A very interesting retrospective look at a Rooling Stones interview Steve Jobs gave back in 2003 regarding the future of digital music and Apple’s role in that industry, only eight months after having opened the iTunes Music Store:
The metrics on what portion of Apple’s revenue consists of iPhone sales versus Mac sales (39% to 30%) were very interesting.
I also really thought Jobs’s comments on copyright was spot on: how maintaining intellectual property rights is not only important for the economy and the future of innovation, but that it when it becomes so easy to steal, not having an equally easy legal alternative leads to the corrosion of consumers’ character.
A collection of very well written articles looking back at the early days of Macintosh and the significance of Apple (through their first heyday, their almost-demise, and their resurgence) over the past 25 years.
This is the first time I’ve seen something that made me feel like I could see the way technology and data connect us together since NASA published it’s “Earthlights” image as their Photo of the Day on November 21, 2000:
I finally created a Twitter account the other day, but since I have a pretty dumb phone, using Twitter isn’t much of an experience for me yet. I get most of my microblogging satisfaction from Facebook at this juncture. But, the Twitter phenomenon really intrigues me as a point of social moment and also as an evolution of business and marketing. I’ve been reading a lot about it, and it really fascinates me.
Those who know me well know that I’m a fan of the work of Edward Tufte (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Yale University Professor Emeritus of Information Design, among other things). So, seeing inventive ways of telling a story with data always excites me. In watching this short video tracing Twitter “tweets” through the day preceding, of, and after President Obama’s Inauguration, where the tweets have the word “inauguration” in a positive context, I feel like I’m seeing a storytelling technique of such genius as I’ve never seen before. Now, certainly this is a video, meaning that the display of the information incorporates the dimension of time as a primary component of the display, so comparing it to amazing, static demonstrations of displaying quantitative information is not apples to apples. But nonetheless, I am floored by the story this simple display tells. I feel like the Information Age has truly arrived.
A brief while after the event itself took place, we can visualise the social consciousness of a nation and a world collectively focusing on the event and its significance. Talk about Collective Soul. I’m a staunch Individualist, but this captures the essence of Obama’s vision of people investing in something larger than themselves in an aptly poetic way.
This video is hosted at Flowing Data, a site dedicated to the visualisation of data. Here’s an excellent article on what they consider to be “the best of” that field for last year.
Since Xbox 360 revamped its interface on November 18 and, in the process, introduced Netflix live streaming to the lsit of available online services, I’ve been watching a good deal of Netflix streaming content. Before the introduction of the service to Xbox 360, I had been thinking of dropping $100 on the Roku Netflix set-top box. My friend, Greg, got one over the past few weeks and has good things to say about it. Then I read that some TVs and Blue-Ray players are coming equipped with the service.
So many options out there… who else but Engadget would take them all and do a comprehensive review of the varous devices, their interfaces, and their audio quality?
Great video with slick monotone vector-based animation providing a fairly comprehensive history of the Internet infrastructure:
I’ve always loved understanding the history of staple institutions that have had a huge impact on the present but which we currently take for granted. Back in 1999, I read a couple of books about the development of the personal computer industry. Accidental Empires was my favourite because it touched on the seminal works of so many influential companies (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Xerox PARC), although Apple Confidential was a little saucier.
I love reading about old microchips and processor speeds and the release of products (or even advertising) that revolutionised the word; the humble beginnings that begat monumental ahievement. Looking back with hindsight, we think of those early contemporaries and the feats the took on, the journeys on which they would embark. I chuckle smugly, thinking, if those folks only knew what they were starting. But then again, I think that they must have. I don’t believe it was really all that accidental.
Any kind of “Early Days” retrospective I find interesting. This short video is no exception. It’s extremely well produced and thorough in its facts. The only problem with it is where it stopped. It ended with the existence of the infrastructure, but there are so many other stories that can be told: details on how the Internet was first used by academic institutions, bulletin board systems, and then later pay services; then the rise of ISPs, and then the web; the introduction of companies like Netscape, Yahoo, Google, the dot-com boom; and then the subsequent true usefulness of all this technology culminating into a social phenomenon, the world connected–Wikipedia, YouTube, social networking, etc.
There’s so much to this story, and I can only imagine how informative and engaging it would be if presented by this visual story teller. Well done.
