Austin Bryan's Dropblog

"There is much of Silicon Valley that warrants criticism: the mono-culture now threatening San..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:02:05 -0400

“There is much of Silicon Valley that warrants criticism: the mono-culture now threatening San Francisco’s storied diversity and general weirdness; the anonymous office park sprawl of its built spaces; the male-dominated engineering culture; its assumption that all disruptions are good ones by definition; its casual scorn for older institutions.”

- More @stevenbjohnson

Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium

"The top 100 tech companies granted 19% of their total ownership to non-senior-executive employees...."

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:15:16 -0400

“The top 100 tech companies granted 19% of their total ownership to non-senior-executive employees. For the rest of corporate America, that number was 2%. In other words, when it came time to share rewards with ordinary employees, the Tech 100 were ten times more generous than low-tech firms.”

- Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium

hershberg: The New Yorker announced the launch of Strongbox...

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:35:29 -0400

hershberg:

The New Yorker announced the launch of Strongbox this morning, allowing people to anonymously send documents and messages to the magazine. Amazing on it’s own and even better to see knowing that Aaron Swartz was one of its creators.

"Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:26:36 -0400

““Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?””

- Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - Salon.com

I like Jaron Lanier a lot, but this illustration as some sort of evidence of the internet hollowing out the middle class is, forgive me for saying so, idiotic. A child could figure out where those jobs went.

1) Instagram SHOWS the photos. We have to include all of the people who work on the cloud that supports that.

2) Kodak made cameras and film. Cameras are still being made - even moreso. At the very least, we should include the current #1 camera maker’s employees. At this point, that’s apple. Fifty thousand employees. Pro rate it to only the apple devices that have cameras, ignoring their mac business. 30,000 employees.

3) The film business still exists. It was just lost to Fujichrome, who still makes film and has over 30,000 employees. This has nothing to do with the web, but rather something called “Globalization.”

The internet didn’t kill a single job in photography. There are more cameras now than ever. There are still tens of thousands of people making film.

Take the market cap of JUST these three companies - facebook, apple, fujifilm, and we’re looking at $500 billion market cap, and nearly 90,000 employees.

Think that’s unfair? Canon has nearly 200,000 employees. Nikon has 24,000. 10,000 more than Kodak. Shit, ZEISS has 24,000 employees.

Never mind every single camera in an android phone.

Those jobs went overseas, and they went to computer companies, Mr. Lanier. They still exist. The internet didn’t kill a single one of them.

(via rickwebb)

Rafer sez:
Huzzah, plus Kodak’s consumer film executives went out of their way to line their pockets on the way down, at the explicit and afaik knowing expense of the nascent digital businesses. They killed Kodak, probably knew they were doing so, and showed no signs of caring at all.

I was the first internet PM for Kodak Hollywood. My product line was one of their victims.

(via rafer)

Well played, Mr. Webb.

I’m less bullish on Jaron Lanier. After his book “You Are Not A Gadget” everything he says sounds to me like some variation of “YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!”

(via kenyatta)

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (FIXED).

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:36:10 -0400

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (FIXED).

Anyone trying to reach me on May 26th, nope.

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:50:58 -0400

Anyone trying to reach me on May 26th, nope.

marksbirch: If you want to know why nearly all companies suck...

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:11:45 -0400

marksbirch:

If you want to know why nearly all companies suck at content marketing, these two charts should make it abundantly clear. Org charts? Committees? That is a good way to slow the process and lose in a world that moves at the speed of social media and memes. Oh, and then you have to add “legal review” to everything…

Less is more when it comes to creating and delivering great content marketing. Relevance and timeliness is everything. That is something you do not get out of meetings, committees and cross-functional groups.

Ugh. This.

"Wired: Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, ‘We..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:36:35 -0400

“

Wired:
Peter Thiel, expressing his dissatisfaction with technology’s progress, recently noted, ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ Do you agree with him?

