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Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma - James Allworth

Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma - James Allworth

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? | NeuroTribes Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Neurotribes, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher. One reason I was looking forward to reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs was my hope that, as a sharp-eyed reporter, Isaacson would probe to the heart of what one of the few entrepreneurs who really deserved the term “visionary” learned from Buddhism. By now, everyone knows the stories of how the future founder of Apple dropped acid, went to India on a quest for spiritual insight, met a laughing Hindu holy man who took a straight razor to his unkempt hair, and was married in a Zen ceremony to Laurene Powell in 1991. Isaacson does a fine job of showing how Jobs’ engagement with Buddhism was more than just a lotus-scented footnote to a brilliant Silicon Valley career. Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Flowers at Tassajara. Bodhidharma.

So This is Openness, Google X, and What Have You Done? You probably recall the stories and, well, I may have even written one or two of them, including the requisite quotes from Google spokespersons. They were about the spirit of innovation at Google Labs, and whether or not the model of trying a plethora of new projects simultaneously and let Darwin decide the victor, was a smart way to construct a viable service. The lessons, as Google would teach them, went something like this: There are many different ways to build great products, and there's no way to know in advance which way is the best. Whenever possible, Google leans toward "openness," which involves as many of its target consumers as possible... wait a minute. What am I doing babbling on about it, when I can let Google's own history speak on its own behalf? Survival of the fittest An example of top-down innovation at Google is its Translate technology. The core business of the company, the Google engineers wrote, is innovation. It's a small world after all... Flatland

Inspirational Quote From Steve Jobs Social Login Offers New ROI from Social Media - Larry Drebes In the last few years, most companies have realized that social media is more than just the latest fad in communicating to the under-30 demographic, and is instead a generator of real dollars and cents value for their businesses. Fewer companies, however, are aware of the value of a new technology called “social login,” which allows visitors to a website to log in using their Facebook, Google, Twitter, or other social media account rather than having to register a new one. In fact, social login can be a huge marketing “force multiplier” in every business’s two core tasks: acquiring customers, and selling them products and services. Take customer acquisition. Yet as Blue Research found during a study we commissioned (and as the trade journal eMarketer and other news sites reported earlier this year) three out of every four Internet users leave a website rather than take the trouble to register a new account. This obviously generates a lot of word-of-mouth referrals.

An incredible 50 minute Steve Jobs interview you probably haven’t seen (including out-takes) From the Series Machine That Changed the World, The Program Paperback Computer. Via Openvault. Another ‘lost interview’ is hitting movie theaters in a few weeks… A lost 70-minute interview from 1995, featuring Steve Jobs and journalist Robert Cringley, has just reappeared and will be shown in select theaters as STEVE JOBS: THE LOST INTERVIEW. The film, which is described as the “best TV interview Jobs ever gave,” will screen at select Landmark Theaters in 19 U.S. cities on November 16 & 17. The footage was originally filmed for the “Triumph of the Nerds” PBS miniseries, but was lost when the master tapes disappeared in shipping. The film is produced by Paul Sen and is not yet rated. According to Landmark, the film will play in the following cities and theaters in its cinema chain: Video: 75 minutes of unadulterated Steve Jobs (tech.fortune.cnn.com)

Contributions to Kinect for Xbox 360 Contributions to Kinect for Xbox 360 Kinect for Xbox 360 has been a smashing success since its November 2010 debut, thanks in part to contributions from Microsoft Research to its audio, skeletal-tracking, and facial-recognition capabilities. And further refinements could mean the best is yet to come. Silicon Valley’s Kinect Contributions Mihai Budiu distinctly remembers the buzz surrounding Kinect for Xbox 360 when it was unveiled in 2009 as Project Natal. Helping Kinect Recognize Faces To use a Kinect for Xbox 360 gaming device is to see something akin to magic. Kinect Audio: Preparedness Pays Off It always helps to be prepared. Kinect Body Tracking Reaps Renown By any standard, Kinect for Xbox 360 has proved to be a technological sensation. The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials.

JFK RICE MOON SPEECH John F. Kennedy Moon Speech - Rice Stadium September 12, 1962 Movie clips of JFK speaking at Rice University: (.mov) or (.avi) (833K) See and hear the entire speech for 56K modem download [8.7 megabytes in a .asf movie format which requires Windows Media Player 7 (speech lasts about 33 minutes)]. President Pitzer, Mr. I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here, and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. We choose to go to the moon.

Tru.ly releases its free age verification API In case you didn’t notice, you are living two separate lives. You are not just you in the flesh any longer. You’ve created an alternative, digital persona- a persona that can be judged as a Facebook profile or a Twitter handle. In February of this year, Tru.ly, a Boston-based startup presents launched an officially verified identification platform for digital personas. Translation: It’s your official ID for the Internet era. Tru.ly is the first and only free, peer-to-peer service that verifies identity against government data. Tru.ly’s API is based on the Facebook registration application, which allows users and the partner sites to have a frictionless experience when proving their age. “Our API represents the foundation for responsible age gating, something that has never been done well on the Internet”, notes David Gordon, Tru.ly’s co-founder and CEO, “The days of simply entering any birthday are over. For more on how Tru.ly’s new age verification API works, watch this video below:

Steve Jobs Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive.

Unwired View » How Nokia was disrupted. Part 1 Back in 2007 Nokia was riding high. They owned well over a third of the mobile phone market, and about every second smartphone sold in the world had Nokia name on it. They set the directions for the rest of the industry, leaving competitors scrambling to catch up with every new product launch. The latest device – Nokia N95 – was a masterpiece of technology. Fast forward 4 years. What happened? To those familiar with Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory, the answer should be pretty obvious. How great companies get disrupted Every industry goes through 2 different development/change cycles. During the period of sustaining innovation, players in existing markets innovate by adding features to the products that makes them better and more attractive to the ever growing number of users. But that’s not what incumbent will hear from it’s best customers, or their traditional market research efforts. And that’s exactly what happened in a smartphone industry over the last 4 years.

Former Apple ad man Ken Segall talks Steve Jobs, simplicity in Time interview By AppleInsider Staff In an interview with Time on Tuesday, Ken Segall, a former creative director of Apple ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day who worked with the late Steve Jobs at Apple and NeXT, discussed a wide range of topics including his time collaborating on the Cupertino tech giant's ad campaigns. The interview, a special presentation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, was conducted by Time editor-at-large Harry McCracken, with much of the time focused on Segall's work at both Apple and NeXT as well as his book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success. Segall is in a unique position to offer insight into the inner workings of Apple's advertising process after being involved in the company's ad campaigns for 12 years. Among his team's accomplishments are the naming of the "iMac" and the "Think Different" campaign, the latter kickstarting Apple's initial rise following the return of cofounder Steve Jobs.

What makes Apple Apple Image by opensource.com The following is an excerpt from Gary Hamel's forthcoming book, What Matters Now, to be published in December 2011 by Jossey-Bass Business.In 1997 I bought an e-tablet from A.T. Cross, the pen company. Codeveloped with IBM, the CrossPad was hailed as a breakthrough product that would open up a whole new category--portable digital notepads. This article was originally posted on the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. Truth is, I'm not so much an early adopter as an easy mark. Over the years I've become a tad less susceptible to the utopian visions of technology's self-proclaimed prophets. Given that, you might have expected me to be at least a teensy bit skeptical of the hype that accompanied the announcement of Apple's first generation iPad in January 2010--but I wasn't. With hindsight, the skepticism over the iPad appears downright silly. Redefine the basis for competition.

Remembering Steve Jobs

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