brandonkm

This is great! Immensely useful for browsing essential mixes.

Would be awesome to see more BBC radio shows added in the future.

I think at some point people need to assess the value that they personally place on their data. Google simplifying their privacy policy and data collection practices are primarily aimed to coincide with the recent ui redesigns across all their products. In short, its a slow transformation of a company and with it, the web.

The era of being blissfully unaware of how your data is being used is ending. Google has anticipated and recognizes this, and is therefore reacting accordingly while providing additional value to users.

I strongly agree with this. Working at a NYC startup, talking with developers at other startups, and observing the broader tech scene, the focus here is certainly not "technology for technology's sake".

This is one of the fundamental differences between NYC and SF. NYC does have a rather amazing tech ecosystem, but I don't believe its as granular or technologically substantive as SF/Silicon Valley.

I think each region has its strengths and its great to see NYC develop its tech sector. There are some pretty amazing startups here and lots of excellent hackers doing interesting work.

NYC is an excellent place to find work as a developer. You have a ridiculous selection of awesome startups and larger companies to choose from. The last Brooklyn.js meetup I went to had more people looking to hire front-end developers than people looking at a ratio ~5:1.

Where did the $1000 figure come from? Currently, their stock is hovering around $324, so an increase of $676 would be extremely unusual. 2011 will probably see a MacBook Pro refresh, a new iPad, and possibly a new iPhone. There could also be a completely new product introduced. If their stock would hit $1000, they would need a proportional increase in revenue and profits.

Given how Apple is already breaking sales records every quarter and experiencing strong demand, their stock will undoubtably rise. An increase of >200% over the course of a year is, however, unlikely.

I don't know anything about Adam and the team at Hipmunk, but I no longer even consider other sites when it comes to searching for flights. The people who I've recommended Hipmunk to have said the same. Their focus on user experience is (even for a startup) uncanny.

The word disruptive is thrown around a lot and often way out of context. I believe Hipmunk and Airbnb are actually disruptive.

I've been enjoying the 'A minute with Brendan Eich' podcasts. They're short, insightful, and always about very recent technology topics surrounding JavaScript.

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com

Industries with scale that are deeply embedded into the American economy (as the cable companies and now the wireless companies are) will always be able influence regulation and legislation in their favor.

I'm pretty excited about this as I've been wanting an official app for awhile now. Every android RSS app I've tried left a lot to be desired. I've also noticed that (with the tiny exception of NewsRob), android RSS apps have pretty ineffective UIs.

This app looks great and has worked excellent so far. RSS on android just became a whole lot better with this release.

One way of distinguishing between the two would be that user experience is the cognitive interaction with features. If you start with a basic web app, then add a user chat feature and then a group chat feature, ux would be how new and existing users interact with those features and your entire application.

Put another way, user experience encompasses the design aspects and the behavioral aspects of an app, as where features include the different components that make up the overall user experience. Its the interaction with the existing features that compose the ux.

I really enjoyed the illustrations. Really brought back memories of the picture books I loved as a kid.

Great explanation. The price discrimination of note here is third degree price discrimination. I think the most vivid example of this type that people here have seen is how Apple's product lineup is composed and the various pricing they offer to different types of customers.

Also, most startups that have incremental pricing on their products (eg: wufoo, heroku) do this as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Third_degr...

This is a good way of showing what deadweight loss is. Another way of explaining it could be anytime you have an economic loss with no gains elsewhere in the economy. For example: trade quotas and tariffs create deadweight loss in a economy because they transfer value from the consumers to the producers by raising prices.

Also, anytime you have a market where theres a monopoly, deadweight loss will typically occur.

Alex Grey's artwork is very intriguing. I like a lot of the concepts he illustrates. Essentially, I think Alex Grey shows us how infinite and special humanity is.

If anyone is interested in reading more about how exactly he invented the Super Soaker http://www.isoaker.com/Info/history_supersoaker.html

I read about this recently when browsing the Yahoo design pattern library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/core/yourvmy.htm...

