Stay thirsty, my friends.
Dear Turntable.fm
Dear Turntable.fm,
Hi. You should charge me for being “anti-social.” For a monthly fee, let me note songs I like and let me listen to them on my own, through an iPhone app. Make me pay to create a channel of 1, i.e. me. If I want to take from the common good (and I do) charge me for it.
I would pay to be selfish. And you should let me.
XO, Hue
Alex Tabarrok put up some stunning charts last week, showing a comparison between the wages of American men vs. GDP since World War II, and the wages of American women vs. GDP since World War II. The graph for men is basically flat since the mid 1970s, while the graph for women has tracked continued GDP growth pretty well.
This data follows up on the same themes as Hanna Rosin’s provacative article in last month’s Atlantic called “The End of Men.”
"On matters of freedom and equality, history has not remembered obstructionists kindly,” he said. “Not on abolition. Not on women’s suffrage. Not on workers’ rights. Not on civil rights. And it will be no different on marriage rights."
"It is as though the earth becomes like a great brass bell, which when struck by an enormous hammer blow on one side sets to vibrating and ringing from all over. Now there have been catastrophic events at three corners of the Pacific Plate—one in the northwest, on Friday; one in the southwest, last month; one in the southeast, last year. That leaves just one corner unaffected—the northeast. And the fault line in the northeast of the Pacific Plate is the San Andreas Fault, underpinning the city of San Francisco."
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Simon Winchester (via joshuanguyen)
Um…..
(via markcoatney)Yeah…”heart” isn’t the best option for this post.
(Source: Newsweek, via markcoatney)
Matt @ Tumblr party
Pitches, by nature, are succinct. They’re all about packing as much information into the least amount of space possible. They rely on what’s comfortable or familiar to help the hearer get it, quickly. They can be easily plugged into statements like x 2.0, x done right, the x of y where x = “hot” company and y = “hot” sector.
But, what if your product doesn’t fit nicely into one of these statements? Or, if one of these formulas sells your company too short?
Marco had a great post this weekend about the iPad. What it does well and what it doesn’t do so well (spoiler alert- anything that requires much typing). He concluded his post with the following:
I still don’t think Apple has found the sweet spot for the iPad’s usage: the ideal role it fills in personal computing. And I don’t think we, as developers or iPad owners, have found it, either. But I know that sweet spot exists, and for a computer category that has only existed for one year, we’re rushing towards it remarkably quickly. This is why the iPad is truly exciting: we can see that it has great potential, and while we don’t quite know its nature yet, we’re pretty sure that it’s huge.
Steve Jobs has been calling the iPad a post PC device. Perhaps his pitch would be “PCs done right” or “PC 2.0”. But its not, its something different entirely. So we struggle to define it. We wrestle with which box to put it in.
We sas something similar happen with Twitter in its early days. Its a simple status update. Its a micro blogging service. Its an interest network. Its the pulse of the globe.
We see it happening with Foursquare. Dennis even got knocked at All Things D for wrestling with how to define it:
What is Foursquare? CEO and founder Dennis Crowley offered at least a half-dozen different definitions of the location-based service. Here are a few of the definitions Crowley offered: Foursquare is a “social utility that intersects with the real world.” It’s a “crowdsourced city guide.” It’s a “stats engine.” “Its like pulling a lever on a slot machine,” referring to the uncertainty of whether a user might earn a badge, a mayorship, or another reward from checking in.
Pitches have their place, but they also sell the most interesting companies and ideas short as derivative work. I can’t help but think that the most important products and services defy us to define them. They make us scratch our heads. Force us to look at them from multiple angles. We hate them and love them, often in the same day. We reach for well understood metaphors to describe them but they all seem to come up short.
And maybe that’s why they evoke so much emotion and why we wrestle so much to describe them. Yes, the best things often defy us to define them but we usually know them when we see them.
PS- F = Fetch
A nice contrast to the pitch-or-die climate here at #SXSW
Notes From Underground on Libya
Why, look around you: blood is flowing in rivers, and in such a jolly way besides, like champagne.
Business is theater.
