Behold the Bicymple, a chainless, two wheel unicycle that unnecessarily ‘disrupts’ something that doesn’t need to be disrupted: the bicycle.
The humble bicycle has to count among the greatest of modern inventions, a marvel of industrial design that remains unchanged from the last century when the design was finally perfected to its 2-wheeled form. You know why the design hasn’t changed in a hundred years?
Of all the charges you can lay against VICE Magazine, being uninteresting can’t be one of them.
The commodity that VICE deals in is a brand of abstract cool and hipster irony. VICE’s greatest assets is its self-awareness; it knows its irreverence and amplifies that stance by embracing the furthest point of the cutting-edge.
What VICE does better than any startup, any entrepreneur, is combine the vicarious pleasures of the verboten with a self-reflected irony at the irreverent attitude with which it approaches it. There are few other publications in the world that do it as well as VICE, and certainly, none of them are quite as big or edging towards the mainstream.
Here’s a chart of the top 50 companies by annual reveue:
From 2009 to 2011, Apple increased revenue by $75,760 million. That’s a whopping 233% increase over just two years. No other company comes even marginally close.
I like to bitch about Apple, but in sheer financial terms, Apple’s success is absolutely mind-blowing. Samsung has interests in everything from construction to shipping, while the consumer division of HP is increasingly shrinking. Apple is the only primarily consumer-facing company on this list, which speaks volumes for Apple’s achievement. The new iPhone might be shit, but I have little doubt it will push Apple past HP and Samsung in terms of revenue.
Dear Startup,
If you want me to sign up via Facebook for your app, please make sure that you DON’T ask me permission for the above. I do NOT trust any app to post things on my behalf, and I’m certainly not comfortable relinquishing control of my Facebook wall to some random app.
I mean, come on, I have family on Facebook. Who knows what I might be doing with your app at 2 AM after a night of drunken debauchery. I wouldn’t want all that to show up on my Facebook feed.
If you absolutely MUST post on my behalf, please be so good to mention the kind of spam that’ll be flooding my wall.
Thank You
I have a confession to make: I’m hopelessly addicted to Reddit.
When I’ll be 80 and nearing death, I’ll look back at my life and account away 1/3rd of it for sleep, and at least 1/30th of it for Reddit. Reddit is a dangerous, dangerous site, especially for productivity geeks like me.
The thing about Reddit is that it makes you feel smart when you are actually doing nothing productive.
So here you were, glued to the monitor (TV? iPad?), hoping for Tim Cook to pull a Jobs-worthy performance out of his hat, and when the moment came, that magic wand of your waiting held aloft for the world to see, and you could only feel a stink of disappointment in the pit of your stomach. You clapped with glee because it was a new iPhone after all, and it was bigger, it was faster, and it was thinner than a stack of nickels, but you walked away from the keynote knowing that something was amiss.
For the first time in almost a decade, Apple is playing catch-up with the market. There is nothing extraordinary about the new iPhone. It is as exciting as a hardware upgrade on the Galaxy Note 2, or another announcement of a EA FIFA game. The iPhone 5 looks eerily like another iteration in a beloved but ageing franchise.
What is Google?
Or more specifically, what is Google search?
Google search is essentially an algorithm. It’s a massive artificial brain that discovers and sorts and arranges the world’s information. And as an algorithm, it should know no moral, ethical or political prejudices. Even if something is unsavory, morally detestable, ethically questionable, the Google search algorithm ought to include it in its indices.
That Google search remain impartial and passive is vital to freedom of speech online. Indeed, as a company, Google has long championed internet freedom.
Unfortunately, Google’s ever widening censorship net threatens to throttle this very freedom.
Confession time: I’ve never paid out of my own pocket for a copy of Windows. This post was written on Ubuntu, and all the previous PCs I owned ran Windows sourced from “not-so-legal” sources.
Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb reported that Microsoft is offering a Windows 8 upgrade to the general public for as low as $14.99. Normally, an upgrade on a recently bought Windows 7 PC will cost $39.99, but with a promo code, it can be whittled down to $14.99. Later, the Verge reported that MS will price boxed versions of Windows 8 at $69.99 initially.
Cheaper Windows may very well be the answer to Microsoft’s piracy woes, particularly in Asia.
What do Poosh All, Woisio, Guchex, and Klosti have in common?
These aren’t the names of Pokemon. These are startups that have made terrible choices in picking their domain names.
In a past life, I used to trade domain names. I like to believe I know a thing or two about domains. When I see good startups make dumb domain choices, I just can’t help but feel a little amused, and a whole lot angry.
“In 50 years there will be only 10 institutions in the whole world that deliver higher education”
– Sebastian Thrun, Stanford research professor
David Youngberg of the Chronicle of Higher education quotes Thrun and postulates why online education won’t replace college. It’s too easy to cheat, he says, and star students aren’t allowed to shine. Valid points, all, and well articulated. But Youngberg misses out a major reason why online education won’t replace regular colleges anytime soon: prestige.
Going to a good college is a matter of prestige. Each year, over a million students in India compete for some 20,000 spots in some of the country’s top engineering colleges. Competition for a seat in one of these colleges (the IITs and the NITs) is so intense that many start preparing for entrance exams in 8th grade, five years before the actual exam.
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