David Lidsky's Blog, page 4871

Infographic of the Day: The U.S. Trade Imbalance Eclipsed by Competing Charts

Two infographics rely on a similar visualization technique to tell different stories about where the economy is headed.

The infographic above depicts U.S. merchandise imports and exports over the last two years, and uses a graphic resembling an eclipse to emphasize the rapid shrinking of the American economy (full size here). A disc representing 2009 is superimposed over a disc representing 2008 to show how much expenditures on imports such as cars and consumer electronics has decreased...

Hey, Baby, Look Who's the Most Innovative Ad Agency

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A glimpse at Grey New York's indelible work for eTrade, the NFL, and even themselves.

It may be 93 years old, but Grey New York has managed to creatively resurrect itself with an infusion of youth: the now ubiquitous eTrade baby. Last year, as ad spending industry-wide plummeted 11%, the WPP-owned agency boosted its operating profits by 44%, thanks to 17 new business wins including BMW, Ketel One, and the NFL.

Grey's creative revival can be credited to Tor Myhren, its chief creative officer...

Googlers Love Real-Time Tweet Feed, Boost Twitter Traffic

We knew how desperate Google was to get some of that live social status sharing action when it signed up Twitter to give it some real time search relevancy. But we didn't know how it would boost Twitter, 'til now. It's a lot.

According to some data-crawling by the folks at VentureBeat, the big switch-on of Twitter's real-time data feed into Google's search engine reversed the slight downwards trend in visitors to Twitter.com. What's more, the fact that Tweets appear in a real-time updating...

Guayakí's CEO Chris Mann on the Importance of Running a Transparent Company

Chris Mann is the CEO and Chairman of the Gourd of Guayakí Sustainable Rainforest Products, Inc. Chris got his BA in Economics from Harvard University but quickly realized that economics conveniently forgot about sustaining the environment and protecting people. Through his experience with Guayakí and previously with Natural Flavors, a 100% organic, vegan restaurant that employed 25 people and 60 local farmers, Chris is finding that by recognizing common purpose, seemingly disparate groups...

This Building Is Invisible to Radar, and Blinding to Everyone Else

Coop Himmelb(l)au design an energy-producing tower that treads lightly on planet Earth, and invisibly on radar screens.

Like most of the work from Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, this proposed 30-story Town Town tower in Vienna is jagged and imposing. But where LA's High School #9 and the Akron Art Museum are meant to stand out like a Judas Priest costume circa 1982, this tower's built for stealth. In fact, the faceted metal skin is invisible to radar.

The building, which is meant to anchor...

Behind the Scenes at Facebook's Grown Up Headquarters

Back in 2004, Facebook was still a post-dormroom project on wobbly colt legs. Now, the company lives in a 150,000-square-foot headquarters that is more reminiscent of an early Google or Microsoft than a scrappy start-up. "Yeah, we've come along way," says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Windows Phone 7 Developer Conditions Leaked: An Apple Clone?

Microsoft's only just announced its months-off revamp to WinMo, now Windows Phone 7, and the SDK release is ages away too. But someone's just leaked the app developer agreement documentation...and revealed it's a lot like Apple's.

As we knew, the code behind WinPhone7 is a radical departure from earlier Windows Mobile efforts, and like the Zune it uses XNA, with some Silverlight and .NET thrown in. And there's also a marked departure from the more free-form rules for developing for earlier...

Is Google Profiting Unfairly From Typosquatters?

A Harvard professor has made it his personal crusade to tell the world how the search giant makes buckets of duckets off people who register deceptive Web addresses.

A slightly more refined variant of cybersquatting, typosquatting involves purchasing domains that are one character away from popular Web sites and serve up ads (or malware) to clumsy typists who land there by mistake. As the Web's biggest advertising company, Google stands to benefit from this practice since it takes a cut...

Why the Blackberry Kindle App May Be More Important Than the Kindle 3

We've been pondering how Amazon could turn the next Kindle into a great machine, but the company has just gone and done something that's probably much more important: It's released a Kindle e-reader app for RIM's BlackBerrys.

Amazon's had e-reader apps for Windows smartphones, as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch, for ages--they're very popular too. And they're fully integrated into the Kindle ecosystem, even remembering which page you're reading and then syncing it back to an actual Kindle...

BBC's Radical Web Site Redesign, Explained by the BBC

The BBC is undergoing a massive redesign of their entire online property, everything from the news site to mobile sites to their proprietary iPlayer video streamer. Usually when a site initiates this kind of facelift, they'll offer a quick "look how far we've come, check out our new site, hope you like it!" story--tech blog Engadget's redesign in November is a good example of this. But the BBC went about fifteen steps further, laying out templates, charts, and explanations for every design...