Category: News

Audi’s latest ad is titled: “Zachary Quinto vs. Leonard Nimoy: “The Challenge”. This features the original Star Trek’s Spock (Nimoy) and the new Star Trek’s Spock (Quinto).

As an added bonus, it also features Nemoy doing his Bilbo Baggins song.

The man who helped rescue three women being held captive in Ohio yesterday is hilarious, and I suspect it’s a matter of time before a new crop of memes begin popping up in his honor.

Charles Ramsey, who lived next door to the home, heard the screams of a frantic young woman and helped her open the door after she told him she’d been kidnapped and couldn’t get out. She turned out to be Amanda Berry, who has been held captive in that house with two other missing women for ten years. Berry also had a child with her.

“I’m eating my McDonald’s; I come outside; I see this girl going nuts,” he said. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

Ramsey, like everyone else in Cleveland, was shocked and elated to discover that the women were alive, unharmed, and finally free after a decade of being held against their will. His joy manifested itself as an awesome sense of humor.

“I barbecued with this dude! We ate ribs and whatnot, and listened to salsa music!” Ramsey said of Ariel Castro, the man accused of kidnapping the women.

An investigation is obviously pending, but the women and Berry’s daughter have been released from an area hospital, where they underwent evaluation to determine what condition they were in. All are said to be healthy and elated to be reunited with friends and family; the three of them all went missing at different times and have been presumed dead for years.

Ramsey’s 911 call is also pretty funny, now that we know the context and that the women are all ok. NSFW unless you work with people who say f**k a lot.

Although we likely won’t see driverless cars on the roads for at least another decade or two, there’s a chance that the first driverless cars we do see will be electric. Bloomberg reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk “has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system.” While Musk has been impressed with what Google has done with driverless cars so far, he did say that the company’s current approach of using sensors is “too expensive” and that “it’s better to have an optical system, basically cameras with software that is able to figure out what’s going on just by looking at things.” Musk said that Tesla would work on its own autopilot system for its cars, although he provided no information about when Tesla’s own system would be ready for road tests.

There are many ways to share files between the computers on your network — simple folder sharing, or cloud-based file syncing are just two ideas that come to mind. But when Apple introduced AirDrop in OS X Lion, it added another way – an elegant, simple means of simply dragging and dropping files to quickly distribute them to other Macs on your network.

The only problem with AirDrop is that you require other Macs, running OS X Lion or later no less, for it to work. Thankfully, third parties have finally come around to developing cross-platform alternatives to AirDrop, and another promising example has just poked its head above the parapet in the form of Filedrop.

It’s still early days for Filedrop, as its version number (0.3.214) attests. At the present time there are just two clients available, for Windows and Mac, with the promise of Android and iOS apps to follow. But even at this early stage in its development, Filedrop is already delivering on its promise.

Like AirDrop, Filedrop works across your local network only. Once installed, fire it up on each of your computers and it’ll immediately display a floating box with all other available desktops (and computer names) shown. Transferring a file from one to the other is as simple as dragging it on to the desktop you wish the file to be copied to.

When someone attempts to send a file via Filedrop, a pop-up dialog will alert the target user, giving them the opportunity to decline or accept the file transfer. By default, all files are copied into the target computer’s Downloads directory, but this can be changed for the specified file transfer by clicking the Downloads link that appears in the confirmation pop-up.

There’s a Downloads button at the bottom of the main window too — this works in a similar way to the downloads button in Firefox, allowing you to open files or their parent folder directly from Filedrop. You can also set a different default folder for all file transfers from here, too, say your desktop or a specific Filedrop folder.

And that’s basically it: Filedrop works with multiple PCs and Macs to give you a simple, fuss-free way of quickly sharing files across your local network. There are some glitches of course, despite opening with modest memory requirements for example (under 30MB in Windows), Filedrop slowly increases its demands as time goes on without appearing to release memory back, certainly not in the short term, so that’s something that will hopefully be rectified in a future release.

But there’s more to come too with the iOS and Android apps currently in development. These will allow you to transfer files to and from your mobile, enabling it to be used as a “wi-fi USB stick”, plus there will be options for streaming photos and music from your mobile to other Filedrop-enabled devices too. The apps should hopefully be appearing sometime this month.

In the meantime, Filedrop 0.3.214 is available as a freeware download for PCs running Windows XP or later, and Macs running OS X 10.6.8 or later.

