Bruna Benvegnù. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. You can find me on
brunabenvegnu.com, flickr, facebook and all over the internets.
brunabenvegnu.com, flickr, facebook and all over the internets.
Genevieve Bell (intel)
(Source: The Atlantic)
bruna benvegnù; tumblr.
“ It turns out women are our new lead adopters. When you look at internet usage, it turns out women in Western countries use the internet 17 percent more every month than their male counterparts. Women are more likely to be using the mobile phones they own, they spend more time talking on them, they spend more time using location-based services. But they also spend more time sending text messages. Women are the fastest growing and largest users on Skype, and that’s mostly younger women. Women are the fastest category and biggest users on every social networking site with the exception of LinkedIn. Women are the vast majority owners of all internet enabled devices—readers, healthcare devices, GPS—that whole bundle of technology is mostly owned by women. ”
“ There’s a difference between a missed opportunity and a complete fuck-up. When Yahoo failed to capitalize on Flickr’s social potential, that was a missed opportunity. But if you want to see where it completely fucked up, where it just butchered Flickr with dull knives and duller wit, turn on your phone and launch the Flickr app. Oh, what’s that, you don’t have one? Exactly. ”
““By the time we were looking at Flickr, Yahoo was getting the shit kicked out of it by Google. The race was on to find other areas of search where we could build a commanding lead,” says one high ranking Yahoo executive familiar with the deal.
Flickr offered a way to do that. Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable.
“That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn’t give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users.”
”
“ How dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious? ”
Catholic theologian Mary E. Hunt, responding to a Papal directive that, as Nicholas Kristoff puts it, “accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.” (via ericmortensen)
(Source: The New York Times)
Mike Krieger explains why Instagram uploads photos so quickly.
It’s slight of app.
Great deck on why speed is a feature. Esp. on mobile.
“We have, collectively, osmotically, decided that we hate the Olympics. It’s costing too much, it’s causing an enormous amount of trouble and inconvenience, it’s bound to put up prices, make it impossible to find a taxi, but most of all, one thing this city doesn’t need is more gawping, milling, incontinently happy tourists.
On the bus recently a middle-aged, middle-class, middleweight woman peered out of the window at the stalled traffic and furiously bellowed; “Oh my God, is there no end to these improvements?” It was the authentic voice of London, and I thought it could be the city’s motto, uttered at any point in its history, embroidered in gold braid on the uniforms of every petty official.”
Design studio marketing
MARKETING
Most clients, when they hire a design studio, take the attitude that the studio is lucky to work with them, that they selected them from a plentiful pool of design companies bidding on their business. To many clients, design studios are, in a sense, interchangeable. So if you don’t want to do something the client’s way, if you don’t want to let them integrate their staff on your team or hand over your development files mid-way through a project or make certain changes to your approach, well they can easily hire the next studio to do it exactly the way they want it done instead.
This is a deadly position for a design studio because it essentially commoditizes the studio’s value. It forces the studio into a mode where it’s essentially selling units of its time and not its unique creative expertise. The only solution is to upend this equation, and create the circumstances under which clients instead feel fortunate that a studio is willing to work with them. It’s a critical difference, because it informs every event within the relationship between the two parties.
How do you make this happen? There’s only one way, and it’s not to do good work, which unfortunately is the answer that many designers prefer. Good work is a core part of what makes a successful studio, to be sure, but even more important is marketing yourself — relentlessly. It’s my belief that at least a third of the investment and/or revenue of any new design studio should be devoted to getting great press coverage, creating attention-getting publications, running advertisements, sponsoring events — in short, creating insatiable excitement around the very idea of the studio. The only way to do great projects on the terms that you want is to make the possibility of working with you incredibly special to a prospective client.
Re-reading Khoi’s take on starting a design studio, and I’m (re-)realizing: what an old way of thinking about things.
(Source: tastefullyoffensive)
The Internet’s Population Doubled Over the Last Five Years
Royal Pingdom susses out some interesting trends about the world’s 2.27 billion Internet users:
- Africa has gone from 34 million to 140 million, a 317% increase.
- Asia has gone from 418 million to over 1 billion, a 143% increase.
- Europe has gone from 322 million to 501 million, a 56% increase.
- The Middle East has gone from 20 to 77 million, a 294% increase.
- North America has gone from 233 to 273 million, a 17% increase.
- Latin America (South & Central America) has gone from 110 to 236 million, a 114% increase.
- Oceania (including Australia) has gone from 19 to 24 million, a 27% increase.
They also note that Asia’s Internet population is almost as large* the entire Internet population was in 2007.
Amazon's knock-off problem (35 Shades of Grey, anyone?)
Perhaps it should be called Spamazon.
Until recently, if you had typed “Steve Jobs Isaac” into the online retailer’s search box, the first choice that popped up wasn’t the best selling book by Walter Isaacson, but instead one with the same name and a similarly sounding author, Isaac Worthington. The book appears to be selling, even though Amazon’s one reviewer gives the book a single star and calls it a “poorly produced pamphlet.” Presumably, Worthington’s book is based on exclusive interviews with Jeve Stobs.
There are a number of books on Amazon with similar titles to much more popular ones. Fifty Shades of Grey, the steamy romance novel that has created buzz around the world, is the No. 1 selling book on Amazon. Also available on Amazon: Thirty-Five Shades of Grey. Both books are written by authors with two first initials – E. L. James and J. D. Lyte – and both are the first in a trilogy about a young girl who falls for an older, successful man with a taste for domineering sex. The publisher of the bestseller Fifty says the book is “a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.” The author and publisher of Thirty-Five, which came out in early April, apparently believe that description fits their book as well, word-for-word. Also selling on Amazon is I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Twilight New Moon. Neither is the book you are likely looking for.
» via Fortune
“It’s perhaps more shocking that Amazon (AMZN) not only sells the books, it’s also helping their authors create them. All of the apparent copycat books that Fortune found on Amazon were made through CreateSpace, which is a division of Amazon. Authors can use CreateSpace’s system to design and self-publish their own books. The books then go on sale on Amazon and other sites. Amazon splits the proceeds with authors. It’s a different relationship than most publishers have with their authors, but there is no way for consumers to know that. On Amazon and other sites, CreateSpace is listed as the publisher of the books.”
“ I’m sick of hearing about him. I’m sick of seeing weeping victims in the media, sick of the entire thing,” said Caroline Dyrnes, a 29-year-old physiotherapist. She is not the only one. Dagbladet, one of Norway’s major newspapers, has set up a version of its website to accommodate those who share her view, with a button that will remove any mention of the trial. ”
Nice. Newspapers with a hide function.
