Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• Videos showing Windows 8 is horribly painful for most people, looks likely to be another Windows Vista-like flop. Really worth watching the videos or trying it yourself (videos [1] [2], try it [1] [2])
  
  
• "38% of the ads are never in view to a user" and another 12% "of the ads are in view for less than 0.5 seconds" ([1])
  
  
• "Many more ads" are coming on Facebook, "a lot more advertising ... [on] Facebook's traditionally clean interface." Could this mean Facebook is having revenue trouble already? ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Not only is the iPhone over half of Apple's revenue, it is more than 70% of their profits. Apple really is a mobile phone manufacturer with a few other businesses attached. ([1])
  
  
• Coming soon, a "voice-activated assistant that remembers everything you say ... systems that are more conversational, that have the ability to ask more sophisticated followup questions and adapt to the individual ... [with] short-term and long-term memory." ([1])
  
  
• "Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them." ([1])
  
  
• "The best way to get the most out of engineers is to surround them with other great engineers." ([1])
  
  
• "It’s positively de-motivating to work for a company where your job is just to shut up and take orders. In tech startup land, we all understand instinctively that we have to hire super smart people, but we forget that we then have to organize the workforce so that those people can use their brains." ([1])
  
  
• Programmers want to learn new skills and technology while working in a team of people they respect, and over 90% of programmers said they are willing to take a lower paying job to get that. ([1])
  
  
• Netflix's streaming catalog continues to deteriorate, is now down to only 853 good movies, of which only 155 were released within the last five years ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "This class is about setting you on the path to developing good taste as a programmer" (free, from Udacity, taught by Googler and AI guru Peter Norvig, starts Apr 16) ([1])
  
  
• Could this be the business model for Udacity? Offer free classes online, then send companies candidates pre-screened for machine learning programming ability? ([1] [2])
  
  
• If my blog is any indication, the only RSS feeder still being used is Google Reader. Are all others dead now? ([1])
  
  
• Huge and wide open opportunity in personalized advertising for online news. Amazes me Yahoo and Amazon haven't gone after this, and that Google hasn't done a better job going after it. ([1])
  
  
• Paper with fascinating statistics on Groupon and other daily deal sites. Most dramatic, it costs restaurants half a star in their Yelp rating if they offer Groupon deals. ([1])