Ulysse Sabbagh

One key characteristic of founders is the great urge to get things done — and this urge is a key component of success. However, there’s also a tendency to simply blast through everything on the agenda so that you can move faster, which is not always a good idea. There are lucky moments where startups stumble upon something that is suddenly loved and used, but most startups do not have the luxury to shoot from the hip to try and hit the target: they need to know where to aim.

Great advice from Philipp Moehring, a Seedcamp executive. 

One key characteristic of founders is the great urge to get things done — and this urge is a key component of success. However, there’s also a tendency to simply blast through everything on the agenda so that you can move faster, which is not always a good idea. There are lucky moments where startups stumble upon something that is suddenly loved and used, but most startups do not have the luxury to shoot from the hip to try and hit the target: they need to know where to aim.

Great advice from Philipp Moehring, a Seedcamp executive. 

stupidiswinning:

Over the next decade there will be a lot of children who for many years have only had access to the internet through apps on tablets.  They will not go to Google to find websites.  They won’t be the unwashed masses who can’t afford a laptop, but they will have years with a tablet before they want one.

It’s a fundamental shift away from the internet as we know it - in a browser - that will be as incredible to help kill as it was to help create and corrupt.  Kids simply won’t be downloading software, games, and porn through the internet or bulletin boards before it.  A purely curated, controlled experience through iTunes or Play is all they will have and know except for a hacker minority.

We’re going to encourage it too.  I could not count the hours I spent breaking and fixing my computer and trying to restore it to even a usable state as a kid.  That’s blowing into cartridges, I bet we remember it fondly because we don’t have to do it anymore.

It takes years to learn how to use a laptop and keyboard effectively and understand the massively more complicated interfaces.  Tablets are so intuitive to use that children immediately realize their fingers are in control, and they’re going to be an invaluable education tool even more than books were for centuries.  They’re also much safer than the internet - “bad” is scaled way back too to something sane.  Someone is watching so I don’t have to.  It’s almost like the internet done right which kind of sucks some of the fun out of it.

The killer question:  what happens when ‘the internet’ is not ‘in the browser’ anymore?  It is only half true today to call Internet Explorer by its name since apps and gaming are so much of our online experience already.

Consider what it means to grow up with a tablet instead of a computer.  tldr; everything we love on our laptops and in the browser-based internet is ripe for disruption.

Some jumbled thoughts in no order:

• What is the ipad WordPress and how can my grandma install my blog?  What will the forum version look like?   Same for FAQ sites.  The notion of these being websites, separate websites even, might be quaint.  Especially if there was a ‘community app’ you could just create your own in as easily as you might in a browser today.  It solves RSS too.  It might be hard to hide blogs from our families, something like violentacrez on reddit may not be possible again.
• Whatsapp has won messaging, text and instant.  What will Twitter and Skype do?
• Children’s entertainment on tablets is going to explode and gaming will follow because this is competing with television for an entire generation.
• How long until startups are “just an app” with no web presence?  They are already “just an app” with a token web presence sometimes
• Our kids will consider Google the search engine as lame as Yahoo the homepage.  Same with YouTube the website.  Google is lucky they have Android.  Microsoft’s got nothing because I’m the one who has to own the device first and I still don’t want a Windows tablet.
• We are getting to the point where people have accumulated $1000s of apps and media that can’t be transferred between devices.  Apple is going to be forced to make iTunes a public park instead of a closed garden, and there will be real compatibility between iOS and Android to avoid a monopoly.  Or will we let it slide?
• At what age will it become a copyright issue that we buy children unique copies of our apps?  This was never a forced issue on the PC industry.  It’s the end game from a rumor (lie) Travolta was suing Apple so he could leave his mp3 collection to his children, only it’s really going to hit once the RIAA and MPAA realizes siblings are getting a free pass.  This will piss everyone off too much, especially because desktop piracy will be fading by then so if their numbers are still down it’s a declining market, not piracy.
• It’s going to be really hard for Microsoft to break into this market because we all already have Android or iPad tablets for hand me downs.  I might never have to buy my daughter a laptop so they need to get Windows tablets into everybody’s hands asap or else they need to start thinking of themselves as an app and server developer.
• Steam box better be part one of an amazing story and fuller experience, if kids don’t have laptops they don’t have pc gaming, and it’s hard to see why they would prefer consoles over tablets especially if I have to pay 10x as much when games are a $1 consumable like candy.  Consoles will probably become just brands, like Atari or Commodore today.  Maybe they’ll be a seal for a quality standard.
• How will our children learn to create digitally?  In all senses, programming, art, media.  All the software we take for granted because they were “too big” for the web so few or poor efforts have been made to move them there.  And a new generation of problems that can be solved digitally.
• It is hard to imagine the keyboard and mouse staying a superior interface and surviving all the way into an infant today’s career, especially when you’re born and raised with a tablet first.

