The Onion makes me cry as I rub it’s finely sliced rings in my oh so satirical eyes, but I’ve just discovered Free-Ass. Press - because newspapers are for dog shit and bird cages, and now I have a new God.

‘INTERNETLAND — Digg.com users registered their insatiable discontent in a perfect storm of negative comments about so many articles that they unwittingly buried the entire Internet.

Within seconds of the interruption, the NASDAQ dropped 47 percent. The New York Times covered the NASDAQ story and tried to post it, but Digg users immediately buried the article for being inaccurate, boring and older than eight seconds.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

Time has an article entitled iPhone Apps: To Pay or Not to Pay, part obligatory iPhone App article to appear to be down with the tehcno hipsters and part questionning of the consumer’s willingness to pay for an application when all around us is free, free, free…

‘So why can’t all iPhone apps be free? Well, quite simply, because people are still willing to pay for them. Apple currently generates most of its revenue from up-front sales — whether it’s for MacBooks, iTunes or iPhones. And the pay approach for mobile games, ringtones and videos has long been used by other tech purveyors like Verizon and Research In Motion, and even third-party app stores like Handango. “It is a historical business model,” notes Kevin Burden of ABI Research. Buyers are willing to pony up, though, because of the cachet of the Apple brand.’
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Mobile, iPhone | No Comments »      

My 2.5 year old daugher said to me this morning, ‘when I’m a big girl I want chewing gum and pills’.

My fear for her development and the effect she may have on any pre-approved babysitter and the fact my wife is 8 months gone with Untitled 2 means our Saturday nights are spent watching a film and eating sustainably sourced pizza’s from South Africa, or something like that.

Wife, who knows her way around a Google but thinks RSS is a whispered insult has taken it upon herself to subscribe to Love Film. People at the daytime social gatherings we attend also subscribe to Love Film.

3 weeks in and dismayed with Wife’s selection, I have decided to take control and duly logged in as her. Frankly if you’ve sat through The Family Stone you will know why I did this. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Movies | No Comments »      

Asylum has a succinct summary of the pros and cons of having sexual relations with a robot such as a Japanese kissing doll or love doll. Please note this story has no relation to an earlier Pikachu genitalia piece.

Is having sex with an ultra realistic robot hooker cheating? Truly it’s a modern conundrum and Asylum has the details and a bonus question:

What if a robot hooker looks like a celebrity?

These are deep digital philosophical questions and perhaps something Qajack might be able to help with, I’ll add it to my list of beta questions.

I had intended to write a post about cloud computing but became distracted by my winking and trusty RSS reader, Newsfire, also it’s hot today and I have to go to a strangers house this evening and massage my wife in front of other men massaging their similarly heavily pregnant wives. It may also involve yoga which concerns me.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

So the thought process could have gone something like this:

Hey let’s sell t-shirts?
Yo
You hear me?
Yo
Let’s get other people to design them
Yo
Then mash it up with Pop Idol
Yo
So people vote on designs
Hmm… yo
And buy them, buy them by the million
Another Oreo?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, New Business Model | No Comments »      

(via psfk)

Much rabid excitement was generated last week with the announcement of GPS for the 3G iPhone. A host of location-based software is scheduled for mobile phones which should be genuinely useful. However, this technology raises a big question: what does broadcasting your every move mean to our eroding notion of privacy?

New York Magazine reports:

Technology was certainly not supposed to know you were at the laundromat. Or the Yankees game. Or your co-worker’s apartment when you were supposed to be working late. But now when you’re at the laundromat, everyone will know. Because you’ll be letting them Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Mobile, iPhone | No Comments »      

Thanks to Mike at Techcrunch for the ticket for this Mashup Conference. We declined the optional upgrade to demo Qajack for one of two reasons:

a. It’s not ready to demo
b. There is no demo
c. This is a third reason

Highlights were meeting Kosso from Phreadz, Mark at Netbenefit and the guys at Ugame and failing to locate Kate Burns from Daily Motion or Ben Mason from Cake who looked sharp and disappeared.

The wonders of being able to text questions to the panel on stage so that they appeared on the screen behind them led to some classics, which went somthing like this:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

Not my words, but Y Combinator, general good guy Paul Graham’s in a great article about the Attention Crash:

‘Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things. Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.’

I thought Chesterfield was a type of gun or a cigarette I once smoked to look cool in front of topless ladies on a beach in Nice when I was an exchange student.

Steve ‘beige polo shirt’ Rubel has some greats posts about this modern malaise, which seems to be crippling most Gen Xers and empowering Millenials. As I consider myself a Post Xer/Pre-Millenial/Neo Despot, I am both afflicted by the Attention Crash but also carrying antibodies necessary to manufacture a vaccine.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

… and so say all of us, but think about it for just a moment those of you who know and love Om, he’d make such a great Bond villain, ‘open source cloud computing Mr Bond?’.

Om has a great post about how Twitter might actually turn it’s hype into a scalable business, in short it’s a Scoble Tax, or so it shall be called hence forth. Essentially charge users with over 100 followers, charge people who send over 500 updates a week, charge them $10, go freemium or go for another major outage when your user base might be less forgiving.

‘This would also fit the Freemium business model that Twitter investor Fred Wilson so loves. And at the same time, it would help Twitter overcome its abhorrence for adding advertising to the messages. I think many of us have a lot to gain from the service: My alerts about my posts on the system are a form of advertising for my work, and generate enough attention that paying for the service makes lot of sense.’

Hey I’d pay $10 per month to keep Facebook clear of all the crapola that dogs the wannabee next new operating system, for more on how this won’t happen read the fragrant Kara Swisher, who I’m beginning to form some sort of ‘you write really well’ tech crush on.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »      

I love tech conferences and I love soundbites, you know the ‘take home’ phrase that makes you glad your hefty entry fee was not squandered on cliche.

I wasn’t at Mediabistro in Toronto, but I do know where Canada is. So does Chris Anderson, he of the Long Tail and Wired fame.

Chris gave a talk about pyramids and DIY Drones and then unveiled this take down of all take homes:

“Be the tallest dwarf”, he recommends to anyone who wants to create their own niche network.

It seems take home’s have become oxymoronic riddles, further riddled with Erick Schonfeld’s comment about Chris’ comment:

“It’s not bad advice. But can old media survive in a land of dwarfs? They tend to be awfully hard to control.”

So on the back of that I’m starting a social network for people who love controlling dwarves.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique | No Comments »