The Moment Jobs Turned Apple Around
For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing Newton PDAs and printer trays,’ says Clive Grinyer. ‘It was a bad existence.’
The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it used for simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with a lukewarm reception. Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the first computers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashed appearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling for under $2,000 by the time it was pulled from shelves less than a year later.
But just as Ive was considering a return to England, his luck changed. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, dropping most of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of the design department, then based across the street from Apple’s main campus.
‘Jobs comes in, looks at all Ive’s amazing prototypes and says, “My God, what have we got here?”’ says Kahney.
Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building on campus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment. He also beefed up Apple’s security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing a private kitchen so designers wouldn’t talk shop in public.
Racial Integration
Via Sky. This is one of those things that reinforces the idea that people are fundamentally decent/just trying to get through this life and that dependence on arcane institutions/norms isn’t a requirement to thrive.
Census officials were expecting a national multiracial growth rate of about 35 percent since 2000, when seven million people — 2.4 percent of the population — chose more than one race. Officials have not yet announced a national growth rate, but it seems sure to be closer to 50 percent.
Rise of the Gargoyles
Noah:
Some spend thousands of dollars homebrewing their own DIY listening stations. Many others – Huub included – rely on handheld gear, much of which can be ordered through Radio Shack. Huub uses the ICOM R20 receiver and the Uniden UBC-785XLT scanner, both of which retail for a little more than $500.
But the type of gear is almost secondary, Huub writes. “I do not simply listen to ATC [air traffic control] or NATO frequencies,” he says. Instead, he monitors everything from aircraft transponder data to IRC chatrooms to pinpoint his planes. “I use a combination of live listening with local equipment, audio streaming, video streaming, datamining, intelligence, analyzing and the general knowledge of ATC procedures, communication, encryption, call signs, frequencies and a lot of experience on this!”
Facebook Group Deals
What would be more exciting than just an internal GroupOn clone that Facebook is currently exploring, would be dynamically generating these offers. Here’s how it could work:
- Users talk about a particular product – a place, a thing, a service – and they are encouraged to tag it in a post/comment.
- Facebook tracks these events, shows the data to the product provider, who purchases a deal or advertising for one.
- (Facebook can use existing advertising data to guesstimate what a good deal would look like.)
This way, users are incentivized to connect with product, Facebook takes a cut, and businesses reward existing customers while acquiring new ones.
Hijacking Times Square
This is great.