Here’s an interesting idea. Flickr allows one to select sections of an image and add an annotation to the image corresponding to the selected portion. Someone who’d been an undergraduate at Cambridge has taken an aerial photograph of the city and annotated it with his memories of various locations. Given his memories, I wonder if that was a particularly wise thing to do, but the idea is intriguing and ingenious.
Thanks to Brian for the link.
From Stowe Boyd’s Work blog…
Working with a client recently, an executive said something along these lines:
We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well.
This has got to be one of the most dangerous sorts of thinking in start-ups, which I believe are all psychological reactions to stress, leading to ‘entrepreneurialitis’. Here’s others that I worry about whenever I hear them:
1. We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well. [means: we don’t have to adapt to the world, the world will have to adapt to us.]
2. Yes, that feature is important, but we’ll put it into a later release. [means: I don’t want to decide what’s important, so we will defer.]
3. We don’t need to test the business model: it’s obvious! [means: I don’t know how to test the business model.]
4. We don’t need to bring in outside experts, and we don’t have time to assimilate that many viewpoints, anyway. [We know everything, and who the hell are you, wise guy?]
5. People believe that building successful applications is hard, but it’s easy if you just [fill in pet obsession here]. [means: it better be simple, because that’s all I am prepared for.]
6. I know what to do: God told me. [This actually happened to me, I am not kidding.]
These range from the mildly out of touch to the paranoid and delusional, but they all are dangerous. Anything short of painful openness to the complexities and subtleties of building successful apps, any retreat from trying to learn from others successes and failures, can lead to complacency, insider thinking, convergent mindsets, and eventually doom for the company…
This morning’s Observer column…
From the moment the internet appeared in 1983, it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that it was a heaven-sent machine for delivering bits from one place to another. This insight, however, somehow eluded the record companies, despite the fact that they had just gone digital (the CD was launched in 1982) and were in the business of transporting bits from recording studios to consumers’ CD players.
Over the next decade and a half, the music industry continued to ignore the net. As a result, the record companies failed to develop a legal method for consumers to buy music online. In 1999, Shawn Fanning launched Napster and unleashed the illicit file-sharing habits that nearly destroyed the industry…