In the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he [Mr. Systrom, Instagram co-founder] told his audience.
I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.
There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.
The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company
Great #longread about the tech “Fab Four” and what the future holds (via @brainpicker)
New York Magazine: Tweet Science
Fab read!
This was linked from another source with the title “Is Twitter Too Big To Succeed?” That really piqued my interest but that’s not actually what the article is about. It is more about the things that are happening behind the scenes at Twitter and what they are trying to do keep celebs tweeting, to become profitable without becoming annoying, and to adapt to their user base. It’s a really interesting read.
The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here. And it’s happening as the company struggles with an interlocked set of existential questions, starting with the most basic one possible: What is Twitter? Initially, the idea was of a kind of adrenalized Facebook, with friends communicating with friends in short bursts—and indeed, Facebook rushed to borrow Twitter’s innovations so it wouldn’t be left behind. But as Twitter grew, it finally became clear to Twitter’s brain trust that the relevant analogy was not a social network but a broadcast system—the birth of a different sort of TV.
And of course, I’ve already tried physics, ballet, Balanchine (very interesting), etc. Needless to say, don’t try it on the office or while working or you are bound to start procrastinating here!
I made showmenonstop.com with Chad Pugh and Casey Pugh at the 24 hour hackday.tv event this weekend.
Type anything in the box for a continuous, full-browser stream of videos. Get as specific as you want, e.g. dogs welcoming soldiers home.
The app is just HTML & javascript using a customized VHX embed player. You can click to skip, but there’s no play/pause button cuz this is nonstop. Click here for source code.
See also: Music Video Genome
(via laughingsquid)
The Infinite Adventure Machine by David Benqué is a computer program which generates fairy-tale plots
The Infinite Adventure Machine by David Benqué is a computer program which generates fairy-tale plots. Based on the work of Vladimir Propp, who reduced the structure of russian folk-tales to 31 basic functions, the project addresses the difficulties of automatic story generation which David explains remain an unsolved problem for computer science.
(via Fast Co. Design)
A collection of all the things I like: The internet, physics & science, computer, ballet, books, photography, random connections and all kinds of geeky stuff.
