The Case For Holographic Concerts

parislemon:

I was in Las Vegas last week and managed to see two Cirque du Soleil shows. My favorite part of both shows was actually quite similar. And I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of it in the future.

In The Beatles show (more about that here), things kicked off with giant silhouettes of the band playing one of their songs. This was topped in the Michael Jackson show by a hologram of the artist performing “with” the Cirque artists.

One was great. The other was spectacular.

This begs the question: why don’t we see more of this? That is, live performances of music where holograms (or at least silhouettes) stand in for the missing performers?

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How good is air safety?

Here’s a number that should be on the front page of every major newspaper: 224. That’s how many people died–worldwide–in airline crashes last year. Around 3 billion people boarded some 35 million flights, each of them traveling over 500 miles per hour in an aluminum tube 7 miles above the earth. And only 224 died. That’s simply an incredible number.

Also, 400 people died in the United States died from falling out of bed.

Introducing Facebook Paper

Some thoughts:

Nice visual design, lots of new stuff in interaction and motion that is very much so in harmony with iOS 7.

However, if the use case is: having a more beautiful Facebook experience it’s interesting but definitely not game-changing.

We’ll see.

Paid, Paymium or Freemium?

Dan Counsell discusses three different pricing strategies for apps. Paymium: paid at first, with paid premium features. Interesting stuff.

I look at myself as an artist if anything,” Mr. Jobs said. “Sort of a trapeze artist.

In 1983, Steven Levy interviewed Steve Jobs for hours about his recent breakup and the birth of the Mac.

At some point, Levy asked Jobs what he saw himself as. To which Jobs replied “Sort of a trapeze artist”.

It’s funny that no one noticed this is the exact one liner Bob Dylan used while interviewed in Austin in 1966:

Reporter: What do you consider yourself? How would you classify yourself?

Bob Dylan: Well, I like to think of myself in terms of a trapeze artist.

Now, now, Steve, everyone is going to call you a thief again.

Specialization might give you a temporary boost in productivity, but it comes at the expense of overall functional cohesion and shared ownership. If only Jeff can fiddle with the billing system, any change to the billing system is bottlenecked on Jeff, and who’s going to review his work on a big change?

David from 37signals shares some interesting thoughts on specialization in a startup. Everyone needs to do (at least a little bit of) everything.

To Lure Customers, Appeal To All 5 Of Their Senses

Cool tips for enhancing the first impression customers will have of your product. Sensorial perception is of paramount importance.

I think Snapchat is a super interesting privacy phenomenon because it creates a new kind of space to communicate which makes it so that things that people previously would not have been able to share, you now feel like you have place to do so.

Spot on, Mark.

Zuckerberg Calls Snapchat A “Privacy Phenomenon” | TechCrunch

Here’s How People Are Using The Jelly App

By using publicly accessible API endpoints, Robert Moore at RJMetrics said he was able to scan all the questions posted thus far on the app. He determined that more than 100,000 questions have been asked, with only about 25% of them receiving an answer. According to his report, Jelly saw 8,275 new active users on the day of its launch, with 5,183 people asking and 5,527 answering.

Interesting that Jelly is taking off so quickly. Or is it?

Jelly gets the right idea: we definitely can use technology to reduce the friction between one person who needs a piece of knowledge and the one who owns it, and make it easy to enable communication.

Rethinking the airline boarding pass. Peter Smart redesigns the boarding pass with a focus on hierarchy and legibility. Impressive.