October 2011
5 posts
Texas officials edited climate change out of... →
Texas scientists wrote a report detailing the state of the environment in Galveston Bay. Rick Perry-appointed officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality went through the report and…
No I'm Not Going To Law School: Disrupting Law... →
Derek Slater is my former colleague at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now serving as a policy analyst at Google. He’s just published a barn-burning essay called “#noimnotgoingtolawschool:…
HOWTO write more secure free/open source software →
Having recently conducted a security audit of several free/open source software programs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chris Palmer and Dan Auerbach have published some guidelines for…
I still can’t believe Mark Zuckerberg did not win... →
Yesterday there was speculation that Zuck was going to get it. But then they gave it to three women who as far as I know don’t even have a startup or even an iPhone app. I tried…
OpenStack Leader: Open Source Needs to Rethink Its... →
Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the “common good,” it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it…
September 2011
8 posts
API design for humans →
One of the things about working with data at 37signals is that I end up interacting with a lot of different APIs—I’ve used at least ten third-party APIs in the last few months, as well as all of our…
404 Not Found →
All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed... →
I don’t mean to overhype this, but frankly I don’t think it would be possible to overhype something as huge and profound as what Facebook introduced yesterday, at least from what I gather…
Armed with a Win8 Tablet, YoYo Games Marches... →
Last week in Anaheim, in amongst the crowd of developers at Microsoft’s Build 2011 conference assimilating the news about Windows 8, was a team from a London, U.K.-based company called YoYo…
Dropcam makes surveillance consumer-friendly, gets... →
Smile, you’re on camera! Wi-Fi video camera company Dropcam raised $5 million in its first round of funding today led by storied venture firm Accel Partners and Google+ vice president…
2nd Mechanicrawl in San Francisco, Saturday... →
Austin Brown of The Long Now Foundation says:
In appreciation of the many fine and astounding mechanical wonders located along San Francisco’s North Short, Long Now invites Bay Area locals…
Adaptive Journeys →
A way to make cities, and especially London, a tiny bit better. But first, an explanation. Yesterday I needed to go from Finsbury Park to Old Street, home of the World Famous Silicon Roundabout(TM)….
New Zombie App Makes You Want To Run →
This fun new app/game shows you just when and where a zombie invasion is about to occur, giving you enough time to run away as fast as you can! Appropriately titled “Zombies, Run!”, it…
August 2011
1 post
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your... →
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become really great.” - Mark Twain
edit: @bremser hmm,…
July 2011
2 posts
Curing the commercial Web blues →
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice:
The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks,…
Paper that died of shame →
June 2011
4 posts
The French really get this one right →
In the United States, the media are making a huge mistake re Twitter and Facebook by treating them as if they were open systems like the web or email. In fact, and they know this, they are…
Kodesk Is Like An Airbnb For Office Space →
Just like Airbnb operates a marketplace for spaces for travelers and whatnot to stay, Kodesk aims to do much of the same for spaces for freelancers and whatnot to work. Essentially trying to build a…
Icon’s “Rethink”: turning receipts into ‘paper... →
Icon magazine asked us to contribute to their monthly “Rethink” feature, where current and commonplace objects are re-imagined.