A clever, straightforward analysis basically re-iterating what Chris Anderson said in Wired in September 2010: the Web is dead, long live the Internet. 

stupidiswinning:

Over the next decade there will be a lot of children who for many years have only had access to the internet through apps on tablets.  They will not go to Google to find websites.  They won’t be the unwashed masses who can’t afford a laptop, but they will have years with a tablet before they want one.

It’s a fundamental shift away from the internet as we know it - in a browser - that will be as incredible to help kill as it was to help create and corrupt.  Kids simply won’t be downloading software, games, and porn through the internet or bulletin boards before it.  A purely curated, controlled experience through iTunes or Play is all they will have and know except for a hacker minority.

We’re going to encourage it too.  I could not count the hours I spent breaking and fixing my computer and trying to restore it to even a usable state as a kid.  That’s blowing into cartridges, I bet we remember it fondly because we don’t have to do it anymore.

It takes years to learn how to use a laptop and keyboard effectively and understand the massively more complicated interfaces.  Tablets are so intuitive to use that children immediately realize their fingers are in control, and they’re going to be an invaluable education tool even more than books were for centuries.  They’re also much safer than the internet - “bad” is scaled way back too to something sane.  Someone is watching so I don’t have to.  It’s almost like the internet done right which kind of sucks some of the fun out of it.

The killer question:  what happens when ‘the internet’ is not ‘in the browser’ anymore?  It is only half true today to call Internet Explorer by its name since apps and gaming are so much of our online experience already.

Consider what it means to grow up with a tablet instead of a computer.  tldr; everything we love on our laptops and in the browser-based internet is ripe for disruption.

Some jumbled thoughts in no order:

• What is the ipad WordPress and how can my grandma install my blog?  What will the forum version look like?   Same for FAQ sites.  The notion of these being websites, separate websites even, might be quaint.  Especially if there was a ‘community app’ you could just create your own in as easily as you might in a browser today.  It solves RSS too.  It might be hard to hide blogs from our families, something like violentacrez on reddit may not be possible again.
• Whatsapp has won messaging, text and instant.  What will Twitter and Skype do?
• Children’s entertainment on tablets is going to explode and gaming will follow because this is competing with television for an entire generation.
• How long until startups are “just an app” with no web presence?  They are already “just an app” with a token web presence sometimes
• Our kids will consider Google the search engine as lame as Yahoo the homepage.  Same with YouTube the website.  Google is lucky they have Android.  Microsoft’s got nothing because I’m the one who has to own the device first and I still don’t want a Windows tablet.
• We are getting to the point where people have accumulated $1000s of apps and media that can’t be transferred between devices.  Apple is going to be forced to make iTunes a public park instead of a closed garden, and there will be real compatibility between iOS and Android to avoid a monopoly.  Or will we let it slide?
• At what age will it become a copyright issue that we buy children unique copies of our apps?  This was never a forced issue on the PC industry.  It’s the end game from a rumor (lie) Travolta was suing Apple so he could leave his mp3 collection to his children, only it’s really going to hit once the RIAA and MPAA realizes siblings are getting a free pass.  This will piss everyone off too much, especially because desktop piracy will be fading by then so if their numbers are still down it’s a declining market, not piracy.
• It’s going to be really hard for Microsoft to break into this market because we all already have Android or iPad tablets for hand me downs.  I might never have to buy my daughter a laptop so they need to get Windows tablets into everybody’s hands asap or else they need to start thinking of themselves as an app and server developer.
• Steam box better be part one of an amazing story and fuller experience, if kids don’t have laptops they don’t have pc gaming, and it’s hard to see why they would prefer consoles over tablets especially if I have to pay 10x as much when games are a $1 consumable like candy.  Consoles will probably become just brands, like Atari or Commodore today.  Maybe they’ll be a seal for a quality standard.
• How will our children learn to create digitally?  In all senses, programming, art, media.  All the software we take for granted because they were “too big” for the web so few or poor efforts have been made to move them there.  And a new generation of problems that can be solved digitally.
• It is hard to imagine the keyboard and mouse staying a superior interface and surviving all the way into an infant today’s career, especially when you’re born and raised with a tablet first.

A clever, straightforward analysis basically re-iterating what Chris Anderson said in Wired in September 2010: the Web is dead, long live the Internet. 

NYT from Kottke:

Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing – minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting – that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

End of the world slated for December 2013? 

NYT from Kottke:

Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing – minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting – that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

End of the world slated for December 2013? 

The difference between pleasure and joy, as explained by Zadie Smith and Thomas Aquinas

The difference between pleasure and joy, as explained by Zadie Smith and Thomas Aquinas

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/the-joy-of-zadie-smith-and-thomas-aquinas/

A fascinating, comparative study on joy and pleasure by Gary Gutting, writing for the NYT’s philosophy blog called The Stone.

