After reading about Apple iOS VP Scott Forstall selling off almost $40 million in shares I was curious to learn more about him. I found this BsuienssWeek profile from last October that had an interesting tidbit about the Apple ecosystem:

Yet even critics don’t deny his accomplishments or ability to troubleshoot. Before the introduction of the iPhone, Forstall supported Jobs’s view that Apple didn’t need to create an ecosystem of third-party developers. Back then they figured the device would stand out for combining a phone with an iPod plus a superfast browser. For the most popular activities—watching YouTube videos, for example—Forstall’s team would simply partner with market leaders such as Google (GOOG) to create apps built specifically for the iPhone.

That worldview changed fast, as consumers began tweaking their iPhones to run unauthorized apps from hundreds of developers inspired by the new device. Forstall oversaw the creation of a software developer’s kit for programmers to build iPhone apps as well as an App Store within iTunes. Forstall’s flexibility impressed even his rivals. “Scott’s a pretty amazing guy,” says Vic Gundotra, a senior vice-president at Google. “In terms of running an operating system team, he’s one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

Forgot that the ecosystem wasn’t there from the start.

Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer's Apprentice at Apple - BusinessWeek

appleiphoneScott ForstallMay 3, 2012

The data here is sort of interesting, but I’m not sure I buy the premise:

Ask Americans if they are willing to spend more to buy American-made products, and nearly half say they are often willing to do this. But in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, the country where a product is made trails price, quality, and even convenience, as an important factor in consumer decision-making. The public gives even less importance to a product’s brand, its impact on the environment, or the political leanings of the company that produces it.

Basically it breaks down that 76 percent say the price of the product is extremely important, 85 percent say quality is extremely important and only 31 percent say the brand is extremely important. I think the price thing is probably right, quality sounds like something people like to talk themselves into (if we cared that much then why do we buy so much Ikea furniture?) and brand seems like a classic case of people not understanding their own motivations. Sure, it might not seem like it, but when someone walks down the aisle and buys Crest instead of store-brand they’re choosing brand over quality and price and probably not even thinking about it. In fact, to most people I’d guess that brand equals quality.

[via Marginal Revolution]

Buying Responsibly: Americans Talk A Better Game Than They Play

BrandconsumersresearchApril 28, 2012

I love asking people who are really passionate about something to talk about the person or thing they hold up as best. Ask a guitarist, for instance, who the best guitarist of all time was and you’ll get a thoughtful (and probably surprising) explanation and insight into what one artist looks for in another.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to read Roger Ebert explain his 10 greatest films of all time. This is someone who has spent his whole life thinking about a topic and his reasoning behind each choice is deep (outside his odd pick of Tree of Life at the end). I like his explanation of Raging Bull over Taxi Driver for Scorsese:

“Citizen Kane” speaks for itself. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is likewise a stand-along monument, a great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. It was a statement that came at a time which now looks something like the peak of humanity’s technological optimism. Many would choose “Taxi Driver” as Scorsese’s greatest film, but I believe “Raging Bull” is his best and most personal, a film he says in some ways saved his life. It is the greatest cinematic expression of the torture of jealousy–his “Othello.”

The greatest films of all time - Roger Ebert's Journal

ListsMOVIESReviewsRoger EbertApril 26, 2012

This is important: How much gold would you actually need to be able to dive into your gold vault like Scrooge McDuck?

In most money circles (insider tip: “money circles” is a term used by only the most elite investors), wealth is measured exclusively by how closely one can recreate this famed animation. It has come to represent success in America and anything less than doing the backstroke amongst a sea of Earth’s rarest metal should be considered an abject failure. A main problem of this measure, however, is that there is no agreed-upon Scrooge McDuck quantity of gold. In order to give the young investor a goal to shoot for, and to clear up this age-old question once and for all, the following is a precise judgment of exactly how money you need to be successful.

How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck 'Gold Coin Swim' | The Billfold

cartoonsFUNNYGOLDmoneyScrooge McDuckApril 23, 2012

I’ve gotten in some conversations recently about whether you should outsource PR early in a company’s life. My take is no. We’ve kept PR in-house except for a bit of outside counsel from friends. (After all, what’s the point of having brilliant friends if you’re not going to ask them for advice?) I’m not really sure how to do it any other way, as the company and product are constantly shifting and the thought of having to keep someone else on top of that and expect them to be able to pitch it seems crazy. Anyway, seems as though Chris Dixon agrees:

A fundamental principle of business is that you do things in house that you think can give you a competitive advantage and outsource things that you don’t. At an early-stage technology company this means you do in house: product design, software and/or hardware development, PR, recruiting, and customer relations/community management. Ideally, most of these activities are led by founders. You should outsource legal, accounting, website hosting, website analytics etc. (Unless you are starting a company where one of those activities can give you a competitive advantage, e.g. a securities trading startup would need to have in-house legal).

