David Lidsky's Blog, page 3412
November 5, 2013
An Artist Attempts To 3–D Copy And Print Herself
In her series Replicants, Lorna Barnshaw challenges various technologies to duplicate herself.
Most sculptors might cite the work of masters ranging from Donatello to Brancusi. But Lorna Barnshaw admits she's been shamelessly influenced by dystopian sci–fi. It was movies like Blade Runner and shows like Black Mirror that inspired her series Replicants, a trio of 3–D–printed self–portraits developed through different digital processes, each exploring the nature of human identity as flesh continues on its course to digitization.
How Existential: Two MacBooks Playing Rock–Paper–Scissors Forever
In this eternal game of chance, there is no ultimate winner, just a temporary one
When two oiled gladiators enter the ring, size each other up, and start throwing rocks, paper, or scissors at one another, they have a number of strategies at their disposal to gain the upper hand. For example, throwing out a rock while bellowing "Paper!" can have a devastating effect on an opponent.
The Ultimate Quantified–Self Device Already Exists: A Defibrillator
Heart patients already have the holy grail of the quantified–self movement running inside of them. If only they had access to the data.
The wearables industry is booming, but no one has yet come up with the killer product: an unobtrusive, comfortable device that measures a wide range of health data, from activity levels and heart rates to blood pressure and sleep patterns. While quantified–self nuts wait for this killer product, one segment of the population––heart failure patients that have implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs)––already has just such a device available to tap into. If only they had the data. Even though implantable cardiac defibrillators have the capability of measuring everything described above and more, only doctors have access to the information held inside.
A Budding Business: The Marijuana Market Is Expected To Top $10 Billion By 2018
A report called The State of Legal Marijuana Markets estimates the U.S. cannabis industry will hit $1.43 billion in sales by the end of 2013.
Poised to bloom into a $10.2 billion market by 2018, marijuana sales will likely outpace the growth of smartphones, according to ArcView Market Research.
Infographic: The History Of Audio Equipment
From phonographs to boom boxes, it's all here in one giant print.
A prominent sci–fi writer once told me that, as prescient as they'd been, he and his peers had missed one big tech trend: Miniaturization. And they really did miss it. Because as you examine Pop Chart Lab's latest mega print of 219 sonic devices across history, The Advance of Audio Apparatuses, it's obvious that technology has been getting smaller for a long time.
A Subscription Service For Underwear, To Make Sure You Always Have Fresh Drawers
Dada Underwear will send you new underwear every quarter––and keep your wardrobe interesting by mixing it up with experimental fabrics made out of stuff like seaweed, bamboo, and coffee grinds.
There is nothing glamorous about shopping for men's underwear. But when the economy is decent, sales certainly do go up––between August 2011 and August 2012, sales of men's underwear in the U.S. jumped 6% year in a year. Perhaps this is the perfect time, then, for DaDa Underwear's Quarterly Underwear Club, a subscription service that delivers new, clean men's underwear every quarter.
Africa's First Fair–Trade Garment Manufacturer Is A Model For Women's Empowerment
Liberty and Justice not only employs hundreds of women, but focuses on an age group that usually gets ignored in the garment industry––women who are over 30.
Editor's NoteThis story is part of Change Generation, our series on young entrepreneurs changing the world.
November 4, 2013
8 Lessons Startups Can Learn From Twitter's Chaotic Creation Story
Most startups will never see anything close to the amount of money Twitter plans on raising during its IPO this week (a reported $1.6 billion) and in fact, three out of four tech businesses fail.
Entrepreneurs in training looking to create a successful company, then, might want to know what turned the 140–character sharing service into a viable business worth billions. For answers to that elusive question, Fast Company spoke with Nick Bilton, New York Times columnist and the author of the forthcoming book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal.
[image error]Nick BiltonImage via TwitterBilton tells the tale of Twitter's founding, which he likens to a murder mystery. Nobody dies, he assures. But, as the title of the book indicates, the company had a tumultuous beginning. The four founders of Odeo, which turned into Twitter, started as friends. "As Twitter grew, the four founders fought bitterly for money, influence, publicity, and control over a company that grows larger and more powerful by the day," explains the book's Amazon page. Out of those ashes, however, emerged a service so powerful it can influence stock markets and revolutions alike.
So how did the soon–to–be Twitter billionaires turn chaos into gold? Here are 8 tips drawn from a conversation with Bilton:
Lesson 1: Mythical founding stories are just that: myths.
"Founding a startup is actually very difficult–– a lot more difficult than I think we sometimes realize when we cover these companies. There's a lot of turmoil and grit and grind that goes into these things. The stories, where it seems like these things came about in an almost Moses–like fashion usually are not necessarily the real story of how these things begin.
Lesson 2: Don't go into business with friends if you want to stay friends.
"The saddest part of the story is that these were a group of people that were really close and their thirst for control of this company tore them all apart.
There's a moment in the book where Noah [Glass] is starting Odeo and he goes over to Ev [William]'s house and he says 'can you give me some money to help start this thing?' And Ev's like: 'Look, I'd love to do it but I don't want it to screw up our friendship.' But, Noah, who was very idealistic and was very sweet, was like 'There's no way it's going to screw up our friendship. We're, like, really close friends, how could it screw up our friendship?' Of course, six months later they were at each others' throats as they were trying to decide who would run Odeo and what the company would end up being."
Lesson 3: If you do go into business with your friends, try not to push them out of the company.
