-
I don't even care if this is fake, it's hilarious (and if it's real, what if there's a man trapped inside that goat, yelling for help??)
-
quite an incredible all around machine, quoting merlin "Beautiful in a million different ways."
links for 2009-12-21
2009.12.21 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-12-14
-
"I think our job (entrepreneurs and investors) is to build & fund companies that can become important, viable and standalone companies. That’s why I don’t consider the question “who will buy this company” when I think about making an investment."
-
great presentation showing Xobni's path to their current 3M+ user base (1.5 years in stealth mode with only 50 users)
2009.12.14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-12-12
-
"If you did understand how to do things, your guys wouldn’t be standing up at Wall Street conferences and complaining about how much traffic you’re getting. Instead, you would be running around like a fucking maniac trying to build out your fucking network and make it the best network in the world — and the only reason you would ever need to talk to me would be to thank me for creating a phone that’s so amazing that it draws people to your shit network in the first place."
2009.12.12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-12-07
-
"Your design isn't finished until you can't take anything else away ...without sacrificing user or business needs"
2009.12.07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-12-06
-
I think this would make a great annual tradition....best trip, best restaurant moment, best article you read, best night out, etc....
-
Direct self-promotion is ineffective and will go unnoticed unless it is backed by a more indirect (and more valuable) form of marketing: namely, sharing information and promoting others.
Is your Twitter feed mostly about your own work, or do you mainly link to interesting work by others? The more you find and promote other people’s good work, the more in-the-know and “expert” you are perceived to be—and the more you (or your brand, if you must) are liked.
You can’t fake this. If you’re sharing half-baked information half-heartedly, nobody will stick around.
Never create a blog or a Twitter feed with the explicit idea of promoting yourself. Create for the joy of creating. Share for the joy of the sharing, and because the information you’re sharing genuinely excites you.
2009.12.06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-12-03
-
complete with an awesome 3D animation. The fact that it's in Chinese doesn't stop it from being the most useful bit of media coverage I've seen about the event.
2009.12.03 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-29
-
To fix your “home” and “end” keys (as well as “page up” and “page down”), just download and run KeyFixer. If you already have a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file, the script will exit without making any changes. If you want to remove the changes that KeyFixer makes, just run the following command in Terminal.
2009.11.29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-27
-
presentation does a great job of framing the key problems for consumer web startups...The three key problems of social software: 1. The signup problem 2. The 1st time use problem 3. The ongoing engagement problem
The behavior you're seeing is the behavior you've designed for. Whether intentional or not
"Product Management is the critical link in value creation - connecting the market with the development team"
Most startups these days build products using the various philosophies of agile...This kind of incrementalism is mostly great, and people should generally do more of it, but the interesting part is when you get a couple months into your product cycle. You often end up with lots of half-done experiments lying around, an infrastructure that isn’t built to scale, and a mishmash of code that needs to be refactored.
review of high end SF coffee....want to try these out, but have to get to either Bi Rite or Napa area to buy them: Ecco Caffe Yirgacheffe Dama Co-op, Ritual Guatemala Xeucelvitz, Equator Estates: Nicaragua Aldea Global, Equator Estates: Costa Rica Montes de Oro (Bi Rite - served at French Laundry)
(tags: coffee)
I believed Duck Hunt was a one player game. I recently found out the second controller can control the direction the ducks fly.I was blind, but now I see.
(tags: videogames funny)
2009.11.27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-23
-
I think it looks like this:
1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Tactics
6. ExecutionIf the top of the hierarchy is messed up, no amount of brilliant tactics or execution is going to help you at all.
Isn't it odd that these six questions are so important and yet we almost never talk or write about them?
"Five Whys is a concept I’ve attempted to–somewhat successfully–apply to myself and my development. When I make mistakes or when I don’t understand something I ask why until I find the root cause of my error, the misunderstanding, or the negative reaction."..."You may find that your reaction is more about protecting existing orthodoxy or the source of the idea than it is about the merits of the particular approach at hand."