We continued some of the thinking from our “Media…
Whatever interests you naturally is the most... →
Below, David talks about motivation. Excerpted from Episode #26 of the 37signals Podcast (listen or read the transcript). I have a very hard to impossible time forcing myself to do things that…
May 2011
13 posts
Facebook is building a browser →
TechCrunch reports that Facebook is hiring a team in Seattle to work on “desktop” software. If you think about it for five seconds, it’s got to be a browser. Of course they’re building…
Just ducky! Swedish boat looks just like a giant... →
Fredrik Sandberg / Scanpix via AP
Shipwright Christian Bohlin steers his vessel made to look like a duck across Stockholm harbor on May 26, 2011. The duck that contains two cots, kitchenette…
Bulgaria turns former dictator's jet into an... →
AP
The jetliner of former Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov is prepared to be submerged and turned into an underwater tourist attraction off the country’s Black Sea coast in Varna on May 25,…
Miro4: open, cross-platform iTunes replacement... →
Nicholas from the Participatory Culture Foundation sez,
Miro 4 has just been released! We believe the open media world can be just as integrated and usable as the closed, top-down, DRM’ed…
What ebook designers can learn from Bible-reading... →
This is part of an ongoing series related to Peter Meyers’ project “Breaking the Page, Saving the Reader: A Buyer & Builder’s Guide to Digital Books.” We’ll be featuring additional material in…
Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization →
In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used…
Forest illuminated by laser party near Bucharest →
Daniel Mihailescu / AFP - Getty Images
People are pictured in a forest illuminated by laser lights during a laser party in a forest near Bucharest May 14, 2011. Hundreds of people gather in…
Patent troll shakes down mobile devs →
A company called Lodsys bought a patent on upgrade buttons and is hitting small developers with shakedown notices. The insanity of the patent is immaterial, because it’s cheaper to pay up than go…
Starbuck and Starbuck in Starbucks →
So, here we have Dirk Benedict, who played Lt. Starbuck in the classic Battlestar Galactica, with Katee Sackhoff, who played Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in the modern Battlestar Galactica, in a…
The Distribution Democracy and the Future of Media →
A few hours ago, a friend of mine emailed me, lamenting a story that CNN was passing off as breaking news, even though it was far from being either news or newsworthy. His displeasure…
How Teens Understand Privacy →
In the fall, Alice Marwick and I went into the field to understand teens’ privacy attitudes and practices. We’ve blogged some of our thinking since then but we’re currently working on turning our…
OBL: Pakistan’s convenient ignorance →
Sure, Osama seems to have been shot dead. The doubts surround the question of Pakistani complicity. Last night professor Akbar Ahmed, formerly a commissioner in Abbottabad, a former…
Obama wins where Carter lost: why both could prove... →
Nothing so scars an American President as un-success. Contrast the fortunes of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Helicopter failure afflicted both in their high profile rescue missions,…
April 2011
5 posts
How Cooking Made Me a Better Lean Startup... →
Patrick Foley recently made an observation on how everything I do now seems to be an “experiment”.
Running experiments is a key activity in Lean Startups, but my bias for…
The note to staff any media CEO would like to... →
I’ve never quoted an entire blog post without permission before, but in this case, I’m asking forgiveness rather than permission because you really should read this without another click. John…
Advice for a young entrepreneur →
I spoke recently to an entrepreneurship class at Carnegie Mellon. The professor approached me saying she wanted to hear from an entrepreneur early in their career who was not yet rich. Check.
I…
The ‘IxD Bauhaus’ – what happens next? →
Occasionally, amidst the rapid rise and fall of trends, fashion and fancy, we are faced with true revolution: paradigm shifts that throw out excess baggage of some kind and usher…
Soyuz Gagarin is ready to lift off for the... →
Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters
The Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, named after the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, is transported to its launch pad at Baikonur cosmodrome on April 2, 2011. The…
March 2011
5 posts
Timo Arnall’s Light Painting Wifi →
Beautiful.
Ditto: Jaiku Founder Leaves Google, Aims to Beat... →
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt said last summer. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” What should you be doing next? A former Googler named Jyri Engeström, whose microblogging service Jaiku was cooler than Twitter, but was acquired into oblivion by Google
Google Chrome removes ‘http://facebook.com/’ from... →
The URL field of Google Chrome will no longer display the “http://facebook.com/” portion of URLs as of today’s update.
Google’s reasons that, for most people, the first part of the URL…
Travel & Tourism: Got Klout? →
I’m an ardent supporter of all things Foursquare-related; be that through either [on a consumer level] meaningless badges acquired through a specific number of check ins or [on the brand side] a…
The Feminine Side →
At the recent Interaction Eleven conference in Boulder CO, Cheryl Platz gave an excellent presentation on ways to encourage young girls to study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)…
February 2011
10 posts
Google Doubles Down on ‘Microdata’ With New Recipe... →
Google has rolled out a new recipe search tool to help you find delicious recipes on the web. Our friends at Epicenter have more details on Google’s announcement, but the real news for web…
Indiana deputy attorney general tweets: "Use live... →
Mother Jones: On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn’t end up…
What happens after Yahoo acquires you →
Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get…
Mystery behind two Libyan fighter jets landing in... →
AP reports that two Libyan air force jets arrived in Malta today. Military officials say their pilots have asked for political asylum amid a bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters in…
Denial vs. Progress. →
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It's about the users, dummy →
Twitter pressed a button tonight, and not just the one marked “Kill.” They sent two wakeup calls to their users: 1. Hey it would be safer to use our client to access Twitter. 2. We will kill…
Open Data Startup Factual Updates Its Datasets,... →
The open data service Factual has just updated some of its datasets and has also released a new iPhone SDK. The Los Angeles-based startup describes the move as another step towards its goal…