Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 66

Photos: New Gallery: Duluth Railroad Museum

Over the summer I had the chance to visit the railroad museum in Duluth, MN (before you ask, I happened to be there for a hockey tournament and had some free time one day). I love trains and the railroad as it embodies such a quintessential aspect of American idealism and expansion. Of course, it also has a very sordid past with respect to American racism but I try not to let that compromise its idealistic and nostalgic characteristics.

This collection of photos also features my first foray in...

Christopher Walken + Fairy Tale Reading + National TV = Twistedly Hilarious!

In 1993 the now defunct British TV comedy series, Saturday Zoo with host Jonathan Ross, sat down actor Christopher Walken on stage to read a very demented version of the classic fairytale, The Three Little Pigs. As you can probably imagine, the results were humorous and even Walken himself seems amused by the skit. Don’t be a dunksy and take a look at the video for yourself.

What’s a Personal Cloud (And Do I Want One)?

The “cloud” is not something new. Apple has iCloud. Google has Google Drive/Google Docs/Google etc…, Microsoft has SkyDrive. Amazon has Kindle and AWS. There are others as well such as Rackspace, Dropbox, and Box.net. And people are starting to use them. Through a variety of synchronizing technologies (maybe you install a piece of software on your computer or, as in the case with Apple, synchronization is built into all of their operating systems), files get uploaded automatically, even accou...

What’s More Effective: E-Commerce or Retail?

As the infographic below shows, e-commerce has radically changed the face of retail. Big businesses are closing left and right and yet online behemoths, like Amazon and Netflix, continue to grow. Is this the slow but sure transition of our lives from the real to the digital?

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Visual: The Power of Pinterest

The wonderful people at TechCrunch have posted a great infographic about Pinterest. Who’s using it? Why? How? Etc. Great insight (compiled from ComScore data and other sources).

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Digital First in 2013: New Revenue Channels for Print Publishers

This webinar, featuring Gordon Borrell from Borrell & Associates, Chad Wagner from Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Jason Thibeault from Limelight, explores how print publishers can take advantage of consumer behavioral trends and digital opportunities to drive new revenue opportunities in the newspaper industry.

Review of Scribd’s iOS app: Float

Reading books on the iPhone/iPad isn’t new. Not only does Apple have their own app (iBooks) but Kindle, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and others have launched their own software to support e-reading.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way to discover user-generated and self-published material very easily. Outside of going to Scribd’s website or loading PDFs directly onto your phone (which is counter-intuitive to the whole “discovery” process) there is no way to really discover content on the p...

The Cloud Is the OS

Joyent recently announced the launch of their “SimpleOS,” a cloud-based operating system:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/joyent-launches-a-new-os-for-the-cloud/

Although I think what Joyent has done is interesting (perhaps not as lofty as they claim it to be, i.e., the only “modern OS” made in the last decade) it does portend to a much bigger movement in how devices will load, operate, and connect with one another.

Right now, we exist in a distributed environment. Computers boot up to a local operating...

Facepalm: Personal Branding Gone Horribly Wrong

The concept:

1. take a picture of your t-shirt and send it to a service along with your contact info.

2. someone snaps a picture of YOU in that t-shirt, emails it to service, and gets your contact info

WTF????

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/09/16/this-service-lets-someone-scan-your-t-shirt-to-get-your-contact-info/

Here’s my comment to the article:

And why would anyone think of taking a picture of my shirt to get my contact info? In what strange, bizzarro land is this common user behavior? W...

The Coming Storm for Consumer Cloud Services

The growing number of proprietary clouds (some of which, like IGware that was recently purchased by Acer, that have hidden behind the scenes) is hinting at a very big problem in the future: data portability. Although I think it’s a good business model for device manufacturers like Acer, Dell, and Apple to build and launch their own clouds (because it provides tighter integration between their proprietary software and the cloud and therefore creates more stickiness) it’s not a good model for t...