The difficult conversation about the problem is far more useful than the endless effort on solutions. The reason is that people don't tell themselves (or you) about the problem they're actually solving. Sure, we'd like a personal computer with a lot of computing power, but we'd also like it to be light and sexy and covetable...The more clarity you can get about what a successful solution looks like, the more likely you will be to have a delighted customer when you're done.
2009.11.23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-22
-
You're going to live in fear, but the question is, which fear? You could have a constant, low level of fear with no payoff at the end, or peaks of fear, and no fear elsewhere, with the chance of seeing your potential realized.(tags: quotes)
2009.11.22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-16
-
"What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team. The most important aspect of your backgrounds is not the names of the schools you attended or companies you worked at – it’s what you’ve built."
-
"I just want to say: yes, shit does matter. Your job. Your obsessions. The ways that the things driving your ambitions, attention, and decisions manifest themselves in the artifacts you share with a world full of strangers. It really, really does all matter."
2009.11.16 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-11-14
-
I began to develop what I thought was an indicator of whether someone was going to be a good surgeon or not. It was a couple of simple questions: Have you ever made a mistake? And, if so, what was your worst mistake? The people who said, 'Gee, I haven't really had one,' or, 'I've had a couple of bad outcomes but they were due to things outside my control' -- invariably those were the worst candidates. And the residents who said, 'I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible thing that happened just yesterday and here's what it was.' They were the best. They had the ability to rethink everything that they'd done and imagine how they might have done it differently."(tags: quotes)
2009.11.14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-10-30
-
" It turns out the factor that explains their success at the beginning is what accounts for their failure later."
2009.10.30 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-10-26
-
"take the time up front to figure out the one and only thing that will have the highest impact and then focus 100% of their effort on that one thing."
2009.10.26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-10-23
-
we procrastinate when we've forgotten: who we are, what should get our attention, and what our options are for the first two.....no system is going to save you, because you have to figure out who you are every day.
2009.10.23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-10-21
-
"But Markowitz was incapable of using his own equation...he ignored the investment advice that had won him the Nobel Prize. Instead of relying on the math, he fell into the familiar trap of loss aversion. Markowitz was so worried about the possibility of losing his savings that he failed to optimize his own retirement account."
2009.10.21 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-10-07
-
Super achievers don't manage their time, they create, manage and maximize their opportunities. They know a to do list is often used as an excuse to avoid the difficult, yet critical, task.
2009.10.07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-09-28
-
"The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you’ll need enough money to answer them all."
2009.09.28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-09-17
-
Threadless designer to Digg, Digg designer to Tiny Speck, College Humor designer to Boxee...others?
-
great attempt at a reasonable (ie: mostly text) redesign of craigslist. also loved the deck created to discuss the changes (ie: the brand and the logo)(tags: design)
2009.09.17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-09-15
-
"A Collection of iPhone Home Screens - from some very talented designers, developers and tech writers"
2009.09.15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-09-13
-
"The tendency of software is to bloat. To include more and “better” features and these things compete for the attention of managers, developers, designers, and other people who work on the software...The problem is when it manifests itself in a way that competes (and wins) against the core use cases and slows down users."
-
"Obviously, balance is a distant goal. In the meantime, I delegate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore politics, sports and pop culture, neglect my family too much and probably don't do any of my jobs as well as I could. But these are exciting days, and if ever these was a time to be overextended this is it.
Don't wait to be given a job to do something cool. Follow your
passions, create something every day, take chances and try to be the
best in the world at something, no matter how tiny and trivial.
Nothing impresses me more than initiative. And there has never been a
better time to take it.I think that leading people is perhaps the most important skill these days.
Helping (and inspiring) other people to do cool stuff is what an editor
does, and when you take it out of a purely professional media context that looks more and more like effective community management. It's a great skill and I admire those who do it well."
2009.09.13 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-09-08
-
"Benjamin Graham famously said that the stock market is a voting machine in the short run and weighing machine in the long run. The same is true of startups. Make something weighty – try to build an empire – and you’ll be far less vulnerable to the ups and downs of the market."
