A fascinating talk on a potential future for food production. By utilizing “bio-printing,” Andreas Forsace and team at Modern Meadow can organically produce meat and leather without actually harming an animal. And the economic, societal, and environmental impacts are astounding (96% fewer greenhouse gases! 96% less water!?), to the point that, if adopted, much of the modern pricing and economic culture we know would be nothing but a memory.
A Consumer's Look at Second Screen Apps
Noel Murray, professional television and film critic, takes a deep dive into the world of Second Screen apps and comes away wanting. His insight that
Here then is where we come back to that old disconnect between what consumers want and what content providers want them to want.
is something I’ve been mulling over for the last few months, and something I think many marketers/techies need to recognize as things move forward. The very nature of your being a marketer or tech person biases you towards these types of technology - but who’s to say the typical person, the one that’s not all that interested in tech or hasn’t caught up to the “professionals”, is interested at all?
Source: grantland.com
Eight Lost Quotes from Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is indubitably one of the most creative, charismatic, and quotable leaders of our modern time. His combination of business-savvy, logic based in programming, and study of the finer things like philosophy, art, and design separated him from most of his business peers then and now. And man, was he willing to say what he thought.
Recently, the entirety of his seminal interview with Robert Cringely - truncated to fit the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds - is now available on Netflix. And does he drop some great lines!
Paste Magazine has a nice little write-up laying out their eight favorite quotes from the documentary. They offer a fine look at one of our great minds.
8. Success
“I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion, and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I changed my mind. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”7. Asking “Why?”
“Throughout the years in business, I found something. I always ask why you do things. The answers you invariably get is, ’That’s just the way it’s done.’ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business, that’s what I found.”6. Really Good People
“When you get really good people, they know they’re really good, and you don’t have to baby people’s egos so much. And what really matters is the work, and everybody knows that. So, people are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing you can do for someone who’s really good and really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough.”5. Dynamic Range
“I observed something very early on at Apple, I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I’ve thought about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between ‘average’ and the ‘best’ is, at most, two-to-one. If you get into a cab in New York City with the best cab driver, as opposed to the average cab driver, you’re probably going to get to your destination with the best cab driver maybe thirty percent faster… Or a CD player, the difference between the best CD player and the average CD player is what? Twenty percent? So two-to-one is a big dynamic range in most of life. In software—and it used to be the case in hardware too—the difference between the average and the best is 50 to one. Maybe 100 to one. Very few things in life are like this, but what I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life in is like this.”4. Computer Science
“It had nothing to do with using [programs] for practical things, it had more to do with using them as a mirror of your thought process. To actually learn how to think. I think everyone in this country should learn to program a computer. Everyone should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. I think of computer science as a liberal art.”3. Product People
“The technology crashed and burned at Xerox. Why? I learned more about this with John Sculley later on. What happens is, John came from Pepsico. And they—at most—would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new sized bottle. So if you were a ‘product person’, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So, who influences the success at Pepsico? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for Pepsico that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen at technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”2. Content
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBMhas the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn’t have a clue about the content. In my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage! But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.”1. Culture in the Products
“The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. You say, why is that important? Proportionally spaced fonts come from type-setting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. So I’m saddened—not by Microsoft’s success, I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They have no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that a lot of customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way we’re gonna ratchet up our species is to take the best and spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft’s just McDonald’s.”
Source: pastemagazine.com
What Saved the Dow? Sensible Economic Policies : The New Yorker
Source: newyorker.com
Man was meant to be upright
Man was not meant to spend all day hunched over a dimly lit screen; disturbingly high incidences of obesity, joint pain and fatigue are our bodies’ not-so-subtle ways of saying they want to get up and move around. After piloting a walking desk – a standing desk attached to a treadmill – for a month, I’m convinced they should become the default workstation. Immediately, my daily calorie burn jumped 30.7 percent, and I lost 3 pounds and a percent of body fat in a week. I also experienced less joint pain throughout the day.
-Gregory Ferenstein, Techcruch
Source: TechCrunch
What’s just depressing to me is how—and it’s not just for us, let me generalize it—the moment a company goes public the conversation shifts from how they’re trying to change the world and the product they’re building to how they’re making money. All the coverage around Facebook’s new search tool was, a little bit about the feature and then it gets immediately into how the market is reacting to it. Like, who the fuck cares?
- Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason
Here is an exclusive story from Andrew Mason’s last interview as the CEO of Groupon.
(via fastcompany)
(via fastcompany)
Galaxy Chocolate resurrects Aubrey Hepburn for a recent UK television campaign, and the results are…interesting.
The commercial itself is a throwback (as much as a commercial with a CGI person can be) and could have been a gorgeous little film. But there’s still something not quite right about the CGI Hepburn, from the uncanniness of her eyes and skin to the potentially ethical dilemma of resurrecting a star to help sell chocolate.
In any case, I think the commercial is an interesting look at where marketers might increasingly turn as the technology moves forward. Nostalgia is great for selling, but it gets that much better when you can actually get a nostalgic star to sell for you.
Events like the Oscars and the Super Bowl generate what game theorists call ‘common knowledge, which itself has value… If you thought nobody else was watching, would you really give up your Sunday night for such an event? Perhaps you would, but I would guess you are in the minority. The awareness that others are watching, and that you will be able to communicate with them about what happens, changes the cost-benefit calculus of the potential viewer.
(via newyorker)
By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.
Nielsen Agrees to Expand Definition of TV Viewing (via courtenaybird)
Finally! Some truthful metrics and the inclusion of the changing youth viewing habits
(via rickwebb)
Source: hollywoodreporter.com
The Youthful Social Network
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America.