Photo Credit: mojito.mak[dog]gmail[dot]com/Shutterstock

When the reporting team at Planet Money — a joint venture between PRI’s This American Life and National Public Radio — decided to do a series tracing the creation of a T-shirt all the way from the cotton fields to the department store, producer Alex Blumberg says that Kickstarter seemed like a natural way to engage listeners in the project. In a sense, he told me in an interview, the web-based crowdfunding platform is really just a more modern way of doing what public radio has always done, which is to allow fans to support journalism they care about.

If launching the project via Kickstarter was a gamble — and one that apparently took a certain amount of convincing before Planet Money’s corporate masters would sign off on it, according to Blumberg — it certainly seems to have paid off: the campaign hit its goal in a single day, and has since raised about $300,000 or six times as much as it was originally looking for (the audio of my interview with Blumberg is on SoundCloud and also embedded below).

Crowdfunding and public radio both go direct

Blumberg, who works for This American Life and created the Planet Money show in 2008 along with NPR economics reporter Adam Davidson, said that when the show decided to set up the T-shirt project — an idea that stemmed from a book by Pietra Rivoli called “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” — he thought Kickstarter was the most obvious way of allowing listeners to not only follow the experiment, but to become participants in it as well.

“We wanted to try and figure out a way to do the project, to do the journalism, but also to sell the T-shirts to people who wanted them, as a way of involving them in the project — so you can either guess about how many you need and borrow the money or sort of get it pre-funded, or you could just go on Kickstarter and find out exactly.”

One of the reasons why it seemed like such a good fit, Blumberg said, is that public radio and the NPR model already involve reaching out to listeners and supporters directly, so it seemed natural to blend the two (a public radio podcast called 99% Invisible took a similar route last year and raised more than $180,000).

“The other part about Kickstarter is that it’s just a great way of sort of involving folks in the project as you go along, and… it felt like with our audience there’d be some interesting overlap there between Kickstarter and public radio — it felt like they would sort of feed on each other. The public radio audience and the Kickstarter model are so close anyway, so why not combine them — it’s sort of surprising that it hasn’t happened before.”

The internet turns everything into public radio

In fact, Blumberg said, it feels like “the internet is driving the entire world towards a public-radio model” in a way, as more media companies — and even individuals such as Daily Dish blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is relying on direct reader funding for support — try to find a way of surviving when advertising revenue is declining and other business models are not obvious.

“You can get lots of stuff for free now, and so the trick is to get people to pay for stuff they can get for free. It’s a trick that public radio has gotten pretty good at, but now other people are sort of eclipsing us — Kickstarter is very ingenious in the way you can involve people in the story, you can build all sorts of different levels, and it’s very very easy. So part of it is about learning what we can from our Kickstarter experience and then feeding that back into the public-radio world.”

Blumberg said that he was pleasantly surprised at the amount of money the project has been able to raise, and that he originally expected it would take most of the campaign’s time limit to even get to the $50,000 goal. The majority of the money raised will go towards travel and production costs, as well as the cost of buying and making the shirts, he said — and anything left over will be used to create a development fund for NPR member stations and put on a series of workshops about the kind of reporting Planet Money does.

A chance for a public-funding revolution

And will evangelizing Kickstarter be part of that program? Blumberg said that the project seems to be doing its own evangelizing, just because of the overwhelming response, which he says executives at NPR and throughout the public-media world are watching closely and are “very excited about.” The American Life producer said he also hopes the project will spark more discussion about the ways in which public radio can use crowdfunding platforms.

“Public radio has been a little insulated from some of the ways the internet has changed other media organizations, but the internet is upending radio as well, in a way that I think can be very advantageous, it just depends on how you do it. I think there’s always been a realization within the public radio system that there’s revolutionary potential, and I think this will add to that conversation and hopefully move it forward.”

Blumberg said that he believes public radio can learn a lot from seeing how crowdfunding works in practice with a focused project like the T-shirt campaign, and that the connection between fans and creators that Kickstarter and other platforms help to create is very much like what public media has been doing for some time without the internet. “I feel like we’ve been out ahead of this whole thing for a long time,” he says, “and we didn’t even know it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz and Shutterstock / Wilson Rosa and Shutterstock / higyu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
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For years, Adobe has sold its professional design software under the Creative Suite banner. There were hints that was going to change when Adobe stopped selling CS6 at retail, but the company has moved to kill Creative Suite faster than anybody expected.