2009.09.08 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-23
-
Almost exactly so....However, when you ‘create things’ in a self-imposed vacuum without accepting feedback — huge amounts of it — from the tastes-only crowd, you cease to be a product person and cross completely over into becoming an artist. The two groups aren’t mutually exclusive by any means, but self-knowledge is critically important.
2009.08.23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-22
-
adding to "to-do" list(tags: food sanfrancisco)
2009.08.22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-21
-
Eyeballing the chart would suggest that the cutting edge of human achievement in the 200m is anything sub-19.7. A 19.59 at Beijing would be phenomenal. Then you scroll down—way down—and you hit Johnson's 19.32. Usain Bolt had his work cut out for him when he ran 19.30....and today - 19.19, insane.
2009.08.21 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-20
-
"Weird to think how insanely different your day could be today. Purely depending on what you do in the next 10 or 15 seconds. If that switch gets flipped in the right direction, then stays there.", "Things that derail action: the unknown, the ambiguous, and the incomplete...Better go check email. Might be something “important.”
-
here's Leah Culver's notes on web product guidelines, complete with guideline revisions, and links to other peoples customizations.
2009.08.20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-17
-
"You can’t really design an experience—it’s something that happens on the user end, where many variables are out of the designer’s reach and control. Right now, I’m calling myself a Product/UI designer, since I spent most of my time creating and polishing this layer of a user’s experience.", "As a designer, you must always remember that, in most cases, your users aren’t there to appreciate your mad visual skills, but to accomplish a task that is important for them in some way.", "most of the time a project’s success is not only attached to its design. There are deeper concerns for a project to be successful, most of them related to solving a problem that users have. You always have to ask yourself if you’re solving an actual problem—then it’s a matter of executing it in the right way, and there’s no formula for that.", ""UI design" is not a science, and no one will never have 100% proficiency on it. It’s more important to be able to put yourself in your user’s shoes all the time."
-
"I would argue that people will annotate "X" much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos...The annotations are explicitly *not* "meant for other people" -- they're meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine."
2009.08.17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-10
-
"pple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature that is considered. And these are not just crappy mockups, these all represent different but really good implementations that are faithful to the product specifications. Then narrow these down to 3 based on specific criteria that the team spends months further developing until they finally narrow down to 1 final concept that truly represents their best work for production. This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions. But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do. "
-
"You can't be successful at everything - any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on. Often our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own."
-
Are we heading towards a tipping point with entertainment? Is it too easy to get a false sense of pleasure from TV/videogames/etc...? "What gamers want most is an experience that conveys the feeling of accomplishing a difficult task, but without the difficulty...Even with very simple gameplay, it’s satisfying and addictive to feel like you’re improving yourself and your environment....There’s a vital question that is rarely asked: does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep better at night selling one than the other."
-
"In scientific research, an experimenter develops a hypothesis with a suspected set of ideas and then builds an experiment to support the hypothesis. I think this is a great way to think about building businesses as well. Find a niche that is just beginning to show promise, develop a hypothesis about where that niche will go in the future, and then build a business to test that hypothesis. Working toward a philosophy rather than a company's success keeps you humble. You're not devoting your soul to the business; because it's an experiment, you're devoting your life and your time to supporting your hypothesis, or your philosophy."
2009.08.10 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-08-07
-
Jobs, the Times reported, “attempted to soothe the audience, saying: ‘We have to let go of a few notions here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose.’”
2009.08.07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-07-29
-
"Meta-work becomes a reflex, a habit, an addiction, and ultimately a replacement for real productive work. It's something I think everyone should watch out for, whatever walk of life or career you happen to have. In fact, I've come up with a zingy little catch phrase to help people remind themselves, and their coworkers, how toxic this stuff can be -- meta is murder. "
2009.07.29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-07-26
-
You don’t have to be an expert to notice the obvious. Newspapers are losing millions of dollars. New, online-only publications, on the other hand, are operating at a profit. And there is a stark difference between the two: new online publications are lean and mean. They are small, flat organizations where most of the employees are producing actual content. The primary problem with newspaper companies isn’t their revenue. It’s the size and scope of their operations.
