$25 Raspberry Pi computer is as small as a credit card, will launch next month
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is preparing to launch a new ultra-affordable Linux-powered computer next month that is the size of a credit card. It’s so affordable, in fact, that it will cost just $25 or $35, depending on how much RAM the buyer requires. In an interview with Edge, Raspberry Pi Foundation head David Braben said, despite the size and low cost, the Raspberry Pi computer is powerful enough to run games such as
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Predictions For 2012 – Add Yours!
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment – Buddha.
It’s that time of year, time to predict what’s going to happen. For me, prediction is just talking about stuff I’m doing now that’s too out there to be interesting to more than a few people. Five and 10 year predictions are fun, but I’m going to stick to
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Every 60 seconds: Apple sells 925 iPhones, 2 million people watch online porn, more
Apple sold 925 iPhone 4S handsets each minute during the device’s debut weekend, and it sells 81 iPads every 60 seconds on average. Research In Motion sells 103 BlackBerry phones, Amazon sells 18 Kindle Fire tablets and Microsoft sells 11 Xbox 360 consoles every minute. More than 700 computers are purchased around the world every 60 seconds, and 232 of them are infected by malware. That malware stat…
Arduino-Controlled CheerLight
CheerLights is a project whereby lights the world over respond to social media like Twitter hash tags, linking the real world to the online world. Pete Prodoehl created his own CheerLight with a ShiftBrite module and Seeduino.
The Scholium Project
The idea of switching careers in mid-life may seem far-fetched for most, but for philosophy professor Abe Schoener this aspiration became a reality when he decided to turn the tables in 1998 and become a student of viticulture. Taking sabbatical from St. John’s College, Schoener headed west where he enrolled as an intern at
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how big is it?
19 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment
I feel like something becomes blog post worthy fodder when I’ve heard or thought about it for the 100th time.
In a meeting last week I was talking about an opportunity with a new start-up to a CPG client and they asked, “Well, how big is it?” and some bell went off in my head signaling that sentiment’s 100th utterance.
Brands like to buy big audiences. Buying big audiences is just easier to manage than courting lots of small groups, especially for a brand team member that’s probably juggling more responsibilities than they reasonably should. It’s also easier to expand the top of the funnel (by buying mass awareness) than it is to make the product better.
Louder advertising is easier to buy than better marketing. We have to change that.
Clients should be courting smaller communities, crowds, and audiences on the web. With smaller groups you get exponentially greater intimacy. You can negotiate truly bespoke partnerships. And you can even garner some free PR just for doing something novel. Creatively, you get to experiment with the brand in a new way. And you gain access to influential early adopters (the kind of people that glom on to new start-ups) who are about a thousand times more likely to talk about your brand’s partnership than the light web user who just ignored your banner ad on espn.com.
The opportunities most often outweigh any risks – but they rarely outweigh the cognitive and administrative costs.
That’s why agencies have to step up and become the connective tissue between the brand and the emerging tech scene. Some are definitely already doing this and pretty soon it will just be a parity product for any digital team worth a damn.
Moreover, we have to become masters of small. Bets, projects, audiences, and communities. We have to become better at tracking small before it becomes big, better at getting to small (projects) faster, and better at spinning smaller plates concurrently. We have to because our clients won’t or don’t have the authority to refocus.
Clients can call up a media department and ask for 5 million eyeballs like it’s a Happy Meal. Most of the time the buy is produced a bit like the meat in a Happy Meal, too.
We have to make small that easy.
Bonus points: work for clients that actually spend time checking out new stuff on the web, educate your clients about emerging tools, create a measurement system that rewards more than box filling, take partnerships out of media’s realm and make it a creative assignment, be good enough, and persistent enough, to influence product not just ads.
what is a digital strategy?
01 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 15 comments
I was flipping through Ana’s new deck on digital strategy, re-stumbled onto Mike’s Tenets of Digital Strategy and decided to take a crack at defining digital strategy, as pithily as possible, for myself.
Here goes …
Thoughts?