Outsource things you don’t care about - Chris Dixon

businessOutsourcingPRStartupsApril 23, 2012

The Times had a great article about a matzo company called Streits that has been in business since the 1916 and hasn’t changed a thing about how they work. What’s especially interesting is why matzo is a tough business for your average food company to get into:

So it’s actually the big snack brands that are stuck. To get in the matzo game, they would have to make a huge investment in new machinery, Jewish law expertise and worker training. Alternately, they could make a nonkosher flatbread knockoff and lose out on that significant kosher-loving base. In either case, Manischewitz would have to become a huge business before it attracted any real competition, and by then the company would be so rich that it probably wouldn’t mind.

The Amazing Matzo Stimulus - NYTimes.com

foodmatzoApril 21, 2012

Apparently there’s a kindergarten teacher in TriBeCa who closes each day with a tweet she composes with the class. The whole story is nice, but I’m especially fond of the explanations of Twitter that end the story:

“To me, Twitter is like the ideal thing for 5-year-olds because it is so short,” she said. “It makes them think about their day and kind of summarize what they’ve done during the day; whereas a lot of times kids will go home and Mom and Dad will say, ‘What did you do today?’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t know.’”

Explaining what Twitter is was a little tricky, she said. But there was a handy analogy. Every weekend, one student takes home a stuffed animal frog and a journal. They take pictures and write about what they’re doing to share with the rest of the class.

“So when I introduced Twitter, I said you guys are doing this with Froggie on the weekend, and so we’re going to let your parents know what we’re doing in class a few times a week,” she said.

[Via @jasonoke]

Tweet, Tweet, Go the Kindergartners – SchoolBook

childreneducationschooltwitterApril 12, 2012

I’ve been telling people a lot lately that I think the most important lesson I’ve learned in my first year of having a startup is have a co-founder you can argue productively with and now it’s in print. I gave an interview with Fast Company in anticipation of the Innovation Uncensored event I’m speaking at and has this to answer to the question “If you could share only one thing about starting a company, what would it be?”

Other than “It’s really hard,” I would say, choose your cofounder wisely. Lots of people say that, but I don’t think many people give specific criteria. In the year of Percolate’s existence I think the single most important thing has been the ability of James and myself to have constructive arguments. We can go at it about the product or company and come out on the other end with a solution we both completely believe in. I don’t think the company would still be around if we weren’t able to do that or if one of us left the conversation in a tizzy and didn’t speak for the next week. You can’t take these things personally, we are both arguing from a place of passion and deep desire for the company to succeed. We have the same purpose and vision, and like any two people we disagree on occasion about the specific details of execution. That’s healthy and normal and actually very positive. If you don’t think you can argue with your cofounder you shouldn’t start a company together.




I’ve learned a lot more, but I think this lesson doesn’t get mentioned often enough.

Has Innovation Lost Its Meaning? Percolate's Noah Brier On Its True Definition | Fast Company

cofounderstartupTechnologyMarch 29, 2012

The folks at Made by Many are some of my favorite agency folks around. They’re smart and testing different ways of doing things. Anyway, at SXSW they made a little app called Picle. It did pretty well and now they’re going to keep making it. Something about the way they’ve presented the thinking around the paths the app can take feel really simple and right:

So now that we have that initial spike of users there will be an inevitable dip, downloads have dropped off a little since we arrived back, but we have broken the 45,000 download mark. According to Stuart’s graph the app can go 2 ways.

1. We can trundle along steadily making changes in the app improving the user experience and making the whole thing a lot more polished. However, this route is doomed to fail, while the experience may get better the inability to attract new users and expose the app to a new audience will result in Picle fading away into the digital ether. This scenario is represented in the rather upsetting looking line A.

Or

2. We stabilise the app and greatly improve the sharing features so that Picle is introduced to new audiences and users. Represented by line B.

Picle Developments | Made by Many || Percolate

agenciesiphonemade by manyproduct developmentTechnologyMarch 28, 2012

I thought this was a really interesting way to look at free agency in the NFL from Grantlant:

The bigger problem is the idea that upgrading at that position, or in that facet of the game, requires a team to throw money at acquiring a talented player, even if it means that the team overspends in the process. Teams approach the problem of having below-average output at a position by saying, “We need to upgrade to something better here, even if it costs us too much.” Instead, they should approach it from the equally compelling, alternative viewpoint of, “We’re already so bad here that we can’t be much worse next season, so upgrading to a superior player is incredibly easy!” Rather than seeing the free-agent pool as being full of players who would provide superior production to the guys on your roster, bad organizations insist on picking one player from that pool and spending more money than they should to obtain an upgrade they can get from just about anyone.