Bill Gates:
I feel sorry for Peter Thiel. Did he really want flying cars? Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another. On the other hand, 20 years ago we had the idea that information could become available at your fingertips. We got that done. Now everyone takes it for granted that you can look up movie reviews, track locations, and order stuff online. I wish there was a way we could take it away from people for a day so they could remember what it was like without it.

”

- Bill Gates in a recent Wired interview with Steven Levy

"In the first few months, they were getting one customer monthly wanting to pay in Bitcoin; now it..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:50:55 -0400

“

In the first few months, they were getting one customer monthly wanting to pay in Bitcoin; now it happens three to five times a week. In one case, a customer paid 4 Bitcoin for what was then $48 USD worth of cupcakes. When the price spiked to over $200, that sale turned into an $800 one. Longson says she was tempted to convert her Bitcoin over to USD then, but she and her husband decided to keep her Bitcoin bank.

“Bitcoin is in its infancy. I’m mostly showing my support for it,” says the freckled, red-haired Longson, who is six months pregnant. “I realize it’s a volatile market and I might take a loss, but it’s interesting to be involved in. It leads to really interesting conversations about how our economy is based on arbitrary people deciding how much a $1 is worth.”

”

- Living on Bitcoin (via wearethedigitalkids)

And 16 hours later, box. #WoodworkingClass

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:47:29 -0400

And 16 hours later, box. #WoodworkingClass

Pat Kiernan reads Gabby Gifford’s entire op-ed on NY1 (by...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:16:25 -0400

Pat Kiernan reads Gabby Gifford’s entire op-ed on NY1 (by Brian Stelter)

"We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right..."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:23:26 -0400

“We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.”

- The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On - National - The Atlantic

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:38:48 -0400

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.””

- Mr. Rogers

Keeping my runner friends in the Marathon and everyone in Boston in my thoughts.

(via kmccormi)

Fundamentals of Woodworking (at Highland Woodworking)

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 10:55:45 -0400

Fundamentals of Woodworking (at Highland Woodworking)

"As regular readers of this letter will know, our energy at Amazon comes from the desire to impress..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:08:47 -0400

“As regular readers of this letter will know, our energy at Amazon comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors. We don’t take a view on which of these approaches is more likely to maximize business success. There are pros and cons to both and many examples of highly successful competitor-focused companies. We do work to pay attention to competitors and be inspired by them, but it is a fact that the customer-centric way is at this point a defining element of our culture.”

- Bezos’ 2013 letter to shareholders

I’m long Amazon.

msg: WOW!!! YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN HYPERLAPSE found via...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:34:47 -0400

msg:

WOW!!!

YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN HYPERLAPSE found via @joelaz (who followed the link at the end of the video :)

So awesome. Though it seems the hyperlapse site has buckled…

fred-wilson: Look… The Sun Is Rising by The Flaming Lips this...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:22:37 -0400

fred-wilson:

Look… The Sun Is Rising by The Flaming Lips

this is how the new record Terror starts off. turn it all the way up and quake in your boots.

Photo

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:19:38 -0400

Designed an Adirondack swing for the little one. Now to build...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 23:25:00 -0400

Designed an Adirondack swing for the little one. Now to build it…

"…we found no statistically significant differences in standard measures of learning outcomes (pass..."

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:03:36 -0400

“…we found no statistically significant differences in standard measures of learning outcomes (pass or completion rates, scores on common final exam questions, and results of a national test of statistical literacy) between students in the traditional classes and students in the hybrid-online format classes…This finding, in and of itself, is not different from the results of many other studies. But it is important to emphasize that the relevant effect coefficients in this study have very small standard errors…what we have here are “quite precisely estimated zeros.” That is, if there had in fact been pronounced differences in outcomes between traditional-format and hybrid-format groups, it is highly likely that we would have found them.”

- still, great cause for optimism. (from the hybrid educational model works)