Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• Tog (of the famous Tog on Interface) says Apple has lost its way on design: "Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them." ([1] [2])
  
  
• Good advice on adding features to a product: "'Great or Dead', as in, if we can't make a feature great, it should be killed off." ([1])
  
  
• Great data on smartphone and tablet ownership. Sometimes it's hard to remember that only five years ago most people didn't have smartphones. ([1])
  
  
• Advice for anyone thinking of doing a startup. Here's the conclusion: "So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)" ([1])
  
  
• Related, a Dilbert comic on the value of a startup idea ([1])
  
  
• "People might think that human-level AI is close because they think AI is more magical than it actually is" ([1])
  
  
• "VCs hate technical risk. They’re comfortable with market risk, but technical risk is really difficult for them to reconcile." ([1])
  
  
• Google finds eliminating bad advertisements increases long-term revenue, concluding: "A focus on user satisfaction could help to reduce the ad load on the internet at large with long-term neutral, or even positive, business impact." ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Crappy ad experiences are behind the uptick in ad-blocking tools" ([1])
  
  
• On filter bubbles, a new study finds algorithms yield more diversity of content than people choosing news themselves ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Facebook data center fun: "The inclusion of 480 4 TB drives drove the weight to over 1,100 kg, effectively crushing the rubber wheels." ([1])
  
  
• Great data on who uses which social networks ([1])
  
  
• "One of the great mysteries of the tech industry in recent years has been the seeming disinterest of Google, which is now called Alphabet, in competing with Amazon Web Services for corporate customers." ([1])
  
  
• "Maybe part of AWS value prop is the outsourcing of outages: when half the net is offline, any individual down site doesn't look as bad." ([1])
  
  
• "87% of Android devices are vulnerable to attack by malicious apps ... because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates" ([1])
  
  
• Fun maps showing where tourists take photos compared to locals ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Multiple camera lenses, an idea soon coming to mobile phones too? ([1])
  
  
• Another interesting camera technology: "17 different wavelengths ... software analyzes the images and finds ones that are most different from what the naked eye sees, essentially zeroing in on ones that the user is likely to find most revealing" ([1])
  
  
• And another: "Take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera ... to recover the desired background scene as if the visual obstructions were not there" ([1])
  
  
• Useful to know: "Survey results are mostly unaffected when the non-Web respondents are left out." ([1])
  
  
• Surprising finding, meal worms can thrive just eating styrofoam: "the larvae lived as well as those fed with a normal diet (bran) over a period of 1 month" ([1])
  
  
• Autonomous drone for better-than-GoPro filming? ([1] [2])
  
  
• "We see people turning onto, and then driving on, the wrong side of the road a lot ... Drivers do very silly things when they realize they’re about to miss their turn ... Routinely see people weaving in and out of their lanes; we’ve spotted people reading books, and even one [driver] playing a trumpet." ([1])
  
  
• A fun and cool collection of messed up images out of Apple maps. It's almost art. ([1])
  
  
• SMBC comic, also applies to AI ([1])