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“So what does it really take to create a gadget? A smart product design, a realistic expectation of time and costs, and the ability to put together the right team, say entrepreneurs. Wired.com interviewed several hardware entrepreneurs to find out what works and what doesn’t.” —
For Hardware Entrepreneurs, Getting From Idea to Reality Isn’t Easy | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
I would like to make a gadget.
Good comment on POE:
‘Pixar was founded on the principles that computer animation should not look like it was done by a computer (just using one). Lasseter in particular made a huge deal about how to map what traditional animators had learned into CG in order to make things work. The other studios seem to try to reproduce reality to add fantastic elements to, and have only been very slowly learning how to do basic things like squash and stretch.
For whatever it’s worth, Pixar’s process is very traditional - they do the whole movie in animatics and pencil tests and the like to get the story and timing and such down solid before they start doing it in 3D.’
“The fact is, the Demand way may be inescapable. A senior executive at a major media company likened Demand’s algorithmic-based content-creation factory to what he saw in the advertising industry in the past decade. Experience, relationships, and gut checks started losing out to raw data. “To customers, advertising may not look that different, but the systems to deliver the right ads to the right consumer at the right time have changed dramatically,” he says. “The content systems are going through the early, early stages of that right now.” — The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine
“Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.” — The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model | Magazine
“Journalists, the Web is not how our profession ends. The Web is a wonderful vehicle for storytelling, explaining, doing civic good and empowering readers who want to dig for information. If you want to know how our profession ends, look at Demand Media, starting with Roth’s poignant portrait of an experienced video journalist shooting noisy, out-of-focus footage for $20 a pop. This is the journalist as Chinese factory worker — except for a lot of rural Chinese the factory is a step up. You know the old joke about the sign that reads Good, Fast, Cheap — Pick Two? Demand Media took that and turned it into an irony-free business plan. The joke, unfortunately, is on the rest of us.” —
Hey, Demand Media! Get Off My Lawn! « Reinventing the Newsroom
This is a really nice article, not necessarily for the ode to journalists losing out to stupid long tail content creators, but rather he is right in thinking about how Demand and AC’s models will have to shift as pagerank will continue to favor engagement activities in content that ‘industrial search’ doesn’t currently take into account.
Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman
“the probability of another steve jobs occurring is vanishingly small. i doubt that another startup could produce a steve jobs. it is a combination of intelligence, market savvy, strong personality, and ruthlessness that makes him successful. not many people can exhibit all those qualities to make it work.” — Update on the Steve Jobs post from an Apple alum | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)
This opening story from todays NYT says it all.
The TV is a nice form factor for large viewing of one thing, in time, The Web. I hope the boys in Cupertino are hard at work on the hardware side of it.