Solving mysteries at 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius).
September 14, 2015 Leave a comment
According to TechCrunch “Tech is the new status indicator. What laptop you carry, what phone you own, what smartwatch you wear is as reliable a signal of your status and position as dirty dungarees and a hobo bindle were during the Great Depression.”
If this isn’t a sign of “nerd” being cool and mainstream, I don’t know what is.
September 12, 2012 2 Comments
Later today we will see the newest iPhone. We may see a new iPad Mini (although TechCrunch thinks we won’t). So why am I not more fired up? Following along with the liveblogs on Engadget or Gizmodo used to be one of my favorite ways to procrastinate at work. I used to tweet about everything they would say as it came out.
Maybe it’s because I know I won’t be getting the new phone (not up for an upgrade this round). Or maybe it’s because I know that no matter what they reveal tomorrow, it won’t be that much better than what I have right now. A slightly bigger screen? Cool, but not a game changer. LTE? faster would be nice, but not blowing my hair back. A better camera? A sharper screen? New dock connector? Please.
These are evolutions not revolutions.
A few years ago it felt like everything was getting awesomer every day. New apps were literally changing the way we live, new devices were radically blowing away their predecessor, and new websites were creating new forms of entertainment.
But now? Now everything feels very blah. Read TechCrunch and you see headline after headline about some new mobile CRM platform or yet another app to modify your photos. You see newer, sometimes better, versions of things we already have. Facebook is boring (although maybe that’s a reflection of my and my friends’ life stage).
Where is the awesomeness?
The digital toys and tech that used to get me so fired up has become a part of my everyday life and now I need more. It’s like a drug. I need another Uber. I need another Hulu. I need another first generation iPhone.
And yet, I don’t need “another” anything. I need a NEW. I need something I can’t even imagine.
Has the pace of innovation slowed? Have we mastered everything there is to master? Every so often someone comes out with a stupid prediction like that and quickly proved wrong. In the past, the technology itself was rapidly changing as we moved from analog to digital. But as digital technology evolved the revolutionary-ness of it slowed. Today’s computers aren’t that different from the first Macintosh. They’re faster, more powerful, have WAY more features. But if you brought someone from 1984 to 2012 and showed them a computer they could probably identify it. I doubt the same would hold true from the average person from 1964.
So what do we have to look forward to? What are you looking forward to most?
November 21, 2011 1 Comment
A couple years ago now, when Facebook was at the height of it’s privacy issues, a few young kids decided they needed to do something about it. They came up with an idea they called Diaspora. It was exactly what we needed at the time, a Facebook where you owned all your own data. They posted this video:
And the web went nuts. Kickstarter was new, relatively untested, unsure of what it would become and who would want to participate. But then these kids, and they were (still are) kids, completely blew the doors off their fundraising plan netting over $200K from over 6,000 investors donors.
People were hungry for a site that would deal with the privacy issues that they didn’t understand, that they media was over-hyping.
May 4, 2011 1 Comment
The most popular camera for photographers on Flickr is almost the iPhone 4 (it might be by the time of this writing, this chart is a few weeks old).
I’d be less surprised if you said this was true about Facebook or Twitter, but Flickr? I always thought Flickr was where the pros went. The wanna-be pros, the overly ambitious amateurs and people who refer to themselves as “photogs.” Those lens snobs who look down on the Shutterflys and SnapFishes.
But the times they are a-changin’.
I'm me?
Hot Tub Crime Machine 