via boston.com
The devastation in Christchurch is unbelievable. I was there 20 years ago....the city is remarkably like Victoria. It is almost the exact same population and has a strong British history and feel to the place.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple’s Subscription Strategy Will
via techcrunch.com
Apple should clearly offer a lower percentage on subscriptions (say 10%). However, as far as offering the users information to publishers (it's opt-in not opt-out) Apple is clearly siding with the consumer on this one.
For Mobile Apps, It’s 1996 All Over Again
via techcrunch.com
It's interesting to note how much faster the app economy is growing then did the web during the same early stage.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Video: Davis 3 Wheeler car (1948) - Boing Boing
Video: Davis 3 Wheeler car (1948)
"This little chariot can really run you around in circles." I'd certainly like a Davis 3-Wheeler. And a 1950s voice like the narrator too. (Thanks, Jeff Cross!)
via boingboing.net
A brief history of the BlackBerry UI • reghardware
About half the people with a BlackBerry know that if you press space twice you get full-stop space. But only a few of them know that you can use space in email addresses to get full-stops and @ symbols. Tell them and their eyes light up with the thought that their little tool has just become that much more productive.
This is the major problem with a user interface, and in particular mobile phone user interfaces: discovery. On a PC you can "lead" users into shortcuts and how to use things. A mobile UI should be just as obvious.
Ten years ago, Nokia had the reputation for being leader of the pack with user interfaces. There were two reasons for this. One is that they really did have the best UI. The other is that market dominance meant that they were the most familiar. So even complicated, not-so-obvious things such as pressing the “menu*” button to switch off the keyboard lock became natural.
That’s the thing with user interfaces. Once you have become habituated to something it becomes second nature. Why should a square mean “stop” when the road sign is octagonal? It’s all about balance: a balance of features against complexity.
Nokia gained the lead when Christian Lindholm brought psychologists in to understand how people related to phones. Before then the decisions had been made by engineers. One of the many fruits of this was the Nokia 6310, still cited as the best business phone ever. An early Bluetooth device, it really got the balance of ease-of-use against features right. One of the other, spectacular ease-of-use successes was the 3310 and the Navi-key interface.
All about buttons
Ask a product manager what would make their phone simple and they say “dedicated buttons”. Let’s have a button for the camera, one for turning the light on and off, one for GPS, one for Wi-Fi. Soon you have more buttons than a Cadbury’s factory and it’s horrifically complicated. What made Navi-key great was that in addition to the numbers there was up/down, cancel and a single softkey.
You want the fewest buttons for the tasks you want to complete. The problem comes when you add features. There is a balance between the number of buttons and what you want the phone to do. Start adding features to a phone with too few buttons and you’ve no idea what to press to do what.
Where the BlackBerry got it right, from day one, is knowing what it was about: messaging. And particularly email. Indeed, first generation BlackBerries didn’t do voice, and when it was added, it was only with headphone. The BlackBerry has always been about email, a strength it takes from its “focus group of one”: Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s CEO. Instead of asking lots of naive users what they would like the device to do, the BlackBerry was built around Lazaridis’s view of what a device should do.
This single-mindedness has helped keep the focus on mail, but as the number of features has grown the device has had to evolve. What’s not shown, until OS 6.0, is that the foundations for a messaging-led platform make everything else work that bit better.
Next page: The first generation of BlackBerries
via reghardware.com
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
The odds were astronomical.......
