David Lidsky's Blog, page 4719

Infographic of the Day: 6 Ways to Lower Your Carbon Emissions

You might be able to cut upwards of 25% of your household carbon emissions in six easy steps.

Reducing your carbon footprint can often seem like an impossible task for any one person. What can you possibly do to fight such an amorphous, all-encompassing problem? Plenty, actually, as this infographic by GOOD magazine, MCAD Designworks, and Brighter Planet shows.

It shows, in detail, the yearly carbon emissions that result from electricity and natural gas, organized by region across the U.S...

Layar Takes Shopping Into the Augmented Reality Dimension With In-App Purchasing

Layar, the augmented reality browser, is stepping up its efforts to bring sci-fi-like AR to the world: It's just introduced in-app shopping. Yes, that's the world's first augmented reality store, and it implies all sorts of astonishing potential for all sorts of people--from world travelers to Disney vacationers.

Layar, explaining the new system in a blog posting, makes pretty light of the matter: "Publishers on the Layar platform now have the possibility to offer priced Augmented Reality...

Rattle and Palm: HP Saves the Day, but How Did Bono Fare?

Palm's safely in HP's hands now, but for several years it's been financially boosted by U2 frontman Bono's company Elevation Partners. With their involvement wrapped up, the rocker's financial experiment fared okay, but just okay [Ed.note: much like the quality of the last few U2 albums]. [Kit note: Blasphemy!]. Bottom line: Bono's other band seems to have taken home a meager profit. We'll explain.

First some background. Elevation Partners were Palm's most influential investors in recent...

Susan Wu, cofounder and CEO of Ohai

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The Gamers

Susan Wu

Cofounder and CEO Ohai

The U.S. virtual goods market will jump 60% this year to $1.6 billion, and analysts estimate worldwide annual revenue could reach $10 billion -- the equivalent of Hollywood's 2009 box-office earnings. Founder of online-gaming firm Ohai Susan Wu knew that virtual goods (products that exist only online) made real money, and she went after the digital wares like a hot commodity. Yet this multi-billion-dollar industry is still a niche...

Steve Jobs: Adobe's Flash is Old PC History, Open Web is the Future

In a rare response to the chatter about Apple's tech feud with Adobe, Apple's Steve Jobs has declared that that the Web should really embrace open standards, even while the iPhone remains closed.

Jobs just had Apple publish his musings on Apple's "hotnews" section. And it's amazing. No, seriously, it's amazing, not only for the frankness of the text, its overt challenge to Adobe's reliability, but also for Steve's stance on open versus closed tech standards. Though the letter's titled...

How to Design Like You Give a Damn in 5 Easy Steps

It may be a recent perusal of so many headlines of disaster and despair that stirred these thoughts. Or it may just be the experiences of many years gelling ever more concretely. But this is a plea to everyone interested and participating in design of any form to "design like you give a damn."

Give a damn about process. If your approach is thoughtful, vigilant and thorough, you're on the way to finding a route to be able to deliver a unique and meaningful expression. Beware the process that...

How Renting, Not Owning an iPhone Could Have Saved Gizmodo: Expert

The Gizmodo iPhone saga is notoriously tough to figure out--our Choose Your Own Adventure story and flowchart were designed to show exactly how murky these legal waters are. There are a lot of theories floating around, many of which have all the legal authority of a 4chan diploma. To figure out what's what, I talked with Lawrence J. Siskind, a former special counsel to President Ronald Reagan and partner in the San Francisco law firm Harvey Siskind LLP, which specializes in trade secrets.

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Sean Parker: Facebook Should Not Have Won, MySpace Blew It

Why did Friendster and MySpace fail where Facebook found phenomenal success? It's not that the site was better marketed, designed or had fancier code, according to Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook and now managing partner of Founders Fund. "MySpace never would have existed if Friendster had been a properly managed company," he said.

And MySpace? "The only reason we won was because of the gross incompetence of MySpace systematically over a period of many years," Parker said...

Palm's Rocky 28-Year Path to HP (A Timeline)

Wednesday's announcement that HP would acquire Palm for $1.2 billion halts--at least for now--the dramatic rollercoaster ride that the company has been on since its birth as a gleam in Palm founder Jeff Hawkins' eye in 1982. Thank goodness, because Palm watchers have been nauseous following all of the company's wild twists and turns over the years (though not as queasy as current Palm shareholders). Sorry, Steve Jobs fans, but Hawkins deserves a lot more credit for creating today's world of...

BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands Confirms Tech Is Taking Over the World

Millward Brown Optimor has released its fifth annual BrandZ report (.pdf file) that shows the 100 most valuable brands in the world--and it shows just how integral technology has become in our lives. The top spot goes to Google, with IBM and Apple following close behind--and out of the top 10, there are just three non-tech brands: McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Marlboro.

Of the 16 categories, however, it was not technology that posted the biggest rise but, rather, financial institutions, with a...