Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 85

Evolution of a Website: Time-lapse

A very interesting time-lapse look a the New York Times website over a year. Notice the change in structure as well as images. If nothing more, just very cool footage:

Photo: When Lightning Strikes

Beautiful picture featured on NatGeo of a lightning strike at Utah-AZ border. Click on the link to read more about the shot.

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http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/lightning-strike-utah-arizona/

When Companies Are Caught Up In Their Own Vision

I believe that successful companies must tap into a collective vision in order to succeed. This is akin to the age-old mantra of building a business to solve a problem. If you aren’t solving a problem then what is the point of the company?

That is exactly where I am at with ThingWorx. From their website:

ThingWorx uniquely connects people, systems, and the physical world, enabling a 5x increase in the velocity of solution development – this dramatically increases IT responsiveness and acts as a...

Text Books For Everyone!

Amazon Kindle has recently launched a program that allows students to “borrow” digital text books, mark them up with highlights, and save the notes for future use (even after the rental period has ended). TechCrunch has a cursory write-up of the new product:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/amazon-launches-kindle-textbook-rental-service-allows-students-to-store-notes-in-the-cloud/

There are a number of very interesting things in this offering. First, is that it’s not the first. Companies rentin...

Wonderfully Complicated

I have been writing a lot of data visualization lately (really as a precursor to a much larger post about the next big step in computing/software) and here is something I recently came across: Wondergraphs.

I’ve pasted their video tour below:

Introduction to Wondergraphs from Wondergraphs on Vimeo.

Now I consider myself a fairly intelligent person capable of grasping pretty complex and abstract tasks. But nothing makes my brain curdle like data analysis. And although I think this company has a r...

Amazon Hardware vs. Amazon Retail

With the Kindle, Amazon broke into the hardware game. Traditionally a retailer (both electronic and physical), they have seen a tremendous uptake in e-book purchasing because of their device. And now, it seems, they are going to build a tablet to compete against the iPad.

http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2011/07/13/amazon-to-release-a-tablet-by-october/

Some people might think this is insane but I understand where Amazon is coming from. If you look at the Kindle, this was really a loss-leader for...

Sometimes It’s the Little Things That Set Everything in Motion

Do you carry any napkins with you? You might want to start considering such after you read the article below. It seems that a host of big-name ideas, everything from Facebook to ethernet, started on a napkin (rumor has it Jeff Bezos made is Amazon list on a napkin as well):

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/napkins-where-ethernet-compaq-and-facebook%E2%80%99s-

We Need Consolidation, Not Expansion (E-reader craziness)

When I was working at my product development startup a few years ago, Q2 Labs, I purchased the first model of the Sony PRS digital book e-reader. We had wanted to see not only how it worked but also understand user behavior with this new class of devices (pre-tablet).

I can’t tell you how many conversations I had on planes with people asking me about the device. It was clear that there was a demand and need for it.

But then came the netbook. And then the tablet.

Now we are left with a host of e-...

Facepalm: Can’t We Put Imagination to Better Use?

Oh, the future sometimes worries me when we seem to be expending energy on the banal. I won’t knock that the link below to “Pickup Lines From 13 Historical Figures” isn’t funny at times but you might, like me, be more inclined to put your face into your palm thinking about all the work that went into this. Maybe they would be better served making more cat videos to post on YouTube…

/facepalm

http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6590736/pickup-lines-of-13-historical-figures

Quote: Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Posted in Present

Originally posted 2011-07-18 13:25:27. When you really want to accomplish something, there is no Plan B – Will Smith From In the Mind of Jason Thibeault, post Quote: Keep Your Eye on the Ball