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Four short links: 19 November 2009

By Nat Torkington
November 19, 2009

Chumby One (Bunnie Huang) -- new Chumby product released. In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s...

Turning Predictions into Opportunities

By Nat Torkington
November 15, 2009

The view from the eye of a recession isn't great. When companies are going bust, unemployment growing, and everyone's scouring their budgets for costs to cut, it can be hard to see opportunities. However, when Tim pointed to Stephen O'Grady's fine set of 2010 predictions I found myself popping with "oh, so naturally this will happen next ..." thoughts. Think...

How to run a creative business

By RJ Owen
November 13, 2009

Since moving into a quasi-management role at my current employer, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to continue fostering creativity and innovation while growing. It's a tough challenge - one that many companies get wrong and one that many people suffer because of. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings summarizes the situation and Netflix's response in this amazing slide deck. I consider it a must read for anyone who's involved in running a growing business. The Netflix approach is that sort of sheer genius that makes things so clear, concise, obvious, and simple that it seems easy, and you wonder why everyone isn't doing this. Hint: nothing valuable is ever easy.

Four short links: 26 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 26, 2009

Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different...

Four short links: 9 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 9, 2009

Don't Display Negative Karma -- A fascinating insight for those building social software, whether for collective intelligence or otherwise: There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user's abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy....

Four short links: 24 September 2009

By Nat Torkington
September 24, 2009

Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography -- This resource provides a comprehensive view of the history of cartography, with examples of maps created throughout the ages and background information about the contexts within which those maps, visualizations and map making technologies were created. Explore each time period, click on the images and stories found throughout each time line,...

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

By Joshua-Michele Ross
September 15, 2009

Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry. Why? Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution...

Four short links: 27 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 27, 2009

Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper Than Pirating Music -- I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes... (via Br3nda) Bill Drummond Talk (MP3) --...

Four short links: 19 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 19, 2009

Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can...

Four short links: 5 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 4, 2009

Reboot Britain Video Archive -- video from the talks at Reboot Britain are online. The event also produced a essay set (PDF), CC-licensed. (via Paul Reynolds) Revealing Errors -- Benjamin Mako Hill blog using computer errors as starting points for understanding how computers control the world around us. (via Dan Meyer) New Microbe Strain Makes More Electricity, Faster --...

Four short links: 24 July 2009

By Nat Torkington
July 24, 2009

Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on...

Four short links: 22 July 2009

By Nat Torkington
July 22, 2009

ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson) How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via...

Four short links: 16 July 2009

By Nat Torkington
July 15, 2009

Transparency Camp West -- a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government. Meeting Ticker -- count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter) More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines...

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 12, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Four short links: 26 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 25, 2009

Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better...

Four short links: 25 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 25, 2009

How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0". The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we...

Four short links: 10 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 9, 2009

Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time....

Four short links: 9 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 9, 2009

Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that...

The Myth of Macroinnovation

By Nat Torkington
May 26, 2009

An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age...

Four short links: 19 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 18, 2009

Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish...

Four short links: 14 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 13, 2009

Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the...

Four short links: 5 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 4, 2009

Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based...

The Goodness of Artificial Milestones

By Mark Sigal
April 29, 2009

A friend of mine in startup-land had a really important meeting with a prospective partner. Knowing the one-shot nature of these things, he literally moved mountains in just a few days, achieving a transformational milestone for his fledging, early-stage company. How did he do it? Read on...

Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

By Nat Torkington
April 8, 2009

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware): Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a...

Four short links: 30 Mar 2009

By Nat Torkington
March 30, 2009

A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free: Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator -- CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I'm loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson's delicious...

Twitscan: The Debate over "Open Core"

By Timothy M. O'Brien
March 3, 2009

There's a debate over the boundaries between open source communities and the business that tend to develop around them. This post covers some of the recent chatter around Open Core Licensing.

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 27, 2009

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend! Translating the Economist -- Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, "we want this, it's not here yet, let's make it happen", is tremendous. Business Models of News -- excellent...

Four short links: 25 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 25, 2009

Amazon, Apple, Science, and Databases: Amazon's Wheel of Growth -- a fascinating diagram in the middle, the flywheel of customer experience driving sales driving sellers driving selection which drives experience again, and all the while lower costs allows Amazon to deliver lower prices and thus lower selection. iPhone Sketch -- stencils to use when sketching your iPhone app's screens. The...

Managing monopolies and dominance in the Net age

By Mike Shatzkin
February 23, 2009

Guest blogger Mike Shatzkin is Founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, where he has focused on supply chain and digital change issues since 1979. Mike has spoken at and organized publishing industry conferences all over the world. He recently launched The Shatzkin Files blog. One of Mike's several books, The Ballplayers, forms the core of BaseballLibrary.com. Our thinking...

Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales: A Case Study

By Sarah Milstein
February 19, 2009

Back in December, Dell reported that offers from its Dell Outlet Twitter account had led to more than $1 million in revenue. A small percentage for a company that books $16B in revenue annually--but a nice number nonetheless, particularly in a dreary economy. Question is: are they the only ones? I haven't yet found anyone else claiming to have micromessaged...

Computerworld: The Coming eBook Revolution

By Andrew Savikas
February 7, 2009

Today Mike Shatzkin (a co-author on the StartWithXML Report ) passed along a pointer to another great article, this one from Computerworld's Mike Elgan listing six reasons that eBooks are about to explode . ... Egan left off what I believe is the most important aspect of writing for electronic reading, which is hyperlinking, but the thrust here is that all publishing is becoming digital publishing , and existing publishers ignore or delay dealing with this at their peril.

