The Artist parades its conceit at every turn of its familiar romance. We’re doing this no sound thing for you because it’s good for you. Things will work out fine. The dog needs no dialogue. The music tells you what to feel. It’s already half over, and besides, it’s already better than the last five movies you’ve seen.

Google Search + parades its conceit at every turn. It’s free, so we can improve it any way we want. We’re already reading everything you write in Gmail, so now we’re blurring the metadata into one big data pool so we can better read your mind and sell the results back to marketers. It’s OK because Facebook already does this. We’d add all the other networks if they would just let us have their data too. And besides, we’re doing this. → Read More

It’s not so much that the world has changed as that the speed with which events evolve has telescoped. The rise of social analytics and realtime feedback loops means that business processes are now transformed on the fly by the velocity with which the impact of a product or idea or strategy is folded back into the process flow. Products become services, interactive streams of data and influence metadata where who thinks what about it when changes the service elastically.

That explains why our leaders are having so much trouble with realtime. Their expertise is in the politics of yesterday, where all the PI used to live. What’s happening? Look at the last election’s data. Meanwhile this year’s voters are getting Twitter push notifications with links to the most up-to-date attitude from a cloud-curated stream of instant influentials. Translated: the news is delivered on a whispernet by those we trust with follows and engage with @mentions. → Read More

There comes a moment, not the aha moment, but the I wonder whether someone else had this idea in 2004 moment. I can’t be sure, but here it is for what it’s worth. I think Apple TV is going to go real small, not the other rumored way around. As in to the cloud by way of the remote. If you think of the current Apple TV and its dimensions, think smaller, iPod Touch small.

As most of us who know how difficult it is to get everything into one box these days, the lure of a universal remote for content is a compelling idea. One device that can show not just the current Apple TV fare (Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, AirPlay,) but Amazon Prime, Xbox, DVDs, Comcast, and with it Spotify and other as yet to debut streaming services. A kind of combo hardware and streaming router. → Read More

This was not a movie for the normals, even with and expressly because of the presence of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. This was a big budget and highly technological rendering of an enigma. But within that frame, I found myself intuitively understanding things just as they happened, only later finally getting enough data to confirm my instinct. Something powerful was at work, on the fulcrum between the normal and the human condition.

For most of the last eight years and certainly the last two, we have been driven by the filter of a man who knew he was dying. Steve Jobs may have done what he did given a more gentle fate, but how he did it within the boundaries of his time left has profoundly altered our sense of what we have done.
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