Quoting Nick Carr’s post:
Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar.
Oh man, I guess the future is reading stupid facebook updates all day.
Do you need some inspiring associations?
Yes you do
Check out 88 constellations:
Sharing something is much faster on facebook, but I still don’t like facebook that much.
Paul Rand is perhaps America’s most famous identity designer, who developed logos such as IBM’s or NEXT’s.
Therefore it might be a shame to admit that it was only recently that I became aware of his works, nevertheless, I wanted to share appreciation of his identity document for Steve Jobs’ NEXT:
On the webpage, you need to scroll down to “identity presentations” section. Reading from photos is not comfortable but doable, especially if you are on a mac and can zoom easily.
One might find his approach to design problems rather intellectual if not pedantic, with all the detailed discussion of why this font and not another, why in italics and why in this color, but I find it quite fascinating, personally.
In fact, I found my way to this document passing from Steve Job’s record of his relationship with Rand:
Note the fragment when Jobs describes Rand’s way of working with his clients:
I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, “No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution – if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you – you’re the client – but you pay me.”
This reminds me, by the way, of a common dilemma in consulting of whether we solve problems for the client or with the client.
But to finish the episode with Steve Jobs and Rand, here is the account of how the cooperation started:
Jobs had always had an eye for good design. He was especially taken with the logos of ABC, IBM, UPS, and Westinghouse, all of which were created by Yale professor Paul Rand. Rand offered to create NeXT’s logo for $100,000, but only if IBM consented.
This was an outrageous price, many times more than what Rand had charged IBM for its now-iconic logo. Two months later, Rand sent Jobs a copy of the logo and a brochure explaining every detail. For the sake of a more interesting design, Rand even renamed the company NeXT, saying the ‘e’ stood for education. The new logo (and the name behind it) lent prestige and clout to a company without customers or a product.
We spend winter holidays in Warsaw, looking after all details for setup of our brand new consulting vehicle.
Details include registering company (in fact two companies), selecting accounting firm, developing company’s brand and identity.
We are trying to be quite innovative and perfectionist in each of these, except for maybe the accounting.
Everyone left for skiing and all, but we are managing these details and it’s actually kind of fun.
Ogito, on the other hand, is closed for the time when I have time for another experiment.
I guess I should be more concerned about investing lots of time and then switching to something else without obvious return, but I’m really not. I guess I like experiments.
Jokes about global warming are probably tired already, but the fact is, I can hardly recall a winter like that. I mean the situation when you lost track of how long the snow has been around – it’s been so long.
I have a feeling that a proper winter spells a very good year. I don’t have anything tangible to back up this expectation, except perhaps how the frost is killing all the wormies etc.
In any case, this year for us is about pumping all the startuping experience into consulting, which is something we know best, and we have lots of ideas how to make it even better, therefore we are quite excited about it.
This post is due to the fact that I feel like writing rather than reading on this lazy Saturday.
I never liked subsidies, just from perspective of avoiding rent-seeking, but this message from PARP (agency managing subsidies at least for innovative projects) gives some rationale to this stand at last.
PARP warns companies who were granted subsidies not to change their ownership structure, because it might be interpreted as breach of subsidy contract.
I’m fascinated by the topic of artificial intelligence, but the fact is, despite all the hype in the last half a century, this faculty hasn’t come up with anything even remotely close to capabilities of a human brain, and many pundits started to lose hope that it ever will.
Development focused on custom solutions designed to tackle specific, narrowly defined problems. The books I read so far tended to be technical reviews of various types of neural networks, which are of course inspired by the brain’s circuitry, but share little with it in terms of flexibility and adaptability.
Hawkins’ book is a rare attempt to come up with general view on how brain really works. In the process, it uses concepts from both biological and technological sides. Its general idea is not obscured by technical jargon, which makes it easy to follow.
In summary, the book offers a glimmer of hope, that some kind of breakthrough in the field might be around the corner.
Microsoft previewed one of its new technologies from the labs, the Pivot.
(on a separate note, while watching the video I realized that till now I didn’t know how to spell pivot correctly)
From the video, it seems that new Pivot does the same thing as it’s desktop older brother in Excel, namely allows to slice a collection of data along available dimensions.
What new Pivot seems to offer on top of that is a more immersive way of exploring data sets, especially those whose items can be visualized somehow. So it’s like a very visual drill-down capability.
Interesting article by Tom O’Reilly.
Perhaps days of fragmented but free-for-all web are coming to an end, as the gravitational pull of proprietary platforms – Facebook, iPhone, Google services – steadily increases.
On the other hand, many of these platforms in fact broke open spaces that were previously off limits to anyone but owners of the closed ecosystems and the few who bought their way in.
iPhone allowed everyone to write and distribute apps without mobile carrier’s blessing, and Facebook granted access to its social graph, allowing third party apps to take advantage of it.
I’m getting used to doing serious work on MS Office for Mac, and while it’s still not close to Windows experience, I believe the work is reasonably productive.
