Greek Complexity

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

Excerpt: The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette. The most “intuitive” thing we know how to do–move our own bodies–reduced to an awkward, device-mediated pantomime: this is “getting technology out of the way”?

More here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514136/your-body-does-not-want-to-be-an-interface/

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Here is how Zopnow delivers orders in 3 hours in Bangalore

Excerpt: "As logistics continues to be a challenge to major ecommerce players, a tiny startup in Bangalore is promising intra city delivery in 3 hours. Zopnow, the grocery retailer has managed the feat. The online store, facilitates delivery of almost 95% orders within three hours!"

More here: http://www.nextbigwhat.com/zonow-express-delivery-297/

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Y U No Lean Your Bike Properly

"There are always at least two ways to accomplish any task: properly and improperly. Drinking beer from a glass, not the bottle; carrying a full umbrella instead of a miniature fold-up; stirring your gin martinis, not shaking them; wearing french cuffs with a suit, not button cuffs."

More: http://www.velominati.com/etiquette/la-vie-velominatus-lean-properly/

How emoji conquered the world

Excerpt: "In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji."

More here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/3966140/how-emoji-conquered-the-world

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Schlep Blindness

Excerpt: "There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task."

More here: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

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Why the Largest Social Network in 2015 Won’t be Facebook, and Will Be From Asia

Excerpt: "We’re all familiar with the major social networks in the U.S. (FB, Twitter, etc.) as well as which ones are up and coming (Vine, Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp). But what are not talked about a lot, are the social networks out in Asia that are growing insanely fast — like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE."

More here: http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/04/why-the-largest-social-network-in-2015-wont-be-facebook-and-will-be-from-asia-2/

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India, Long the Home of Outsourcing, Now Wants to Make Its Own Chips

Excerpt: "The government of India, home to many of the world's leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for computer hardware. But unlike software, which requires little infrastructure, building electronics is a far more demanding business."

More here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/business/global/india-known-for-outsourcing-now-wants-to-make-its-own-chips.xml

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Peter Thiel's 3 Rules for Starting a Business

Third rule: make sure ownership, possession and control are aligned. "Bonuses and cash salaries produce opportunities for misalignment. Salary caps are very important. A categorical rule of thumb that Founders Fund has developed is that no CEO should be paid more than $150,000 per year."

More: http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/peter-thiel-3-rules-for-starting-a-business.html

Moore's Law and the Origin of Life

Excerpt: "As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself."

More here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/

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Governments should clear the decks and let entrepreneurs drive their own destinies

Excerpt: "Over the last ten years I have worked with something like 35 different government agencies in the UK, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. All are trying to support early stage business through economic intervention of some kind. I am struck by the fact that arguably the most successful country at entrepreneurship in the world — the United States — offers very little public support to entrepreneurs. It just clears the way for them to get on and do the job themselves."

More here: http://sgentrepreneurs.com/2013/04/16/why-governments-should-clear-the-air-with-less-entrepreneurial-initiatives/

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