Blog

How to make it as a musician in 2011: give your music away for free
The media has been proclaiming the death of the music industry for nearly a decade now. Every news piece on declining album sales includes the requisite doomsday graph where-- horror of horrors-- the bars representing album sales get smaller to the right. Just this month, the band Cake saw their new album debut at #1 on the Billboard charts with only 44,000 copies sold, the lowest #1 debut in SoundScan history.
27 Jan 2011
Simplicity Is Not Overrated – It’s Misunderstood
People want features. But in reality they only want features that make a product do what they want it to do. They’re not interested in the features needed to get the product to do things that other people want it to do.
16 Nov 2010
Reasons VCs Are Investing in NY Startups
Howard Morgan, a veteran investor and managing partner at the New York-based First Round Capital, says New Yorkers are more pragmatic. “We’re not as quickly enamored by the latest technology,” said Mr. Morgan. “California is more likely to be. They often have a ‘we’ll fund it now and figure out the business model later’ attitude. On the East Coast we like to figure out those business models sooner.”
2 Nov 2010
Metro UI: Less interface, more focus on content
As my friends can attest, I won't stop raving about the Windows Phone 7 user interface, dubbed 'Metro' by the team behind it. I love it for a couple of reasons: The aesthetic - Nice typography / minimal interface elements / slick layer of polish The approach - Focus on user content / subtle functionality cues / activity-based UI
1 Nov 2010
iPad User Experience Study
A San Francisco coffee shop called Sightglass uses an iPad equipped with Square (a payment app) to process credit cards.
13 Aug 2010
Nobody has two television sets
Between 1975 and 2009, the number of US households with more than 3 television sets nearly quintupled (11% in 1975 vs 54% in 2009). Source: Nielson Wire
30 Jul 2010
Urban Density and Budget Allocation
If all of Earth’s six billion people were to live at the density we do here in the five boroughs of New York City, all of humanity would occupy less than one half of one percent of the earth’s land mass — roughly the size of Texas.
26 Jul 2010
U.K. Times Website Paywall Kills Two-Thirds of Visitor Traffic
Many newspaper publishers have been threatening to shutter their content behind paywalls for some time now, but The Times in the UK is one of the first to actually do it. Now the results of this change are beginning to surface. According to PaidContent:
22 Jul 2010