everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Work

  • Matt, meet Andy

    I love hyperbolic prose. Especially when it’s used to sell something. Better yet when it’s pitching you or something you do.

    The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is hiring and Matthew Doig penned what is perhaps the all-time best Want Ad ever. It reads more like a call to arms than a job spec.

    We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

    We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed  office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

    For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

    Interested? Click through to apply. I bet you this is a job Friendster Andy could handle.

  • PowerKiss, Wireless Charging from Finland

    PowerKiss, Wireless Charging from Finland

    Wireless charging technology has been around since Nikola Tesla came up with the idea. In that sense, Finland startup PowerKiss is no different. Put the receiver (the Ring) into your phone and then place it on top of the power transmitter (the Heart) which is designed to be attached or built into furniture.

    But unlike Powermat, which markets itself as an end-to-end solution that you buy for yourself and keep in your home, the folks at PowerKiss are marketing themselves to cafes, hotels, and airline lounges as a service that they can offer their customers. Power as a service, elegant battery top-up as a value add.

    The idea is that the traveler borrows a receiver from the business when they walk in (the receivers cost about 10 EUR each) and plugs it into their mobile device and places it on a table that has the transmitter built in. No wires to trip up other customers, no crouching around looking for a spare outlet.

    Clean, elegant, utterly Finnish. The PowerKiss chargers currently support Nokia phone 2mm jack, the microUSB, and the iPhone/iPad format too. Their site also says they have a laptop charger in the works.

    Launched last year, the company now has 15 employees in Helsinki situated in the Aalto design factory. Here’s a video interview with the founder, Maija Itkonen.

  • Three Days of Terror at Pinboard

    Pinboard has a three-day trial period, and I was now having nightmare visions of spending the next ten days sitting in front of the abysmally slow PayPal site, clicking the ‘refund’ button and sniffling into a hankie.

    – Anatomy of a Crushing

    In the middle of the great del.icio.us exodus of 2010, the small bookmarking site Pinboard faced a crushing influx of new users. Co-founder Maciej Ceglowski writes in detail about how he and Peter Gadjokov kept the site running and lessons learned along the way.

    "Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help."

    Yes. I’m a pinboarder too.

  • Social Decay

    Social Decay

    The money shot from yesterday’s Yahoo Research’s Like Log study is the social activity graph below showing how this activity drops off a cliff after the first 24 hours.

    Looking at over 100,000 articles across 45 big media sites over the course of three months, Yahoo researcher Yury Lifshits found that a vast majority of the Facebook Like and Twitter Retweet activity. Broadly, 80% or more of the activity takes place during the first 24 hours following the posting of a story. No surprise here, News is about New.

    The conclusion from  Yury makes is that sites that put out more than one story a day actually run the risk of splitting their traffic if they can’t double it. Each additional story/day diminishes the return and may contribute to burnout of your audience. This runs counter to the leaked AOL way memo pushing for quantity over quality.

    Gawker Revisits the Front Page

    Gawker famously underwent a redesign that reinforces the conclusions made by the Yahoo research. Look at the redesign before and after and you can plainly see. The image below is their traditional “blog” output which presents the latest story at the top with newer stories pushing the older ones down the page. The default Popular Now column on the right gives some counter-weight but otherwise it’s the standard, reverse chronological layout.

    Gawker.com Old View

    Now contrast this with their new look below. Notice how much more emphasis is placed on the images. This view is called their “Top Stories” view and they’ve taken away all timestamps on the stories as that is not the point of how things are laid out. This layout has an editorial touch to it, the Gawker editors are putting stories in front of you they want you to see.

    Gawker.com New Design

    Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, posted at length on the thinking behind the redesign.

    We need a few breakout stories each day. We will push those on the front page. And these exclusives can be augmented by dozens or hundreds of short items to provide — at low cost — comprehensiveness and fodder for the commentariat. These will typically run inside, linked by headlines from the blog column, so the volume doesn’t overwhelm our strongest stories.

    and later,

    A prominent “splash” slot on the home page — taking up the two-thirds of the page — can promote the most compelling gossip and scandal. But it also provides the opportunity to display our full editorial spectrum. The front page is our branding opportunity. It’s a rebranding opportunity, too, a way to demonstrate intelligence, taste and — yes, snicker away! — even beauty.

    Back when I was selling the idea of blogs to media companies, I remember saying to them that the front page is dead and that people were coming in the side door to their sites via shared links and pointers from the search engines. This was why it was important for them to make sure each page could stand on it’s own as its own front page for their business.

    It seems as we have come full circle with the larger blog sites now focused back on the front page, picking favorites to be their star headline stories for the day. Are we giving up on social mediation to solve the information filtering problem? Are we going back to a world where we start each day with a collection of bookmarked top sites we visit daily? Are we going back to appointment television? Do we abandon the firehose feed and stick to just the top stories?

  • Hakkapeliitta spirit

    During the Winter in Finland the ocean freezes over. Highways that normally twist around the lakes in the warmer months are re-routed to cut straight across, efficiently. GPS vendors offer Winter Packs to take advantage of these new routes, cutting Winter travel times considerably.

    But this is Finland. Not only do they keep driving at normal speeds, studded tires helping keep traction on icy roads, they also have world records to break. Which brings me to today’s headline.