Zadie Smith understands pleasure as an experience of the daily occurrences of life: eating, people-watching. These “small pleasures” satisfy a big part of her desire for pleasure. 

Joy is very different: it doesn’t, per se, provide pleasure but is rather a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith’s true love for her husband and child is far more important than pleasure, for instance.

Both agree that joy is something much more than the bodily pleasures that satisfy an animal.  As Smith puts it, animals always “choose a pleasure over a joy.”  Aquinas, agrees, though with a philosophical refinement: “We do not attribute joy to brute animals”—it’s not quite that animals choose pleasure over joy; there’s no choice because they are incapable of experiencing joy in the sense that humans do.

explore-blog:

“I don’t believe in market research. I don’t believe in marketing the way it’s done in America. The American way of marketing is to answer to the wants of the customer instead of answering to the needs of the customer. The purpose of marketing should be to find needs — not to find wants.

People do not know what they want. They barely know what they need, but they definitely do not know what they want. They’re conditioned by the limited imagination of what is possible. … Most of the time, focus groups are built on the pressure of ignorance.”

— Massimo Vignelli

explore-blog:

“I don’t believe in market research. I don’t believe in marketing the way it’s done in America. The American way of marketing is to answer to the wants of the customer instead of answering to the needs of the customer. The purpose of marketing should be to find needs — not to find wants.

People do not know what they want. They barely know what they need, but they definitely do not know what they want. They’re conditioned by the limited imagination of what is possible. … Most of the time, focus groups are built on the pressure of ignorance.”

— Massimo Vignelli

This post lays out the Minimum Viable Kitchen (MVK) for creating gourmet food. It’s aimed at the person that wants to make truly great food, but isn’t quite sure where to get started or how expensive the commitment will be. As it turns out, you can assemble all the kitchen equipment you need to become a great chef for under $1000. This post isn’t trying to convince you to become a great chef or a foodie, but if you are already so inclined, it will help you get started.

The Minimum Viable Kitchen by Matt Maroon at Priceonomics details how to get a decent kitchen, from knives to dessert paraphernalia. 

This post lays out the Minimum Viable Kitchen (MVK) for creating gourmet food. It’s aimed at the person that wants to make truly great food, but isn’t quite sure where to get started or how expensive the commitment will be. As it turns out, you can assemble all the kitchen equipment you need to become a great chef for under $1000. This post isn’t trying to convince you to become a great chef or a foodie, but if you are already so inclined, it will help you get started.

Time-lapse of blooming flowers by Katka Pruskova.

Time-lapse of blooming flowers by Katka Pruskova.

Great analysis by Farhad Manjoo over at Slate, explaining why Samsung’s strategy (building everything from refrigerators to computers) is actually working:

This flood-the-market strategy isn’t elegant. It can be confusing for customers, a pain for Samsung’s carrier partners, and very difficult for the firm’s engineers and designers to keep up with. It also doesn’t have history on its side. Other firms that have tried the build-everything approach—see Apple in the early 1990s, or Hewlett-Packard over the last decade—eventually begin to lumber under their own complexity.

Yet Samsung’s strategy is extremely well suited to our current tech era. We live in a time of profound transition, when the future of everything is up in the air. The world’s tech-addled masses are switching from desktop devices to mobile ones, from bulky programs to sleek apps, from limited local storage to acres of space in the clouds. When everything is in flux, predicting what will be hot a year from now—“skating to where the puck is going to be,” to quote Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretzky—becomes all but impossible. Samsung’s strategy is to put a man at every spot on the ice. Be in enough places and you’re bound to catch something no one was predicting—like, for instance, the world’s bizarre love affair with phablets.

The Cup Is Already Broken

The Cup Is Already Broken

http://minimalmac.com/post/40193527821/the-cup-is-already-broken

minimalmac:

The Buddha told his student, ‘Every morning I drink from my favorite teacup. I hold it in my hands and feel the warmth of the cup from the hot liquid it contains. I breathe in the aroma of my tea and enjoy my mornings in this way. But in my mind the teacup is already broken.’

Like The Buddha’s teacup, your hard drive has already failed. That file will already no longer open. That software is already obsolete. That hardware is already dead.

If one accepts that the hard drive is already failed, perhaps they will backup right now to prepare. Perhaps one will choose the file types they use carefully in order to assure the greatest longevity. Perhaps they will choose software that has stood the test of time. Perhaps they will choose hardware that is easy to maintain, repair, or replace.

Some poetry by Patrick Rhone, author and curator of Minimal Mac about why you should back up your hard drive right about now. You probably have nothing better to do than save your data & memories. 

Hunter S. Thompson’s daily routine.