Author: Jake

Great fodder for a Friday, I give you: The Economics of Seinfeld From their about: This site will be part of an ongoing and expanding attempt to make these sorts of popular culture teaching materials widely and conveniently available. We are doing this in the hopes that the materials hosted here, now and in the… Read More

For no real reason, I asked myself a question yesterday: what’s the difference between a website and web app? Failing to come up with a concrete set of differentiators, I took my question to Rich (@rmanalan), and subsequently stumped him. He eventually boiled the differences down to: A web application is an application that’s accessed… Read More

So, Apple is renowned for creating great design, and in this post, Zach compares the Apple remote with the remotes for Google TV designed by Sony and Logitech. The difference between Apple and everyone else – Blog – Zach Waugh Bit of an unfair comparison. The remote for Apple TV trades hardware simplicity for software… Read More

It’s not very often I see any news about elevators, let alone not one, but two interesting nuggets. First, apparently, there is a hack to go directly to any floor without making any stops. According to the poster, it’s in place for police use. Makes you wonder how spreading it through the interwebs will be… Read More

I found out about Long Bets, an ongoing charitable endeavor that provides, “an arena for competitive, accountable predictions” by way of Hacker News and the declaration of a winner in this bet. A profitable video-on-demand service aimed at consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 2010. Netflix fits the bill for this bet… Read More

A few months ago, when I was getting acclimated to my shiny new Droid and Android generally, I penned a note about the annoyance of Android’s notifications. Now, it’s time to admit I failed, or in the words of Happy Gilmore: I’m stupid. You’re smart. I was wrong. You were right. You’re the best. I’m… Read More

David McCandless’ TED Talk has me pondering data visualization and its easy intuitiveness. Think about this: in a decade, will reading have become a difficult skill? There’s some logic here. Not that long ago, I used to write all the time. In high school and college, I took written notes. I wrote letters, I wrote… Read More

Submitted for your entertainment, a TED talk by David McCandless, (@infobeautiful) who pens one of my favorite data visualization blogs, Information is Beautiful. David does a great job explaining succinctly why we love data visualizations; they solve the information overload problem everyone has by exposing patterns and connections immediately. Obviously, visualizing data is not a… Read More

This post was shared on Hacker News with a much more tantalizing title, “Would you let a stranger read your DMs? You probably already do.” Richard Henry: Improving Twitter OAuth, With Mockups Read it if you use a Twitter client. My own inventory of OAuth authorizations includes precisely 0 that are read only. Richard’s point is one… Read More

Interesting piece from the Register. Shhh… Opera holds the web’s most valuable secret • The Register I’ve been dimly aware of Opera Mini for a while, but only recently, have I become aware how popular and critical it is outside the US. The proxy browser idea is a smart one, and it never occurred to me that… Read More

Yes, it’s come to this. As much as I avoid using Facebook, now that it’s populated with in-laws, relatives and people I barely remember from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and has become a sore spot of social obligation, it has become an indispensable tool for marketing and engagment. Blech. I know, this is the same guy… Read More

I’ve touched on copyright issues in the past wrt to the use of photographs, and over the past couple days, an ugly episode has come to light. The Cooks Source Scandal: How a Magazine Profits on Theft (h/t Geekosystem) To support the accusatory headline, Edward Champion (@drmabuse) documents several cases of verified and possible copyright… Read More

I know, sounds like a misnomer. This is, of course, what everyone in advertising aims to create. I’m not a fan of advertising, and who really is anymore, excepting those who get paid to do it. Still, given the inundation of ads in life, the clever ones stand out, and in the past day, I’ve… Read More

This is gonna replace CD’s soon; guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again. One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies, Men in Black. I was reminded of this quote while Rich (@rmanalan) and I pondered whether we would win free Google TVs and if you could play Angry Birds on… Read More

Very interesting analysis from Phandroid evaluating Facebook’s announcements yesterday and their potentially far-reaching impact. Well worth the read. How Facebook is Pulling an Android… and Why | Android Phone Fans There are some key differences. Google hoped the carriers would use their existing relationships to lure in new customers. They did. Right-wrong-indifferent, there is a level of… Read More

HTML5 is changing web development in awesome ways. HTML5 input types | 456 Berea Street If you’re looking to build a mobile app, why not try a cross-platform standard before investing in one platform over another?

Interesting study in user experience with a nice ROI bow on top. Expedia Saved $12 Million a Year by Deleting One Input Field on Their Website | Geekosystem Let’s not be so quick to condemn the users. Obvious is a state of mind.

Check out this infographic from VisionMobile (h/t ReadWriteWeb). The infographic is a part of VisionMobile’s Developer Economics 2010, a research report evaluating mobile application development on eight main platforms. The report is free, if you provide an email. I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile lately, and hardly a day passes without some key piece of… Read More

The 37signals team just released an interesting iPad app that spurred some ideas in Rich’s (@rmanalan) head. More on that in the future. Introducing Chalk: A fun little browser-based app for iPad inspired by our new office – (37signals) What I want to know is which wins in a fight, chalk or whiteboard? Tale of… Read More

Chet (@oraclenerd) noted a short outage here earlier. Maybe you saw it too. If so, apologies. All for a good cause though, as Rich (@rmanalan) was implementing mod_pagespeed, which is new from Google today as part of their initiative to make the web faster. So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server… Read More