I know you’re not all football fans, but it’s an interesting way to think about how business is run generally (I’m sure there’s a behavioral economics fallacy for this).

Free Agency Day 2: Catch Me If You Can - The Triangle Blog - Grantland

businessfootballmoneynflMarch 19, 2012

I love this answer from Poke founder Nik Roope on what designers can bring to organizations:

Businesses are built on concepts. Ideas structured to extract or create value in some way. These ideas, famously penned on napkins (although more likely Evernote theses days) are by their nature abstract and intellectual. “Design” takes a central role in the step from the intellectual to the manifest and when the process is working this isn’t a verbatim translation, it’s an active process that structures, orders, tunes the components into a compelling working system. Broad-minded designers with solid structural sensibilities are thus critical for success.

[via @domgoodrum]

Voxpop - What can designers bring to organisations? | News | Design Week

businessdesignmanagementMarch 19, 2012

Felix Salmon has an excellent piece breaking down the whole Mike Daisey/This American Life thing and what it really means. Included is this quote from Rebecca Hamilton, author of Fighting for Darfur:

To build a mass movement quickly, it helps to have an over-simplified, emotive narrative with a single demand. It also helps to tells people that by doing easy tasks – sharing a link on Facebook, buying a bracelet — they can save lives. Central to the formula is that the agency of local actors gets downplayed to hype up the importance of action by outsiders. But all those ingredients inevitably lead to eventual failure when the simple solutions can’t fix the complex reality. The movement walks away, disillusioned. And in the meantime untold resources have been expended on solutions that have been out of step with what local activists need.

Fabulous journalism | Felix Salmon

appleChinajournalismMarch 18, 2012

The story of Fabrice Muamba from yesterday is hard to imagine. A professional football (the English kind) player had a heart attack during the game. The facts themselves are pretty crazy, but this article does a great job giving the broader context to what happened around the story:

Many said yesterday evening that football becomes irrelevant in such circumstances. This is partially true, but doesn’t tell the complete story of last night. When something such as this happens, the match that is taking place ceases to be of much importance, of course. The game, however, to the extent that “football” exists as an entity in and of itself, certainly doesn’t become irrelevant, and this much was demonstrated by the messages of support and concern that we saw last night. Football frequently seems to exist in a bubble, isolated and insulated from the outside world. When the full horror that real world can occasionally offer came calling last night, though, its humanity shone through. Considering what happened at White Hart Lane last night, it’s a tiny consolation. But a tiny consolation is better than no consolation at all.

Fabrice Muamba | Twohundredpercent

cultureeplHealthheart attacksoccersportsMarch 18, 2012

This is a really interesting way to think about the power of Facebook:

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

The rest of the article is worth a read as well. It’s a former Google engineer explaining why he left and what’s changed inside the organization in the last two years with the transition to social.

Why I left Google - JW on Tech - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

advertisingengineeringfacebookgoogleMarch 14, 2012

If you’re a football fan (American that is), you’ve been following the bounty story about how the Saints were paying out when one player injured an opposing player. Anyway, I’ve been paying attention to the debate with moderate interesting, but I really liked this point about the whole debate from my friend Jeff over at Da Bears Blog:

Here is my big problem with the Saints bounty story. A year ago, during labor negotiations, the players preached solidarity. They preached they were a single organism and ownership was out to limit to their economic intake during their short-term NFL tenures. They were against the 18-game schedule for health reasons and never allowed the issue to be put on the table. They are still against rigid HGH testing and many believe it is because players depend on HGH for muscle regeneration. (Being that football is just 300-pound guys hitting each other repeatedly, I get it.) Now we find out that 1 of the 32 teams was benefitting economically from sending players to the sideline. Not just quarterbacks, either. This was tight ends and linemen and backups. Guys who play less than five years on average in the league. If you knocked ANY player out of a game, you were worthy of a bonus. I don’t get on the moral high horse with these types of issues. But if the Bears had done this I would be incredibly embarrassed.

