Last week, we learnt that the Web Is Dead. Actually, it turns out that everything that’s alive today has already been dead once before: Facebook, Microsoft Office, Microsoft itself, E-mail, the Desktop, the iPod and more.
Then, we read an article from last December about a website that combines city crime reports with maps to find for you the safest path home; in fact, how local Governments making data available to programmers and data miners is resulting in a surprising – and useful – burst of creative applications.
Finally, we read about how, to achieve wide partner adoption, you need to treat the API of your web-based business like a product in itself, with marketing and love (the API, not the business itself). “API cannibalizing Business Development”, in other words.
In non-tech, we read how citizens of Gujarat, so used to having movies banned for them, simply assumed that the movie Firaq would not release in their state when in fact it hadn’t been banned and was playing.
Also, if both parents are psychologists, do they ‘shrink’ their kids? (“to help him get over a bout of teenage impotence… she took young Micah to a local park and had him pretend to be his own boner… “You are an erection. What words come into your head?” He visualized himself as a “victorious penis,” running around the park triumphantly.”)
Finally, Germans work shorter hours, take more vacations but are more productive and have better quality of life. What’s wrong with the American work ethic? Apparently, capitalism gone amok.(“The whole system (in America) is just grossly inefficient. All of those European countries have one system. There’s cost control. There’s no cost control here; there are four or five systems competing simultaneously.”)