October 31, 2006
Designer Garages
Does your garage look like this?
Founder Chad Haas couldn't find anything suitable on the market when he wanted to spruce up his garage. So he started a company.
Via Springwise.
October 18, 2006
Blue and Brown
New to me is the Blue Ocean Strategy. "Don't Compete with Rivals - Make Them Irrelevant" by creating "blue oceans" of uncontested market space ripe for growth.
One company that is doing just that is Brown Paper Tickets which according to The Business Innovation Insider is fast becoming a consumer and vendor-friendly alternative to Ticketmaster. And it's not just for concerts. Even a small charity luncheon can use Brown Paper Tickets for ticketing and distribution.
My Life Bits
Engineers and scientists at Microsoft are looking for a way to create a backup brain, a surrogate memory, a way to bring total recall in the future.
"MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything."
I am a strong and enthusiastic advocate of Personal Legacy Archives, of memorializing, organizing and digitizing IMPORTANT STUFF.
But everything is WAY TOO MUCH. Total recall is much too much. There's some stuff I want to forget and a lot of stuff I want to get rid of.
I don't want to be able to "rehear every conversation" I had when I was 20 because I want to enjoy my life now.
It seems too much like the overstuffed closets of people who can't give or throw away a single item of clothing yet can't find anything to wear.
Discrimination between the important and the unnecessary is essential.
October 8, 2006
Bloglines Feedback
Bloglines is my aggregator. I've recommended Bloglines to many people and set some pre-subscribed feeds tailored to their interests to get them started.
Not only can I read many more blogs on many more subjects, I can save the posts I want to go back to. The only thing that was a little bit annoying is that every time I' d check a post to save as new, the entire tree of my 300 feeds would refresh which took a few seconds.
Their "wizard" has figured out that nobody likes that, so the tree doesn't refresh every time you check or uncheck a box, it refreshes every few minutes whether I want it to or not. When it does everything stops while my entire tree of 300 blogs is refreshed. I mean everything. I can't get a new page, scroll down on Bloglines or on another page on my browser.
Please stop it. IT"S DRIVING ME CRAZY AND THWARTING MY ABILITY TO SURF THE WEB WHILE IT'S REFRESHING.
Or at least, give us control over the rate of refreshing.
October 7, 2006
Future of the Internet
Time to check up on what the Pew Internet and American Life Project has been doing.
On familiarity with Internet terms.
The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term “phishing” means,
On Internet Penetration in April 2006
Fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users, up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey. And the share of Americans who have broadband connections at home has now reached 42% (about 84 million), up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005.
On the Evolution of the Internet
A wide-ranging survey of technology leaders, scholars, industry officials, and analysts finds that most internet experts expect attacks on the network infrastructure in the coming decade as the internet becomes more embedded in everyday and commercial life. They believe the dawning of the blog era will bring radical change to the news and publishing industry and they think the internet will have the least impact on religious institutions.
Checking up at the Pew's new predictions of the Future of the Internet, Part II
Fascinating with a few surprises.
• A significant number 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about our ability to stay in control of technology in the future.
* Tech "refusniks" will become a cultural group with some likely resorting to violence.
* The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.