Audibles From the Long Snapper: Tag Deadline Day Edition | DA BEARS BLOG

bountiesfootballmoneynflMarch 6, 2012

Rei Inamoto, who’s in charge of creative at the agency AKQA, has an interesting piece on how agencies need to act more like startups. While I don’t agree with everything in there, I have always been interested by the relationship between the advertising and startup world described by Cindy Gallop:

This contradiction, and this identity crisis, however, doesn’t just exist within the ad industry. Gallop points out a core contradiction inherent in the startup space: just about everyone in the tech world hates ad people’s guts. They all believe that advertising is a very bad thing and that ad people are very bad people. Yet, their entire business model in many tech ventures is built around advertising. Take Facebook, for example. The bulk of its $3.7 billion revenue comes from advertising. Google, a company that shunned advertising for many years, built its business around advertising.

Madison Avenue’s Identity Crisis (And Why Silicon Valley Still Needs To Learn From The Ad Industry) | Co.Create: Creativity Culture Commerce

agenciesdigitalinnovationStartupsMarch 6, 2012

In this interview with News.me, Evan Williams wonders why there aren’t better tools to surface old content:

One thing that I find missing is discovery of non-new content. The web is completely oriented around new-thing-on-top. Our brains are also wired to get a rush from novelty. But most “news” we read really doesn’t matter. And a much smaller percentage of the information I actually care about or would find useful was produced in the last few hours than my reading patterns reflect.

I’m definitely with him on that. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a bit with Percolate and was actually having a conversation about last night at dinner (specifically, why do old things resurface on Reddit?).

Getting the News — Evan Williams | News.me

evan williamsnewstwitterMarch 5, 2012

Apparently Bloomberg’s styleguide banned the word “but” from its stories:

Seth Mnookin’s piece on Bloomberg News, in this month’s Vanity Fair, quotes from the company’s stylebook, “The Bloomberg Way,” saying that Bloomberg banned the word “but” from its stories because it required readers “to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence.” It’s a little hard to tell from the context whether this rule is still in effect or not, but (there I go again) I can guarantee I will now be looking for “but”s or “however”s in every Bloomberg story I read.

The Balance Sheet: One Thought Per Sentence : The New Yorker

bloombergStyleWRITINGMarch 4, 2012

The new Readability iOS app looks beautiful and all, but the big feature I keep waiting for is the ability to highlight things and save them to some sort of archive. I understand it would be a pain-in-the-ass because of the offline mode and all that jazz, but isn’t that the thing you most want to do when you’re reading really interesting stuff (to me, highlights is the real killer feature of the Kindle). Does this exist and I just don’t know about it?

Readability for iOS | Teehan+Lax

kindlelongformreadabilityreadingMarch 4, 2012

A thought-provoking piece on just how unequal technology distribution is across gender lines. A snippet:

This may sound like bitching, and of course in some sense it is. But it began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed - Charlie's Diary

genderTechnologyMarch 1, 2012

The other day I wrote about what it likes to build Google Maps and this week I read that Foursquare has switched off Google’s map service (apparently they’re starting to charge businesses who use it). It’s interesting to think that just a few years ago there was no such thing as a map API service business and now Foursquare is writing this:

When we initially began looking around for other map providers, we found some incredibly strong alternatives. And while the new Google Maps API pricing was the reason we initially started looking into other solutions, we ultimately ended up switching because, after all our research and testing, OpenStreetMap and MapBox was simply the best fit for us.

foursquare is joining the OpenStreetMap movement! Say hi to pretty new maps! | Foursquare Blog

businessFOURSQUAREmapsMarch 1, 2012

This whole Core77 article about the design of Google Maps is pretty excellent. It’s a great breakdown of the insane challenges of building a map of the world. Beyond everything else, though, I found this especially shocking: “In recent months we have introduced a few more regional changes to our color palette adding 3D building shadows to indicate local time-of-day.” 3D building shadows … Who knew? (I can’t seem to track it down myself, but it’s in the screenshots on the article.)

Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas - Core77

designgooglemapsFebruary 27, 2012

A little bit of distraction might be good for you:

The study adds to research suggesting that small doses of distraction — including hard-to-read fonts — prompt the mind to work at a more abstract level, which is also a more creative level. (The possibility that sound energized people was considered but rejected: Participants’ heart rates did rise when they first encountered noise, but soon subsided.) The effect of noise is inverted-U-shaped, this study suggested: There’s a sweet spot between silence and din.

I wonder how much of this is about the noise versus the environment. I find that in an airport I tend to get a lot of work done. I think it just has to do with the change of scenery and the specific amount of time I’m there.

