- Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap — cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and “puffiness”.
- CMU iPad Course — iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming.
- Inspiring Matter — the conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with materials research and innovation to talk about how they work cross- or trans-disciplinarily, the challenges and tools they’ve found for working collaboratively, and the ways they find inspiration in their work with materials. London, April 2-3.
- Facebook’s S-1 Filing (SEC) — the Internets are now full of insights into Facebook’s business, for example Lance Wiggs’s observation that Facebook’s daily user growth is slowing. While 6-10% growth per quarter feels like a lot when annualized, it is getting close to being a normal company. Facebook is running out of target market, and especially target market with pockets deep enough to be monetised. But I think that’s the last piece of Facebook IPO analysis that I’ll link to. Tech Giant IPOs are like Royal Weddings: the people act nice but you know it’s a seething roiling pit of hate, greed, money, and desperation that goes on a bit too long so by the end you just want to put an angry chili-covered porcupine in everyone’s anus and set them all on fire. But perhaps I’m jaded.
"ipad apps" entries
No more book app sifting: PlayTales designed its bookstore within an app
Anna Abraham on PlayTales' strategies for success.
In this TOC podcast, Anna Abraham, marketing and PR manager at PlayTales, talks about what makes PlayTales unique and describes how they've embraced the opportunities in children's ebook publishing.
Story first, interactivity second
Jos Carlyle on creating successful children's book apps.
In this TOC podcast, Persian Cat Press creative director Jos Carlyle talks about the company's new book, "The Gift," and what goes into building a successful children's book app.
Four short links: 2 February 2012
Build a Button, CMU iPad Course, Materials Conference, and Facebook IPO
Children's ebooks and apps are big business on the iPad
WingedChariot's Neal Hoskins on the state of the children's digital book market.
In this TOC podcast, Neal Hoskins, founder of WingedChariot, talks about challenges and opportunities in children's ebooks, including issues with screen sizes and making the development choice between EPUB or app. Hoskins also predicts three front runners vying for the future of this market (hint: Amazon isn't one of them).
Four short links: 26 December 2011
Text Analysis Bundle, Scala Probabilistic Modeling, Game Analytics, and Encouraging Writing
- Pattern — a BSD-licensed bundle of Python tools for data retrieval, text analysis, and data visualization. If you were going to get started with accessible data (Twitter, Google), the fundamentals of analysis (entity extraction, clustering), and some basic visualizations of graph relationships, you could do a lot worse than to start here.
- Factorie (Google Code) — Apache-licensed Scala library for a probabilistic modeling technique successfully applied to […] named entity recognition, entity resolution, relation extraction, parsing, schema matching, ontology alignment, latent-variable generative models, including latent Dirichlet allocation. The state-of-the-art big data analysis tools are increasingly open source, presumably because the value lies in their application not in their existence. This is good news for everyone with a new application.
- Playtomic — analytics as a service for gaming companies to learn what players actually do in their games. There aren’t many fields untouched by analytics.
- Write or Die — iPad app for writers where, if you don’t keep writing, it begins to delete what you wrote earlier. Good for production to deadlines; reflective editing and deep thought not included.
Keeping Safari Books on top
Andrew Savikas on how Safari Books is evolving to meet customers' needs.
Safari Books Online CEO Andrew Savikas talks about Safari Books' success and how it's incorporating mobile technologies into its business model.
Four short links: 26 October 2011
CPAN's Sweet 0x10, Social Reading, Questioning Polls, and 3D Manufacturing
- CPAN Turns 0x10 — sixteenth anniversary of the creation of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. Now holds 480k objects.
- Subtext — social bookreading by adding chat, links, etc. to a book. I haven’t tried the implementation yet but I’ve wanted this for years. (Just haven’t wanted to jump into the cesspool of rights negotiations enough to actually build it :-) (via David Eagleman)
- Questions to Ask about Election Polls — information to help you critically consume data analysis. (via Rachel Cunliffe)
- Technologies, Potential, and Implications of Additive Manufacturing (PDF) — AM is a group of emerging technologies that create objects from the bottom-up by adding material one cross-sectional layer at a time. […] Ultimately, AM has the potential to be as disruptive as the personal computer and the internet. The digitization of physical artifacts allows for global sharing and distribution of designed solutions. It enables crowd-sourced design (and individual fabrication) of physical hardware. It lowers the barriers to manufacturing, and allows everyone to become an entrepreneur. (via Bruce Sterling)
Amazon's "Prime" challenger to the iPad
Why Amazon's Kindle tablet can succeed where others have failed.
While conventional wisdom says that to compete with the iPad you must emulate Apple's best practices, Mark Sigal argues that Amazon can do just fine by blazing its own trail.
Promoting free downloads to increase revenue
Nelson Saba on how freemium is helping his Glo Bible app.
Publishers continue to struggle with the concept of a freemium business model. In this TOC podcast, Nelson Saba, CEO of Immersion Digital, talks about his Glo Bible app and how upgrade conversion rates are surprisingly good.