Thomas Stenumgård

stoweboyd: Tom Gauld is the dank notes.

Mon, 28 May 2012 13:25:09 +0200

Tom Gauld is the dank notes.

"It seems natural that the first wave of mobile apps would be about improving core smartphone apps..."

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 02:02:14 +0200

“It seems natural that the first wave of mobile apps would be about improving core smartphone apps (e.g. photo apps) or porting apps from other devices (e.g. games). And there is probably a lot of interesting innovation remaining there. But the really massive opportunity is dreaming up new ways that the little computers loaded with sensors that we carry around with us everywhere can improve our real-world experiences.”

- Offline first, mobile enabled - Chris Dixon

Towards a unified theory of starting up

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:19:22 +0200

david-noel:

soundboy:

Wired asked me to write something for the last issue about start-ups, aka that ol’ heartache.

Here’s my attempt at a unified theory for starting up:

1. Find the people you believe you could build something amazing with. These are your cofounders.

2. Find something you love deeply that could be so much better. This is your market.

3. If you spent your lifetime on that thing, what could it become? This is your vision.

4. What is the smallest possible thing you could build that would test whether others agree? This is your minimal viable product.

5. Recruit the smallest team needed to build it. These are your seed investors and first hires. Be utterly ruthless about choosing people who share your values, vision and ambition level.

6. Build it and launch it. This is your first test.

7. Celebrate. It’s really important to do this. That was some intense stuff!

8. Tell some people that you think will care. These are the most important people in the world now, the first ever users of your product.

9. Is there anything about your product that your new users couldn’t live without? If not, return to step 4, it’s OK. If so, onward!

10. Improve that specific thing that they can’t live without. See if they start to tell their friends about how great it is.

11. Go back to step 3. Maybe it’s even bigger than you thought. If so, tell everyone in your team how so.

12. Figure out a way to make money that is aligned with what your users can’t live without.

13. Use that money to move faster towards your vision. This means making more users happier, faster.

14. Go back to step 3. Making something better is addictive. Doing it with the best people in the world, for something you love, is worth the heartache.

Great way of distilling startup life into a few key points.

"I brought along some field recording gear to use while I was staying in the lovely pod/room/boat. I..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:41:26 +0200

“I brought along some field recording gear to use while I was staying in the lovely pod/room/boat. I went out during the day and recorded sounds that I thought might be useful and evocative. It turned out that most of the sounds – even the church organ in Southwark Cathedral – seemed to converge around a common rhythm. It’s a bit too good to be true – that every large city should have its own rhythm, but here it is. I let the sounds dictate the groove, the tempo, and then I simply played along.”

- David Byrne Captures Sounds Of London In New Art Piece

via PSFK

Evening run (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:11:53 +0200

Evening run (Taken with instagram)

The link between factories and Factory

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:30:00 +0200

When I stepped into the steam shed at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry the sounds, motions, smells, temperature and humidity really hit me. I suddenly understood something about Manchester, about the mechanical age of British industry, about post-industrial spaces and decay, and about the sound of the Manchester music I grew up with: the link between factories and Factory.

by momasu

"Pattern matching, deductive reasoning, and expert opinion tell you how things work in the “typical”..."

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:55:29 +0100

“Pattern matching, deductive reasoning, and expert opinion tell you how things work in the “typical” case, but of course, we’re not interested in the typical case – we’re trying to find the exceptional ones, the rocketship companies that define the startup landscape. That’s exactly when our logical reasoning and historically-based reasoning fails us the most.”

- Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)

"I spend a lot of time in solitude, and a lot of time in nature. I also go swimming every day. When..."

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:51:08 +0100

“I spend a lot of time in solitude, and a lot of time in nature. I also go swimming every day. When you go to the woods, or to the desert, or to water, and you consider your ideas, if the ideas seem timeless and valid in places like that, then they are probably very good ideas. If ideas seem good in the context of a city, it’s often because they are trendy and sexy and fashionable (like people who live in cities), but not necessarily nourishing, timeless, and strong. I call these natural ideas versus city ideas.”

- Are Self-Reflection And Timelessness Possible On The Internet? [PSFK NYC 2012] @PSFK

"Launch 2012 seems to me to reveal that the most awesome decade of disruptive in technology..."

