September 2009
95 posts
The “smooth subversion” of air travel →
Beginning or Ending, Heathrow Airport, London, England
Alain de Botton, in A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary, after discussing the brutality of airport car parks and their…
Business Models and Life Models, Interconnected →
A couple notes on business models and life models, and links to many cool people and projects.
Trolling, Bratislava, Slovakia, Sept 2009
Disparate but related thoughts, projects and…
Airport Literature →
Creating a commercially sponsored culturematic to personalize the impersonal: marketing London’s Heathrow Airport through light philosophical literature.
Meta Experiences, Heathrow…
Goodbye, London (for now) →
Continuing the jaunt, a goodbye to London for the moment.
Stroll, London, England
Preparing for an upcoming flight from London back to the USA; a huge thanks to the great people of…
“[DRM] cannot enable a new business model economically. That’s because...”
– DRM Doesn’t Enable Business Models; Blind Fear Disables Business Models | Techdirt
I’ve never thought about business models this way before. Thoughts?
Culturematics and Communities →
A short note on culturematics, social objects and communities…
Look | Palmer, Alaska | 2006
Grant McCrackern, in his post Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps,…
The Tuttle Club →
A note about Tuttle, my new favorite ritual in London.
I was introduced to The Tuttle Club by Alan Patrick (@freecloud) at SXSW. Noting my love for meeting interesting people in my…
“Ideas don’t need a market.”
– Bad Ideas: Trying To Build Patent Marketplaces | Techdirt
“… Culturematics produce a small, likable episode in the life for the...”
– Grant McCracken: Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps
And that continuity can also create resonance, value and meaning; the beauty of a culturematic is that they are meaningful on their own small scale, but if they resonate they can be copied, amended, adopted, spread.
...
“Try to get doers
… The other type that you find that’s not...”
– Building the initial team for seed stage startups | Andrew Chen @andrew_chen
Great post in all, and spot-on with this point. And I’d be the first to admit that it hits home.
DSLRs = SUVs →
DSLRs = SUVs. Do people really “want” bigger cameras? No, and that’s why the micro 4/3 innovation is important: not as a sign that micro 4/3 is the solution the mass market wants, but that DSLRs…
“My perfect city isn’t fixed, it doesn’t actually... →
Businesses aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, cities aren’t perfect. And that’s a good thing.
Across, Kyoto, Japan, June 2009
David Byrne’s Perfect City in WSJ.com:
The perfect…
WatchGNIP: “Get your APIs here…” « The SiliconANGLE
Cloud, platforms and a middleman for structured data. Brilliant. Worth the full 15 minutes.
“A sort of trespassing is involved in writing about other people, even when the...”
– It Happened One Decade (via sleuth)
The interesting bit is that the aforementioned “one decade” was nearly 70 years ago; is that “violation” a fundamental human condition, or is it a learned cultural response that will disappear under the mountain of public social gestures?
Skimming and Plunging →
“Skim-and-plunge” changed my life (for the better).
Skimming Through, Berlin, Germany
Steven Berlin Johnson, Skim and Plunge, referencing Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:
I think many of us who feel, unlike Carr, that Google has actually made us smarter operate in what I call “skim-and-plunge” mode. We skim through pages of search results or hyperlinked articles, getting a...
What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation? →
1. Vivek’s take is spot on. I’ll opine that VCs do create value, but the NVCA made a mistake in giving too much credit to VCs for job and revenue creation.
2. VC is ripe for creative destruction and resurrection; Umair Haque, for one, has been writing about this for years.
3. This isn’t a new debate.
Hearts, Hidden and Emerging →
A couple small notes on how the web helps us “bring our hearts to work”.
Hearts, Hidden | San Francisco | 2007
Hearts, emerging:
Jason Kottke, Your company? There’s an app for that.…
Cause It's My Birthday - Spread the Love, not... →
One of the keys to living a cool life is to keep creating new, awesome, meaningful, powerful, inclusive, valuable and simply fun ways to live. As a lover of awesomeness I’m biased, but this project / party / escapade by @sloane & @projectfresh (more details) is simply too cool not to support.
“There is a counter culture going on among startups that pit the venture...”
–
An Entrepreneurial Counter Culture is Looming – The Startup Market is Not OK « The SiliconANGLE
Interesting read about the state of startups and VC
via Taylor’s Twitter
(via echolot)
All I’ll add (at the moment) is that this isn’t a new issue, and that the trends will impact...
“What explains Vuitton’s resilience? Beneath the gloss of advertising campaigns,...”
– LVMH in the recession: The substance of style | The Economist
Really? Hmm. I’d be curious in hearing from anyone that follows the fashion industry…
“The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50...”
– 50 Cent (via kareem)
“When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.”
–
Betty Bender —- I’d argue that as a company owner, you’re better off when your employees bring their hearts to work. I’d rather work with passionate and engaged ppl rather than those who check in at 9 and check out at 5. (via kareem)
In fact, I would argue that getting people to bring their...
“In fact my #1 travel goal - seriously - is to get asked for directions by...”
– WhatBox?: by Ryan Booth
A Night In-Between →
An overnight bus ride from Amsterdam to London, my unreasonable happiness, exposed and laid bare.
After a morning in-between, the prospect of a night in-between didn’t seem that bad; an overnight bus ride seemed like the best way to get from Amsterdam to London.
And yes, I arrived safe and sound, but a little more worn down than expected, a wee bit more churlish and prickly than normal, craving...
“The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this:...”
–
We would solve so many of our problems if we knew the answer to this question.
(via suzannexie) (via hiten)
(via kareem)
Perhaps the first step is just to “do”, and figure it out by doing. The idea that we can decide exactly what we want without any experience doing it is...
Lives, Reflected →
Lives, reflected, and a reminder: “never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside”.
Lives, Reflected | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Sept 2009
A sidenote, from Our face…
Fake walls, real skies →
Fake walls, real skies | Berlin, Germany | Sept 2009
Tim Ferriss, Do You Really Know Bill Gates? The Myth of Entrepreneur as Risk-Taker:
You don’t have to be fearless to make dramatic…
A Morning In-Between →
A morning in-between…
Isolated, Amstel Station, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The joy of landing in a new city before it wakes up. The questions (when will the city awake? where will the…