Tim Cook's Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks. Prior to his death on Oct. 5, 2011, Steve Jobs made sure that the elevation of Tim Cook—his longtime head of operations and trusted deputy—to Apple chief executive officer would be drama-free. “He goes, ‘I never want you to ask what I would have done,’” recalls Cook. “‘Just do what’s right.’ He was very clear.” In Cook’s first 16 months on the job, Apple has released next-generation iPhones and iPads and seen its stock price rise 43 percent. Though it hasn’t yet expanded into new product categories (still no Apple TV set), the company has changed in significant ways, largely because of Cook’s calm and steady influence. In his most wide-ranging interview as CEO, Cook explains how Apple works now, talks about the perception that he’s “robotic,” and announces the return of Apple manufacturing to the U.S.
Bloomberg Businessweek: How has Apple changed since Oct. 5, 2011? In creating these great products we focus on enriching people’s lives—a higher cause for the product. Sean_obrien : Watching the debate on Xbox... 3 ideas you should steal from HubSpot. I’ve been following Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups blog for years and I remember when he announced HubSpot, the company he was starting. I’ve been fascinated to watch it grow and grow, so I was excited when I got to visit their offices a few months ago. Just after my visit they closed a Series D funding round for $32 million from Sequoia, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com, but despite its success almost nobody in the technology world has heard of HubSpot.
I blame the combination of a location in Boston and a mainstream customer-base of small business owners for the lack of recognition. It’s a shame because there’s a lot to learn from their technology and process — they’ve solved some hard problems in thought-provoking ways. People are fascinated by mirrors There’s a good chance you’ve used their Twitter Grader tool, and its popularity shows one of the secrets to HubSpot’s success. You should kill unicorns and rainbows with science User education is painful but powerful Related: iOS5 split keyboard in use - tehkr. Sean O'Brien: A tweet of a tweet from iO... The Blood Test Gets a Makeover | Magazine. Photo: Mitchell Feinberg The blood test is, when you think about it, a remarkable thing. With the prick of a needle, the molecules coursing through your veins can be extracted, centrifuged, and translated into a stream of digits, units, and acronyms.
Blood becomes data, and in these numbers lies knowledge about your current health, your risks for disease, and your potential response to treatment. Of course, you yourself would have a hard time deciphering any of this. The typical blood test report is an exercise in obfuscation, a document that needs to be translated by a lab technician or physician, and that’s if you somehow manage to see a copy of your results. But lab reports don’t have to be unintelligible. On the next few pages, Wired has given the lab report a makeover. It’s your body. Some advice from Jeff Bezos by Jason Fried of 37signals. The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows. A survey released this week by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and Life Project shed light on the social side of the Internet. The results offered insight into the differences between the connected and the disconnected, revealing that Internet users are more likely to be active participants, with some 80 percent of Internet users participating in groups, compared with 56 percent of non-Internet users.
These findings confirm the impact of the the Internet on collective action, observed Beth Noveck, NYU law professor and former deputy CTO for open government at the White House. “Internet users are more active participants in groups and are more likely to feel pride and a sense of accomplishment.” Perhaps we are all not, as Robert D. Putnam suggested, relegated to “bowling alone.” “Technology may not be the corrosive force that Putnam imagined in American life,” wrote Jared Keller in The Atlantic. The idea of online vs. off-line, and that there’s a “place” called cyberspace. Why Websites Suck : The World. Beyond Hawaiian-Shirt Friday: Groupon, Hulu Inspire Employee Innovation With Radical Trust. Inside the multi-million dollar video streaming giant, Hulu, CEO Jason Kilar has gone to extraordinary lengths to subvert his own power: he has no office, has a makeshift desk partly built from empty boxes, and personally takes each new hire out to lunch to learn what he or she thinks the company can do better.
"You will not attract and retain the world's best builders in a command-and-control environment," Kilar tells Fast Company. Last weekend, Hulu and fellow Internet prodigy, Groupon, were honored at the WorldBlu Live conference for their unusually strong commitment to worker empowerment. We sat down with these web successes to understand the driving philosophy, small-team orientation, and straight-up weird employee morale boosters that lie at the foundation of their innovative products.
Part Philosophy, Part Intuition "We assume that people are fundamentally good and people are responsible adults," says Groupon CEO Andrew Mason. Serious About Silliness You don't BS friends. Why Don’t We Video Chat More Often? Video Calls Are Common In Star Trek - So Why Don't We Use Them In The Real World? One of the most common staples of any futuristic movie or book has always been the video (or even holographic) phone call.
From Back to the Future to Star Trek, it seems as though people in the future are always chatting it up in style. So why is it then, that most of us use video chat so rarely today? Ten years ago if someone had told you that in 2011 everyone would have a webcam in their home or in their pocket, and that the cost of video chat was going to be zero, how many of us would have predicted that people still wouldn’t use it? I certainly would not have predicted such an outcome, yet this is exactly what has happened. A recent report from the Pew Research Center documents just how little video chat is used. In a quick search on Dell.com, I was unable to find a single laptop for sale that didn’t come with a built-in webcam. So what’s going on here? Do I have to look at you? Online Identity Isn’t a Transaction — It’s a Feeling: Tech News and Analysis « Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams noted in a blog post this weekend that online identity is one of the thorniest issues any web-based service has to deal with — in part because the word “identity” means a number of different things.
Williams tried to parse the term’s various meanings in his post, including authentication, reputation and personalization. But one thing he doesn’t really grapple with is that what we mean by “our identity” can change depending on where we are and what we’re doing, and that may be the most difficult problem of all to solve. The post — one of the first the former Twitter executive has written on his personal blog in almost two years — breaks down what Williams calls the “Five Easy Pieces of Online Identity,” something he and Twitter CTO Greg Pass came up with to help them understand the idea. These pieces include: Authentication. Boyd has a point. Williams is right about one thing: Identity is “still a messy problem.” Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles".
