Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 64

What Does This Say About Us?

Mobile is 2% of Global Gross Domestic Product. $1.3 trillion in sales.

http://gigaom.com/broadband/stat-shot-mobile-is-2-of-global-gdp/

But what this seems to indicate, besides our love and addiction for electronics, is the growing societal connection. Whether 3 miles away or 3,000, these devices enable us to stay connected with each other in an unprecedented fashion. Not only do they connect directly (voice, email, text) but also indirectly via web (login to Facebook) and now even applications...

Words of Wisdom from Jeff Bezos to Entrepreneurs

Forbes posted a great article on a recent interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In this interview, Jeff outlines six points that all companies should take into consideration…and that helped shape Amazon into the juggernaut it is today.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/11/16/6-things-jeff-bezos-knew-back-in-1997-that-made-amazon-a-gorilla/

1. When you have a window of opportunity, go for the jugular – even if you have to exhaust a huge number of resources.Critics saw a bottomless pit...

The Secret Ingredient to Making a Media Smash Hit Is…

You guessed it:

A dash of “I got a cool idea,” a pinch of “let’s take it a series so it takes a lot of books,” sprinkled with a healthy dose of “yes, that’s right, this could be you in these pages,” and the final, secret ingredient.

But that’s just it, the secret ingredient that makes Harry Potter so incredibly popular and authors like George R. R. Martin smashing successes is so secret that no one really knows why it happens.

The New Yorker recently published a very interesting investigation in...

How-To: Pick the Best Camera For the Job

With digital cameras constantly evolving (and becoming more complicated) it’s good to pick the camera you need for the photos you generally take. Big on low-light? How about action? Maybe something really pocket size?

MacWorld has a great write-up of camera-selection criteria:

http://www.macworld.com/article/161535/2011/08/pick_the_best_camera_for_the_job.html

From the article:

There is no one perfect camera. But if you need a camera suited to a specific kind of photography, you can get the best...

HTML 5 Falls Short for Video Delivery

In my current position with Limelight, I get a lot of questions about HTML 5. Of course the tag in HTML 5 is great. It makes it very easy for customers to quickly provide video content on their website without having to deploy a Flash or Silverlight player (which requires the user to have a plug-in). And it allows for the deployment of content via HTTP obviating the need for specialized media servers like FMS, IIS, or even Wowza. In short, it’s a great first step towards standardizing video...

A Glimpse Into the Multi-Screen World

Google (in conjunction with Ipsos and Sterling Brand) produced a powerful, insightful report into how we interact with content through the multiple screens/connected devices that are beginning to permeate our lives. I reference this study frequently in webinars (like this one about the Olympics), with some of the world’s biggest brands I get to work with, and various articles I’ve written since the publication of the report. So I decided to clip the content from Google’s think-tank website: w...

Bringing Data to Life

If there is one trend that I am happy to see growing, it’s data visualization. In a recent project published by MIT called The Connected States of America, they have mapped out the connectivity between people (via mobile phone calls and text messaging) in a heat-map.

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I firmly believe that data analysis, intelligence, and visualization hold a huge key to the success of businesses in the coming years. As more and more data is produced, it is critical for businesses to be able to synthesize and a...

Forget an Alien Invasion, We Need To Keep Our Eyes Open for the Robots!

From GalleyCat:

“Swarmanoid is a heterogeneous robot swarm in which different groups of robots have different capabilities: some robots are specialized in manipulating objects and climbing, some in moving on the ground and transporting objects, and some in flying and observing the environment from above. This video presents the Swarmanoid project, a 4 year research project coordinated by Marco Dorigo and funded by the Commission of the European Union.”

This is a really awesome demonstration of...

Look Into My Eye…

A really cool series of photographs of the human eye. Puts things into perspective when you think about how amazing the eye is as a biological mechanism…and how beautiful.

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/award-winning-photographer-looks-into-our-eyes

Vertical Social Networks

The world of social networking is here to stay. That much is for certain.And what’s more, social networking has definite applications to businesses. Instead of employees congregating around the proverbial water cooler, they can do so on the Web from anywhere allowing for much deeper and wider collaboration than possible before.But Facebook has shown us that its “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t necessarily work for business. Its approach to privacy, for instance, doesn’t meet the needs of...