When great ideas go bad
Logan Molen said: Good read: "Why Plastic Logic failed:" Once-revolutionary tablet technology got lost w/o speed to market & content
On the surface, Plastic Logic had it all. When the British company first emerged 12 years ago, it looked as if it could become a technology giant: after all, it was spun out of one of the world’s great universities, staffed by amazing engineers, and owned a killer product — electronic displays that could be printed on plastic as thin as a credit card. But when the company announced on Wednesday that it was ditching its hardware business to focus on licensing its technology, it marked the end of a troubled decade in which it tried, and tried — and ultimately failed — to reach its ambitious goals. Of course, the news was presented with an attempt at positive spin: chief executive Indro Mukerjee referred to the move as a revamp, suggesting that there were actually much bigger opportunities in selling the technology on to other businesses. But he’s not fooling anybody: this strategic about-face might make sense for the business as it stands today, but it has finally killed off the company’s long-burning desire to revolutionize the consumer market.
Ride the Amgen time trial course
Logan Molen said: Ride along challenging Amgen course w/our experts in advance of cycling tour's stop in Bakersfield. #BCali #BakoTube
The Bakersfield Californian's Glenn Hammett, an experienced cyclist, provides the color commentary as Chris George pushes the pedals over the time trial course Amgen Tour cyclists will cover during their Bakersfield stop on Thursday.
The power of a simple "ask"
Logan Molen said: Great example of using low-fi tools to see what sticks: "How to use your interviewing skills to trend on Twitter"
While I love Twitter as an RSS replacement - a handy way to push headline feeds out to willing readers - the medium's also a perfect one for this type of focused, real-time conversation. You don't need a pay for some special chat tool, and the 140-character limit forces everyone to get to a point efficiently. So I figured, why wait for these moments just to happen? Why not schedule some conversations, and let my readers know when to expect them? The trouble with these types of planned events, of course, is that they too often come across as too planned. It's like going to a party where the host has overscripted every element of the event. Who wants to be told when the fun starts? This isn't some network broadcast interview, where advance work has squeezed all potential for spontaneity from the conversation. Instead of coming to each Twitter chat with a list of canned questions to ask, I kicked it off with a single question, then let the conversation evolve from there. Listen, then react. Probe. Direct. Test. Challenge. Ask.
One of the best ever
Logan Molen said: Crap: Just learned that legendary Stax bassist Duck Dunn has died, leaving rich legacy on 100s of classic soul songs
"Duck was one-fourth of the glue that we know and appreciate today as the Stax sound, that identifiable sound you hear in the background," said Deanie Parker, a former singer and executive at Stax. "He was the quarter note that helped make the whole note." Mr. Dunn also played with numerous other musical icons, including Levon Helm, Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. He received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2007. With Cropper, he also showed up when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd got the band back together in their classic love letter to Memphis soul, "The Blues Brothers."
Optimizing your reach
Logan Molen said: I may have just wasted this post: "Bit.ly data shows best times to post links to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr"
Bitly, the URL shortener of choice for most people, has analyzed its click-tracking data to find the optimal days and times for posting links to social media. The results show interesting, distinct patterns among Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. On Twitter, the best window is 1 to 3 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. Facebook was hot at 1 to 4 p.m. And Tumblr is a night owl, with posts doing best after 7 p.m. See the charts below for the full breakdown from Bitly.
Preserving the past
Logan Molen said: Cool idea to preserve online news coverage in digital age: "LA Times developer begins archiving newspaper websites"
Ben Welsh, a 29-year-old developer at the Los Angeles Times, is setting out to change that. This week, he is launching a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to fund PastPages, an online archive that hourly takes screenshots of dozens of newspaper home pages and other online news sites and makes them searchable by date and time. “It was something that I would assume exists, but didn’t really seem to,” he said. “When the Egyptian thing happened last year, I went around and collected home pages because I thought it was an important news event.”
Thinking outside the brand
Logan Molen said: This could be interesting: Zinio selling collections that bundle articles w/common themes but from different mags
Zinio wanted to find a way to capitalize on readers' interests in specific topics, rather than relying on magazines' existing "brand cachet," as Mullen calls it, to draw readers. "We started to look at whether we could help push magazines a little if we could talk about content in them that was behind the cover," Mullen said. "We wanted to help people find content by grouping it into categories that people can respond to." Zinio is now creating and promoting two Content Collections each month based on timely trends and themes, like the Academy Awards or Mother's Day. Zinio staff highlight a selection of articles from Zinio's digital magazine offerings, mixing and matching stories from a wide variety of magazines within each collection. Even little-known and foreign magazines are included in the mixes. Readers can then preview individual articles in the collection and choose to buy the single digital magazine issue where an article appeared, or even buy a digital subscription to that magazine.
Sparing no expense
Logan Molen said: Wow. This scene was fantastic, but authenticity came at a high cost: "Use of Beatles song cost 'Mad Men' $250,000"
"Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner paid $250,000 in licensing fees to use the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" in last Sunday's episode of "Mad Men," the New York Times reports. It has become notoriously difficult to license the band's music for television, but Weiner felt the high cost was worthwhile because it was thematically and chronologically consistent with the setting of the show, which takes place in the mid-'60s. "It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing," Weiner told the Times, noting that previously attempts to license Beatles music on the show had been declined by Apple Corps. "Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century."
Say it ain't so
Logan Molen said: This has "bad idea" written all over it: Investors want to resurrect legendary CBGB club in a new Manhattan location
New club investors are currently pursuing a permanent downtown Manhattan venue for the club that shuttered its doors in 2006, according to a club spokesman, who emphasized the managers of new venue will not be trying to emulate the past. "They are hoping to open a new venue focused on new music," the spokesman said. "They are not trying to recreate the past but hope to open a space in the spirit of CBGB." In addition, the first CBGB music festival will take place over four days from July 5-8 and showcase 300 indie bands at dozens of venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as film screenings and panel discussions. The club that existed on the border of Manhattan's East Village -- its full name is CBGB & OMFUG, or Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers -- became the epicenter of the punk-rock scene in the 1970s launching bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie. The closing down of the club after a rental dispute signaled the end of an era and the gentrification of The Bowery area that now houses luxury apartment buildings with modern glass facades. The club's founder, Hilly Kristal, died in 2007, and since then CBGB was dismantled and only existed to sell club merchandise.
A look underneath the covers
Logan Molen said: More interesting than I expected: "Blown Covers," a look at The New Yorker designs not quite ready for the newsstand
But for all the memorable New Yorker covers out there, an equally large number of covers didn't make it to the newsstand. They were not quite on the money — or were sometimes a little too coarsely on the money. Francoise Mouly, the magazine's art editor, is also the author of a new book, Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See. Mouly generally has a stack of rejected covers in her office, and she tells NPR's Robert Siegel that finding just the right image is the cornerstone of her work. "The one that will provoke discourse," she says.
