Tumblr is about to grow its design staff to two people. How did they become so design-centric when so few designers work there?
79 notes | Permalink
To illustrate how much Twitter drove our global dialogue, we culled the most talked-about topics into a crossword puzzle. Click here for the answers.
The World’s Most Innovative Companies: Twitter
18 notes | Permalink
At a Congressional hearing this morning that veered into contentious arguments and cringe-worthy moments, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spilled the beans on their social media monitoring project.
DHS Chief Privacy Office Mary Ellen Callahan and Director of Operations Coordination and Planning Richard Chavez appeared to be deliberately stonewalling Congress on the depth, ubiquity, goals, and technical capabilities of the agency’s social media surveillance. At other times, they appeared to be themselves unsure about their own project’s ultimate goals and uses. But one thing is for sure: If you’re the first person to tweet about a news story, or if you’re a community activist who makes public Facebook posts—DHS will have your personal information.
Department Of Homeland Security Tells Congress Why It’s Monitoring Facebook, Twitter, Blogs
14 notes | Permalink
This video is mesmerizing.
Aurora Borealis over Northern North America and Canada
Video description:
This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 30 on board the International Space Station on January 29, 2012. This video begins as the space station is passing over the dark waters of the North Pacific Ocean northeast towards Vancouver Island. The Aurora Borealis can be seen far north, where both the under side and top of the aurora are visible. They continue to pass over Canada until the sun begins to come up in the east while over Quebec.
Video from NASA
![theatlantic: Occupy Wall Street Now Has a Super PAC Embracing Occupy Wall Street means embracing the language of the 99 percent—even when you’re filing for a super PAC. Today, an election lawyer tipped us off to a Federal Election Commission filing for a brand new super PAC: The Occupy Wall Street Political Action Committee. It’s the type of document that’s typically stuffy and technical, but less so when the treasurer of the super PAC is an Occupy organizer. Note the mailing address. It looks like a high school prank but the committee’s treasurer John Paul Thornton promises us it’s anything but. ”We’re utterly serious,” he says. A data technician in Decator, Alabama, Thornton says he’s an active member in his state’s Occupy movement, contacting state representatives and city council-members, participating in weekly general assembly meetings, and saying active in his local branch’s private and public online forums. Read more. [Image: FEC/Flickr/Vectorportal]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2F27.media.tumblr.com%2Ftumblr_lzi3doZgyO1qcokc4o1_500.png)
Occupy Wall Street Now Has a Super PAC
Embracing Occupy Wall Street means embracing the language of the 99 percent—even when you’re filing for a super PAC. Today, an election lawyer tipped us off to a Federal Election Commission filing for a brand new super PAC: The Occupy Wall Street Political Action Committee. It’s the type of document that’s typically stuffy and technical, but less so when the treasurer of the super PAC is an Occupy organizer. Note the mailing address.
It looks like a high school prank but the committee’s treasurer John Paul Thornton promises us it’s anything but. â€We’re utterly serious,†he says. A data technician in Decator, Alabama, Thornton says he’s an active member in his state’s Occupy movement, contacting state representatives and city council-members, participating in weekly general assembly meetings, and saying active in his local branch’s private and public online forums.
Read more. [Image: FEC/Flickr/Vectorportal]
Reblogged from theatlantic with 204 notes | Permalink
"In an ironic way, Long says, this frees many people to be more public about who they really are and who they want to be, because it’s less focused on the kind of personal content that sets off privacy and security alarms. “Pinterest is a place where we can demonstrate: ‘If it weren’t for all those mundane things that I do that I post on Facebook, this is what I would be doing and consuming. Here is my real self,’†he explains."
73 notes | Permalink
The power of habits in guiding our behavior—and how companies like Target have used customer data to create new buying habits:
There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.
“How Companies Learn Your Secrets.†— Charles Duhigg, New York Times
Soup is a photo series that documents the millions of tiny pieces of plastic floating in our oceans. Pollution has never looked so pretty.
Beautiful Photos Of The Ocean’s Deadly PlasticÂ
182 notes | Permalink
Reblogged from laughingsquid with 211 notes | Permalink
Jean-Paul Cauvin calls himself the binôme, or right-hand man, of the French designer Julien Fournié. Fournié and Cauvin recently teamed up with Dassault Systèmes, whose 3-D simulations last year demonstrated how you could tug an iceberg across the ocean. Why this unlikely partnership? Together, the team developed FashionLab, which enables fashion designers to envision their garments in 3-D from the earliest stages of the creative process. As New York Fashion Week drew to a close, Fast Company spoke with Cauvin about the need for designers to embrace the brave new world of technology-assisted fashion design.
Why Fashion Designers Need To Embrace Their Inner Geek
4 notes | Permalink
"There’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. There’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. Education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. The education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. In many cases that’s just not true. Here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism."
i don’t always agree with Peter but he’s spot on about education
A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine (via pegobry)
Here’s some background on Thiel’s program:Â Peter Thiel Gives Whiz Kids $100K To Quit College, Start Businesses
Reblogged from fred-wilson with 95 notes | Permalink
You are viewing a mobilized version of this site...
View original page here
