A fascinating talk on a potential future for food production.  By utilizing “bio-printing,” Andreas Forsace and team at Modern Meadow can organically produce meat and leather without actually harming an animal.  And the economic, societal, and environmental impacts are astounding (96% fewer greenhouse gases! 96% less water!?), to the point that, if adopted, much of the modern pricing and economic culture we know would be nothing but a memory.

Noel Murray, professional television and film critic, takes a deep dive into the world of Second Screen apps and comes away wanting.  His insight that 

Here then is where we come back to that old disconnect between what consumers want and what content providers want them to want.

is something I’ve been mulling over for the last few months, and something I think many marketers/techies need to recognize as things move forward.  The very nature of your being a marketer or tech person biases you towards these types of technology - but who’s to say the typical person, the one that’s not all that interested in tech or hasn’t caught up to the “professionals”, is interested at all? 

Steve Jobs is indubitably one of the most creative, charismatic, and quotable leaders of our modern time.  His combination of business-savvy, logic based in programming, and study of the finer things like philosophy, art, and design separated him from most of his business peers then and now.  And man, was he willing to say what he thought.  

Recently, the entirety of his seminal interview with Robert Cringely - truncated to fit the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds - is now available on Netflix.  And does he drop some great lines!

Paste Magazine has a nice little write-up laying out their eight favorite quotes from the documentary.  They offer a fine look at one of our great minds.

8. Success
“I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion, and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I changed my mind. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”

7. Asking “Why?”
“Throughout the years in business, I found something. I always ask why you do things. The answers you invariably get is, ’That’s just the way it’s done.’ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business, that’s what I found.”

6. Really Good People
“When you get really good people, they know they’re really good, and you don’t have to baby people’s egos so much. And what really matters is the work, and everybody knows that. So, people are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing you can do for someone who’s really good and really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough.”

5. Dynamic Range
“I observed something very early on at Apple, I didn’t know how to explain it then, but I’ve thought about it since. Most things in life, the dynamic range between ‘average’ and the ‘best’ is, at most, two-to-one. If you get into a cab in New York City with the best cab driver, as opposed to the average cab driver, you’re probably going to get to your destination with the best cab driver maybe thirty percent faster… Or a CD player, the difference between the best CD player and the average CD player is what? Twenty percent? So two-to-one is a big dynamic range in most of life. In software—and it used to be the case in hardware too—the difference between the average and the best is 50 to one. Maybe 100 to one. Very few things in life are like this, but what I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life in is like this.”

4. Computer Science
“It had nothing to do with using [programs] for practical things, it had more to do with using them as a mirror of your thought process. To actually learn how to think. I think everyone in this country should learn to program a computer. Everyone should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. I think of computer science as a liberal art.”

3. Product People
“The technology crashed and burned at Xerox. Why? I learned more about this with John Sculley later on. What happens is, John came from Pepsico. And they—at most—would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new sized bottle. So if you were a ‘product person’, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So, who influences the success at Pepsico? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for Pepsico that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen at technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

2. Content
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBMhas the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn’t have a clue about the content. In my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage! But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.”

1. Culture in the Products
“The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product. You say, why is that important? Proportionally spaced fonts come from type-setting and beautiful books, that’s where one gets the idea. If it weren’t for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. So I’m saddened—not by Microsoft’s success, I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They have no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that a lot of customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way we’re gonna ratchet up our species is to take the best and spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft’s just McDonald’s.”

What Saved the Dow? Sensible Economic Policies : The New Yorker

Man was not meant to spend all day hunched over a dimly lit screen; disturbingly high incidences of obesity, joint pain and fatigue are our bodies’ not-so-subtle ways of saying they want to get up and move around. After piloting a walking desk – a standing desk attached to a treadmill – for a month, I’m convinced they should become the default workstation. Immediately, my daily calorie burn jumped 30.7 percent, and I lost 3 pounds and a percent of body fat in a week. I also experienced less joint pain throughout the day.

-Gregory Ferenstein, Techcruch

- Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason

Here is an exclusive story from Andrew Mason’s last interview as the CEO of Groupon.

(via fastcompany)

Galaxy Chocolate resurrects Aubrey Hepburn for a recent UK television campaign, and the results are…interesting.  

The commercial itself is a throwback (as much as a commercial with a CGI person can be) and could have been a gorgeous little film.  But there’s still something not quite right about the CGI Hepburn, from the uncanniness of her eyes and skin to the potentially ethical dilemma of resurrecting a star to help sell chocolate.

In any case, I think the commercial is an interesting look at where marketers might increasingly turn as the technology moves forward.  Nostalgia is great for selling, but it gets that much better when you can actually get a nostalgic star to sell for you.

Nielsen Agrees to Expand Definition of TV Viewing (via courtenaybird)

Finally!  Some truthful metrics and the inclusion of the changing youth viewing habits

Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America.

Hollywood is abuzz with reports that the tiny islands of Antigua and Barbuda may begin operating their own national versions of the Pirate Bay, where individuals can cheaply, or even freely, download the latest films and TV shows. The clincher: this will all be legal.

fastcompany:

5 Insanely Simple Work-Life Balance Shortcuts From People Who “Have It All”

• Make it your responsibility to decide what matters, and when to get it done—no one else is going to determine or prioritize it for you.
• Don’t keep separate work and personal calendars or priority lists. (Fast Company likes Clear, if you need an app.)
• Frequently take stock of what’s working and what’s not—because it’s always changing. Put that on your calendar.
• Schedule time for small, manageable steps in the areas of their life they’ve identified as important instead of just identifying huge, lofty goals.
• Focus on and celebrate what does get done, not what falls by the wayside—small or partial steps are better than nothing.

[Image: Flickr user Joe Plocki]

Dr. David Katz is an opponent to Coca-Cola, but he also knows that if actually want to change, we have to let them

It’s about us, and the choices we make. And we apparently have some hard ones. We have water, but choose to drink Coke. We have broccoli, but choose to eat bologna. There are no bears involved. We have met the enemy- and it is us.

Yes, we are also the victim. Yes, the food industry really has manipulated us with foods engineered to specificationsborn of functional MRI scans. But come on: does anyone think Coke is good for them? Does anyone not living under a rock think you can drink a gallon of that stuff daily and not suffer any consequences? Is there really anyone left who has not heard therumors about sugar? And does anyone bemoaning the unbearable (pun intended) burden of a soda tax truly not know where to find a water fountain?

Coke is quite right about one thing: we are all in this together.

Definitely worth a read

Apple’s Profit vs. Amazon’s Promise

Just to be clear, it took 18 years for Amazon to pull in what Apple made in the last three months. The market responds by rewarding Amazon and punishing Apple.

Lots more about this nonsense @ Daring Fireball.