August 2013

Mega Cities in Hong Kong

You can build a two-story house on a plot of land or you can build a 60-story house, but if you build 60 stories you can get 20,000 apartments out of it.

I went to Hong Kong was I was about 8 years old with my parents. I remember being completely amazed by the tall buildings. However, after all of these years I can only imagine what they look like in person. Amazing feats of human engineering.

Elon Musk creates “in-thin-air” gestural design process

Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium.

Seriously? Elon is the real life Tony Stark. No Doubt.

If Steve Ballmer ran Apple Inc.

[Under Ballmer] Apple would give both China Mobile and NTT Docomo whatever concessions necessary to gain access to their customers, and Apple’s carrier base would double, perhaps even triple to Samsung’s level.

The revenue and profits would flow.

And yet, under Ballmer, everyone at Apple would be working so hard, and be making so much money, both for themselves and for Apple’s shareholders, that they would ensure that Apple never again reinvents consumer computing.

Ballmer would have ruined the “culture” that goes on at Apple Inc. on a daily basis. I am glad he never had a chance to.

One method Ballmer used to severely hurt Microsoft

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.

If your best talent are constantly worried about their rank, none of them would want to be on best teams, as their likelihood of being rated less increases. Having your team see you lose almost $1 Billion from the failure of the Surface RT makes the workplace even more demoralizing.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop to replace Ballmer?

One could argue that Elop does have the skills to turn around companies who are seemingly set on a wrong course, though he doesn’t come without controversy either. Many former Nokia supporters have consistently called for his ouster since his famous burning platform memo, which called for drastic change within the company for it to survive.

I don’t think that Elop would help Microsoft at all. They need to bring back Sinofsky.

Google is already killing the Chromecast

Well, thanks to a recent update pushed out by Google, AllCast doesn’t work anymore. To hear Dutta tell the tale on Google+, this was probably a calculated move to ensure that only Google-approved content providers could play.

Almost too good eh? I saw this coming. I love AirPlay.

300 days with the iPad mini

 The main thing you need to know about my iPad mini right now is that it’s here next to me.

Personally, I still enjoy the size of the full-sized iPad 2. But if the next generation of the iPad mini has a retina display, I just might pick one up this holiday season.