How to Make a Brilliant Mistake Everyone makes mistakes—every entrepreneur, every business leader, every employee. The mark of a great company isn’t that it avoids failures—that’s impossible—but that it has the wisdom to take full advantage of them. Behavioral economics tells us that we humans are short-sighted by nature. We are wired to seek out evidence that confirms what we already believe and to ignore evidence that contradicts it. On top of that, we are usually overconfident, thinking we know more than we do and underestimating how much we don’t know. Stumbling on Chaos History is full of such brilliant mistakes. But the apparent error led Lorenz to a far more significant discovery. The Lorenz example illustrates the two prime ingredients of a brilliant mistake: Something goes wrong far beyond the range of prior expectation; and New insights emerge whose benefits greatly exceed the mistake’s cost. The brilliant part lies especially in condition (2), but also in recognizing that (1) is necessary for (2) to occur.
GestureWorks - Multitouch Framework - Build Gesture-Driven Apps Multitouch Table and Display Comparison Chart « Ideum Choosing the right multitouch equipment is a critical factor in planning a successful public exhibit. Size, build quality and performance are key factors when evaluating a device that will be used day after day in a busy public environment. Our Multitouch Table and Display Comparison Chart (PDF 600kb) compiles key facts about our MT Series multitouch devices, along with available information on many of our competitor’s multi-touch tables and displays. We hope you will find this a valuable resource when selecting equipment for your next museum exhibit or public display. We pride ourselves on building the best integrated multitouch tables and touch walls for public use. Whether you are comparing the the MT55 Platformtable, MT55 Pro table, or our new MT65 Presentermultitouch wall, you will see that our product performance is second to none in build quality and value. Download the Multitouch Table and Display Comparison chart* (PDF 600kb)
Beware Of Following The Gospel Of Minimalism, Preached By Apple The cleverest trick that Apple has ever pulled isn’t convincing us to pay $500 for a phone or MP3 player, but rather convincing the world that if you want good design, then you have to follow Apple’s template of clean lines and stripped-down details. You can see how that happened: The company has become so synonymous with both good design and minimalism that most people assume those two things are one and the same. They’re not: You can have good design that’s fanciful and wacky; likewise, you can have minimalist design that’s horrible. The fact is, minimalism has been a business strategy for Apple--and maybe their most successful business strategy of all. While just-in-time manufacturing and a stand-alone retailing have earned it hundreds of billions in sales, minimalism built the brand that made their gadgets lust-worthy to begin with. Let’s dissect how that works. Every Gadget Sells The Others To appreciate how unique that is, simply look at some of their competitors.
4 Elements That Make A Good User Experience Into Something Great In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Awards were good. The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. For the most part, they checked the design boxes we have all come to expect. Sure, some seemed to have beamed in from the early days of Netscape, but overall, buttons, pushed, sent you somewhere you thought you might go. So far so good, right? As it happens, some clues about the future of the discipline lay among the category winners in the awards program (of which I was a juror). Building Platforms Best in Show went to "Loop Loop," a musical application for Sifteo, which neatly turns the 1.5" blocks into a tiny interactive music sequencer. Moving Beyond the Screen The People’s Choice award went to "Interaction Cubes" by Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida, from Rio de Janeiro. Seamlessly Integrating Data Making things work might be one responsibility of the interaction designer; making sense of things is another. Empowering the User
Xbox 720 to feature touch-screen remote? | Crave Xbox World magazine published some rather bold claims about Microsoft's upcoming game console in its latest issue. The publication cited sources saying said the Xbox 720 will support a souped-up controller that touts an HD touch screen in addition to traditional analog sticks and buttons. The design is pretty similar to the Nintendo Wii U 's own tablet controller, though the Microsoft version is said to be closer in size to to Sony's PlayStation Vita . According to Xbox World, this Xbox touch-screen controller also doubles as a TV remote control, a Web browser, and a panel for displaying software buttons and game information. To up the overall gaming experience, the Xbox 720 has also been rumored to offer augmented-reality capabilities, directional sound and an improved Kinect accessory. (Source: Crave Asia via CVG)