It’s funny how I’ve been doing this for at least the last six years and I’ve never tried to define it.
help create the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community
23 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 5 comments
it’s probably best to view this fullscreen
I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking around improving this site and what my readers (that’s you!) actually need from a site like this. The document above goes into depth about my ideas. I’ve taken inspiration from sites like PSFK and Buzzfeed, and from people like Noah Brier.
I’d love to hear reactions and suggestions. Moreover, I’m interested in finding people that want to bring this to life with me. Editors, writers, and developers that want to own part of this and dedicate their time. My time is very limited, especially now that I’m back writing on the book, so in order to move forward I have to find a group of passionate people that want to build this together from scratch.
Behind the ideas are some trends or concerns I have about the state of publishing:
- RSS is the new QR Code – With Google Reader killing the community aspect of their product, I worry that the super user group inside Reader is scrambling like I am to find a new way to source content, new ways that involve algorithms like Percolate that sort content and not RSS readers that merely present it. Also, my site has taken a traffic hit since Reader lost its community. I see RSS still being functionally very useful, but less and less of a consumer facing technology.
- We’re Building Tools of Distraction – Flow content, the rush of ephemera on sites like Buzzfeed, is more and more the norm across the web for brands and publishers. We’re reinforcing a shallow attention span and we’re not innovating on long-form pieces with the same creative effort.
- Archives are Graveyards – When I consulted for CNN, I was interested in making their archive of content more useful to readers and the content more valuable to the brand. Think about it, in the way most sites work (in reverse chronological order), content has a shelf life of a few minutes. The efforts of editors and writers are worth more than that and every publisher should be experimenting with making their archives more useful and valuable. I’m calling my idea the Inspiration Board, but it’s just one possible outcome for content.
In essence, I’m proposing a massively collaborative project, powered by a small community. Are you interested in joining our little cabal of editors, writers, designers, and developers? If so, hit me with a comment or shoot me an email.
would you fund a new site for creative inspiration?
06 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 3 comments
I’ve been blogging here since July 2008 and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to amass a small group of dedicated, kind, and interested readers. I attribute my small measure of success to this blog’s format: a mix of daily inspiration and the occasional deep dive on a wide range of intellectual pursuits. Well, I attribute 30% (roughly) to the format, 60% to the people around me both physically and online, and 10% to the silly images.
I really enjoy blogging, for the mental exercise, for the immediate feedback, and for the value of amassing interesting content close at hand. At the core of everything I do here, I believe that creativity needs both a mix of highly divergent beauty and deeply applied thinking.
Lately I’ve been considering scaling the site to make it more valuable to the creative community at-large. If I do it, I want to build the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community. Doing this would require some investment into the site, in the form of design, development, and most importantly new editorial blood (that could generate and curate a wide range of topics).
I’ve already developed a pretty robust vision for the site and how it would work. Just like this site, I see a strong emphasis on daily doses of interesting (but far wider topics and much more content) and then longer-form, incredibly valuable and deep pieces of analytical or logical reasoning. No middle ground, whatsoever. But even more critically, I see a set of tools that would mine our content to create valuable tools to be used in the creative process. I don’t just want to create another content portal, or an aggregator, I want to take the site to a new, functional, level.
But.
I’m curious if you feel that something like this is actually missing. If I created a Kickstarter project for this, would you consider funding it?
Also.
If I’m actually going to pull this off, I need this to be a project owned and obsessed over by more people than myself. I’m less interested in owning ideas these days. I’m more interested in making them happen. Are you a blogger or editor interested in a new project that you could be a part-owner in? Are you a development team looking for part ownership in a platform that you can use as a test bed for your best ideas and a powerful marketing tool to reach new clients? If I do Kickstart the site, I aim to be able to actually pay folks, but I’m not sure it will be full wages. To even consider it, you’ll probably have to know me and trust me that we’ll make it awesome together.
Quite premature, but in terms of business models, I don’t want to build another Huffington Post. Revenue on the back of free labor. I want to build a worker’s cooperative, where those that create/aggregate content and develop the site are invested in the success of the business. Generating revenue off content is no easy feat, though. It’s actually pretty rare. But I think there are opportunities beyond display; opportunities in our tools and thought leadership (conferences, workshops, videos, etc.).
Right now I’m just interested in feedback. Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.
