Awesome ads for Stihl out of Australia from the very talented team at WhybinTBWATequila.
My Nest knows it’s snowing
Fortunately, I don’t travel as much any more but this will be interesting to try. It’s much more modern looking, but very Emirates inspired…
Quantas’ Airbus A380 first class looks like Starship Enterprise in Star Trek
Oldie but goodie. (via George Takei)
Some good advice from Guy.
Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.
Experts are clueless.
Customers cannot tell you what they need.
Jump to the next curve.
The biggest challenges beget best work.
Design counts.
You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.
Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.
“Value” is different from “price.”
A players hire A+ players.
Real CEOs demo.
Real CEOs ship.
Marketing boils down to providing unique value.
Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen.
Click through to see the examples for each.
It’s depressing (and scary) how much Google is doing like Microsoft did. Yet another race to the bottom. That is, how shitty can I make something and still make money.
*sigh* That’s not putting a dent in the universe. All that does is put a dent in the pockets of the 99%…
When discussing whether or not there should be apps built specifically for tablets, Android chief Andy Rubin noted that “the Twitter phone app works fine on a tablet.”
In this case, I can’t determine if “works fine” is code for “looks like shit” or “‘meh’ is good enough”. Either is absolutely the wrong attitude and perhaps speaks a bit to why Android is doing so poorly in the tablet space.
iPhone apps running on the iPad also “work fine” but I think everyone will agree that they look like shit. If the iPad only ran iPhone apps scaled-up, there’s no question in my mind that sales would be a fraction of what they are. It’s the apps that are custom tailored for the new form factor that make it magical.
While the ability of a tablet to run any app is a nice fallback, it’s more of a marketing ploy. It was a genius way to get people buying the iPad originally (“look, I have all these apps that already work!”), but Apple was quick to make sure that developers got on board with building custom iPad apps as well.
Again, those are the key. It sure doesn’t seem like Rubin gets that. Of course, he’s in a tough position since there are so many different form factors for Android. Big tablets, small tablets, mini tablets, big phones, small phones, huge ass phones. How does one custom tailor for all those sizes?
They don’t.
But I’m sorry, “meh” isn’t good enough. “Works fine” isn’t good enough.
Four months with Android: reflections, grievances and some tenuous metaphors bundled up into a weighty tome
To be frank, I still don’t know who Android is for.
If it’s for those who don’t want or simply refuse to use a product with an Apple logo, that’s sad, because all you’re getting is an inferior facsimile.
If it’s for those who still want to make some sort of argument predicated on shouting the word “OPEN!”, that’s sad, because Android’s “openness” is a meaningless bullet point to average users and a facade championed by its most devoted.
OR, The longest, most awkward dinner of my life
tl;dr version: I’m really glad to have an iPhone 4S.
(Note: this was written over multiple days, spaced weeks apart.)
I approached this experiment with a lot of questions, the primary of which was quite simple: why do people use Android? I had my own preconceived answers — they dislike Apple or couldn’t get an iPhone for one reason or another — but I dove in with an open mind regardless. After over four months of Android 2.3 on a Nexus S, I’m left mostly answerless.
Very accurate speech recognition systems have been around for some time. So too has advanced artificial intelligence — Watson has won Jeopardy, and every year, the entrants to the Turing Test get better and better. But until now, nobody had put speech and artificial intelligence together in a compelling way: which meant that the voice systems on our computers and our phones have been clunky to the point where it was just easier to avoid them.
That’s what Apple has fixed. Rather than simply roll out technology for its own sake, Siri starts with a deep understanding of the job users have for their devices — and then deploys speech and AI technologies in a way that actually helps them accomplish what they’re trying to do.
James Allworth - Harvard Business School
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