One in a million chance. Went out for dinner with our eBay hosts in Richmond, London (at a great pub called the Duke) and ran into David Fahey (an old friend from University). Literally the odds of this happening must have been a million to 1. Great to see him and I hope to catch up with him on my next trip to San Francisco.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
One on One: Tim Wu, Author of The Master Switch
This is the next book I will be reading. It has received tremendous reviews.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Back to the Blog
It has been quite the hiatus for this blog. I won't go into the details as to why but most of them have been around finding a blogging tool that would work for me. My old standby, Flock, has changed significantly and is no longer viable. I am currently checking out MarsEdit. If has Flickr integration but no YouTube integration. It remains to be seen if any of them will work for me......I will let you know.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
"Obama Should Follow in FDR's Footsteps" - Paul Krugman
There are lots and lots of things that need attention in our cities and counties, starting with, but by no means limited to, infrastructure. Labor and raw materials are relatively cheap due to the recession, and interest rates will never be lower, so why don't we hire people to do what needs to be done?:
Obama should follow in FDR's footsteps, by Nick Taylor, Commentary, LA Times: As President Obama weighs his options for adding jobs and pumping up the economy ... he might look back for guidance to Franklin Roosevelt.Indeed, Obama's experience so far resembles FDR's first uneven stabs at job creation. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932... When he took office, with the unemployment rate at 24.9%, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps... But it was too limited... The "CCC boys" ... never numbered more than 300,000... Roosevelt continued his efforts with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration..., it put 2 million people to work by the fall of 1933...These efforts still left far too many people out of jobs. As winter approached, relief administrator Harry Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to create a temporary jobs program that would give the private economy a few more months to pick up steam. The Civil Works Administration put more than 4 million workers into jobs during the winter of 1933-34. They mostly repaired roads, parks and public buildings, but there were jobs for teachers and other white-collar workers too.The CWA ended, as designed, after just five months. But unemployment remained unacceptably high. Like Obama today, Roosevelt had midterm elections to think about. His critics accused him of socialism and fretted publicly that large deficits would ruin the country. They insisted that workers would ... never be weaned off the government's largesse.But despite his vocal opponents, in January 1935, FDR announced his intention to launch the massive jobs program that became the Works Progress Administration. ... The WPA addressed a range of long-standing infrastructure needs, including roads and bridges, hospitals and water treatment plants, and airports. Its workers fought floods and forest fires and cleaned up after hurricanes. Its sewing rooms made clothing and blankets that went out to disaster victims. The WPA also employed nurses, doctors, teachers, librarians and artists. By the fall of 1936, 3.3 million people were on the WPA payroll. The stimulus provided by those jobs buoyed the economy. By the spring of 1937, after Roosevelt's landslide reelection, the country's unemployment rate had dropped to 14%.FDR then, again like Obama, heard calls to cut spending and balance the budget. ... And he heeded them. He slashed WPA spending by two-thirds ... for the year starting July 1937. Half as many workers — 1.65 million — would get WPA paychecks.At the same time, Roosevelt tightened bank reserve requirements. Deductions for the new Social Security System took more money out of the economy. ... That fall, industrial production fell, the stock market plunged and, by the end of the year, unemployment had surged, with another 2 million workers losing their jobs. Republicans called it the Roosevelt recession.In the spring of 1938, Roosevelt decided he'd had enough of budget-cutting. He resumed spending, and soon the WPA rolls were back above 2 million, on their way to an all-time high of 3.4 million.The lesson for Obama in all this is that stimulus works, and the sooner and more aggressive, the better..., a push today on new infrastructure would also provide lasting and necessary benefits. ... An America prepared today to meet the future will be applauded long after this recession is consigned to the history books. ...Millions of people out of work, vast needs throughout the nation, and a president unwilling to fight to bring the two together because, I don't know, it's not bipartisan? Whatever the reason, there are many, many areas where we could put people to work where the benefits exceed the costs, including valuable public goods that the private sector will not provide, but we don't seem to be willing to allow the government to broker these exchanges. It's frustrating. People could be helped, and it would make us all better off, but it's hard to see how this could possibly happen at the scale that is needed.
Update: I should have waited until this came out before doing this post:
Building the Bridges to a Sustainable Recovery, by Robert H. Frank, Commentary, NY Times: Last year’s economic stimulus program helped stem a crisis that was poised to rival the Great Depression. ... Now, those stimulus payouts are waning... As a result, a fragile economic recovery is faltering. ...All the while, however, we’re facing vivid examples of failing infrastructure across the country. Clearly, the maintenance and rebuilding of bridges, roads, water systems and the like can’t be postponed forever. And the work will never be cheaper ... than right now, when high unemployment and excess capacity have put the opportunity cost of the necessary labor and equipment near zero. ...According to data compiled by the civil engineers’ society, planned spending across 15 categories of infrastructure, including aviation, drinking water systems, energy programs, levees, roads, schools and wastewater treatment, will fall short ... by a cumulative total of more than $1.8 trillion in the next five years. ...Deferring maintenance does nothing to alleviate our national indebtedness; in fact, it makes the problem far worse. According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, for instance, rehabilitation of a 10-mile section of I-80 that would cost $6 million this year would cost $30 million in two years, after the road deteriorated further.If such a project is at all representative, spending an extra $100 billion nationwide on interstate highway maintenance now would reduce the national debt two years from now by several hundred billion dollars...Some people object that infrastructure spending takes too long to roll out. But many projects could be started immediately. And remarkably low long-term interest rates imply that markets expect several more years of sluggish economic activity, so even projects that take a little longer would still be timely.But won’t this extra spending make the deficit problem worse? A better question is this: Why is anyone worried about short-run deficits in the first place? Deficits are a long-run problem..., the short-run imperative is to increase total spending by enough to put everyone back to work as quickly as possible. ...
With the midterm elections looming and deficit hysteria at a fever pitch, it is far from certain that even the president’s modest proposal can gain Congressional approval. If it can’t, our infrastructure clearly isn’t the only thing that needs fixing.
This is from Economist's View by Mark Thoma.
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