This week I am joined by Jonathan Poritsky to talk about media. We touch on Hollywood being out of touch with technological reality, the ins and outs of streaming with Hulu, Netflix and everyone else.
Thanks to my sponsors, Dark Sky and Timelytics — two fantastic iOS apps.
Paul Ford:
Did you ever notice, wrote my friend Finn Smith via chat, how often we (meaning programmers) reinvent the same applications? We came up with a quick list: Email, Todo lists, blogging tools, and others.
Fantastic article, I could quote the entire thing.
The new podcast app on the block, but more to the point the new app from Marco Arment, is Overcast. I’ve downloaded it, but to be frank I actually don’t listen to any podcasts. It’s a rare occasion that I do listen to a podcast, so my commentary on the app is like Paul Thurrott commenting on anything but a Microsoft press release.
Here’s what people are saying:
I played with Overcast this morning for the first time and while there are some really nice touches (suggestions based on Twitter, EQ while audio is playing) there are somethings that I really don’t like (the typography doesn’t feel very cohesive to me). Again, I don’t use podcast apps so I’m a poor judge here.
Either way, it plays podcasts just fine, so I don’t see a reason not to get it for free to check it out.
Tim Bajarin:
In fact, they invoke a level of trust in IT that is tough to beat. IBM’s endorsement of iOS and the devices that use it speaks a lot to how much they respect Apple’s technology and are willing to stand behind these products as part of their major IT solutions programs. Given the power and clout of both companies, I suspect this will become one of the most important and powerful tech partnerships we have ever seen.
Apple doesn’t market to enterprise, but IBM is enterprise. Apple an now continue to focus on consumers, and let IBM focus on the enterprise. Apple just expanded the size of their market tremendously. Smart play.
Pretty neat way of getting weather Forecasts in LaunchBar. ((Note: It is a bit slow and not that intuitive, but I can’t say if that is because of a problem with the plugin or the fact that I have a beta OS, and beta LaunchBar installed.))
Great new app for your Mac to use Pinboard natively. I actually don’t care if I use a service on the web or as a native app, but the important thing here is that Pinboard looks like absolute hell. Spillo, looks great in comparison.
Haven’t used it much, but it seems to be fast and looks better — which really is key here.
This is great work from GQ. I hate stupid movie plots like this.
Cool new NAS offerings that have native BitTorrent Sync functionality baked in. Now we just need a Macminicolo.net like service for these.
The description:
Climatology gives you climate information for anywhere on Earth: temperature, rain and sunniness. Whether finding where are the warm, dry places to go on holiday in December, or avoiding rain for your wedding, to finding out what the climate is like in Kazakhstan in April, > Climatology allows you to discover the information you want.
Sounds pretty neat, and looks nice too.
It’s made by Microsoft, which is the biggest surprise of it all. (Kind of like Forecast.io’s Time Machine feature.)
A while back I posted about how likely people are to interrupt each other given the device/thing that person is using. Richard Koopmann analyzed the survey data and together we put out this post.
A loyal reader pointed out that Koopmann’s data analysis had a few flaws, all minor, and none that effected the conclusion. This, however was not ok with Mr. Koopmann, who has spent considerable time to re-write and calculate his analysis. It’s so robust I gave it it’s own page.
Dan Lewis in his daily email newsletter:
Somehow, we learned on a subconscious level to treat the emoticon as if the person who typed it was actually smiling at us.
Fascinating, I wonder how emoji effects this. Does it further entrench the ‘smile’?
In 2004 customers took an average of 8 minutes to order, but ten years later they take an average of 21 minutes. All because they are dicking around on their phones. Overall eating times increased by 50 minutes and it's mostly related to time spent on phones. Amazing and sad.
My new podcast has over 2,500 listeners now, so if you have a product to promote now is the time. Click through for the details and pricing.
Dave Wiskus:
Design is how it works. If you were only hiring a designer to make your app pretty, you were already focused on the wrong problem.
Jamie Condliffe:
In a research paper published to arXiv, Daniele Quercia from Yahoo Labs explains how a new algorithm could optimize directions for beauty. “The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant,” he writes.
Personally I would love this.
Justin Williams:
To do pretty much all of the things I actually want to do with this thing on my wrist, I don’t need a big honking screen. I just need a lot of sensors. The same sensors that are in your phone, just crammed into a tiny bracelet.
Pairs well with the latest episode of the podcast.
I run a small business in addition to the business that is this website, and Shawn’s advice is spot on. Read the entire thing if you work for ourself.
Amy Schatz:
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia asked the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday to look into whether Facebook’s experiment on the ability to manipulate emotions on Facebook using the data of 700,000 unwitting users may have violated the company’s privacy agreement with the federal government.
Finally, but really go look at the Facebook response. They are practically flipping everyone off with that statement.
Very cool little set of data. I’m all for the Kurt Vonnegut schedule.
Om Malik:
While many of the technologies will indeed make it easier for us to live in the future, but what about the side effects and the impacts of these technologies on our society, it’s fabric and the economy at large. It is rather irresponsible that we are not pushing back by asking tougher questions from companies that are likely to dominate our future, because if we don’t, we will fail to have a proper public discourse, and will deserve the bleak future we fear the most.