The Great Ephemeralization | Bottom-up. I recently had the pleasure of reading The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen’s excellent “Kindle Single” about the future of innovation and economic growth. Cowen makes the case that, contrary to the right-of-center conventional wisdom, the American economy is in the midst of a decades-long period of mediocre economic growth. Previous generations of Americans enjoyed an abundance of “low-hanging fruit”—cheap land, technological breakthroughs like electricity and the internal combustion engine, rising levels of education, an end to racial and gender discrimination—that allowed rapidly increasing living standards with relatively little effort.
But now, he says, the orchard is getting bare. Since the 1970s, big innovations have been few and far between, and this explains the comparatively slow rate of GDP growth in recent decades. The obvious response is to point to Silicon Valley, where there’s clearly a lot of innovation going on. Today these magic wands exist. We Don’t Need No Frickin Architects « Systems Thinking, Lean and Kanban. “We Don’t Need No Frickin Architects” I’ve lost count the number of times that I have heard this statement (or some kind of derivative) during my career when mixing with Agilistas.
The reasoning behind these statements is that architects are either defunct in the agile world, or that they need to roll their sleeves up and relearn to code alongside others in a delivery team. It makes no sense to over-egg the pudding. I understand the reasoning, but as a Systems Thinker it is my belief that there is a need for architects.
Lets listen to what Dr Russell Ackoff, a Systems Thinking pioneer and organisational theorist, has to say on the subject. A system has 3 properties:Each part of the system can affect the behaviour or the properties of the whole. In the above quote Ackoff is referring to the Organisation as a System, he is not referring to technology based systems. As an Agile practitioner this is all good by my book, and makes sense to me. But the Systems Thinker in me thinks differently. All Hail The Cord Cutters: Tech News « It was almost four years ago when we decided it was time to launch our online video blog, NewTeeVee. At the time, I wondered to myself how I could best understand the ongoing broadband-based video revolution in a way that would give me a window into the future – so I decided to do what was unthinkable at the time: I called Comcast and asked them to turn off my cable TV.
And remember, these were the glory days of The Sopranos and Weeds, so it was a major sacrifice. Nevertheless, my broadband sources were telling me that bandwidth-to-the-home was on an upswing and was seeking a killer app — and that video was most likely it. Large media companies were demonizing devices like Slingbox and bemoaning YouTube. These were signs that the big shift was about to happen. My cord-cutting adventure was helped along by a handful of services, which emerged as early players in the world of web video: We want to watch what we want, when we want, where we want, and discover the content how we want. While Yelping, I was presented with this great... - tehkr. Canvas continues innovative use of game mechanics - with a shop - tehkr.
Barak Hachamov: What Google “Contextual Di... RSW/US Survey Finds That Digital-Only Shops Must Diversify to Stay Relevant. Being digital alone won't cut it anymore. Digital shops that don't diversify their offerings face the same creeping irrelevance as traditional agencies that give lip service to digital, according to marketing executives polled in a new survey from RSW/US. More than two-thirds of the 174 marketing executives polled (67 percent) said digital shops need to offer more traditional services to remain relevant, while just a third thought digital-only firms could survive long term.
"The point of differentiation that digital firms have currently in being expert in that space is going to diminish, and we’re going to be left with a lot of agencies that do digital," said Mark Sneider, president of RSW/US, a consultancy in Cincinnati. "There are going to be fewer and fewer clients looking for digital-only firms. " The finding also underscores a desire among some marketers to integrate their business under one roof. Why Is Email the Prize in the Facebook-Google Battle? | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD. Google and Facebook may act like toddlers fighting over a toy, but there is a lot more going on in their recent too-public spat about user emails.
Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen. But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here.
As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Wikileaks and the Long Haul. Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks. Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state.
Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities. On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. And so we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. As Tom Slee puts it, “Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’
I don’t think such a law should pass. What Smart TVs Need to Succeed. The Internet and TV are finally converging, in a way consumers seem to be responding to. Wilfred Martis, Intel 's GM of consumer electronics in the digital home group, says that while we've heard this before, it's different this time. We agree. Intel is trying to brand smart TVs as something different from Internet-connected TVs - poised to be a hot item this holiday season - that have web-based features but fall short of being smart. In Intel's world, Martis says, a smart TV must meet the following three pillars: "To do that, you need a browser. " This means a smart TV shouldn't be restricted by the apps available to run on it. It should be able to grab any content that lives on the web. Google TV happens to use Intel's smart TV technology and Atom processor. Martis emphasized that the architecture should be easy for app developers to use so apps would be plentiful.
Martis says an app store like Apple ’s could be the key to the growth of smart TVs. Understanding the Language of Innovation - H. James Wilson - Research. By H. James Wilson | 9:45 AM April 7, 2011 We all know innovation has its own language conventions, rich with revolutions, evolutions, ecosystems, and more. This may seem like a harmless dialect that simply reflects the nature of the work. Innovators, after all, are trying to communicate the promise of something that may not exist yet, and sometimes that requires some optimistic adornment. But maybe the metaphors and hyperbole signal something more important. Maybe the language is used because of a lack of quantitative data, or the fact an idea isn’t as completely formed as it needs to be. And if we could recognize that, we could use these communication tools only when they’re effective (or, put a better way, never when they’re not effective).
We wanted to learn more. We were particularly interested in how respondents talk about innovative ideas in the absence of quantitative market or company data, which was the case in this exercise. Recognize how you are using metaphor. H.