Adobe announced at its annual MAX conference that it will no longer be releasing new versions of its software under the Creative Suite banner. Instead, all future updates and features will be delivered via Creative Cloud. In other words, those who buy Creative Suite 6 will only get just that while all new features to Photoshop and the like will only be available via Creative Cloud.

The move to Creative Cloud, which is a subscription service, has upset some members of the Adobe user community. The complaints were excellently captured in a new video released by our favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA:

Adobe says that it’s moving to a subscription-only model because it will allow them to deliver updates to users at a faster rate:

“We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “By focusing our energy — and our talented engineers — on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace.”

To convince current CS6 users to move to Creative Cloud, Adobe is offering discounts on the subscription service for a limited time. You can check out all the different Creative Cloud plans here.

Menlo Ventures has added Avery More as a venture partner and Alex Gorelik as an EIR, according to a blog post. More will source enterprise deals at the firm, and Gorelik will incubate a company and offer advice on the cloud and big data investments.

More founded and was CEO of CompuCom and is chairman of Aeroscout, a Menlo company bought by Stanley Healthcare Solutions last year. He also chairs Menlo company Vidyo as well as QualiSystems and BuzzStream.

Gorelik founded Exeros, acquired by IBM, and Acta Technology, acquired by Business Objects. He has held executive positions at Informatica and was a distinguished engineer for information integration at IBM.

See the Menlo blog post here.

The post Menlo Adds More As Venture Partner, Gorelik As EIR appeared first on peHUB.

A woman who won $14 million in the California Lottery this week claims that she hadn’t meant to purchase the ticket.

Thuan Le, a single mother of four, told lottery officials last week that she normally purchases $4 of Powerball tickets and $1 of SuperLotto Plus tickets on a regular basis. On May 1, however, Le accidentally put $6 into the self-serve lottery machine at her local CVS store. With the extra dollar she purchased an extra SuperLotto Plus ticket, which ended up being worth $14 million.

Le reportedly ran screaming from the store when she verified her ticket numbers had won. She immediately called her sons and traveled to the California Lotto’s local district office to claim her $14 million prize. Le has stated that she plans to use the money to buy a house, travel, and visit her parents, who live in Vietnam.

“We thought she was joking, but we thought would she really joke like this?” said one of Le’s sons. “My older brother said, ‘yes, she would’.”

In a recent financial filing, Yahoo cited that Microsoft extended its revenue guarantee in the two companies’ ongoing “search alliance”. This is a guarantee that Microsoft has so far failed to live up to, but continues to extend, presumably, to keep Yahoo from walking away from the deal, and potentially into the arms of a certain competitor.

Reuters reports:

The U.S. revenue-per-search guarantee, which had expired on March 31, will be extended for one year, and took effect on April 1, Yahoo said in its 10Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.

…

Extension of the search revenue guarantee marks Yahoo’s first agreement with Microsoft since Marissa Mayer became Chief Executive of Yahoo in July. Mayer, who is seeking to reverse a multi-year decline in Yahoo’s revenue and in its online traffic, has been critical of the Microsoft partnership struck by former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz.

Indeed she has. At the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in February, she expressed her disappointment, saying that they need to see monetization working better, “because we know that it can and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

There have been rumors in the past that Yahoo would kill its deal with Microsoft prematurely, but Microsoft has indicated that it would not make it easy for Yahoo to pull out. Of course, there has also been plenty of speculation that Yahoo could try a deal with Google again. Yahoo initially tried to partner with Google, but potential regulatory hurdles led to that falling through and Yahoo settling for Microsoft.

But that was a long time ago, and under different leadership.

The Microsoft Yahoo Search Alliance could still fall apart.

“On March 31, because of the failure with RPS, Yahoo potentially could have terminated its deal with Microsoft on February 23, 2015,” explains Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. “That’s the five year mark into the ten year agreement, where there’s an out for both sides.”

“That’s still a date to watch, but April 1, 2014 is more important,” he adds. “If Microsoft fails to deliver for a third time, maybe by then, Yahoo will want to move on. Assuming, of course, that US regulatory bodies even allow it to partner with Google.”

Google has cleared some significant regulatory hurdles since it tried to partner with Yahoo before. It would be interesting to see how such a scenario would develop in the future.

In semi-related news, Chitika announced a multi-year extension of its advertising agreement with Yahoo.

