Is webOS a cult?
When the notion of Apple fans as cult members began–it dates at least to the mid-1980s–the company’s customers were indeed a small, obsessive group, at least in comparison to the teeming masses that used PCs running Microsoft software. […] Back then, the fact that there were relatively few Apple enthusiasts, clinging to the products of a company with a questionable future, was supposedly evidence that they amounted to a cult.
This is your mind being just a little bit blown.
How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon
There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site.
[…]
Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.
[…]
But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.
How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy?
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
And:
So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects. There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.
Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.
AT&T Punishes Its Customers For T-Mobile Merger Failure
GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard:
After blasting the Federal Communication Commission for “picking winners and losers” in the wireless industry by scrutinizing every deal, Stephenson claimed AT&T is now in a mobile capacity-constrained environment which has forced it to raise prices and manage connection speeds (aka throttle) for its highest volume subscribers.
As I wrote back in December:
I suspect their next move will be a lot of complaining that the government is now the reason why they’re so inept…
Total jackasses.
Who’s Using Pinterest? Yup, It’s Mostly Ladies
Or, as Gizmodo calls it: “Tumblr for ladies”
Um. Isn’t Tumblr “Tumblr for ladies”? Most of the people I follow on Tumblr are women. Once again Gizmodo thinks their DudeBro outlook on the world is universal. I am so tired of DudeBros.
![futuramb:
Why 3-D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality - Technology Review
This isn’t just premature, it’s absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what’s going on at present is pretty cool—whether it’s in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces.
But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a “mature” technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter.
[…]
Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I’ll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact.
I believe this is right. That is why it is interesting to try to look where 3D print might have a unique advantage. Following Bruce Sterlings early insights about this I think one of these possible areas are places on the planet where they don’t have access to factories yet, but is in need of things – many cheap, small but specialized things like e g spare parts for important machines.
Update: Ian Pearson commented on Twitter on this post by noting that 3D print will create a great digital craft industry, which I agree with. And that is a whole interesting area in itself since a whole new craft area will most likely redefine how we relate to design and production. Maybe not for everything but for the things that are perceived to be special and we really like and have emotional relations.](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/ktbradford/16581710707/1/tumblr_lyehuab1jg1qz4fj0)
Why 3-D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality - Technology Review
This isn’t just premature, it’s absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what’s going on at present is pretty cool—whether it’s in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces.But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a “mature” technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter.[…]
Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I’ll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact.I believe this is right. That is why it is interesting to try to look where 3D print might have a unique advantage. Following Bruce Sterlings early insights about this I think one of these possible areas are places on the planet where they don’t have access to factories yet, but is in need of things – many cheap, small but specialized things like e g spare parts for important machines.
Update: Ian Pearson commented on Twitter on this post by noting that 3D print will create a great digital craft industry, which I agree with. And that is a whole interesting area in itself since a whole new craft area will most likely redefine how we relate to design and production. Maybe not for everything but for the things that are perceived to be special and we really like and have emotional relations.
Education on a Digital Scale
Felix Salmon provides us with an update on Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, which wrapped in last year:
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
…
And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.
With the completion of the class, Thrun declared he “can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s walking away from his tenure and starting Udacity, an online university.
Education is finally starting to fully embrace digital. Developments like Udacity, Khan Academy, Code Academy, and Apple’s textbooks look to do to college what blogging and the internet have done to publishing, lowering the cost of entry to an almost negligible point and increasing the scale of participants by several factors.
Think back to how many newspaper and magazine columnists we had in 1995. Now think of how many people are writing frequently online. Imagine if we achieved such a shift in college education, with millions of people learning how to create search engines (Udacity’s first class) and more. Thrun’s numbers above feel about right, and he’s just getting started.
The potential of a population educated on a digital scale, not just made louder with access to publishing platforms, promises to be massive.
RF-enabled app locates lost objects or children
We’ve recently seen RFID technology used to help farmers track cows and locate children. Now, recently launched Bikn enables consumers to find lost objects, pets or children with a system consisting of an RF-enabled iPhone case, multiple tags and an app. READ MORE…
via springwise:
The webOS dev community is so reminiscent of the early Mac dev community. A small band who knows they’re spelunking a new and better universe, and freely shares discoveries of the pathways thru the twisty little corridors …
Palm’s problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just now starting to see the problems facing mobile Web apps being addressed through the HTML5 spec such as CSS and rendering along with caching and device access to elements like the camera and accelerometer. The native platforms have had that advantage since the beginning.
This is where webOS has a chance. It straddles the line between Web and native in a very fundamental way.
The art of Feric Feng, who’s currently creating a game based on his egg-shaped robots.
She had us at “egg-shaped robots.”
Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. For one thing, those sites are overwhelmingly visual: images nearly always do much better than words. And more generally, journalists are much better at writing than they are at reading — which means that they’re really bad at seeing the value added by curating and reblogging.
What Does The Perfect Mobile Interface Look Like? (Don’t Ask Siri)
Is Siri a novelty or are you using it on a daily basis?
At Sundance, Weinstein Co.’s Bob Weinstein got a first-hand taste of the challenge facing the studios when a technician fixing a television set in his hotel room recommended the film “Apollo 18.” Mr. Weinstein, whose company distributed the film, says he was thrilled—until the man added that he had downloaded a free copy and could do the same for Mr. Weinstein within 20 minutes. “That’s my movie!” Mr. Weinstein says he exclaimed. “You’re arrested!
Attention, Wall Street Journal archivists: Please file this anecdote under “Things that probably didn’t happen.”
(via markcoatney)
