Cloudbrain

A very well-made video ad for the new humanitarian group Nulu International. I love the graphic-novel style graphics. The whole thing is gripping. Reminds me of the last season of 24 where Bauer becomes an aid worker in Africa to escape the stress of fighting terrorism...

Great note over at Boing Boing today about Russell Davies’ talk at Playful and “pretending objects”. There is a fine balance in product design between allowing the user to “pretend” (so they buy your product) and making them feel stupid (when they see through to your lie and move on).

The extent to which we are all being brainwashed is pretty severe. Found by @beckybratu and Gawker

We are working on something cool. I’ll tell you about it later.

Paul Graham wrote a great essay today that is the best summary I’ve read so far of the plight of media and publishing companies like newspapers. ...

If you want people to believe something about you, you need to be prepared to say it over and over again. When people hear something enough, they start to believe it.

Want people to remember your idea, message or product? Put it in a story. Remember middle school when you learned about the parts of a story? The central character. The conflict. The rising action. The resolution - Just like that...

Great article in the Wall Street Journal today about Norman Borlaug. A man who, the WSJ theorizes, saved billions of lives over his lifetime by teaching the world how to better grow food. From the article: Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output...

If you had sat in on the pitch for these products, would you have been able to predict the one that went on to huge financial success? This is what is meant by failing cheaply. It is almost impossible to predict winners ahead of time...

This is our business plan at Cloudbrain: Fail Cheaply. When it comes to creating a new product, the biggest question businesses face these days is not “Can We Build This?” or “Will it Work?” – the most important question is “Will Anyone Care?”. Unless you a...

You know the TextEdit application on every Mac computer? The Apple equivalent of Notepad. This is what the icon looks like zoomed in. The note says: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Th...

So a while ago I checked the option in iTunes for syncing my GMail contacts with my iPhone. That sounded like a good idea - I use Gmail for email and my iPhone is with me all the time, so why not? YIKES! Big mistake. Suddenly I had thousands and thousands of entries in my iPhone contacts...