Twitter’s “Innovator’s Patent Agreement”:
A truly innovative stance would be for a large technology company to avoid filing patents,2 and to lobby aggressively for progressive patent reform to make that a practical choice for every technology company. But that’s not what Twitter has done.
The Innovator’s Patent Agreement is a well-intentioned gesture. But that’s all it is.
Source: Marco.org
Web developers use virtual environments every day with their web applications. From EC2 and Rackspace Cloud to specialized solutions such as EngineYard and Heroku, virtualization is the tool of choice for easy deployment and infrastructure management. Vagrant aims to take those very same principles and put them to work in the heart of the application lifecycle. By providing easy to configure, lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual machines targeted at development environments, Vagrant helps maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team.
Vagrant is a development tool which stands on the shoulders of giants, using tried and proven technologies to achieve its magic. Vagrant uses Oracle’s VirtualBox to create its virtual machines and then uses Chef or Puppet to provision them.
[Congrats on getting to 1.0 to all involved. Check out the Railscast to see it in action.]
Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Raises $3.8M on Kickstarter:
Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods.
So Migicovsky posted his watch on Kickstarter, a “crowd-funding” website where anyone can pledge money for creative projects that have yet to be completed. In the last few days, roughly 26,000 people plunked down their cash, with many pledging hundreds of dollars and about a half dozen folks promising $10,000 or more.
[It seems cool. I’m in. Crazy story.]
Let me think about the people I care about the most,
and how when they fail or disappoint me,
I still love them,
I still give them chances,
And I still see the best in them.
Let me extend that generosity to myself.
No one said it would be easy to invent entirely new ways of moving money, especially given a banking system that’s decidedly not future-proof, but it’s a problem worth solving. It should be simple.
[It should be but it’s not. Maybe it should be Simple.]
Source: Simple Blog
The assumption here is that the only way to search is through Google, and that the “open Internet” is only what Google can index and sell ads against.
[They’ve lost their way because they remained a one trick pony.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Nest not only takes inspiration from Apple, they take lawyers:
Nest describes Honeywell’s patents as “hopelessly invalid” “retreads already invented by others years before,” and as The Verge reports in their story, Nest CEO Tony Fadell describes Honeywell as “worse than a patent troll”:
Nest’s full answer to Honeywell’s lawsuit reveals the same arguments in greater detail. (It also contains amazing legal zingers like “Nest denies that Honeywell is an innovator in the area of thermostat technology.”) According to the filing, “Honeywell has a track record of responding to innovation with lawsuits and overextended claims of intellectual property violations,” and the patents in question should all be invalidated by prior art — even, in some cases, by previous Honeywell patents Nest claims the company hid from the Patent Office.
Man, I’d never have thought thermostats could get so interesting.
[Me either. Plus I’m hoping that some combination of success and desire cause them or others to create similar improvements for other household controls. Goodness knows they need it.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
It’s much faster and simpler than a photo deposit. (I can also get cash while I’m there. Can’t do that with the iPhone app.)
And then it’s done. The check is out of sight and out of mind. I know that if anything goes wrong, the bank will mail me something about it, although I’ve never had an ATM-deposited check get rejected by the bank later.
Sometimes, new technology is not progress.
[I hope the folks at Simple are listening. (Hey, where’s my invite anyway? :) The thing is, simply using cool technology is never enough. It has to provide a better experience. If it doesn’t it’s a failure. Certainly you don’t want a process that’s worse than old way, or less flexible.]
Source: Marco.org
(Part of) Why Instapaper and Similar Are So Useful:
ReadWriteWeb, Jon Mitchell: Websites Have to Get Better:
Read-later apps are competition for noisy, ad-ridden websites. They represent a simple fact: Users hate our sites.
Sure do.
Dave Winer suggests:
Generate a community of template designers who create readable templates that we can use in content management systems… Make it easy for people to make readable sites. And beautiful and have advertising. Help solve the problem.
[It’s like the golden age of designers. I don’t think the impact of design has ever been given more play. And the same open source tools that work for developers probably work well fr designers (I’m thinking Github here). I wonder if there is a too much ‘individuality’ still bred into the designer space.]
Source: inessential.com
Books May Be Better Objects, but E-Books Are Better Tools: I have some significant concerns about Amazon’s increasing dominance over the publishing world, and the company may not keep my loyalty forever; but the transferability they have enabled is a huge boon to me in my work. Years ago, when I was a young book collector, I decided that I had to spend my money on books for use rather than display — I didn’t have the resources to be a collector and a scholar. Similar thoughts have prompted my recent move towards electronic texts. Like Nick Carr, I love the fixities of the book as a designed object; but the resources offered by digital versions of texts make my life as a scholar far easier than it has ever been. I can’t resist that.
Jacobs makes a very important point that ebooks are often far better tools for daily use. When Apple introduced Multi-touch books in iBooks 2, they made a big point about the ease of fast navigation in the textbook – something that is crushingly awful on a hardware Kindle.
At the same time, iBooks doesn’t have a “back” button so navigating around a book via hyperlinks is fraught with the danger of losing your place.
[I wish I had tie to dig into the process of creating something via iBook Author. I thin I’d learn a lot about how my son will be reading in a few years.]
Source: Fraser Speirs
turnings :: daniel berlinger 