“Yahoo! has a proven track record of capitalizing on strong, successful partnerships, helping the organization meet and exceed its business goals,” said Venkat Kolluri, Chitika’s CEO. “Extending and expanding our relationship with Yahoo! reaffirms our commitment to deliver innovative online and mobile ad technology solutions, which will help contribute to the growth of Yahoo!’s search marketplace.”

BitTorrent just added another incentive for creators to give their content away to file sharers: On Tuesday, the company will introduce Bundles, a new product that turns torrents into promotional campaigns, and possibly even online stores.

The first bundle released by BitTorrent comes courtesy of Ultra Music. Fans of dance music producer Kaskade will get a free MP3 of one of his tracks, as well as a trailer for the release of Kaskade’s upcoming tour DVD as soon as they download the torrent. An additional 10 minute concert video and an exclusive booklet can be unlocked by signing up for a Kaskade newsletter.

However, this is only one iteration of the bundle. Artists can also elect to use torrent bundles to directly sell additional content to their fans. From BitTorrent’s blog post:

“We don’t need another digital radio station. We don’t need another walled garden or standalone content store. We need ways to place value exchanges within the content itself – allowing these exchanges to travel freely, without barriers or limitations; allowing these exchanges to multiply as content is shared. Our goal is to move the interaction to where it matters; making it a property of the file, versus the distribution framework; giving artists real data about, and real access to, their fans.”

This isn’t the first time BitTorrent is trying to sell content to file sharers. The company launched a digital download store dubbed the BitTorrent Entertainment Network in 2007. The store featured DRM-protected movies from major Hollywood studios — and was largely ignored by the file sharing masses. BitTorrent eventually shut down the BitTorrent Entertainment Network at the end of 2008.

The company went through a bit or a rough patch in the following years, but has since recovered, and put a bigger emphasis on working with independent artists in recent months. Asked whether the company wants to take a cut when people start to sell their music or movies through bundles, a spokesperson told me that there are “no immediate plans for this.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Are Torrents a Tool for Predicting the Future?
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When Apple unveiled the iPad in 2010, smartphone vendors were caught off guard and they rushed to launch similar tablets to take advantage of the new market that had been created. Their early efforts were absolutely awful, however. Android slates have gotten much, much better since those early days and now Android vendors’ combined tablet market share looks ready to pass Apple’s share. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company isn’t done setting trends though, and its iPad mini is the latest device Android vendors will look to base their new models on moving forward.

Continue reading…

 

Sony’s new mid-range offering the CX190 (not to be confused with the recently leaked Sony C3) has found its way online in the form of a Picasa sample shown above. Currently codenamed the Xperia C, the modest device is rumored to pack a dual-core Qualcomm processor (either the MSM8627 or the MSM8230), 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of storage and a microSD card. It is also expected to have a 4″ display with a 480 x 854 resolution.

 

Come comment on this article: Sony’s new mid-range CX190 leaked specs and camera sample surface

At the EMC World event this week in Las Vegas Brocade announced that its SAN solutions are integrated with EMC’s new ViPR platform, and Dimension Data adds tiered EMC storage to its Public Compute-as-a-Service offering.

Brocade integrated in EMC ViPR

Brocade (BRCD) announced its Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) solutions are integrated with the new EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform. This solution will allow more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to immediately realize the virtualization benefits of the new EMC ViPR software-defined storage platform within highly virtualized cloud environments.

With Brocade technology integration, EMC Connectrix SAN customers can now utilize the EMC ViPR platform to enable existing SAN infrastructure to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. This complete spectrum of capabilities can be run against enterprise or commodity storage.

“As a crucial component of today’s storage infrastructure we are very excited with the work we’ve done with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with ViPR,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, vice president of marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation. “The ability to automate and define policy across the entire storage environment extends our common vision to deliver proven, simple-to-use solutions for storage networks and private clouds with unparalleled ability to transform enterprise data centers. We look forward to continuing our long term strategic relationship to further improve the utilization of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”

Dimension Data Tiered storage

Dimension Data announced the availability of tiered storage options as part of its enterprise-class Public Compute-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering. Public cloud clients can now access three tiers of block-based storage at $0.07 to $0.44 per GB per month, enabling businesses to increase efficiencies in the cloud and significantly reduce total storage cost by matching the level of protection, performance and accessibility of data to the storage media that best suits an application.

The offering uses the EMC VNX storage platform, and is provisioned through a web-based user interface or API, enabling organizations to change the type of storage required for cloud servers on the fly. The new service leverages solid state drives (SSD) to accelerate performance for both the High-Performance and Standard options.