Four short links: 2 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 2, 2009

Songs off the Charts -- Johannes Kreidler's audio visualizations using Microsoft Songsmith. Reminds me of Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where the amazing spreadsheet program could produce happy jingles or funereal dirges based on a company's revenues. (via Ben Fry) PWN! YouTube -- elegant URL hack: replace "www." with "pwn" in a YouTube movie URL and...

Four short links: 29 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 29, 2009

Luck, craft, coding, and strategy today on Four Short Links: Because -- After a NZ big-money low-success e-tailer closed, there was widespread "ha! about time!" in the blogosphere. This post, by one of New Zealand's most successful web entrepreneurs, is a fantastically humble reality check. "Build it and they won’t necessarily come, no matter how good you think it is...

The Twitter Value Paradox

By George Reese
January 18, 2009

Twitter is the only social media tool that has proven itself in the business arena. While some tools have serviced niche uses for specific industries, Twitter's global appeal to business and the amount of value it adds are unmatched. The irony of this situation is that any attempt to recapture that value necessarily destroys it.

Scott Berkun Talks about Innovation in Guy Kawasaki's New Book

By Sara Peyton
December 30, 2008

Scott Berkun, the bestselling author of The Myths of Innovation, discusses how innovators and inventors get their ideas in Guy Kawasaki's popular new book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

Needed: A New IT Employment Model

By Kurt Cagle
December 24, 2008

It's Christmas Eve as I write this, but after having put the children to bed and turning off the tree lights, I find that my thoughts are not on Santa Claus tonight ... at least not in a very positive way.

Online Communities: The Tribalization of Business

By Joshua-Michele Ross
November 12, 2008

Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation). The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point....

Why Jerry Seinfeld Probably Cost Microsoft a Lot More than $10 Million

By Nitesh Dhanjani
November 10, 2008

In this article, I want put forth a case study to demonstrate how capturing feelings on the social web can allow companies to measure the reputation of their brand.

Tech Terms Every Small Business Owner Should Know--A Forbes.com Special Report with Help from O'Reilly

By Sara Peyton
November 3, 2008

If you're running a small business or thinking about starting one in today's brutal economic climate, a special report put together by Forbes.com can help you make the right decisions about technology. The package includes five stories illuminating everything from "hardware and networking to executing and securing transactions in cyberspace." Each story includes a glossary of terms put together by a team of O'Reilly editors: Shane Warden, Kurt Cagle, Timothy M. O'Brien, and James Turner. The stories and glossaries aim to help "entrepreneurs and their employees make smart technology decisions and purchases, communicate more effectively with in-house information technology staff and, ultimately, please their customers." Read on to learn more.

TOC Recommended Reading

By Mac Slocum
October 9, 2008

The Future Is A Foreign Country (Timo Hannay, Nascent) As with my journey to Japan, my personal response to all this internet-enabled weirdness was one of almost unadulterated joy....

A Star is Born? NY Times syndicates outside blogs but that's not enough

By Joshua-Michele Ross
October 7, 2008

Recently the New York Times announced that it will be syndicating content from three well-known blogs, Read/Write Web, Giga Om and Venture Beat. The New York Times is using these blogs as an extra-sensory organ; they can dial into what is happening in the tech sector (and particularly the West Coast with this trio) without allocating a lot of internal...

Business Tips for Creative People

By David Battino
October 2, 2008

Lots of beautiful noise in the LinnDrum as well.... Drum machine inventor Roger Linn once told me, "A creative mind is a loud mind. It has lots of thoughts popping up in different directions." For creative people, focusing can be difficult. That's why I was intrigued by Michael W. Dean's recent essay, called simply "Professionalism." It's an outtake from his...

Relationship is miles ahead of frequent flyer programs

By Emerson Niide
September 25, 2008

Many companies think they are investing in the relationship with their clients, but in fact, they are only establishing a points program

Vector Linux Partners With SQI To Provide Support Infrastructure

By Caitlyn Martin
September 9, 2008

SQI is providing and hosting their Incident Manager software, a ticketing system specifically for paid support customers, as well as a blowledge base available to all Vector Linux users. In addition to providing the software for the knowledge base they are assisting with content creation. The new Vector Linux website which was unveiled in July is also hosted by SQI.

My Two Most Valuable Business Lessons

By Rick Sammon
August 30, 2008

Many years ago, I attended a seminar given by a professional photographer who said something like this: “Every decision I make is a business decision.” I took his comment quite seriously, making many decisions over the past 20 years based on the final and potential financial outcome of the project - be it a book, assignment, speaking engagement, workshop, seminar and so on.

A bright future for corporate iPhone OS dev?

By Giles Turnbull
August 28, 2008

Sadly I have only half a post for you today; I was hoping for something much more detailed, in order to spark off some debate. Alas, only half the tale can be told. But perhaps we can have the debate...

iPhone News Roundup

By Matt Twomey
August 11, 2008

A short series of interesting tidbits from the week in iPhone: Firmware 1.2 Beta 3, iFund, and iOlympics

Open Source Code Licenses Review

By Andre Charland
July 18, 2008

Grant Skinner has been thinking about and researching open sources licenses. I think this is timely blog post that everyone involved in software should take a look to get a quick high level understanding of the most popular open source licenses.

Last Chance: Sennheiser Sonic Logo Contest

By David Battino
July 15, 2008

Sounds like . . . Sennheiser. While updating my business card the other day, I started to think it would be cool to have an audio logo as well as a graphic one. You've certainly heard these "earcons" — the THX Deep Note, the Duracell coppertop clank, the Intel Inside chimes. . . . With just a few notes and...