[Via Barking Up The Wrong Tree]

A Creative Buzz - Ideas Market - WSJ

DistractionscienceFebruary 26, 2012

Steve Jobs was an asshole. That seems to be the overwhelming conclusion of anyone who read the biography. Genius for sure, but also not very nice and a fairly tortured soul. I used to worry that people’s takeaway from the Jobs era was that managing by being a massive jerk was the way to go, but I actually think we are past that … Anyway, that’s all a long-winded intro to this paragraph about Jobs that I would have agreed with 8 months ago (but still think is well said):

The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

applebusinessstevejobsFebruary 16, 2012

Good Hacker News thread about what Web 1.0 businesses still make money. One of the answers is affiliate, but even better than the answer is this explanation of the complicated relationship between Google and affiliates: “Big Daddy G basically sees most affiliates as bugs which, if fixed, would entitle them to an extra 100%+ on the purchase at issue over what they’re getting currently. This results in a frenemy dynamic because affiliates also spend $$$$$$$$ on AdWords.” That’s the trouble with Google, whether they like to admit it or not, they’re in competition with many of their biggest customers and like to pretend they’re not.

Ask HN: What are the good old ideas that still make money on the web? | Hacker News

affiliatebusinessgooglesearchFebruary 12, 2012

Mimi Chun is the design director at General Assembly (the shared working space, not people behind #occupy) is working on baking series of cookies painted to match famous works of modern art. While the cookies look fantastic, I liked her point about makers versus viewers:

For makers, the value lies in the act of creation; for viewers: the outcome. Like others who have chosen similar vocations, I make things because I’m in love with making, because I can’t imagine a life without it, and because I secretly enjoy all of the angst, self-flagellation, and learning that comes with the territory. Given the option of: Would I prefer to A) spend every waking minute making terrible work that never saw the light of day or B) wake up every morning to discover that I had made amazing work in my sleep, I would choose A every time, and I’m willing to venture that I’m not alone here.

Work in Progress: Creating to Destroy - Long-winded: A Blog for People Who Read

ArtbakingcookiesculturemakingFebruary 12, 2012

Interesting perspective from Fred Wilson on how Instagram is challenging the iPhone’s built in camera. His conclusion: “Clean, simple, networked, social, cross platform mobile apps will be the winning model in the mobile ecosystem and the OS vendors will not be able to maintain dominance with the default apps they ship with the OS.”

A VC: Utilities vs Networks

interestingMobilenetworksFebruary 12, 2012

Started naming all our product releases after street artists. Our first release under this new schema is Futura 2000 (one of my personal favorites). A little context:

I’ve been a big fan of graffii for a long time. When I was a kid and I’d go on vacation with my parents I’d make them walk me around to shady places so I could take photos of the painted walls. It’s never something I did myself (I don’t have the hand for spraypaint), but I’ve been a pretty voracious consumer of the stuff for my whole life. So that’s the plan, each release gets a number, a graffiti artist and a little history lesson on who they were (in addition to some notes on the release).

2.3: Futura 2000 | Blog @ Percolate

graffitipercolateproductreleaseFebruary 7, 2012

Facebook did a big study on how we find information and, not entirely surprisingly, our weak ties tend to give us stuff we wouldn’t otherwise run across. Nothing really shocking there, but, as Slate notes, the scale of the study was:

The other crucial thing about this study is that it is almost unthinkably enormous. At the time of the experiment, there were 500 million active users on Facebook. Bakshy’s experiment included 253 million of them and more than 75 million shared URLs, meaning that in total, the study observed nearly 1.2 billion instances in which someone was or was not presented with a certain link. This scale is unheard of in academic sociological studies, which usually involve hundreds or, at most, thousands of people communicating in ways that are far less trackable.

Online echo chambers: A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought. - Slate Magazine

facebooknetworksresearchscienceFebruary 6, 2012

Slate has an interesting explanation for why train systems in the US look the way they do:

The existing rule, sadly, evaluates proposals almost exclusively on the basis of how much time a new rail line shaves off commutes. But taking a train station-to-station rather than driving a car door-to-door is guaranteed to be slower unless traffic jams are severe. This has biased new mass-transit construction in favor of a very particular kind of project: First identify a highway that’s already extremely congested and where widening it is either politically or logistically impossible. Then build commuter-rail tracks in the highway median. Put the stations far apart from one another so that trains can cruise at maximum speed for a long time. Surround the stations with parking lots. Driving your car to a park-and-ride station and taking the train downtown is now cheaper and perhaps faster than the average trip on the congested highway.

Mass transit vs. highways: The Department of Transportation rule that is killing American cities. - Slate Magazine

politicstrainstransportationJanuary 30, 2012