“Dimension Data is committed to providing a high-performance cloud that is easy to use and customize,” said Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions Business Unit CEO at Dimension Data. ”Providing additional options around storage media is an important innovation that enables our clients to leverage the cloud for a variety of applications including high-performance databases, as well as less demanding applications such as archiving, backup and long-term data retention.”

TenFarms, a Los Angeles, Calif.-based startup focused on advertising technologies for smartphones and tablets, has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed sources, in what the company is characterizing simply as “angel funding.” The money, says TenFarms, will be used for further development of its applications.

PRESS RELEASE:

TenFarms today announced a $2.7M angel funding round that will be used to fuel the continued development of its Photopoll app for iOS devices and bring Adtile, a new advertising solution for smartphones and tablets, to market. Unlike existing banner advertisements on mobile devices, Adtile is built on patent-pending technology and will deliver geo-targeted ads through native and web applications, fully embedded for a more user-friendly and engaging design.

“Banner ads might still function well in print and on desktop computers, but it’s clear that they just don’t work on mobile devices,” said Nils Forsblom, Founder & CEO of TenFarms. “Not only are banner ads intrusive to mobile users, but the limited space and inadvertent taps from the ‘fat finger’ effect doesn’t offer advertisers a reliable platform for quality engagement. Adtile will change all of this with a simple and automated method for integrating ads into mobile apps and websites. We believe the best way to revolutionize advertising is to create an entirely new design that embraces the needs of mobile users and publishers, making it part of the user experience.”

The Adtile mobile advertising solution consists of a customizable SDK that enables easy integration into mobile applications and websites, complete with a dashboard to deploy and analyze campaigns. Adtile’s unique algorithm has the ability to determine a user’s location and deliver smart ads based on that data. Additionally, ads are served based on specific keywords, categories and more, ensuring that relevant ads reach consumers, which offers developers and brands options for a fully automated but very targeted and tailored campaign. Adtile will also allow flexibility in the delivery approach based on the type of mobile application, whether it is music, games, lifestyle, shopping, or any other category.

TenFarms most recently introduced Photopoll, the world’s first mobile app for iOS devices that allows users to group and share multiple photos into a feed for instant polling. Compared to other apps that only allow feedback on one or two photos, Photopoll empowers users to share their stories through up to five photos, or poll the open community to access public opinion on any given topic. Part of the new funding will go towards further development of the application and experience, and growing its user base.

For more information about Adtile and to learn more, visit www.adtile.me.

For more information about Photopoll, visit www.photopoll.com.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/photopoll
Twitter: www.twitter.com/photopoll
App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photopoll/id456863839?ls=1&mt=8
About TenFarms

TenFarms is a startup company based in Los Angeles, California. The company’s purpose and mission is to design and build mobile products with substance, style and simplicity. With the introduction of Photopoll, TenFarms is the first company ever to introduce a multi-photo sharing solution that integrates polling. Its latest offering includes Adtile, a mobile advertising solution set to launch in 2013. TenFarms also holds six patents pending on mobile solutions and technology that drives its products and services. For more information, please visit www.tenfarms.com.

The post TenFarms Raises $2.7M in Angel Funding appeared first on peHUB.

Google is running a doodle celebrating the birthday of graphic designer and typographer Saul Bass in parts of the world where the date has changed to May 8th.

Also a filmmaker, Bass is best known for his work on movie title sequences, posters and corporate logos. How many films can you pick out from Google’s animation?

Saul Bass did title sequences for the following films:

Carmen Jones (1954)
The Big Knife (1955)
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
The Racers (1955)
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
The Shrike (1955)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
Storm Center (1956)
Attack (1956)
Edge of the City (1957)
Saint Joan (1957)
The Pride and the Passion (1957)
The Young Stranger (1957)
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
Cowboy (1958)
Vertigo (1958)
The Big Country (1958)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
Psycho (1960)
Spartacus (1960)
The Facts of Life (1960)
Exodus (1960)
Ocean’s 11 (1960)
West Side Story (1961)
Something Wild (1961)
Advise and Consent (1962)
Walk on the Wild Side (1962)
The Victors (1963)
Nine Hours to Rama (1963)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1965)
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Grand Prix (1966)
Not with My Wife, You Don’t! (1966)
Seconds (1966)
Such Good Friends (1971)
That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976)
Broadcast News (1987)
Big (1988)
The War of the Roses (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Cape Fear (1991)
Doc Hollywood (1991)
Mr. Saturday Night (1992)
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Higher Learning (1995)
Casino (1995)

