Unsurprisingly, the music industry finds itself growing as it allows us to purchase music in the way we want (online, offline, concerts). If the industry thought of itself of a platform and helped people create things like mash-ups and add-ons, just think of the revenue they could achieve.
Secondly, it surprises me that an industry that is worth
Published on
July 29, 2009 in
Science.
Great essay by Kevin Kelly mirroring work in Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. The insights that I hadn’t seen before were that exponential growth curves could be seen as being the summation of multiple traditional S-curves over time, and that the one-to-two year cycle time for doubling was probably based on the yearly planning and doing structure of companies.
It is coming up for time to replace my O2 XDA Orbit 2 / HTC Touch Cruise, which has been a good PDA and an OK to not-so-good phone (but that might have something to do with dropping it every so often).
The front running options that I am considering are (not all out in the UK yet, but most due during August):
- iPhone 3GS (Pros: big app store, lots of developers lovely design, “it just works”. Cons: no multi-tasking, you have to do it Apple’s way, everyone has one now).
- Palm Pre (Pros: keyboard, good design, nice interface, synergy – brings all the contact information from Google, Facebook etc together, can use apps I bought for the Palm 750 all those years ago, touchstone charging – super cool inductive device. Cons: small developer community, proprietary system, little forward look)
- Samsung i7500 with picture (Pros: AMOLED display, Android – growing developer community and tens of new machines on the way, great Google integration – my email, contacts and calendar are all Google. Cons: slightly ugly, D-pad is only 4-way still early for Android). Android-only Wikitude sounds excellent: augmented reality brings GPS, video and Wikipedia together on your phone.
- HTC Touch Pro 2 (Pros: HTC keeps improving Windows Mobile – you very rarely have to see it, full keyboard – useful for doing notes in meetings, excellent speakerphone facilities, can use apps I bought for the XDA. Cons: Windows Mobile, bulky case – has put me off previous versions). Engadget doesn’t find it too bulky.
Things still to check on:
- Editing of Microsoft Office documents
- Battery life
- Bluetooth headset compatibility
Published on
July 29, 2009 in
Reading.
Visualising visualisations. Just extraordinary on the basic and meta levels.
Published on
July 29, 2009 in
Science.
Nice guesstimated video of what’s happened to the continents in the past and the future. Funny how spread out we are compared to most other times. Is that an anthropmorphic thing?
Some nice McK articles on thinking coming out of the credit bubble deflating.
- There are power curves popping up across sectors and event types. We don’t really understand these kind of curves (lots of low impact / intensity events with the occasional shocker), how to predict them or how to work with them effectively. Hindsight allows us to say: “that was a black swan”, but could we tell we were in one while it was happening?
- Companies need to have more flexible approaches to strategy based on an attempt to spot structural shifts effectively (”Rumelt: I think if you have a clear vision of the future ten years hence, you
Published on
July 24, 2009 in
Reading.
Wiffy brought my attention to this article in the Indy. While the “think of something in terms of some other measurement” often is misguided, I found that the statements here did make me think.
[Update: Information aesthetics links to some more in the same vein, and a particularly nice set of simple charts.]
Published on
July 24, 2009 in
Reading.
Funny to see two ex-Wazzers in my email on the same day. The boss, the left-a-long-time-ago.
Published on
July 23, 2009 in
Reading.
Lovely Onion on how not to do PowerPoint. I liked the mini-logo bullet points. Shudder.
Published on
July 23, 2009 in
Science.
I saw one from a plane once. It was extraordinary. Still is even in pictures.