John Battelle Quotes
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Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media.
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The Nexus 7 is about the same size as a Moleskine notebook, and it just 'feels' like the right form factor for doing all those things you want to do on a smart phone, but can't quite do in the right way. It's not too big, and not too small - just right.
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The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet... it didn't.
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In short, Now is Google's attempt at becoming the real time interface to our lives - moving well beyond the siloed confines of 'search' and into the far more ambitious world of 'experience.' As in - every experience one has could well be lit by data delivered through Google Now.
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Teenagers aren't loyal to much of anything - especially Internet stuff.
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I sense that the sea of smart phones lit up at concerts is a temporary phenomenon. The integration of technology, sharing, and social into our physical world, on the other hand, well, that ain't going away.
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Bitcoin woke us all up to a new way to pay, and culturally, I think a much larger percentage of us have become accustomed to the idea that money no longer comes with the friction it once had.
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Long walks force a certain meditative awareness. You're not moving so fast that you miss the world's details passing by - in fact, you can stop to inspect something that might catch your eye.
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Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.
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Bill Gates has become the patron saint of philanthropy and the poster child of rebirth, and from what I can tell, rightly so.
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If you're going to build something, don't build on land someone else already owns. You want your own land, your own domain, your own sovereignty. Trouble is, so much of the choice land - the land where all the people are - is already owned by someone else: By Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Apple (in apps, anyway).
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I'm quite certain the Windows 8 team is preparing to market IE 10 - and by extension, Windows 8 - as the safe, privacy-enhancing choice, capitalizing on Google's many government woes and consumers' overall unease with the search giant's power.
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As much as I love scores of wonderful sites across the web, most of them are driven by the daily grind of the display/pageview hamster wheel. They create 20, 30, 40 'content snacks' a day, and I miss far more than I consume.
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The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just... put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate... and eventually, a Facebook emerges.
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I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.
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The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons. It's nearly impossible to find signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap.
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Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.
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We all know the future is mobile, right? And the iPhone and iPad are Perfect Expressions of Beauty, Ideal Combinations of Form and Function. Except they're Not.
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As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.
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Way back in 2008, when the iPhone was new and Instagram was a gleam in Kevin Systrom's eye, I was involved in creating a service called CrowdFire. It was a way for fans at a festival (the first was Outside Lands) to share photos, tweets, and texts in a location and event specific way.
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There are essentially two main reasons to hold a phone up at a show. First, to capture a memory for yourself, a reminder of the moment you're enjoying. And second, to share that moment with someone - to express your emotions socially. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me.
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If you're a publisher and you forbid deep linking into your site, or have a paid wall or registration requirement, then you're making it hard to 'point to' your content. When no one points to your content, your content is harder to find because search uses links as a proxy for popularity.
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Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital - pilots fly them, but aren't in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects - the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular - killing people, for example.
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Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.