He did movie posters for:

Carmen Jones (1954)
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
Edge of the City (1956)
Storm Center (1956)
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
Saint Joan (1957)
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
The Big Country (1958) (style b poster)
Vertigo (1958)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Exodus (1960)
The Magnificent Seven (1960) (design not used)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Advise & Consent (1962)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1964)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
The Two of Us (1967)
Why Man Creates (1968)
Very Happy Alexander (1969)
Exodus (1960)
The Magnificent Seven (1960) (design not used)
One, Two, Three (1961)
Advise & Consent (1962)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Cardinal (1963)
In Harm’s Way (1964)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
The Two of Us (1967)
Why Man Creates (1968)
Very Happy Alexander (1969)
Such Good Friends (1971)
Rosebud (1975)
Brothers (1977)
Notes on the Popular Arts (1977)
Bass on Titles (1978)
The Human Factor (1979)
The Shining (1980)
The Solar Film (1980)
Return from the River Kwai (1989)
Schindler’s List (1993)

Bass also did logos and designs for:

Alcoa (1963)
AT&T Corporation (1969 and 1983)
Avery International (1975)
Boys & Girls Clubs of America (1980)
Celanese (1965)
Continental Airlines (1968)[10]
Dixie (1969)
Frontier Airlines (1978)
Fuller Paints (1962)
Geffen Records (1980)
General Foods (1984)
Girl Scouts of the USA (1978)
Japan Energy Corporation (1993)
J. Paul Getty Trust (1993)
Kibun Foods (1984)
Kose Cosmetics (1991)
Lawry’s Foods (1959)
Minami Sports (1991)
Minolta (1978)
NCR Corporation (1996)
Quaker Oats (1969)
Rockwell International (1968)
Security Pacific Bank (1966)
United Airlines (1974)
United Way (1972)
US Postage (1983)[11]
Warner Communications (1974)
Wienerschnitzel (1978)
Wesson Oil (1964)
YWCA (1988)

Hat tip to Patrick from DoodleShow, Lists from Wikipedia

It’s been said that the greatest things in life come in the smallest packages, and the Fiat 500 is the perfect example. It’s got zero cargo space, is slower than the fastest snail, and is about as reliable as well – a Fiat. However what this little bugger loses in performance, it more than makes up for in personality. You see this is a car that makes you smile. It makes the sun come out on a cloudy day while at the same time, bringing joy to all those who see it. The Fiat 500 is not just a car per say, but moreover, it’s a little bit of joy that rolls slowly on four wheels.

Source: Petrolicious.com

Building out the infrastructure for Snapchat was an act of faith, according to co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy. The company, which apparently was so easy to build that a Facebook engineer took two weeks to mock up a similar service, operates on Google’s Compute Engine. That’s a notable choice in a field of startups that have chosen the more popular Amazon’s cloud services.

But Murphy told me in a phone call that he likes Compute Engine and he believes Google is scaling out and willing to invest in this platform. He prefers some of the features for Snapchat’s purposes and believes when it comes to scale, Google could offer more than AWS for his application. The details behind his consideration will be the focus of Murphy’s chat onstage at the Structure conference occurring June 19 and 20 in San Francisco.

So if you caught Murphy’s appearance on The Colbert Report and want to learn more about the infrastructure and the economics of scaling out an app with 150 million photos uploaded daily, then register for Structure.

Murphy’s is one of several developer-focused talks we’ll have this year as we try to draw more attention to the fact that building out applications on massive cloud infrastructures requires a change in thinking. It’s not just about learning how to build an application in the cloud, but also mandates a strategic approach regarding how to architect your applications in a way that takes into consideration to the economics of hosting them on someone else’s infrastructure.

We’ll have conversations with Cory von Wallenstein, the CTO of Dyn, focusing on how to build a process for evaluating and changing your architecture without disrupting your existing users. There will be another with Gleb Budman, the co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, and Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix, about building hugely scalable infrastructures in the face of serious logistical obstacles.

Six-and-a-half years ago when we started thinking about our first Structure event, it was a hard sell. People didn’t understand what cloud computing was, nor why a small technology blog would want to build a conference around web infrastructure. Our advertising team got questions like, “You want to hold a show on servers? Why?”

