovation
When I organize a conference, I don’t just reach out to interesting speakers. I try to find people who can help to tell a story about what’s important and where the future is going. We’ve been posting speakers for the second annual Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC Sept 7-8, but I realized that I haven’t told the story in one place. I thought I’d try to do that here.
Why software startups decide to patent … or not
Berkeley Patent Survey finds first-mover advantage trumps patents for some.
Researchers Pamela Samuelson and Stuart J. H. Graham discuss key results from the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey, including how software startups perceive, use and are affected by the patent system. Of particular note, startups find that first-mover advantage and complementary assets are more important than patents.
Beware the march of the IP trolls at the House Committee on Small Business
What new massacre of technological and cultural innovators is being planned behind closed doors?
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