Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 84

Variety is the Spice of your Writing

As writers, we tend to focus on what we think is important in the act of storytelling: plot, motivation, character development, pacing, arc. Of course, those are all great aspects and writers should pay attention to them but how many writers pay an equal amount of attention to the words they put on the paper, to the structure and length of their sentences. In short, to their prose?I like to think of a story as a giant block of clay and the words as my tools, carving away at it. It’s a visual...

Photo: Awe Inspiring Pictures of the Universe

I believe one of the key benefits of photographer is our ability to capture the really grand (i.e., the universe), the really small (i.e., the atomic or cellular), and couple that with a snapshot in time. When you look at these kinds of pictures, your mind can’t help but to wonder if it looks the same now, how it’s changed, how it’s evolving and living all incapable of being seen by the naked eye. It’s the realization that there is an unknowable, incomprehensible world of grandeur and microco...

Semantic Programming

It has long been the holy grail to create a programming language that used everyday language. So instead of “a x b = c,” people could type, “what’s the product of a and b?” It seems that Wolfram Research is moving in that direction with their Computational Document Format:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterpris...

Wolfram is most famous for his mathematical framework, a New Kind of Science. And although that has met with varying degrees o...

Hadoop Gets a Big Push

For those of us immersed in the cloud industry, this is big news:

http://gigaom.com/cloud/exclusive-yahoo-launching-hadoop-spinoff-this-week/

It provides a heavy-weight’s backing to a core cloud technology. Hadoop provides a core infrastructure that will become more and more necessary in distributed environments to improve overall cost efficiencies of carrying out high-compute intensive activities.

Yahooooooo!

How-To: Taking Photos with Your Camera Phone

As the smartphone market continues to grow, it won’t be long before we are all carrying little computers in our pockets. But what’s more interesting to note is how advanced the cameras in these phones are becoming. First it was 1 megapixel. Then 2. Then 4. And now, with the supposed iPhone 5, 8 megapixels. These phones will take pictures as good as (or in some cases better) than point-and-shoot cameras and even low-end DSLRs.

NatGeo has posted a great series of “how-tos” for taking great photo...

Can Your Brain Process Javascript?

I recently watched the first 9 episodes of a digital series called H+ which is a fictionalized account of a world-ending event: a virus that infects billions of people who have been implanted with a nano-technology that integrates computational/interface capabilities with the human body. Based on these 9 episodes, the virus shuts down infected humans, eventually killing them.

The series terms this bio-compute integration as “transhumanism.” The screen shot below (which links to the YouTube pag...

Learning From the Past

It’s always great to hear failed entrepreneurs come out with their self-reflections about their experiences with their startups. Much like postmortem committees in hospitals (to talk about what happened when a patient dies as a result of the hospital’s procedures, and how things might be improved as a result), this kind of outing helps all of us as entrepreneurs better recognize the signs of failure as well as the impact of the startup on our lives and the lives of those around us.

http://then...

Do You Know the Engagement Styles of your Social Media Followers?

Although Klout is getting a lot of press lately (well, maybe more the idea of trying to measure influence than just Klout) , they do introduce a very important topic for digital marketing: engagement styles.

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The picture above is a screenshot from my own Klout score analysis. As you can see around the corners of the diagram, there are a number of different “styles” that Klout has identified:

Listening,
Casual,
Consistent,
Focused,
Participating,
Sharing,
Creating, and
Broad.

What’s interesting about thi...

Mobile Web vs. Mobile Apps. Which Will Win?

For anyone that has spent at least a little bit of time on an iPad or iPhone has experienced the world of applications vs. the world of the Web. In many cases, the smartphone/smartdevice platform that Apple built has given rise to the “application experience:” network-aware/connected applications that provide a much more mobile-friendly/mobile-centric user experience than the web. Take Facebook for example. Their mobile application for both iOS and Android is far superior to using the website...

Google 10m users + 1 billion shared items. So What?

I think had we touted these numbers even 5 years ago, it would have been truly amazing. But with the explosive growth in being online worldwide, users have shown a greater proclivity for trying new services. It’s easy. Just sign up and go. Take it for a spin. Stop using it when you don’t want to anymore. There’s no “cost of trying.”

But with Google’s massive world-wide reach, I wonder what this 10m really represents of their current user base? 10%? 5%? 1%? In that case, it’s really nothing tha...