Archive for the 'Bits' Category

Warston Spring 2012: Links, visitors and the future

Ulysse Sabbag | April 24, 2012 | 0 Comments

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Since September, Warston grew a lot. In terms of visitors and team.
We’ve had new writers, we’ve launched The Log and we finally had a decent growth in visitors.
For the following weeks, Warston will wear new clothes. The main URL (http://www.warston.com/) will automatically redirect to Warston Links. We will soon enter exam mode and we won’t really have the time to write the enjoyable bits and pieces you are used to. However, we’ve decided to keep content up so we opted for links. Images, videos are considered as links and a little comment from time to time won’t hurt anybody.
This is impermanent and is part of Warston Spring 2012.
Oh and yes! I almost forgot: you can now submit your own link or image/whatever for publication on Warston Links. Keep them coming!
We hope you like it, do tell us if you have a suggestion.

Figure is probably the best iOS music app to date

Ulysse Sabbag | April 19, 2012 | 1 Comment

It’s easy, grab your iPhone, go there, and give it 5 minutes. If you don’t have the time or an iPhone, read on this Wired review:

Figure lets you combine drums, bass synth and lead synth together in a simple, blocky interface that looks fantastic on an iPhone screen or even when blown up on the iPad 3′s Retina Display (despite the fact this is not a “universal” app).
It’s incredibly easy to use — a novice with no music experience will have a beat pumping out of the speakers within 10 seconds. Those with a bit more knowledge, however, will find the app surprisingly deep — you can tweak around with the pitch, filter, waveform, distortion and other effects, adjust the key you’re in, and even add a bit of shuffle.
It sucks you in. You’ll be on a bus, half an hour from your stop and then look up again 45 minutes later, way past where you should have got off. There’s enough diversity in the included presets for the average user to not get bored for a while, and there’ll be value in here for more professional musicians, too. The only big omission, for my money, is a sequencer of some sort to lengthen the period of time that the app records for.

 

Is Facebook making us lonely?

Ulysse Sabbag | April 15, 2012 | 0 Comments

In a truly masterful article, Stephen Marche, writing for The Atlantic wonders sagaciously if Facebook is making us lonely:

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation.

Good to read on an otherwise slow Sunday.

Tumblr, apps and the future of startups

Ulysse Sabbag | April 15, 2012 | 0 Comments

David Karp, founder of Tumblr, recently gave an interview to Ryan Kim of GigaOM. He said he wanted to get back at doing what is at the heart of Tumblr, empowering creativity. A noble goal indeed. The way he decided to empower creativity is as interesting as it is revelatory:

One way Tumblr wants to become more of a creative platform is to invite more developer support. Tumblr already allows a couple dozen developers to sell templates on its Tumblr’s marketplace but Karp sees a much bigger opportunity to fling open the doors to more developers. The company recently posted a job title for API lead to work with outside developers.

Karp said he envisions a big marketplace where developers can sell designs and templates with Tumblr taking a cut similar to what Apple makes in its App Store. Toward that end, Tumblr is working on creating a better set of tools for developers.

Marketplace, developers… Pretty much exactly like Apple does with the App Store. If more and more startups and platforms like Tumblr open up to developers, they will ensure the workforce supply they need. A very basic principle of economics indeed but true nonetheless.

Apps on Facebook are taking over. Instagram also opened its door with a public API. Twitter has been doing that for a long time.

It feels like it is now expected, for any new start-up to anticipate that it will one day (or from day one) become a platform with an important developer community. I bet you now that this will be the fate of any new successful start-up.

myTaxi: inevitable future or legitimate anger?

Ulysse Sabbag | April 12, 2012 | 0 Comments

MyTaxi

MyTaxi is an app that is currently causing a great deal of disruption in the taxi industry in Germany and all over the world. Because it is cutting the relationship between taxi dispatch centres and customers (the app uses GPS to send the customer’s location to the nearest available drivers in the are within seconds. The app charges 0.79€ for the service).

The German Association of Taxis and Hire Cars (BZP) is very angry. That is because Daimler (the car maker) has given some of its money through Car2go to myTaxi:

A few weeks ago, officials at industry association BZP wrote a letter to Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche. “We’re fuming with disappointment and anger,” the letter read. For the taxi industry, the letter stated, the deal was like a “slap in the face.” The officials accused Daimler of making a pact with the devil.

To me, this look like an inevitable future. Mobile Internet has given power back to customers in a lot of areas and taxi companies are just another casualty of an inevitable future — the main thing is that I don’t see why customers would be angry and customers will have the final say.

Some birds can see the magnetic field of Earth

Ulysse Sabbag | April 11, 2012 | 0 Comments

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Yet again, nature surprises. Some birds have a heads-up display compass, overlaid on their normal vision. When you thought this existed only in video games…

According to the new model, when a photon of light from the Sun is absorbed by a special molecule in the bird’s eye, it can cause an electron to be kicked from its normal state into an alternative location a few nanometres away. Until the electron eventually relaxes back, it creates an ‘electric dipole field’ which can augment the bird’s vision – for example altering colours or brightness.

Crucially, the alignment of the molecule compared to the Earth’s magnetic field controls the time it takes for the electron to relax back, and so controls the strength of the effect on the bird’s vision.

