I don't know if the relaunch will work or not because I don't know if the web is fundamentally changing what (topic, length) we want to read. I do know they're sitting on a trove of evergreen content. A few years ago I rented a cabin in the woods for a month - no internet. There was a stack of 5 year old New Yorkers and I read all of them. I was blown away by the quality and timelessness of the writing. I had never paid much attention to it before, but I became a subscriber after that.
Jobs pursued spirituality with the same zest as he pursued art and technology. He was neither a great artist nor a great engineer. Or was he? In the same way, he was not a great buddhist.
Your point that lynching is just "ritual sacrifice" by a different name is valid. But I doubt the lynched would agree we lucked into better circumstances.
The visual storytelling of the associated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH863XXRZEQ is fantastic. You can watch the vid w/out sound and still understand the point they're trying to make.
I really like Quickcast's simplicity. I think the upload in the BG works great. I don't always want my crappy takes stored in the cloud, but minor point.
Apple wants to own the entire music chain from beginning to end. The hardware player, a software/mobile player, the store, the streamer, the radio, the intelligence (Topsy), and the output speakers. It's interesting to imagine winamp for mobile - if Apple creates the best music player on Android and iOS then all its other services fall into place. Iovine is one of the few folks that can get an exclusive deal done with content owners and he understands marketing in a way no one at Apple currently does. Granted the Beats music player needs a lot of work. But the deal only looks weird if you don't know the personalities involved and don't see the company's end game to create/own the best music experiences everywhere.
I'm neither a lawyer nor a politician. But the FTC's mandate is to protect American consumers, "To prevent business practices that are anticompetitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers". And those are the consumer issues related to tech that matter right now.
I appreciate that the FTC is trying to do right by consumers - it's a great mandate. This Snapchat issue seems so inconsequential compared to two areas I'd love to see them addressing - net neutrality and data privacy across all services.
I actually read the blog post as a team that hadn't pitched a lot of investors. What you suggest here is being very forward in a setting that had been set up as a passive "interview". He was expecting them to set up the right question and probably wasn't experienced enough to just start telling them what he wanted them to know. There might be some cultural (U.S., S.V., "pitching") aspects to this dynamic as well.
His reason for selling was that he was (it turns out rightly) concerned about Jobs' health and didn't feel that Apple was behaving honestly with its investors w/r/t the public statements about it. http://avc.com/2009/01/selling-apple-a/
Apple (et al the total is $10M) is going to get some blowback for giving so little given their cash reserves. But it's a great gesture and a great start. The long term solution is going to require more vision than charitable giving in my opinion. How can tech meaningfully impact regular Americans in their endeavors? Awesome devices, free email and messaging is incredible, don't get me wrong. But, for example, the car companies of the previous century also lifted a middle class and gave them an opportunity to raise a family, send their kids to school and have a stake in the country's future. I don't have the answers, but I do know lots of working class folks need more (and better) job opps.
"Tim Cook, cautioned against being too aggressive. Samsung was one of Apple’s biggest suppliers of processors, display screens, and other items. Alienating it might put Apple in the position of losing parts it needed for its products." The thing that always boggled me was the dysfunctional relationship - Apple being dependent on Samsung as a supplier while also having to sue them. Of course, Apple had already been through this with Microsoft... and Google. Coopetition much?
"But I had in the back of my head that I could be a star, that I could get a little fame in the hobby world, like Bill Gates, if I created the first BASIC for the 6502." Big things start small!
I think the title of this article is misleading. This is an agreement between Id and ZeniMax not ZeniMax and Oculus. The implication of the article is that Carmack violated this agreement (he didn't sign this agreement Id's lawyers did) and didn't negotiate an exception for Oculus in the same fashion as he had for Armadillo Aerospace
Edit: For clarification I don't think Oculus "broke" this agreement, perhaps Carmack did though.
As a foursquare user, I like this move. When you're in new neighborhoods browsing for food, the fact that friends have been to a place and left tips is a much bigger signal than yelp reviews by strangers. But even when I'm in places where I don't know the network, I find check-ins is a better signal than stars.
“Five years from now, this is going to be commonplace, that people use drones to document news stories” I realize this statement is probably obvious in the abstract, but the footage makes it viscerally obvious.