2009.07.26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-07-13
-
"The goal in life, I believe, is not to always make the right choices, but to make hard choices. If you don't find yourself making hard choices, you're not going to gain things of worth out of life."
-
from the Twitterific peeps
2009.07.13 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-07-12
-
"This brings us to the question of what, if any, were Mr. McNamara’s lasting contributions as secretary of defense? Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. When Mr. McNamara took office he discovered secret Pentagon plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. He worried that the Joint Chiefs wanted nuclear war, and he was determined not to allow that to happen. From ’63 to about ’67, we had first-strike capacity and nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union. (In the words of George C. Scott in “Dr. Strangelove,” I’m not saying we wouldn’t have got our “hair mussed.” But we would have destroyed them.) After Kennedy’s death, he served that central role of keeping the Joint Chiefs in check. If true, he becomes not the villain of American history, but something quite different. "
-
"if you don't learn to manage your attention and decide when you've got enough information you'll never know when you're done...and you'll get mad at yourself because you're not making decisions about where to put that attention"
2009.07.12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-24
-
"every decision is based on a time perspective...optimal profile: past-positive: High (roots), future: Moderate High (wings), present-hedonism: Moderate (energy)
2009.06.24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-19
2009.06.19 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-12
-
"“Find a happy person, and you will find a project.” – Sonja Lyubomirsky
-
I want to go to there
-
Clever stuff from Ji Lee. Took me a few seconds to get #8(tags: design)
2009.06.12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-07
-
interesting set of slides that makes some great observations around "discovery" and "attention"
-
"I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria."
2009.06.07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-03
-
"Plenty of brands are in trouble right now because they're not sure if they represent Luxury or Premium products."
-
"the Obama plan dilutes the company’s focus. Instead of thinking obsessively about profitability and quality, G.M. will also have to meet the administration’s environmental goals. There is no evidence G.M. is good at building the sort of small cars the administration demands. There is no evidence that there is a large American market for these cars. But G.M. now has to serve two masters, the market and the administration’s policy goals."
2009.06.03 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-06-01
-
We're living in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.
-
Despite the comfort factor of dilly-dallying, it is not a truly enjoyable past-time. In fact, it slowly eats at my self-confidence and sense of purpose. It is enjoyable in the sense that it is not painful, but it is not rewarding in itself. Enjoyment as lack of unenjoyment is the lowest form of enjoyment.
-
20 San Francisco day trips(tags: travel sanfrancisco)
2009.06.01 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-31
-
The bit about UPS is pretty crazy, along with lots of other interesting ideas
2009.05.31 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-30
-
some great old school pro basketball photography
2009.05.30 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-26
-
"I want to think seriously about what I can accomplish with what's left of my life"(tags: photography)
-
looks like a painting, feels like sculpture, reads like a map(tags: sanfrancisco)
2009.05.26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-25
-
“What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”
2009.05.25 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-23
-
incredible(tags: architecture design)
2009.05.23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-22
-
a 42 second film titled "Last Day Dream". Subject: a man watches his life pass before him
2009.05.22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-20
-
video demo of WiiSpray 2nd edition....perfect for a projector setup
2009.05.20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-18
-
The music video for the song 'Alice', an electronic piece of which 90% is composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film 'Alice In Wonderland'.
2009.05.18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-15
-
when technology doesn't live up to our expectations, we just have to accept that "you know what, this is as good as it is right now"
2009.05.15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
links for 2009-05-14
-
Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”
2009.05.14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
New to AKISC?
- Some good places to start...
1. Movies.xls or NameThatFilm.xls
2. Questioning the Long Tail
3. Marquette name debate
4. Business Model of a Blogger
5. Klosterman's "The (other) paradox of choiceI also write a travelog called Whereami and have a photo collection in Flickr.
Recent Comments