via www.wired.com/

In a space that’s crowded with several players, a definitive loss would be the complete failure and disappearance of a company. Zachary and Schobel are both betting Palm will be the first to go. Palm’s WebOS runs on the Palm Pre, and the company currently possesses 0 percent market share, according to Gartner, who predicts WebOS’ market share will only grow 1.4 percent in the next three years.

The company’s smartphone market share continues to shrink, and Zachary said he previously thought Palm would eventually be acquired by a larger company, such as Samsung, to develop mobile operating systems in-house. However, because Google hands out Android as a free, open source OS, this decreases the value of Palm as an acquisition target.

“Who I’m really scared for is Palm,” Schobel said. “They’re dead.”

As mentioned earlier, I fear the same. It's sad, because WebOS is a great Platform – just still in its infancy.

via www.wired.com/

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

via www.wired.com/

This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

Die Anonymität des Internets, und die kurzsichtige Gier der Massenmedien, verhindern die Verbreitung von Information / Wahrheit.

via www.wired.com/

And if you need a new factoid to support your belief system, it has never been easier to find one. The Internet offers a treasure trove of undifferentiated information, data, research, speculation, half-truths, anecdotes, and conjecture about health and medicine. It is also a democratizing force that tends to undermine authority, cut out the middleman, and empower individuals. In a world where anyone can attend what McCarthy calls the “University of Google,” boning up on immunology before getting your child vaccinated seems like good, responsible parenting. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

via www.wired.com/

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

via www.handelsblatt.com/

Im Firmenblog brachte es einer der zahlreichen Kommentatoren auf den Punkt: "Wir (Generation C64, Generation Upload, Generation was weiß ich, die mit den Computern halt) sind einfach etwas anderes sozialisiert worden. Wir hassen Werbung, alle. Wir hassen PR-Geblubber. Wir hassen diese ganze Scheiße, mit der wir seit unserer Kindheit zugedröhnt wurden." Vodafone hat sich verhalten, wie Tante Emma es nie getan hätte. Verschwurbeltes Kauderwelsch wäre ihr ein Graus gewesen. Niemals hätte sie sich gebrüstet, etwas ganz Besonderes für einen besonderen Kunden zu haben, wenn das nicht stimmt.

Die Zukunft von klassischer PR ist düster

via www.handelsblatt.com/

Auf diese Weise kommen Unternehmen und Verbraucher nicht mehr ins Gespräch. "Werbung funktioniert nur noch, wenn sie nicht als Werbung daherkommt", sagt Amir Kassaei, bewunderter Kreativchef der Agentur DDB. Oder wie der Blogger und Cartoonist Hugh McLeod meint: "Wenn du mit Leuten reden würdest, wie die Werbung mit Leuten redet, würden sie dir eine reinhauen."

Social media erfordert eine neue Form der Werbung

via www.comedycentral.com/

Months after the initial announcement, today, it becomes official: Yahoo has shut down GeoCities — one of the original kings of free web hosting services.

Now, all of those GeoCities websites (excuse me, "Web Sites") are coming down. It's got me more tear-jerkingly nostalgic than Where The Wild Things Are.

No doubt, GeoCities started a revolution, but many of its ways have gone by the wayside. While Yahoo deploys the virtual demolition crews, let's make one last toast to a few of the relics they'll leave in the rubble.

Das Web folgt eigenen Moden, die sich an technischen Möglichkeiten halten. Geocities ist ein Beispiel für diese Mode, ähnlich wie 80er Jahre Kleidung.

via news.slashdot.org/

"Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

nuff said

via www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/

The diversity of the 18-49 demographic certainly isn't new, and on the surface shouldn't be cited as a notable trend for 2010. But, when you stop to think about how different the media world is for an 18 year-old, relative to a 49 year-old, you might just be ready to step away from a target cohort that doesn't hold up. And every year, the divide between 'internet-raised' and 'television-raised' consumers becomes more profound. Just read 'Media Generations' by Martin Block PhD, Don Schultz PhD, and BIGresearch, and you'll quickly understand that today's 18-49 demographic cohort contains four different media generations.

A more finegrained means of target demographics is necessary.

via www.paulgraham.com/

Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard you have to work to maintain your relationship. You don't have to do that with coworkers. It explains why the ups and downs are surprisingly extreme. In a job there is much more damping. But it also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most people can't imagine such freedom. As you go down the list, almost all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs from a job.

Very nice essay on the differences between operating a startup and a regular job.

via www.fakesteve.net/

Larry's like, Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They've always been copiers. That's been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they've done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple's ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s -- that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

wie innovation bei microsoft funktionierte, als der markt es noch erlaubte.

via www.nytimes.com/

“This used to be the company that everyone looked to for innovation and excitement,” says James R. Gregory, the chief executive of CoreBrand, a brand consulting company. “It has lost that edginess in a fairly convincing way.” According to a new CoreBrand study, Microsoft’s reputation and the perception of its management and investment potential have been declining for over a decade, with the drop-off accelerating over the last five years.

das vertrauen in die unternehmensführung / die fähigkeit nützliche produkte herzustellen ist verloren gegangen

via games.slashdot.org/

I made a point in a term paper a few years back that the very nature of GTA, though transgressive, transmits a clear establishment message. You cannot beat the police in GTA. You may escape them, but you cannot stop them. Any attempt to directly oppose the police always inevitably leads to death as there will always be more of them than you. The police in GTA are individually stupid, collectively difficult to evade, and taken as an entire establishment entirely invincible.

Further, there's a recognition (especially in GTA San Andreas) of the fact that the player you embody is fundamentally broken and leads a life devoid of meaning. All of the most likable characters in the games are either killed, betray you or are the "straight men" - the people who point out to your character the failure of their lifestyle.

So although the GTA games allow you to explore your own dark side it seems to guide you to the message that not only is the world better off without your enemies (the people you kill throughout the game) but also without you (the killer).

via www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like John Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.

das internet bietet mehr informationen als das bei zeitungen möglich war.

via www.newyorker.com/

One important lesson Marx taught is that capitalism tends toward monopoly--an observation that was far from obvious in his day--giving rise to a need for strong regulation.... Likewise endogenous-growth theory models are undoubtedly Marxist in spirit, since their main aim is to demonstrate how technical progress emerges from the competitive process, and not from Heaven, as in the neoclassical model.

Schon auf Marx geht die Idee zurück, dass technologischer Fortschritt durch Konkurrenzkampf definiert wird.

via isocracy.org/

The current reality is that despite all the talk of the establishment of user-created content, the "virtual community" of what is called "Web 2.0", the various 'blogs, facebook-like sites, twitter and so forth, only a small percentage are engaging in this community and arguably this is due to the presence of 'trolls', time-wasting individuals who exist soley for argument, rather than a cooperative search for the truth and mutual understanding [15]. In other words, they breach the first requirement expressed by Habermas as a foundation of a public sphere and formation of public opinion; intentional semantics.

via www.thecommentfactory.com/

Theodore Adorno, his idea of mass culture was formed when he spent time in America – the replacement of high culture by base culture, vulgarization, commercialization and all this kind of stuff

wow