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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on November 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

  • Blame the Equipment – Thom Hogan

    Pretty much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for photography

    tags: photography lens camera equipment

  • How to Test a Lens

    Very comprehensive for sure, though I doubt the average user will be able to perform most of them.

    tags: photography test lens

  • The Online Photographer: The Case Against Zooms

    A well elucidated case against relying entirely on zoom lenses. Touches upon the importance of learning to visualize.

    tags: photography zoom lenses prime

  • Netapedia: Know your neta

    An interesting site containing information on Indian politicians. Includes quite a lot of details like assets, status etc. Should be pretty useful come election time.
    It’s an initiative by a bunch of IITB students.

    tags: knowledge politics politicians information

  • Apple’s App Store shame | ZDNet

    I don’t suppose Steve Jobs envisioned that Apple would be making money (the 30% App store cut) through sales of Smurfberries & barrels of cash & the likes…

    tags: apple app store profits marketing

  • A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

    A very detailed argument that the current touch interfaces are just an intermediate phase before we move on to more tactile systems that make better use of our capabilities:
    “With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?”

    tags: design touchscreen touch interaction

  • Steve Jobs « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry

    A nice piece on Steve Jobs, and the anecdote on how close he was to meeting Tim Berners-Lee and his demo of what became the www (it was apparently written on a NeXt machine) makes you wonder “what if” that meeting had happened…

    tags: apple stevejobs internet

  • Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers – Businessweek

    Supply chain is an area where Apple & Amazon have really capitalized & seem to share similarities.

    tags: apple supplychain logistics operations

  • File:Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre.jpg – Wikipedia

    “The first picture of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show. Note that the image is a mirror image.”

    tags: wikipedia photo history

  • The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

    The “social” bit of the argument is particularly interesting:
    “You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.”

    tags: social graph design

    • You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
    • It is admittedly annoying to have to re-follow people every time you sign up for something, but it also forces the authors to make the site appealing enough to get us over that hurdle.
    • My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

  • Uncanny valley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

    tags: technology robot wikipedia science psychology

    • The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics[1] and 3D computer animation,[2][3] which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

  • Steven Poole: Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?

    Two simple laws to remember:
    “If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.”
    “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”
    And, as Apple showed with its MobileMe to iCloud transition, your data may not be safe even if you pay for the service. So, keep your expectations in check – “The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours.”

    tags: Google data social-networks ownership facebook apple cloud

    • If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold
    • The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours.
    • Anyone who thinks Apple is going to be more careful about or respectful of its users’ stuff in the new “free” service is a dribble-dreaming iTard.
    • If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.

  • I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages — Scobleizer

    It’s really ironic that Google opted to launch one of their mass products minus the “beta” tag when it was clearly incomplete and evolving, and draw so much of criticism.
    On the other hand, Apple launched a mass beta (Siri) that everyone’s excited about. How times change…

    tags: Google products social-networks brands pages beta

  • AB’s Reflections

    Facebook page for the blog. Check it out & do post your feedback.

    tags: facebook pages blog

  • The One Chart You Need To See To Understand Mobile

    All very good, but it is a very narrow view based solely on the US. The real so called Blue Ocean is actually in the developing markets where the number of mobile phone users makes the US market pale in comparison. That would be the actual chart that you need to understand.

    tags: chart mobile apple Google android ios market

  • the understatement: Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

    Makes for pretty sad reading, and the situation with Android updates outside of the US is even worse. I share the exact sentiments with my Galaxy S i9003 that’s still stuck on Froyo 2.2

    tags: android Google update software support history

  • Virtual Router – Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2

    “Virtual Router turns any Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 Computer into a Wifi Hot Spot using Windows 7′s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology.”

    tags: windows7 software wifi utility

  • Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker

    Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs, based in particular on Walter Isaacson’s biography. Offers a very different view of Jobs – was he a visionary or a tweaker?

    tags: stevejobs gladwell apple biography genius

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on November 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

  • 12 Myths Every Photographer Should Know

    Actually has 11 myths, but does explore pretty common ones and offers explanations for each

    tags: myths photography

  • Cheap Android Phones Could Cost Telcos Billions in Repairs | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

    Highlights the perils of android being an open platform with very little control over the hardware & end user experience. And it’s not just the users getting affected in this case.

    tags: android Google issues fragmentation repair

    • Platform fragmentation: It’s shorthand for saying that multiple devices — all boasting different internal components and screen sizes — are loaded with a wide variety of OS versions. In the world of Android phones, all this variance from device to device can cause problems for engineers who must perfectly match hardware builds to software builds. In the end, consumers are sometimes faced with hardware that doesn’t seem to work.
    • That means pushing out lots of updates to phones that may not be ready.
    • When another Android update is released the phone manufacturer must retool its custom UI in order to make the new OS work.

