garytouet

I’ve a read a lot of articles this morning about the new Facebook Timeline for brand pages. No one was actually covering all the new features, so I started writing my own post with quotes from different sites highlighting the main things to remember, until I found this great article on Techcrunch. I ended up quoting them for each feature. No point doing that, so a direct link makes more sense.

You’ll learn everything from the new cover image to the pin posts, highlights and possibility to hide posts as well as the new private messages and admin panel. Josh Constine also made a good job commenting and giving tips for a good use of the new features.

Very long piece by Burt Helm for Inc.com narrating YouSendIt’s troubled early stages:

The story of why—how a talented young entrepreneur turned on the company he worked so hard to help create—is at once bizarre and weirdly typical in the world of Silicon Valley tech start-ups.

It’s all about friendships, trust, power and money. That’s worth reading if you have the time and some popcorn around. It’s a bit romanesque sometimes, but it makes the read more enjoyable.

Anyway this is a pretty tragic story explaining how a founder can see his dream being stolen and lose what he has put some much effort into.

The biggest lesson, I guess, is not giving up ownership when accepting money from investors.

Cult of Mac points out something I did not realize. Guess what?

Apple usually sends out invites exactly 7 days before the date of a keynote, but today they broke tradition and sent the invites out 8 days before the event just to screw with Google.

So what is the reason here?

Right as Google’s Eric Schmidt was taking the stage at Mobile World Conference to talk about how awesome his company’s Android platform is, Apple completely distracted the entire internet by sending out invitations to their iPad 3 event.

Generate more press than Google, that’s Apple’s answer to Eric Schmidt’s praises of Android.

This is it. One week before the event Apple sends the invites out and therefore notifies the public. I guess one week is enough for the journalists to get prepared and short enough for the excitement to be at its peak at the event.

Looking at the sharpness of the graphics on the invite, it seems fairly accurate that the iPad 3 will have a Retina Display.

Two weeks ago, Kickstarter lived an epic day with two projects hitting $1M in pledges.

Today, it strikes again with a third project hitting the impressive seven-figure amount: The Order of the Stick Reprint Drive.

That’s a good sign of success. On top of that, two of the projects come from established artists, which gives a lot of credibility to Kickstarter for being a trusted funding platform.

On Twitter’s blog:

In December, we launched a new version of Twitter. It’s been available for mobile phones, via the mobile web, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, and we’ve been rolling it out steadily to Twitter.com. Now, everyone has access to it.

So it took two months and close to ten days to Twitter to roll out this update.

Isn’t that a bit long?

If you’ve ever taken a plane, you’ve had a boarding pass in your hands. If you’re like me you realized how confusing these are, but never really thought how this could be improved.

This is when Tyler Thompson comes in the game. Unlike me, Tyler tried to figure out how boarding passes could become less confusing and helpful.

He dedicated a webpage to his attempt and intelligently added contributions from other designers to the reflexion.

It builds up a discussion both interesting and striking. There are still plenty of ‘boarding passes’ to reinvent.

Well-written post by Tommy, an Harvard student obviously exposed to a lot of pretty smart people, about what we can learn from them.

It is definitely worth reading and what is to be remembered is the following:

Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

Neither should you.

Fascinating.

Crazy 24 hours on Kickstarter:

Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making... the list goes on.

And exciting 24 hours to work at Kickstarter.

As I’m settling down after a 3-week trip in south-east Australia, what do I notice this morning?

I finally have access to the so-called ‘New New Twitter’ after wondering if I’d ever see it.

I guess rolling out this kind of update to Twitter’s entire user base has taken more time than expected. I could not believe Twitter purposely took two months to spread this over. And who knows, I’m more than likely not the last one to be upgraded.

As a clue to my point, I encountered several bugs that I would classify as post-update technical issues. First, I cannot edit my settings anymore. The password I enter to save my changes, which is exactly the same I used to log in, is said to be incorrect (screenshot). Second, it’s impossible for me to log out from Twitter. Each time, I get the following server error (screenshot):

403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.

I want to log out. It sends a request to the server. The server understands it, but refuses to log me out, because I do not have the rights to do so.

Something wrong definitely happened during the upgrade of my server, which leads me to think that it took so long because Twitter encountered many more problems than expected.

Roman Mars writes as an introduction to his show:

If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. It sometimes means they fake it.

