“From [Nicholas Sparks movie]” is the new “Golden Globe Nominee.”
(The Vow trailer)
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked.
“
| — | Louis CK with a sales report for his Live at the Beacon Theater show that he produced, directed and began selling for $5 off of his site this past weekend. (via futurejournalismproject) |
A Silent Alarm Clock - Sessiz Alarm Saati by Johan Brengesjo
Alarm clocks usually jolt us awake leading us to reach for the almighty snooze button. Silence is a conceptual alarm clock that allows you to program multiple alarms and wakes you without any sound. Each person wears a wireless rubber ring with an integrated vibration device that generates a tactile alarm. The snooze function is engaged by shaking your hand. However, each successive time you want to snooze, more movement is required, making sure you get to work on time.
We work for the Internet. And we’re guessing many of you do too. Whether it’s researching, selling, coding, supporting, designing — so many of our careers depend on the Internet.
One argument that’s been made to Congress is that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is needed to protect American jobs. In truth, the new liabilities this bill would impose on startups could stop American innovation in its tracks.
To make this clear to Congress, we’ve built IWorkForTheInternet.org to show the world how many of our careers depend on the Internet.
If you work for the Internet, please add yourself and spread the word.
You and Mark Aren’t Friends
Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography
Timeline is the story of your life.—Mark ZuckerbergNine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup—Georges Perec, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Ninteen Hundred and Seventy-Four”Four months after Mark Zuckerberg first introduced it to the media, Facebook’s Timeline feature was rolled out in early December in New Zealand. Why New Zealand? Perhaps because the country makes for a relatively small control group and is marginal enough not to become an international center of outrage once it becomes clear that the company’s innovations, as is so often the case, are destined to kill your privacy.
Now Facebook has made Timeline available worldwide. It has fixed one notable problem with the feature since Zuckerberg unveiled it (it no longer outs you when you unfriend someone), but the fundamental approach of Timeline remains unchanged. What it does is reorganize your information and make it vastly more searchable, albeit by the same people whom you have given permission to view the information in the first place. This is no small difference. Previously, Facebook worked as a diary that couldn’t be browsed except by turning its pages backward one by one, in an extremely laborious and time-consuming manner, meaning that for all intents and purposes your old data wouldn’t be accessible except by somebody who took an inordinate amount of interest in it. Now Timeline places the things you have shared with Facebook along a chronological axis that can be navigated quickly and intuitively, allowing users to, say, jump back to somebody’s life in 2008, or view all the information you have put up in a particular category over time.
The easiest way to make sense of the change is to understand that your Facebook profile is henceforth no longer your (public) diary: It’s your biography. To underscore this point, Facebook invites you now to fill in the time before you joined the site. Consider my timeline:
The time between “born” and late 2008, when I joined Facebook, is currently blank, but I could fill it by uploading and giving dates to photos from my childhood or creating announcements and events to mark key moments in my life — say, my high school graduation, or when I moved to New Zealand. Facebook would like me to do that very much. That’s not just because the more information they have about me, the more valuable their product becomes to their advertisers, but also — and I suspect more importantly — because the more emotionally invested I become in their product, the deeper my engagement with it is likely to grow. Google+ has millions of users, yet nobody uses it. Facebook is used daily even by some of its most ardent critics. It’s always been its paradox.
“And we morph again, from a manufacturing economy to a service economy to a software economy. Again, not everyone will be writing code. But many more people will be ordering it, writing it, managing it, and interacting with it. It makes sense to understand it and to be able to create at least a little.”—
Smart piece from Dan Frommer on why code should be the second language you teach your kids. Couldn’t agree more.
