Ashley Lynn Sanders

I like tech, the Internet, hot chocolate, and warm blankets.

[laughingsquid]

Supercut of Movie References to Mainframe Computers

[parislemon]

I happen to work in an industry where if anyone actually said “mainframe”, I’d likely hear it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “mainframe” once in a real conversation.

[parislemon]

Kevin Holmes for The Creators Project:

At some point in your life, you’ve had a movie poster on the wall of your home. Maybe in your student days when you thought you were the first person to discover the French New Wave you had the Breathless poster on your wall or Star Wars, Top Gun, Pretty Woman? Who knows. As household decor they’re signifiers of your alleged taste, as attention-grabbing billboards they’re advertisements for escapism and, if done well, they can be icons of design. They’re also a fast ticket to nostalgic memories—just like a song can transport you instantly to another time and place, seeing a poster that maybe once sat on the cover of a VHS tape can take you back in time for a few stolen moments.

Lovely. (And right in my wheelhouse.)

[nevver]

Cat power

[theverge]

Of course Google made a talking shoe for SXSW 2013 (video)

Last year, Google created an entire village near the Convention Center. This year, just outside the convention center, Google has opened a “playground.” And what better way to experience the playground than with a shoe that taunts you with a male, British voice.

[ashleylynnsanders-blog]

Well, would you talk about innovation.

[theverge]

Google and Apple got into internet television mostly because they’d conquered their corners of the desktop and mobile markets and were trying to expand into new spheres. Intel comes to television out of necessity.

Tim Carmody on Why Intel could be the company to finally crack internet TV (via thisistheverge)

[nevver]

— Steven Wright

[parislemon]

And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.

President Obama, during his State of the Union speech last night.

No mention of PCs.

(via parislemon)

[ashleylynnsanders-blog]

Steve Jobs’s true legacy lies not with his products, but his method, the way he would forge revolutionary products from cold blocks of creativity. I know. I was one of his earliest recruits and watched him develop the method. Steve applied it one project at a time. My hope is that Apple now has teams applying it across many projects, shortening the historic six years between breakthrough products.

Why does this make everything sound so good? Now I really, really want Apple to make an iWatch. I think I'd finally be able to stop pulling my phone out of my pocket when I don't even need it.

[ashleylynnsanders-blog]

I figured this might have happened somewhere down the line.

The only problem is this: Apple has too much money, is unsure of what to do with the surplus, and is unsure of how innovation is going to proceed from this point on.

And truth be told I'm a little worried about the innovation as well. Despite claims to the contrary, I doubt Apple's share price is going to undergo a massive boost in the next couple of months, and I doubt their rev/earnings will either.

It's just...falling. I think their best bet right about now is to wait a bit before introducing any new products, so that they have time to get their creativity sorted out. After all, cuttingly innovative ideas take their time to start about.

One more thing. Where's Jonathan Ive in all of this?

[nevver]

— e.e. cummings

[ashleylynnsanders-blog]

Alicia Keys' now Global Creative Director of BlackBerry.

Kind of like will.i.am at Intel, only we've got no frikin' idea what he's doing there.

[theverge]

[theonion]

(via Faceless Reader #1786)

Uh oh.

[parislemon]

Power corrupts.

[emptyage]

But Apple might not be the right behemoth to use as a benchmark for Amazon’s recent performance. In 1994, Walmart’s net sales topped $60 billion for the first time, the neighborhood that Amazon’s playing in today. A decade later, Walmart’s sales had nearly quadrupled to $256 billion. Last year, Walmart’s sales clocked in at just south of $444 billion.

Amazon’s Growth Looks Like Wal-Mart in the 1990s — But Even Better (via parislemon)

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Commentary

[brooklynmutt-deactivated2021090]

FaceTime for Apes: Orangutans Use iPads to Video Chat With Friends In Other Zoos - Popular Science

[ashleylynnsanders-blog]

Nothing has changed about your photos’ ownership or who can see them.

Though they've made it clear again, unfortunately for Instagram they've already been hit by a class-action lawsuit.

Moral of the story: people will create a shitstorm about the smallest thing if it affects the content they create, so be careful, companies.

[shortformblog]

Facebook’s Snapchat competitor is called “Poke,” confirming what we already knew: The word “Poke” is innuendo for sexy time.

[parislemon]

Fascinating just how close to Snapchat it actually is.

There’s no question that the UI/UX is better here, but I’m not sure how much that will actually matter with the teenage Snapchat demographic. Many teens seem to use apps that look and may even perform awful, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the graph — that their friends are using it.

And you might think, “but everyone is on Facebook” — sure, but that also doesn’t matter if the use case is different. Maybe teens are using Snapchat specifically because it’s not Facebook.

Anyway, I’m not going to pretend to really understand Snapchat anyway. Compelling social, fun idea (the self-destructing message) — but high potential to be faddish. But I’m sure I’m missing something.

I’m more interested here in Facebook’s continued march to make stand-alone apps. This seems like it should be a part of the Messenger app, but it’s not. And the deep iOS integration makes this approach really shine (“Sign in as MG Siegler?”).

I also can’t help but wonder if maybe this is a message from Facebook: don’t want to come work with us? Fine, we’ll clone your service in a couple weeks and ship it to a billion users.

At the very least, Poke is a fun attempt to make use of an old part of Facebook in a way that actually makes some sense in the modern, mobile world.