Quick links

What caught my attention lately:

• Jeff Bezos on what innovators need: "A willingness to fail. A willingness to be misunderstood. And maintaining a childlike wonder in the world." ([1])
  
  
• "Agreement feels good -- hey, we get along great! -- but it's not the best for innovation. Why? Because if everybody has the same idea, then you only have one idea." ([1])
  
  
• "It's amazing the amount of difference a cultural intolerance to bullshit can make" ([1])
  
  
• "Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail ... the largest retailer in the history of the world ... [It is] a secret in plain sight." ([1])
  
  
• I love Duolingo and Duolingo's business model: "students receive high-quality, completely free language education, and organizations get translation services powered by the students ... two major publishers are financing our operation by [our students] translating their content." ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Pinterest now valued at $3.8 billion, on a constant valuation ratio of infinity times revenues" ([1])
  
  
• "Microsoft is continuing to fire on all cylinders with its enterprise products and services and has a ways to go on the consumer side" ([1])
  
  
• The "screamingly obvious ... solution ... Offer regular Windows on regular computers, offer TileWorld on tablets" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Apple is trying to maintain premium pricing in a market in which competitors are increasingly selling high-quality iPad alternatives for significantly lower prices." ([1])
  
  
• Patents should only be used "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "The most popular films are not even available through preferred legal channels" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• I do not think it means what you think it means: "No banner ads on the Google homepage or Web search results pages… ever." ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Gesture recognition (like the Kinect, but just using a laptop or tablet's existing webcam) is going to become more common? ([1])
  
  
• Instead of trying to recycle plastic, turn it into oil: "Each barrel of oil costs about $10 to produce" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Very clever idea for moving small robots: "No external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground ... [a] flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube" ([1])
  
  
• Frightening that you can see results this large with electrical stimulation of the brain on an area known to be important for compliance with social norms ([1])
  
  
• Four-legged, all terrain drones coming to a war near you ([1] [2])
  
  
• Curious claim about US education: "When controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools" ([1])
  
  
• Strange, I don't remember this, back in 2001, Jeff Bezos did a weird Taco Bell ad. ([1])
  
  
• A dark but hilarious Halloween comic from SMBC: "I'm expectation of death" ([1])
  
  
• The Onion: "CEO worked his way up from son of CEO" ([1] [2])