I highly recommend you listen to the episode and. It’s only over five minutes and it is incredibly interesting.

Prior to that, I always assumed that sound was recorded directly from the field. It is not and it is in fact a bit more tricky than that.

Trust me. You want to know.

(via @leeunkrich)

A lot of disasters and damages would be avoided by HzO’s technology.

There’s an incredible potential for this. I bet device manufacturers will have to offer a good guarantee though for people to feel any fear.

However, I can already imagine the huge potential of being able to use your smartphone to take pictures and record videos underwater.

Another reason to abandon your classic camera. Isn’t that right, Kodak?

Sarah Lacy, former Techcrunch’s senior editor, introduces its new tech blog with great ambitions. She writes:

We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.

PandoDaily goes therefore straight to my RSS folder. We’ll see how it evolves.

I wish Sarah and her team the best journey. I hope we are the beginning of something big.

Good news, but as the New York Times reports:

The statement did not threaten a presidential veto, but it made plain what types of piracy enforcement measures the White House would not accept.

The White House seems to understand what’s happening, but it’s not over yet.

Side note: The White House has a website for citizens to post petitions to address important issues. I know it’s guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, but it feels very modern to me. Maybe we’ll have that in France in five years time.

That’s an interesting video by the Verge of Cubify’s 3D printer. 3D-printing is still at its early stages, but the final results are actually pretty good. It’s still expensive for consumers, but there is no doubt 3D printing will be more accessible in the future.

Now my question is. When you see what the entertainment industry is trying to do to the Internet to address online piracy (SOPA, ACTA, HADOPI, etc.), what are goods manufacturers going to do when people will share 3D models of their products to print at home? When a search for an iPhone case 3D plan will be as easy as downloading a song? When they’ll have to face the competition of creative people proposing their awesome models for free?

You know what, I’m worried.

So after over five weeks, I still don’t have access to the New New Twitter.

Have I been relegated to the third world of web services because I don’t have any smartphone?

Let’s see what Twitter says:

We’ll be rolling out the redesigned Twitter over the next few weeks. You can see it immediately on the just-updated versions of mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone, and Twitter for Android. You can get early access on your computer by downloading and logging into Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android.

It’s a ‘Yes’.

Wimpy, a South African fast food chain, with its ad agency MetropolitanRepublic found this very clever way to introduce their new braille menus.

How? They prepared 15 burgers and used the sesame seeds to create messages on the buns. They then distributed these burgers to blind institutions.

Great idea. Cheap. And their message has been relayed by very credible institutions to over 800,000 sight disabled people (according to their video).

I bought Breaktime.app (€3.99 on the MAS) 4 days ago and I am a happy customer. It is a very simple app, but definitely worth trying since it helps solving several of my problems.

After my ‘2012 resolution’ post, I’ve been trying new ways to push myself to do things and especially to spend more useful time on the computer.

This is when I found Breaktime. Its purpose is to force you to have breaks while on your computer. It will remind you to have a break away from the computer, or at least move your eyes away from the screen.

I’ve set up Breaktime to stop me every 20 minutes for 2 minutes each time. Why 20 minutes? It’s a mix between the Pomodoro technique, which recommends 25-minute work periods interrupted by short breaks to solve procrastination, and what experts recommend for your health and eyes.

On top of that, I’ve set up Breaktime to start at login and I highly recommend it. The point is not to worry about it, just let it do its thing. I also want the app to prevent me from switching to other apps and from hitting ‘done’ early. I do not want ways to cheat easily. I keep the ‘In a Minute’ button though for emergency cases.

So why do I recommend it? What is it useful for? It solves many of my problems:

In general, I feel less sucked by the computer, which is awesome.

It is simple to use, lightweight, well-designed and it solves problems. That’s money well spent.

A myth busted by Fraser Speirs:

Let me be as clear as I can be: the iOS multitasking bar does not contain "a list of all running apps". It contains "a list of recently used apps". The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.

So iOS users do not need to manually quit the apps in the multitasking bar. This is useless since iOS has been built to manage it for the user. Fraser is explaining this very well in his article that I recommend you to read. Very interesting.

It took three years to Apple to bring multitasking to iOS. Remember it arrived with iOS 4.0 in 2010, but at least they took the time to make it smart and painless for the user.

What technology should be.

(via Daring Fireball)