Withings is back!

#Boom #TakeMyMoney

"""In short, computer-based music distribution simply made no allowance for the over 400 years of western music that existed prior to the pop album. People who listened to classical music were effectively deemed irrelevant."""

I enjoy this kind of retrospective insight. This podcast episode is from March 2016 so it's much easier to see where the host had insight (the section on Apple's need to transition to a naming scheme that would allow them to ship 3 phones is particularly brilliant if one accepts that from now on Apple will ship an iPhone N, NR and NMax.) and where he doesn't (the bit where he perfectly describes and dismisses the case for big phones).

"""One of the highlighted demonstrations onstage today was the ability to manually adjust the depth of field after taking photos in Portrait Mode. Despite Apple’s claims that “this has not been possible with any kind of camera,” it’s actually a feature that’s been available on Android phones like Huawei and Nokia for a few years. Not to mention, the refocusing technology was first pioneered by the now-defunct light-field camera company Lytro in 2012.

So we can take all of Apple’s big keynote claims with a grain of salt, but if we’re looking at technical specifications, how do the new iPhones stack up against the top Android phones? """

https://www.ted.com/talks/aris_venetikidis_making_sense_of_maps

#FutureMe #PirateMaps

https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different just made me realise that I have no idea how addressing works in Tokyo.

"""Amazon has more revenue than Facebook, Google and Twitter put together"""

I'm fascinated by the many different interests that have banded together under the banner of antitrust regulation and reform. Some people want these companies to be smaller; some want them to be less profitable; some want these markets to be more competitive; some want these companies to be more obedient to the will of governments and politicians; some want these companies to have smaller market capitalisation; some want them to employ fewer people; some want them to acquire fewer startups; some want them to be treated as utilities and thus immune to competition as part of the state; some just want them destroyed or broken up no matter the consequences; some want them weakened so that their country's equivalent can have a chance to take the same role; some just want their profits redirected to local taxes so that can be invested in their country; some just want them to subsidise their particular industry; some want to rollback network effects that intrinsic to the way certain technologies work; some want them to be more active political actors safeguarding democracy and other vaguely-defined values; some want them to be less involved in the political arena; and some just want these companies gone so that the world will go back to the way it was before the Internet.

They all disagree on the nature of the problem as well as which companies are part of the problem.

The final contradiction in such a broad alliance is that they can't all get what they want and some of them are going to get the exact opposite of what they want. A lot of this will be driven by a blindness to the consequences of actions that feel right and the entire situation reminds me of that Chinese proverb "the enemy of my enemy is my friend...for a little while. "

Disclaimer: I'm clearly biased here but I'm not speaking for my employer.

"""A solid historical awareness gives you a really good toolset to ask the question: what is different this time? The answer (or lack of one!) to that question will very often determine the success or failure of a new technology."""