"There's nothing wrong with being rich and successful and doing it without hurting other people. I think the easy route is to hurt other people and to dismiss them and remove them from the history of the story and creation. And, sure, it's more difficult to explain what happened at the beginning and to give people credit and money that they deserve, but I think it's the right thing to do."
Lesson 4: Fighting is okay, though.
"If there was no turmoil, Twitter wouldn't exist. There's a lot of things you could point to that show that company would not exist without it: If it wasn't for Noah's crazy mind and his disagreements with Ev, it wouldn't have pushed them to start exploring new projects. If it wasn't for the turmoil of Apple essentially making Odeo nonexistent in a single press release, there wouldn't have been that. I think the turmoil between Jack [Dorsey] and Ev throughout the entire book and entire story show that without those two having those two complete drastic different views of what the companies was we wouldn't have this extremely popular service, Twitter.
The thing I love about all of them is that they all kind of wanted to tell the man to go fuck themselves in one way or another and they did that by building this product."
Lesson 5: Really embrace the chaos.
"Don't try to build something in this world where everything just works and makes sense. Embrace the chaos and really own it. I think that trying to look at these founding stories and wondering why your company is not working because you don't have this wonderful creation myth, understand that that's what exactly these things are: They're myths. And the dirt and grind and the grit and the turmoil and the fighting can lead to great things."
Lesson 6: Don't be a selfish jerk who takes credit for everything.
"Everyone can get credit in these stories. It doesn't just have to be given to one person. There were 12 people in the room when Twitter was hatched and 11 have been written out of the story. Essentially it was this story that Jack Dorsey created this on his own. But really, it wouldn't exist without those other people. If you have a successful startup as an entrepreneur, you should embrace and own and share the glory with everyone who helped get you where you are."
Lesson 7: It's okay if your product constantly crashes...as long as it's cool.
"In the early days there weren't that many users on the site. There were people who were paying attention to it, but not many people signed up. The ones who had signed up were using it quite extensively and it started to crash and started to go through major problems. Some of that was attributed to the fact that Jack Dorsey and Florian Webber, two of the earlier programmers, had built this thing in two weeks as a prototype and had never meant it to be used the way it was. So, for a variety of reasons, this thing was going offline all the time and it started to gain attention because it was this thing that kept going offline. People kept saying: What is this thing? If it's breaking because so many people are using it, I want to know what it is. It's like if you see a line outside of an ice cream shop you're going to go see what the line is all about."
[image error]Lesson 8: Don't get drunk at inappropriate times if you have investors to answer to.
"Jack and Biz [Stone] had to go to New York for some meetings and they didn't know what the heck Twitter was but they had this opportunity to meet with some media companies in New York. They had a couple of hours to kill so they decided to get lunch in the park over by Madison Square Park and Biz being his usual goofball self said 'Hey, this is like a business lunch! We should do what business people do and order a martini.' So they drank a martini, then he said: 'I think business people drink two martinis.' Next thing you know they're totally drunk and have to go to this meeting. They sat there and didn't say a word."
BlackBerry Stops Looking For Buyers, Boots Out CEO
BlackBerry has abandoned plans to sell itself and is instead looking for about $1 billion in new funds that it will use to try to turn its business around. The company is also planning far–reaching changes to management and will remove both its CEO Thorsten Heins and some directors.
Related
Should BlackBerry Lay Off Creative Director Alicia Keys?
The new decision from BlackBerry follows the end of a buyout deal by financial firm Fairfax Financial Holdings earlier in the summer. The deal was said to be in the range of $4.7 billion, and Fairfax had until today to study BlackBerry's books and make an offer. Whatever Fairfax found in the company's finances and its business model for the future is unknown, but it is now irrelevant because BlackBerry has changed course. Even during the period when Fairfax was courting BlackBerry, a number of other big–name buyers were said to be interested in the formerly giant smartphone maker.
Instead, BlackBerry will sell a new form of convertible stock to a group of investors, raising extra capital with which it can retool and restaff to point the company in a new direction. The maneuver suggests that, despite losing significant staff and nearly all its standing in the marketplace, the company's management feels it can survive as a going concern.
It Looks Like The Air Is The Best–Selling iPad Yet
Though Apple's not released any official figures yet, and we don't know if they're going to, some initial estimates of sales figures for Apple's new iPad Air have hit the Internet, and they're impressive. Fiksu Inc., an app marketer, has analyzed data from "millions" of devices that use its client's apps and has concluded that iPad Air adoption is about five times greater than that for 2012's iPad 4.
Ficksu's chart is quite an eye–popping one:
[image error]The data isn't conclusive of course, because it doesn't give us hard iPad sales number. Nor does the measurement necessarily scale 1:1 into actual iPad sales––a number of other factors, such as differing choices of app among users, could also play a part. But last year when Apple revealed its first weekend iPad sales, aggregating the iPad Mini and iPad 4's figures together, it noted that three million were sold. Adding this to Fiksu's data could mean that anywhere between five and ten million iPad Airs were sold this last weekend, depending on what the actual sales mix between iPad 4 and iPad Mini was last year. Apple's iPad mini is going on sale later in November, and Apple may prefer not to report Air sales alone as they would then expose the new iPad Mini sales ratio.
What can we take from this? Quite a lot actually. It's likely that recent alleged slips in iPad sales were misrepresented data based on the fact consumers were waiting to buy the updated device. And it would seem pretty certain that Apple will assume a commanding lead in tablet sales in the important Holiday season buying frenzy. Considering that the iPad is becoming a critical part of Apple's overall revenues, this is big news.
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