But we knew that just as the printing press changed the distribution of knowledge, the emergence of cloud computing, web-based services and even mobility would change how we disseminate information all over again. And in the process it would create new economic opportunities and change the way the world works.

However, that first Structure conference was about building that vision, not about the servers. If we were around back in the 1400s, we’d hold a gathering at a local tavern not about paper, but about the coming revolutions promised by that technology and and maybe even looking forward to the creation of the novel and widespread literacy.

So make sure you are in the audience at this event so you can predict how the future of the web is changing; not just how infrastructure has evolved, but how we’ll build businesses on top of it. Register here and we’ll see you in June.

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Last week we showed you pictures of Huawei’s new ultra-thin phone, the P6-UO6. Today we bring you more photos of the Chinese manufacturer’s newest offering, this time in a sleek black variation. While Huawei hasn’t made any official announcements regarding the P6-UO6, the phone will reportedly come in black, pink and white variations and will be available in Asian markets, with no word on whether or not we’ll see it stateside.

Thanks to the photos, we now know that the device has what appears to be a microSIM and microSD slots on the right side of the device, with the 3.5mm audio jack awkwardly placed on the left. As reported before, the device is powered by a quad-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front-facing camera. Hit the break for more photos.

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Anyone who has served on a board of directors can appreciate that each board has its own characteristic rhythm, social rules and level of effectiveness. I’ve been advising boards and management teams for 25 years as a consultant and C-Suite executive, and have served on several corporate boards, and can attest that it’s long been a puzzle to me what exactly makes a board effective.

To try to answer the question, I went back to school. As part of my PhD research, I interviewed directors at 22 small- to medium-sized publicly traded companies about board practices and dynamics. Half the companies had received above-average rankings for governance quality from Governance Metrics International; half had received below-average rankings.

What I found was that there is something powerful about the way directors speak to one another, especially when they disagree. My interviews revealed two kinds of boardroom conflict — cognitive and affective — with very different implications for board performance.

• Cognitive conflict is task-oriented, with a focus on how to get things done to achieve optimal results. Cognitive conflict can sound like: “I don’t think your idea will work, maybe we need to look at it a different way…have you thought of this?” This kind of conflict is essential in creating value as it stimulates conversation around topics, addresses ideas or points of view with an opening for directors to offer something creative, innovative and positive.
• Affective conflict, conversely, is emotionally oriented and focused on personal differences or shortcomings between people. Affective conflict can sound like: “I don’t think you have good ideas and you don’t understand the issue.” This kind of conflict destroys any chance of creating value as it is a personal attack on the capabilities and perspective of the individual director, inhibiting individuals from participating in dialogue.

Boards that recognized affective conflict and addressed it quickly were associated with high governance quality, whereas boards that were less willing to address affective conflict or ignoring it altogether were associated with low governance quality. High governance ratings were also more common for boards that had engaged directors generating high levels of cognitive conflict.

Possibly associated with this are attrition rates — higher on boards that didn’t address affective conflict, at 24% attrition, compared with 13% attrition on boards that actively address affective conflict. Given that boards have infrequent face-to-face meetings, stability is critical for effective board dynamics.

Two distinct recruiting sources

There also appeared to be a relationship between board governance quality and prior personal relationships of directors. High-governance boards cast a wide net when recruiting directors, and often recruit people with whom the other directors did not have a prior relationship. The study showed close to 70% of high-governance-board directors were “strangers” when they joined their board, while only 25% of directors recruited to low-governance boards were unknown quantities.

These different recruiting approaches appeared to affect boardroom dynamics. When directors had a prior relationship with a newly-recruited director, they were driven by their desire to maintain a congenial relationship — to not “rock the boat” of their extra-board relationship by addressing affective conflict in the boardroom. Conversely, in high-governance-rated boards, where directors only have the boardroom as the context of their relationship, it became even more important to address affective conflict to make sure that the work environment be productive. Directors were not willing to sweep issues under the carpet for the sake of keeping peace when the health of the company was at stake, and tackled affective conflict head-on.

What does this teach us about creating good boards? Recruit the best people you can by casting a wide net beyond your personal network. Screen directors not just for professional capital, but also for behavioral characteristics and “fit” to your boardroom culture. Address affective conflict as soon as it arises — easier done if you don’t fear the consequence of damaging a prior relationship. Don’t be afraid of cognitive conflict — embrace it as a source of innovation and creativity in problem solving.