But there were few things which I was really missing:
Solutions that I used don’t seem very elegant (basically making Applescript emulate clicks and key strokes), but at least it works for me and makes me more productive, so I share it below. (read more…)
I’m just coming out of a fairly intensive period, and of what? Consulting work. Who would have thought.
In the last couple of years I tested relation with consulting industry from three different angles: as an employee of a large international company, as a freelancer, and now as an operator of a stand-alone consulting practice. Each has its set of pros and cons.
As an employee you get comfort, stability and benefits, and initially you can learn a lot. However, you don’t have any control over your life, you are not rewarded for managing projects unless you are a manager, and you are not rewarded for selling projects unless you are a partner (and I love selling projects).
As a freelancer, you get control over your time, you have incentives to sell and most likely you earn more money. You don’t have direct responsibility for projects, so I was thinking you would be under less stress, too. However, I discovered that watching some people managing projects and having little influence over them is more stressful than having the whole responsibility for the project myself.
Which brings me to third mode of operation, negotiating and selling projects oneself. It’s a hell of a fun so far. It’s like having a startup, but in area when you have the most expertise, so it’s like a ride downhill. You make all decisions. You can invest in research and development to improve the way things are delivered. Or hire people you want to work with.
Sure, it might be just a honeymoon period, but I’m enjoying it enormously.
First stop – probably Prague. No further plans, but I am determined to focus on Western Europe this time. Maybe Vienna and the Zurich and then Italy.
Love my new watch. Shines in darkness. No way in hell a bystander can tell a time from it.
Got my first netbook, too. Acer aspire one. Relatively large screen (11”) and keyboard. Relatively good looking. Unfortunately, with Windows on it. Half an hour of updates and tens of warnings and reminders before the thing is ready to work.
So now I am an Apple fanboy, but if I looked closer, I leave more money with Ecco.
I’m not consuming, I’m investing. There is a bigger scheme.
Only couple of things left for tomorrow and off I go.
I arrived in Moscow on Monday to do some consulting for the coming months. Two months to be precise, unless there is an extension of the contract.
I’m sitting now in the huge space of Crowne Plaza lobby, a facility with an interesting history – or so I was told – but I cannot find it written anywhere (i.e. not on wikipedia). Colleague told me the complex was built in the 70s and became a rare enclave of capitalism within soviet Moscow, where people in western clothes could be seen, prostitutes abound etc. (full fledged capitalist environment in any case).
What else. The weather is shitty and I can hardly mobilize myself to do any work on Ogito side.
There seems to be a new element which came to light after I was last here, as an effect of the crisis.
People I work with, and they would be typical new middle class representatives, talk about feeling insecure in the country, anxiety can clearly be felt, to the point that makes them worry about state of things in Russia.
In the time of prosperity any troubling signs were filtered out before they could reach their consciousness. Things like political killings or corruption were known to exist, but not something successful specialists aiming for new cars and apartments would worry about.
Plus they bought into nationalistic theme, where every unpleasant fact was dismissed as exaggeration driven by hostile external propaganda.
Not anymore. Moscow streets were always a curiosity, where luxurious cars of the elite are mixing seamlessly with working class in ancient Russian ladas. Now, low income workers start to display open hostility towards suits passing by on the street.
Police would be expected to separate the extreme layers of the society, but unfortunately anyone in the uniform is considered rather a potential threat than protection. Men in uniforms look to benefit from their status for extortion and not serve anyone.
Prosperity is over for now and status quo where everyone is paid into submission through oil money may become unsustainable. Things may get ugly then.
Agnieszka Pomaska, 29, will become a new member of the Polish parliament. She barely missed being elected in Gdansk last time, now she will take place of a new EU representative.
She is a hell of a sportswoman, studied politology and apparently did a good job in Gdansk’s government (can’t tell since I’m not from Gdansk).
With liberal party getting 45% of votes in the middle of the recession, Polish politics doesn’t leave a lot to complain about, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have more young politicians.
Even better if they understood new technologies and helped the country compete – topics like user-friendly copyright law and support for high-tech startups could use some spokesmen.
Some impressive map overlays (phone calls data during Obama inauguration):
http://senseable.mit.edu/obama/index.html
I find visualizing data to be such a cool topic – which can easily be seen from the number of posts related to statistics on Ogito blog, like this one.
But there is often a gap between aesthetics and usefulness of advanced visuals.
To be useful we typically require easy access to lots of context, to be able to draw any conclusions from the data, for example:
(Ogito statistics for cities — registration required to see the charts — use simple Google Charts and tables with links to underlying sets of objects, and this is already enough to get the basic understanding outlined above)
Sometimes complex visualizations add difficulty to perform these basic operations rather than reduce it.
Bartlomiej Owczarek used to be a management consultant in a global company, but at the moment he prefers to explore his own ideas at Goldenberry.
He lives in Warsaw, Poland.
Recently I use nozbe for "Getting things done". It allows to get tasks out of your mind, just like a calendar allows to be at ease about appointments.
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