Malware Developers Tread the Open Source Route Cyber criminals have adopted an open source model with the vision of making development of banking Trojans and other malware far easier than they are today. According to security experts, the new threat emerged after the developers of Citadel had embraced the open source and Software as a Service model, thus facilitating themselves with a more efficient platform to come up with more advanced and deadlier malware. Citadel happens to be one of the latest variant of the notorious Zeus Trojan. Ever since VXers adopted the open source malware approach, many new modified versions of Zeus Trojan have come up over the past few weeks. In a report by security firm Seculert, it has been revealed that the creators of this malicious software have set up communication platforms, through which fellow e-banking defrauders and hackers can contact each other. This new open source adoption has facilitated the development of new versions of malware. [Source: The Register]
13m US Facebook Users Unknowingly Sharing Info with the Public Facebook’s privacy settings can sometimes be a source of confusion for the social network’s millions of users, and in the US, nearly 13 million of them are either unaware of, or simply don’t use, the privacy controls the site offers. In a recent study, Consumer Reports shows exactly why that figure is nothing short of disastrous, and how over-sharing publicly can be used against Facebook users. 4.8 million people have shared details about their plans for a certain day, making it publicly known when their houses are going to be empty, and 4.7 million have ‘liked’ a Facebook page related to health issues or treatments – exposing details that can be used against them by insurance companies. Out of the 150 million Facebook users in the US, almost 9% are sharing personal information, but seem to be completely oblivious of the fact, and the lack of awareness has had its consequences. Consumer Reports offers users 9 tips on how to understand privacy tools: Think before typing.
Starting a New Business Overnight for Survival by Arturo F Munoz Starting a new business for the sake of making quick money to survive from one day to the next is nothing new. Street walkers do it all the time. So do drug dealers. But this is not work. This kind of quick money is no way to survive, because the point of survival is to grow strong to fight another day. So keep your time horizon always before you. Though you need to make money quick, you also need to have an idea of what you will undertake a moment later, after you get that quick money. Quick Money For What? Quick money is not what lies behind starting a new business overnight. Make lots of money quick because you can't help to receive this money quickly as a by-product of executing honest, reliable yet quick money making ideas. What sort of quick money making ideas? He was 17 and the fifth of 7 children. Willing To Share Your Story? Click here to tell us your expectationswith making money with a business. The boy got a mixed bag of education from his parents. "Um.
Five High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs By Bridget Quigg, PayScale.com Imagine the following scenario. Someone asks you how work is going and you say, “Not bad. PayScale.com collects salary and job information from employees around the country and has found that the most enviable gigs are typically knowledge-based and require highly specialized training and education. “Being smart at something really helps you feel happy,” says Katie Bardaro, lead research analyst at PayScale.com. She adds that not having the pressure of being “a cog in the machine alleviates some stress.” Perhaps the promise of a career like this will inspire you to get the degree or additional job training you need to land one of these five high-paying, low-stress jobs. 1. Find optometrist jobs. 2. Find materials scientist jobs. 3. Find economist jobs. 4. Find aeronautical engineer jobs. 5. “I work on projects just as they start or even initiate the project myself,” says Mike Bibik, a senior UX designer in Seattle. Find user experience designer jobs.
Interview: Sherry Turkle, Author of 'Alone Together' As soon as Sherry Turkle arrived at the studio for her Fresh Air interview, she realized she'd forgotten her phone. "I realized I'd left it behind, and I felt a moment of Oh my god ... and I felt it kind of in the pit of my stomach," she tells Terry Gross. That feeling of emotional dependence on digital devices is the focus of Turkle's research. Her book, Alone Together, explores how new technology is changing the way we communicate with one another. "The pull of these devices is so strong, that we've become used to them faster than anyone would have suspected," says Turkle, a clinical psychologist and the founder of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self. When Turkle asked teens and adults why they preferred text messaging over face-to-face conversation, they responded that when you're face to face, "you can't control what you are going to say, and you don't know how long it's going to take or where it could go." Interview Highlights On young children using digital devices