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:00:32 +0100

“Launch 2012 seems to me to reveal that the most awesome decade of disruptive in technology history–an era that produced social media and social networking; mobile, tablet and cloud computing–is now entering a period of normalization. The era of engineers and entrepreneurs swinging for the wall every time they stood on the stage is closing and now we are in a period of consistant base hits.”

- Launch Conference Indicates End to Tech Decade of Disruption - Forbes

Still feels early. Especially considering all the awesome (scary) stuff that will come from bio- and nanotechnology, and get hooked up with IT.

Light painting

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:42:13 +0100

The Penki app looks like a lot of fun.

The Ambient Computing Era

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:50:00 +0100

Mozilla Research Fellow Allen Wirfs-Brock has given a super interesting talk, The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology, where he makes the case that we’re entering the ambient computing era. If you’re interested in these kinds of things I recommend watching the first 30 minutes of his presentation. After that it get’s slightly more technical with a discussion of the role and importance of JavaScript in the years ahead. The presentation isn’t embeddable but it’s available here. There’s also a blog post here.

I jotted down a few thoughts on this last year, although from a slightly different perspective: Digitally Amplified Behavioral Communication.

I, for one, am looking forward to enter “seamless lazy mode” :)

"Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too..."

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:28:32 +0100

“Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking “are we there yet?” and you’ll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you’re building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you’ve replaced email when it’s a fait accompli.”

- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

"Pinterest is where the puck is going, because web navigation is shifting from search to social and..."

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:48:23 +0100

“Pinterest is where the puck is going, because web navigation is shifting from search to social and from “streams” towards “grids.””

- Haven’t really made up my mind about grids, but it sure feels directionally right.

Google Buy Pinterest

Click here or on the screenshot to connect. It’s a...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:24:38 +0100

Click here or on the screenshot to connect. It’s a live-streaming 3D point-cloud, carried over a binary WebSocket. It responds to movement in the scene by panning the (virtual) camera, and you can also pan and zoom around with the mouse. Currently you’ll need Google Chrome to try it, and the number of people who can tune in at once is limited for reasons of bandwidth. If you can’t connect, or nothing much is happening, try this short video on YouTube instead. It might be the future of video-conferencing. It could also be the start of a new wave of web-based movement-powered games.

(via A depthcam? A webkinect? Introducing a new kind of webcam at George MacKerron: code blog)

Really, really cool.

It’s a project by Interactive Things, along with Lift and Near...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0100

It’s a project by Interactive Things, along with Lift and Near Future Laboratory, which traced cell phones to visualize the daily flow of people across Geneva. With the goal of capturing the “living rhythm of the city,” a week’s worth of anonymized cell-phone data was provided by Swisscom.

Amazing

"Over the next years you’re going to see that the value that comes out of Dropbox is more and..."

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:15:09 +0100

“Over the next years you’re going to see that the value that comes out of Dropbox is more and more the stuff that other people build. Whether it’s your TV or your camera or the apps on your phone, we want to make it easy for anything that consumes or creates data to be able to plug in. What we’re really trying to build is the Internet’s file system.”

- Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud - Technology Review

love dropbox

caro: A map of Airbnb properties in San Francisco in 2008...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:40:10 +0100

caro:

A map of Airbnb properties in San Francisco in 2008 versus today, from its Global Growth infographic.

"The pervasiveness of electronics in virtually every aspect of daily life has prompted designers to..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:00:14 +0100

“The pervasiveness of electronics in virtually every aspect of daily life has prompted designers to rethink the way that people interact with their devices and the world around them. The next evolution of natural user interfaces sees voice and audio recognition technologies capable of reacting to spoken commands and audio cues, enabling people to perform a wider variety of instant, hands-free operations from searching for information to surfing the channels.”

- The Sonic Interface Trend [Need To Know: SXSWi] @PSFK

"If there was one lesson I’ve learned in the last three years working for [Secretary Clinton] and..."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:01:05 +0100

“If there was one lesson I’ve learned in the last three years working for [Secretary Clinton] and being witness to significant shifts in power around the world, it’s that there is a significant shift in geopolitical power globally right now, from hierarchies, like the nation-state, to individuals and networks of individuals. This is something that’s being accelerated by increasingly powerful and ubiquitous information networks.”

- Alec J. Ross at Davos as reported by The New Yorker (via cacioppo)

coding an app is like writing a story

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:38:51 +0100

coding an app is like writing a story