David Lidsky's Blog, page 4751

Texas Sprawl Goes Out With a Bang, Development Sprouts on Irving Transit Line

With 2,715 pounds of dynamite Sunday, 40-year-old Texas Stadium -- the one with the hole in its roof, "so God can watch his favorite team play" -- was reduced to 2 million pounds of steel scrap and 4 million pounds of (recyclable) concrete rubble. Thousands of die-hard Dallas Cowboys fans and former players showed up to tailgate once last time and cheer the early morning implosion.

One entity that isn't sad to see it go is its host city of Irving, Texas, which lost the new $1.3 billion...

Quiz: Ad Agency or Indie Band?

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Courtesy Amanda M Hatfield

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Advertising creatives like to think of themselves as rock...

HTC "Continues to Assess" Making Their Own Smartphone OS--or Buying One From Palm

Bloomberg reports that HTC is studying whether to create its own OS to compete with Apple's iPhone OS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. It's no easy feat--but HTC sees lots of reasons to try it.

"We continue to assess, but that requires a few conditions
to justify" having our own system, Cheng Hui-ming,
chief
financial officer of the Taoyuan, Taiwan-based company, said
in a phone interview with Bloomberg today.

Those "conditions to justify" are pretty easy to figure out...

Adobe Rumored to Be Preparing Lawsuit Against Apple

ITWorld hears strong rumors from sources close to Adobe that the of-late embittered company will be suing Apple as a result of two major setbacks for Adobe in Apple's iPhone OS platform. Lots of details are missing, but we know Adobe is steaming about Apple.

First, Apple refused to allow Flash on any iPhone OS platform. That's rough, because the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are major products, and Adobe doesn't want to have one of their flagship pieces of software become useless. But Apple is...

Google Buzz Buttons to Invade Your Favorite News Sites

A typical story on a social-media-centric site like the Huffington Post or Mashable is inevitably accompanied by about forty "share via" buttons. You'll be able to share via Twitter, Facebook, email, Digg, Reddit, Morse code, carrier pigeon, and hand-delivered engraved stone hieroglyph. Those buttons are important--they feed content into those social networks/archaic communication forms, which gets more people reading them, because there's more content. It's a circular process--more content...

Webby Awards Nominees Announced: New York Times Makes Up for Those Pulitzer Snubs

This year's Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and the Washington Post bested the New York Times in awards, four to three. But in Webby nominations, NYTimes.com positively cleaned up, scoring 15 nominations, nearly twice that of the next-most decorated site, the BBC. But the Webbys are all about rewarding the glorious weirdness of the internet--nowhere else does the Grey Lady share accolades with Selleck Waterfall Sandwich.

The top-nominated pubs are the New York Times, BBC...

High Stakes: Winning the Ultimate Bet

Venture onto the top floor of many corporate HQs and the silence, the deference, and the sense that the air is thinner can be disconcerting. Most Boards and C-Suites live in reality bubbles, which may--or may not--reflect existing or emergent realities. Exxon CEO Lee Raymond famously presided over the 'God Pod'--the bubble within which his executive office operated with near divine powers. More recently, one doesn't need to look further than what went on at the top of companies like Enron...

Today in Most Innovative Companies

News of note from our Most Innovative Companies, including Hulu, PG&E, and Huawei.

Hulu: How long do you spend catching up on missed episodes of Glee and Saturday Night Live online? Apparently more than you did a year ago. According to comScore, Hulu's viewer engagement is up 120% year-over-year in February 2010 to 2.4 hours per viewer. While comScore didn't breakdown YouTube's hourly viewership, of the 132 million visitors, each averaged 89 videos, totally 11.9 billion videos watched--Hulu...

Graduate USC's New Program, Demand Friends Call You "Dr. Innovation"

In a description so buzzword-happy and circumventing it could almost be an Onion story, the University of Southern California has announced a new program for its graduate school: The USC Diploma in Innovation Program. According to the site, "students will emerge from the program with a greater ability to
recognize the broad
possibilities for how their academic
expertise intersects with pressing societal
needs and with the skills...

Swarovski Opens Its Crystal Vault to Designers in Milan

Ten leading international designers were paired with nine industrial design and furniture producers and handed the equivalent of the crystal company's Bedazzler.