    I didn’t know much about tires to begin with, nor anything about Nokian Tyres except that they are one of the original business lines for the company I work for, Nokia. The news story was interesting, bits of trivia on the challenges of designing tires for sub-zero temperatures, but what was really interesting was the section on the Nokian site which described their working spirit.

    Nokian Tyres employs over 3700 people, who have their own joys and sorrows, dreams and values. These is something that we all share: solid faith in our competence and skills, confidence in finding answers together, respect for hands-on hard work. We are there for those in need, and we never give up. This is what we call the Hakkapeliitta Spirit. it is something very tangible yet difficult to define, still natural, genuine, real. Frighteningly simple. And impossible to imitate.

    “Joys and sorrows?” This passage seemed so utterly Finnish. What American company would admit their employees are anything but joyful? My Finnish colleagues here at Nokia have tried to describe to me this acknowledgement that an honest life is a struggle.

    This is something that existed in the early days of Nokia when young Finnish engineers were sent to Singapore with a suitcase of phones and a bag of cash and asked to “set something up.”  The goal of work, for these Nokia old timers, was less about waving your flag at the top of some mountain and more about the struggle (sisu) it took to get there and how that struggle brings people together.

    Broken out into sections, the Nokian site goes on to give you a little thumbnail what it’s like to work at Nokian. Sections are titled things like, Together we can achieve more and include phrases such as, “We support each other and never leave a colleague in a pinch.” All of this comes under the header, the Hakkapeliitta spirit.

    Wikipedia gives some background on Hakkapeliitta.

    The Hakkapeliitta were well-trained Finnish light cavalrymen who excelled in sudden and savage attacks, raiding and reconnaissance. The greatest advantage of the fast and lightly-armored Hakkapeliitta cavalry was its charge. They typically had a sword, a helmet, and leather armor or a breastplate of steel. They would attack at a full gallop, fire the first pistol at twenty paces and the second at five paces, and then draw the sword. The horse itself was used like another weapon, as it was used to trample enemy infantry.

    Wikipedia

    If I’m going to be driving at top speeds on the ice, I know who I want making my tires!

  • Driving around with lasers

    I heard about this cool project from a Nokia colleague on the Maps team using some amazing hardware used by Navteq. I promised not to blog about it but I discovered today that it was shown off last year so I guess it’s OK to talk about what’s already been reported. Apparently this was all the buzz at CES 2010 but I was in Finland and Mapping isn’t really my field so I didn’t know it was public. Any excuse to blog about a car mounted with lasers!

    The image above is the output from a specially equipped car that scans the road and surrounding buildings with an array of 60 lasers on it’s roof. Think of it as an über-version of the standard camera cars you see mapping the streets today. It’s insane. Here’s how it’s described in a post by CNet.

    One big part is a LIDAR (light detection and ranging) system that uses lasers to construct 3D maps of the world out of a sea of data points. The company boasts that its True system uses 64 rotating lidar lasers, captures 1.5 million 3D data points per second from features as far as 150 meters away and works even when the data collection vehicle is traveling at highway speeds.

    There’s more that can be done with the hardware than what you see above but I better not go into that. Rest assured, it’s mind-blowing. I was joking with a colleague, combine the plane and landscape database from the Flight Simulator guys at Microsoft with the street view database from Navteq and you’ve got a hyper-realistic gaming environment.

    If you want to learn more about LIDAR and the technology about it, there’s a talk by two folks from Navteq at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA in April.

  • Conan O’Brien updates Nokia Ringtone

    Conan available online all week in Finland thanks to Team CoCo. Tonight’s segment? A rockin’ update to the Nokia ringtone!

  • Cloud Wars

    Marketing campaigns are gearing up for the major players offering cloud services as add-ons to their core products.

    Google Docs recently launched Google Cloud Connect,  a plug-in which lets  you add your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents to Google Docs and share with your colleagues. (Ars Technica reviews Cloud Connect and says it’s “not ready for primetime”)

    Microsoft will be ending the beta of it’s Live Mesh service on March 31st and has announced Windows Live Mesh 2011 with the byline, “Access the stuff on your computers from almost anywhere.” It’s part of Windows Live Essentials bundle which you download and install and includes,

    Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, Family Safety, Bing Bar, Messenger Companion, Microsoft Silverlight, and the Outlook Connector Pack (Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector and Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider for Windows Live Messenger)

    There is a custom install option in case you don’t want to take all of this in one go. You can learn more at explore.live.com

    Finally, Apple has just changed it’s tune. I took a screenshot of me.com yesterday and got the image you see above. It’s all about the services. Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Photos, Cloud Storage, and the Find my iPhone app. I just went back today and the site has been refreshed and the message is totally different.

    Today, when you visit me.com it’s all about the hardware. The cloud is front and center and behind are the familiar outlines of the Apple brand of glass tablets and phones. If you wave your mouse over the cloud, you’re greeted with a pixie-dust effect adding some magic to an otherwise plain ol’ login page.

    Could this be positioning for the launch of the rumored Media Stream service or is this just a routine update now that we’ve rolled over from February to March?

  • The Future of Glass

    For Corning, the future is made of glass.

    Corning makes Gorilla glass (check out this video) that is found in the Nokia N8, the LG Optimus 7 that I’m test driving and many other smartphones.