Thanks to the team at The Cloud Factory in Canada for putting together a great event on the state of cloud technology — and its digital economy and innovation impact. Stunning backdrops, great ideas, and good debates about everything from pricing wars to cloud commoditization to flavors of Open Stack. Below are the slides I presented …
The skinny on startup accelerators
If you have a startup that’s launched but needs to grow, how do you choose, apply to, and make the most of a tech accelerator experience? Monday’s Rough Draft Ventures Sketch brought together four accelerator alumni and professionals to demystify the accelerator process — the pain and the perks. Several themes emerged: Accelerators are competitive, and can afford …
Why kitchen cabinets trump corner offices
When I started my career at a blue chip publisher, furniture mattered. Your career progression was reflected through office floorplans and desk hues: you migrated from low cubicle to high cubicle to office, and the final destination was a corner office replete with faux mahogany. Dream big, kids, the story went: at the end of all those 60-hour work weeks …
Visualizing Crimea interest online
Lots of thoughtful coverage of today’s significant events in Crimea at major outlets like The Guardian, CNN, and Politico, as well as through crowdsourced efforts to amplify local opinion, like Global Voices. Two quick snapshots of escalating web interest below. Google searches for Crimea over the past year: Twitter mentions of Crimea and Sochi over the past month:
5 lessons from Buzzfeed @ Harvard
Today, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith spoke to fellows, students, and a few curious onlookers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center (Storify recap). Listen to the full audio above; below are my top five takeaways from the discussion: Headlines definitely matter — and if you’re writing headlines for catchy listicles, be sure to lead with the number. Headlines at BuzzFeed …
Alone together, or shared space?
Pew Internet reports that 25% of married or partnered adults who text have texted their partner when they were both home together. Is this a good or a bad development? The answer may well depend on the circumstance. Social behaviors vary dramatically by age cohort. danah boyd’s new book focuses on social media behaviors of …
On jazz hands and ad networks
Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all …
On death and online culture
As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so …