Beyond Tablets: The Next Five Computing Form Factors - Sarah Rotman Epps - Voices - AllThingsD
Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity | Xconomy
Excerpt:
For its next act, the Silicon Valley giant wants to put a supercomputer in your pocket, the better to sense, search, and interpret your personal surroundings. We talked to the scientists who are making it happen.
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Easier is Better than Better
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.
“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”
Common sense would dictate that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you, when in reality humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision. Politicians are rarely elected based on the majority of people doing research on their background and the policies they support. They are elected for the fact that people can relate to the message they are spreading and because we have heard of them before.
When it comes to our own designs, we imagine people being able to make informed decisions on what the next step should be. However, they are already making 400+ decisions throughout the rest of the day that are likely more important than what they will deal with in our design.
Do you think most people realize there are benefits to driving a manual transmission car over an automatic? Do you think they care? Automatic is easier to pick up so why bother with any other choice? How often do we stay in relationships that we shouldn’t, simply because it’s easier to just deal with it than face the repercussions of having to confront the person?
3 Reasons to Believe in the Death of "Smartphones" (GOOG)
Excerpt:
Devices that were once special aren't anymore. They're the standard.
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Millions of Reasons for Apple to Worry (AAPL, AMZN)
Excerpt:
A million Kindles cleared in each of the past three holiday shopping weeks -- even if it's lumping the $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle Touch 3G, and $199 Kindle Fire in one pot -- is impressive.
Amazon also has some encouraging milestones to discuss specifically about the Kindle Fire that was introduced last month.
"Kindle Fire is the most successful product we've ever launched," Amazon exec Dave Limp is quoted as saying in today's press release. "It's the best-selling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we've already sold millions of units, and we're building millions more to meet the high demand."
Limp also goes on to say that Kindle Fire sales have been accelerating in each of the past three weeks.
Nice! Having already sold "millions" means that Amazon has shipped out at least 2 million Kindle Fire devices.
Let's frame this a different way. Market tracker NPD Group stunned tech watchers when its channel checks revealed that there were just 1.2 million tablets -- outside of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL ) iPad -- sold in this country through the first 10 months of the year. In other words, Amazon has already outsold every other non-Apple tablet maker combined.
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The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained - NYTimes.com
Excerpt:
These C.E.O.’s may have had their own internal business reasons for these unpopular decisions. But they were internal, self-interested reasons. Reasons intended to please stockholders, perhaps.
Even so, all three committed several cardinal sins: Putting customers last. Rewarding loyalty with rudeness. Failing to make their cases to the public.
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On Pivoting
But some startups have barely come up with a plan. One group of founders knew from the beginning of the session that they were going to have to ditch their original idea, which was a tool to make real-time plans with friends. They used it as a way to get into the class but always intended to abandon it once they came up with something better. The trio—two engineers and a derivatives trader with degrees from Stanford and MIT—has been spending 14-hour days in front of a whiteboard, trying to brainstorm a promising concept. Time and again, they have proposed potential businesses to Graham; none of them worked out. But just before the first weekly dinner, they lit upon the idea of building a curated mailing list of high-demand jobs linked to college alumni networks. Graham gave them the go-ahead, and they are just getting under way with their new company, Insider Posts.
That kind of radical reinvention is standard practice here. Indeed, a sizable percentage of YC companies will, at some point, drastically rethink their business—a process known in the startup world as pivoting. During last winter’s session, an 18-year-old Israeli founder named Daniel Gross pulled the most notorious pivot in YC history. Two days before Demo Day, soon after his cofounder quit on him, the young engineer realized that his original business plan was fatally flawed. Gross concocted an entirely new idea, a site that would allow users to search all of their social networks at once. He quickly coded a demo and gave the pitch. Within a year, he had launched the product. Now his company, Greplin, has $4.8 million in funding.
Helen Belogolova and Christine Yen are trying to accomplish a similarly successful pivot. When the two MIT grads interviewed for Y Combinator, they outlined their vision for Citythings, a site to help people discover local events. Over the next few months, they realized it wasn’t working and dropped the idea. But as they researched, they discovered another potential business: Because venues for special events often sit unused even as party and conference planners spend days trying to find space, Belogolova and Yen decided to set up a system that connected planners with available spaces. Citythings would become Venuetastic. Pivot completed.
HP Offers Business Savings With Two Leasing Promotions - Yahoo! Finance
Excerpt:
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire -12/13/11)- HP (NYSE: HPQ - News) today announced two leasing promotions that can help businesses deploy the latest technology while conserving capital for strategic purposes.
The "1-2-3" and "90 Day" deferral programs are offered to qualifying businesses in the United States and Canada through HP Financial Services, the company's leasing and asset management subsidiary.(1)
The programs can help businesses expand their capabilities and evolve to Instant-On Enterprises, where everything and everyone is connected. Instant-On Enterprises require IT environments that are flexible, automated, secure and able to quickly adjust to changing demand.
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2012: Siri Is a Stunner, Amazon Is Amazin' and Security Gets Spendy - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD
Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”
What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”
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Design of Flipboard iPhone app
NPR: Making Facebook Private Is 'Oxymoronic'
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