Apple Doesn’t Do Focus Groups

According to Jonathan Ive who heads up Apple’s Industrial design team, the company doesn’t do focus groups when it designs it’s products. My favorite part:

We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products.

Posted at 12am on 7/3/09 | no comments; | Filed Under: Macintosh, Product Development | read on

Bit.ly is all about Ranking

Very interesting write up on Bit.ly’s grand plans. Bit.ly is a URL shortening service, like Tiny URL, that is currently used to shorten 2-3 million unique URLs a day that are then posted to social networks like Twitter.

Bit.ly (and other services like it) is basically sitting on a treasure trove of data about what URLs are hot/popular. The company plans to use that data to drive a new service called “Bit.ly Now” which, similar to sites like Digg.com, aims to present a real-time view of the most popular URLs being shared each day. Bit.ly’s service could do a better job than Digg at determining which URLs are most popular due to the fact that they see 100 times more URLs each day.

This trove of popularity data could also ultimately be used by search engines to better rank segments of the web that are new and have not yet become entrenched in the link graph.

Could be a game changer.

Posted at 11pm on 6/30/09 | no comments; | Filed Under: Product Development, Search Engines, Social Software, Web Analytics | read on

Google Goes After Microsoft Exchange

This all bad for Microsoft as running Exchange for email and calendaring is the most popular the reason I hear from IT managers as to why they have not moved their company away from the Microsoft stack all together.

Google Apps Outlook Sync for Microsoft Outlook

Posted at 5pm on 6/29/09 | no comments; | Filed Under: Technology | read on

Clear May Sell Customer Data, Lost Some Too

Nightmare. I wonder how much for a retinal scan? Oh wait, seems that data may already be on the black market.

Posted at 12pm on 6/27/09 | no comments; | Filed Under: Technology | read on

Kodak Retires Kodachrome – another nail in the film coffin

Kodak is retiring it’s iconic Kodachrome color slide film after 74 years. I just scanned about 200 rolls of Kodachrome that I shot throughout the 90’s as well as a few from the 70’s that were shot by my father. Kodachrome 25 was my preferred stock largely inspired by the results that Galen Rowell achieved with it.

Truly the end of an era.

Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak's taking Kodachrome away – Yahoo! News

Posted at 7am on 6/24/09 | no comments; | Filed Under: Photography | read on

Archives