In It to Win It: Asana Raises $28M Series B, Peter Thiel Joins the Board
I have tried many collaboration websites and apps. Asana is really good (except for the iPhone app); I would invest.
Archives For July 2012
Business Model Dances – Jean-Louis Gassée
Microsoft announces its Surface tablets…pardon…Tablet PCs, and quickly finds itself between two business models: Are they offering a vertically integrated device, a la Xbox; or are they licensing a software platform, as in Windows/Office? As remarked upon by Horace Dediu and others, one day Ballmer says:
“We are working real hard on the Surface. That’s the focus. That’s our core.”
and the next, with equal strength of conviction:
“Surface is just a design point.”
Interesting take on business model changes in the google-apple-amazon-microsoft wars.
What’s Next for Superhero Movies?
The Dark Knight Rises was fantastic – a must see.
But.
Enough already. There have been many, many bad superhero movies. I thought the idea was to keep rebooting until you got it right. (Right: Toby McGuire, Sam Raimi in Spiderman; Chris Nolan, Christian Bale in Batman; Norton in The Hulk; see also Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings). When you get it right: STOP! That’s it. The special effects technology is good enough now to find a good director/writer/actor combo and get it done properly. When you’ve done this, come up with new ideas.
The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told lots of people who have sought him out to catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the good life. He isn’t arguing that readers not look for guidance in the story of Jobs; he knows it is the nature of biography-reading to do so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the lessons to be found myriad.
The legacy of the Walter Isaacson book continues with derivatives. I think Steve Jobs chose wrong, he should have chosen David McCollough. Isaacson missed something; he doesn’t have the love (of technology in this case).
Jobs was a unique character: he didn’t have to be the way he was to be successful, he just was that way.
But I hadn’t known about this addendum from Isaacson (not bad).
Barack Obama: Taking the Cyberattack Threat Seriously
Pretty bland, but the threat is real – the economic IP theft is already thought to be huge.
The President’s op-ed reminds me of that scene from the West Wing when President Bartlett is deciding on an “equivalent” response to a terrorist bombing. Cyber War makes that kind of tit-for-tat war acceptable for even nuclear powers.
See also this much more interesting read in Wired on Kaspersky:
What is mentioned is Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.
A New Technology
He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world.
At least Thiel’s fantasies are aimed at improving the world. “It seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time,” he said. “I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’
What’s interesting about Thiel is his drive to make the world better (basically solely through technology) combined with his harsh Libertarian views. An unusual connection occurred to me while listening to NPR’s Fresh Air this morning: Jill Tartar, former director of SETI, kept describing civilizations (ours and alien ones) as technologies. E.g., “an old technology” might describe an ancient civilization who managed to get to us from across space. Describing our civilization by our technology alone…is certainly one way to describe us, but it assumes a equivalence of our fundamental nature, or our societal moral nature, while compared to another species.
The Future of Manufacturing Is in America, Not China
iFab and Making Things are trends we will be talking more about here at Longvie.ws.
All of these advances play well into America’s ability to innovate, demolish old industries, and continually reinvent itself. The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven’t cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.
- Belief: Company X could have came to market with product Y Z years ago!
- Implied: Company X would have owned the market like Company A does now.
- Reality: Product Y would have sucked and nothing would be different.
Today Nokia announced that it lost $1.7 billion in the second quarter, its fifth quarterly net loss in a row. Just a few hours before the announcement, the WSJ published a great piece revealing how, as early as 2000, the Finnish phone maker had designed a proto-iPhone – complete with a color touch screen and geo-location, gaming, and e-commerce capabilities. The phone, though, never moved into the mass production phase because of ”a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.”
While it’s not surprising that a lumbering, oversized multinational corporation failed on the innovation front, it’s clear that Nokia does not suffer from a dearth of ideas: It spent $40 billion on research and development over the past decade, almost four times what Apple spent over the same period. Nokia also developed and ultimately discarded not one but two operating systems, Symbian and MeeGo. Nokia’s deficiency lies in what Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble call “the other side of innovation,” or the problem with executing new ideas, not just thinking them up.
Wrong.
Nokia had a nice piece of hardware in tablet form years ago based on Linux: it never took off. This mythical iphone-pre-iphone would also have had no traction. Nokia phones have always sucked software-wise (if you don’t think so, you just didn’t know any better). Basically no one knew any better until the iPhone arrived (except Palm Treo users to some extent).
Simply the best computer ever made; I can’t recommend it enough.
Walker admits during testimony that collective bargaining law doesn’t save money
PS: Walker was an impetus (one of many) for starting Longvie.ws
A few other links I’ve saved to refresh your memory; his day of reckoning awaits.
- Wisconsin wasn’t broke.
- Wisconsin juge blocks new anti-collective bargaining law.
- We are all Wisconsinites now.
The Top of My Todo List – Paul Graham
Don’t ignore your dreams;
don’t work too much;
say what you think;
cultivate friendships;
be happy.
Welcome to Longviews and a diet of strong opinion.
Welcome to Longvie.ws!