There are many such molecules spread throughout the eye, with different orientations. So from the patterns on top of its vision, and the change of these patterns as it moves its head, the bird learns about the direction of Earth’s magnetic field.

(Kottke via Physorg)

Apple, it’s time to fix iTunes

Ulysse Sabbag | April 11, 2012 | 0 Comments

When Apple introduced iTunes in 2001, it served one purpose: As a music jukebox app. Later that year, it added its most important feature: The ability to sync tracks with the just-introduced iPod. Originally, you could just drag tracks onto your iPod and they’d copy over. iTunes had automatic music-sync features that were rudimentary, but they did the job.

That was a long time ago. These days, iTunes is simultaneously Apple’s most important and problematic product. It’s a music and video player. It’s a store, the gateway to buying music, videos, ringtones, and iOS apps. And of course, it’s a syncing system, connecting to Apple devices from iPhone to iPod to Apple TV.

Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul.

This article, written by Jason Snell for Macworld is making a lot of noise this morning. And rightly so.

Slow, unclear and clunky, iTunes doesn’t look like most Apple products. However, it is definitely a central element in the iConnected life and there are a lot of things to change.

What is wrong with Google+?

Ulysse Sabbag | April 11, 2012 | 0 Comments

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In a long yet captivating article, Devin Coldewey shows us that TechCrunch still has some good writers. He analyses the Google+ situation (low user engagement, not the Facebook-killer we expected) using quotes from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

The article itself is a great read and you should take some time to read it but I’d like to discuss a few points here.

He first talks about how Google makes products, in general:

Google never said “What you’re doing is broken. Use our thing instead.” They always said “Did you know you we can do that too, for free?” Did they say Excel was broken when they let you make spreadsheets in Docs? Did they break down email to its bare bones and remake it for Gmail? Of course not. Google was about ubiquity, diversity, and a few memorable little quirks or improvements that set them out from the crowd.

Facebook already is the ubiquitous and diversified social network. There can’t be two of them. Devin argues that Google are not good at making new things and I agree. Saying, however, that Google’s greatest strength against Facebook is his ubiquity is damning Google+ rather quickly.

Facebook is a place you go to, not a presence that surrounds you. Facebook is a personal place, something you log into, and you don’t want to have it following you around. On the other hand, you expect to turn around and find Google there, the way you expect your own shadow.

Yes, exactly, you want to go on Facebook; you’re just used to have Google everywhere but the feeling that you made a choice isn’t nearly there. You feel like you’ve been forced to.

Devin concludes:

Google lost its status as a neutral party because of a number of choices that minimized the user and promoted themselves unilaterally. How many of these decisions were made deliberately, and how many innocently? It’s hard to say, but in the end the analysis is merely academic. The reality is that they are no longer trusted. The liberties they took with their best assets were questionable at best and infuriating at worst. And they have had the side effect of drawing attention to just how much power Google wields.

Two years ago, Google was a utility. Now it’s a monopoly being watched not only by the government but by every user, many of whom have been burned or frustrated by one of the many changes. Two years ago it was Facebook in that position, and people were excited about the prospect of a better, more independent social network. Now people are uploading videos to Facebook instead of YouTube. Think about that.

 

Little girl soldiers in Russian elite military school

Ulysse Sabbag | April 10, 2012 | 0 Comments

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In the Moscow Female Cadet Boarding School No. 9, life is not always easy. Although the girls make their beds in the morning and gently arrange a teddy bear on their pillows, they are capable, according to photographer Sergey Kozmin, to strip down an AK-47 in the time a normal teenager sends an SMS.

In addition to standard subjects, the students study the basics of military service including marching, military strategy and marksmanship. The school’s curriculum also includes sewing, ballet and compulsory choir practice.

Many of the girls come from military families and dream of careers serving Russia, whether in the army, the police force or the Federal Security Service. A museum inside the school celebrates famous Russian women, beginning with the era of the czars. The students want to be like them, Mr. Kozmin said, as well as other prominent Russian women like Alina Kabaeva, the Olympic medal-winning rhythmic gymnast and member of the Russian parliament.

Via Lens.

Factual is trying to gather all of the world’s data in one place

Ulysse Sabbag | April 10, 2012 | 0 Comments

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Gilad Elbaz has big plans for his company, Factual. But he is not just anybody; he is financially linked to more than thirty start-ups, has started-up himself a company that is the basis of Google’s AdSense business and has interest in an incubator which specialises itself in Big Data.

What is big data?

Very simply put, big data represents extraordinarily big amounts of data that cannot be treated or interpreted using day-to-day database management tools. You need algorithms and entire rooms filled with complex and powerful computers to get clear and usable information.

Mr. Elbaz’s endeavour is great, he wants to gather all the data in the world in one place:

Factual’s plan, outlined in a big orange room with a few tables and walled with whiteboards, is to build the world’s chief reference point for thousands of interconnected supercomputing clouds. The digital world is expected to hold a collective 2.7 zettabytes of data by year-end, an amount roughly equivalent to 700 billion DVDs. Factual, which now has 50 employees, could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.

Let’s wish him luck.