Yahoo, within the last five years especially, seemed to fall victim to the economics of the search engine space. That is, they failed to properly differentiate their product in any meaningful way and never once had a very strong focus on the experience of search. Web search just became too important and they were relegated to continually play catch-up while Microsoft crafted their strategy which, from this bit of news, seemed to have been fairly effective.

For books I recommend the Javascript Cookbook ( http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596806132/ ). It was released a few days ago and from the parts I've read so far, covers a lot of use cases for the language as well as lots of HTML 5 + ECMAscript 5 bits.

If you're interested in building something with a client-side js framework, you should check out this tutorial http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb . It covers how to build a simple blog app with node.js and express.

I found this interview pretty engaging. Particularly, Gates insistance on the fact that technology companies can't become complacent. Despite Charley's focus on Microsoft's successes, Gates never once gives any indication that things will always be that way, and shows that a company could easily come in and change the landscape, just as Microsoft did with IBM.

Looking back at this now, its interesting to note how he never mentioned 'search' as a type of company that could derive significant revenue from an advertising based business model on the internet. In fact, at no point during this interview did he discuss internet search. It was exactly this oversight by Microsoft and the wider technology industry that paved the way for Google.

I understand where you're coming from in regards to kids who graduate leaving. On the other hand, theres a ton of people in their 20's flocking to areas all over the triangle. The glenwood south area of Raleigh, Chapel Hill/Carrboro, and some parts of Durham come to mind.

It seems to me that whenever I visit Raleigh its growing so much that the people who graduate leaving doesn't seem to be that much of an issue. I think what the triangle area needs (and has needed for a long time) is critical mass that makes it an established place in peoples mind of a startup hub. Theres lots of great tech companies and startups, but there could be a lot more :-).

This. + Magic Mouse and Lacie firewire speakers. May get the cinema display sometime soon.

I'm finding it absolutely amazing how well Walt Disney knew the field of animation. This letter could have been written last month with no modifications and still have been as applicable to animators as it was in 1935.

$1000 will definitely sort you out with macbook. Be sure you get the education pricing when you buy it. I think you'll actually be able to get the macbook for $900. Theres also the 'buy a mac, get a 8gb ipod touch' special happening now, which is a pretty nice bonus for buying a mac around this time.

Excellent interview. More than any other figure in music, this guy has managed to not only stay relevant over the years, but really continue to create innovative music. I'm about to begin reading the recently released book Another Green World which I'm pretty excited about.

>After principal photography, Carruth took two years to fully post-produce Primer. He has since said that this experience was so arduous that he almost abandoned the film on several occasions.

Wow. This particular fact really stood out to me. I'm glad he chose to be resilient and finish the project. Theres a lot of parallels founders can draw upon from the making of this film (budget, style, technique, etc.).

This thought occured to me the other day as I wondered in the Apple store to just look and walked out with my wallet $1500 lighter. In less than 45 minutes Apple extracted more money from me than Facebook ever did during the five years I used that site. Despite eyeballs, large numbers of users, and other assorted impressive metrics, there's still something to be said for functional (physical) products that solve problems and a solid product line.

The wm 7 ui is typography based with minimal visual flourishes and virtually no icons.

Its very different than any mobile ui out there. I really enjoy the experience on my zune hd and that's a preview of what wm 7 will be based around. From what I've experienced (people who have never seen this type of ui before), people seem to be intrigued and curious by it. If the mobile team at microsoft is paying attention to details in the way the zune team did leading up to the launch of the zune hd, then a lot of doubts people have about this platform will be gone.

I'm running Android 2.1 on the G1 courtesy of the cyanogen mod (http://www.cyanogenmod.com/). Its been very snappy and has surprisingly had minimal bugs for a beta release.

I think pinboard is a great example of competing with a free product (delicious). Pinboard has focused exclusively on a core set of features, with a particular focus on being the minimal bookmarking web app. This page they created does a good job of comparing them to their competition http://pinboard.in/switch/ .

I mention all of this to say that I would focus on what exactly makes your app better. The goal may not be to win against the free app, but to make the best app you can while focusing on the paying users.

I enjoyed his very direct analysis of the situation (however opinionated) and the list of links chronicling Facebook's recent changes were appreciated as well. Upvoted.