While the iPhone is yesterday’s news, the rumors of a Google Phone are speculations at best, there’s a new interesting phone about to enter the market - targeting gamers. The gaming boss of Sony Ericsson, Peter Ahnegard has said ‘it will be here before christmas’ (failing to specify which christmas that is, though). This will expand their portfolio adding a gaming-line to the existing the walkman-line and the cybershot-line. More details on PocketGamer. It will be interesting to see if this will become more of a mobile/gaming hit than the n-gage once set out to be.
[Via Gizmodo]
[Rest of the videos available here]
Last night hell froze over as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates was featured on the same stage. In a part of ‘All Things Digital’ they join in on a friendly (yet with an edge) conversation about the past and future of Microsoft and Apple, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Obviously a lot of bragging, but also a good handful of interesting insights by both Jobs and Gates. Before they got on stage this prologue clip was shown. More information and a transcript here.
Photographer Chris Jordan has posted his project ‘Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait‘. The artist describes the work as looking at “[...] contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); ); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.”
Also worth checking out is the projects ‘Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption‘ and ‘In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster‘
Social Network site ‘Facebook‘ just released their free classified ad service dubbed ‘Marketplace‘. (Quick Walkthrough on C|Net). Can this compete with existing services such as Craigslist? In this blogpost Donna Bogatin of ZDNet argues why that’s not going to happen. Personally, I find the ‘core values’ of Craigslist compared to Facebook, more compelling than the potential benefit of listings made relevant through networks and social patterns. While Facebook potentially benefits from the social structures of their user base I think they’ll have a hard time reaching the volume of specific services such as Monster.com for job listings. And in some markets, like here in Norway, there’s services simply too dominating in coverage (jobs, real estate, furniture etc) to allow for new entrants. However, I think ‘Facebook Marketplace’ will work well on a smaller scale for ads such as renting out a room etc.
BusinessWeek [July 28, 2006] features an interview titled ‘Interaction Design: An Introduction‘. The conversation is between editor Liz Danzico and Dan Saffer from design consultancy Adaptive Path. He’s also the author behind the book ‘Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices‘, which release serves as a starting point for the interview. Among other topics covered are new technology, service design, hackability and general thoughts on interaction design. Well worth the read.
Included below is Ira Glass’ thoughts on how to tell a story. He’s the guy behind ‘This American Life’ as mentioned in this post. A great radioshow hosted on Chicago Public Radio, now a tv-series on Showtime. Which six episodes in is a really great show. In either media the backbone of ‘This American Life’ is the unique quality of the storytelling. And in the four YouTube clips below Ira Glass share some of those secrets. These include how to find great stories, structuring them, anecdotes, presentation and more. An overall focus on his thoughts is storytelling techniques unique to broadcasting.
Continue reading ‘The building blocks of storytelling’
On Friday New York Post reported that an ongoing talk about a possible acquisition, where Microsoft would buy Yahoo!, had been intensified. Considering Google’s recent purchase of Doubleclick (a $3.1B deal), Microsoft desperately needs to step up their game. A competition which basically revolves around search, advertisement and web applications. Advertisement of course being where the revenue is at a global estimate of $34.1B this year. As SeekingAlpha suggests, a Yahoo! buy-out would definitely position Microsoft a lot better in increasing their share.
The valuation of Yahoo! in such a deal was speculated to be approx. $50B. As a consequence the Yahoo! stock soared and 246 million shares changed hands in the last 24hrs. But according to this Wallstreet Journal article the actual chances of a merge is minimal. Both Seattle Times and BusinessWeek also have some interesting coverage on this, dismissing a merge but suggesting that some sort of partnership still is relevant.