  • Android Market Apps Known Issues

    Makes for pretty sad reading for an OS that is supposed to be at version 4.0. Problems aplenty for both users & app developers.

    tags: android apps market issues bugs Google

  • Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

    The article (by Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004) is almost 2 years old, but just as relevant after the news of the demise of the Courier tablet. Also makes you wonder whether Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on software is becoming its Achilles heel.

    tags: nytimes innovation microsoft design politics

    • As the fellow who tried (and largely failed) to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago, I could say this is because the company placed too much faith in people like me.
    • Its marketing has been inept for years
    • When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
    • Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware.
    • Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.

  • Amazon Launching E-Book Lending Library – WSJ.com

    Nowhere close to the physical lending model yet…
    “Moreover, Amazon will restrict borrowers to one title at a time, one per month. Borrowers can keep a book for as long as they like, but when they borrow a new title, the previously borrowed book automatically disappears from their device.”

    tags: amazon library books lending ecommerce

  • ifttt / Post diigo bookmarks to wordpress

    Posts your public bookmarks on diigo to wordpress along with your description & tags.
    ifttt (If this then that) is a handy internet service that lets you mashup different online services and create tasks for them.

    tags: diigo bookmarks wordpress ifttt

  • ifttt / Selective diigo bookmarks to wordpress

    Posts diigo bookmarks tagged with “forblog” (can be changed to other tags) to wordpress
    Also, if you are an internet poweruser, check out the ifttt service that allows you to mashup different online services ranging from facebook to flickr

    tags: bookmarks wordpress diigo ifttt

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on October 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on October 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on October 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on October 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on September 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on September 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

  • Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a Tablet | Epicenter | Wired.com

    Bottom line is that you need a strong business model backing your products. Apple has one, and Amazon is just pushing into the new space, while Google is still not sure what to do.

    tags: amazon tablet ecommerce

  • Was Marx Right? – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

    So, Marx had something in his diagnosis of capitalism. Now, if we could only find a suitable prescription for the economy.

    tags: socialism capitalism politics economics communism marx

    • America’s largest private employer is Walmart. America’s second largest employer is McDonald’s
    • while Marx’s prescriptions were poor, perhaps, if we’re prepared to think subtly, it’s worthwhile separating his diagnoses from them

  • Coming to terms – WWW.THEDAILY.COM

    Proposed redesign of the iTunes agreement. One aspect that Apple has not been able to simplify thus far.

    tags: apple agreements design

  • What makes someone leave a website? [Infographic]

    Nice bunch of tips to consider for your website design

    tags: infographic design webdesign

  • Capitalism is dead! – Our weekly editorial cartoon: KAL’s cartoon | The Economist

    More relevant now than ever before

    tags: cartoon economist capitalism

  • Jobs Will Follow a Strengthening of the Middle Class – NYTimes.com

    Communism didn’t work that well, and neither does unrestrained capitalism it seems…
    The infographic on top is particularly enlightening

    tags: jobs nytimes economics usa depression

    • Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits.
    • Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread.
    • Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.

  • ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up

    It makes you wonder how startups manage to even survive, much less grow to become Apples, Microsofts & Googles, once such “mangers” come into the picture.

    tags: startup entrepreneurship

    • What really sent him over the edge, as far as I can tell, was when I related my  response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to  watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied  ”like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and  are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off”).

  • Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker

    All the tools do is to make the weak ties more accessible, but that’s not going to lead to too many revolutions outside of slacktivism & clicktivism. Unless of course, the internet is turned off. That would be the real stimulus to get people off the armchair.
    Time to revisit the high context & low context culture definitions too

    tags: activism socialmedia facebook gladwell

    • Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
    • In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.
    • “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
    • Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
    • The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life
    • By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.
    • In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.
    • No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
    • Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.
    • A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

  • Sheeple – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Are we people or “sheeple”?

    tags: activism culture wikipedia language people

  • Slacktivism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    And so we have a proper definition & wikipedia page for it

    tags: activism socialmedia culture language wikipedia

    • posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change
    • the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair

  • Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth – Adrian Slywotzky – Harvard Business Review

    It’s not enough to just have a vision & supreme taste. You need to be able to really refine them & make them a reality.

    tags: apple stevejobs innovation design

    • But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.
    • And, oh, the marketing: brilliant marketing. No one is better at creating attention than Apple. But attention without fulfillment is a straw fire. The magicians say “Presto!” and we gasp in delight. But they deflect our attention from the back-breaking labor that goes into assuring a perfect customer experience, hundreds of times a day, at 300 stores around the world, and countless conversations on the phone.
    • Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple has done 10 times the amount of relevant homework of most companies — internal competitions, supply chain training, endless deal-making, endless recruiting, training, and generating and sustaining employee excitement that you just can’t fake.

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Interesting links (weekly)

Posted on September 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

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Interesting links for the week (weekly)

Posted on August 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

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