"More than 50 percent of Walmart customers have smartphones, and mobile is driving more than 40 percent of Walmart.com seasonal traffic."
—@Walmart Labs’ Tim Kimmet talks what’s in store for mobile shoppers
Tag: qpost
The Joys of Marginalia
I can’t really concentrate on reading unless I have a pen in my hand. I love marginalia. I love used books and getting a glimpse of some stranger’s relationship to a book that is now in my life. I underline, star, box, vent, exclaim. I like rereading my books and seeing coffee stains or chocolaty fingerprints I left behind the last time I read them.
The 100 person limit
Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. Yet they are so prevalent that professional investors should and do seriously reconsider before investing in companies that have more than one office. Severe coordination problems may stem from something as seemingly trivial or innocuous as a company having a multi-floor office. Hiring consultants and trying to outsource key development projects are, for similar reasons, serious red flags. While there’s surely been some lessening of these coordination costs in the last 40 years—and that explains the shift to somewhat smaller companies—the tendency is still to underestimate them. Since they remain fairly high, they’re worth thinking hard about.
The beast known as Samsung
If there was a common thread among everyone The Verge spoke with for this story, it was Samsung’s brutal dominance: the Korean giant’s own-sourced display and processor combined with an enormous marketing war chest make competing in Android extraordinarily difficult.
EMC World: Pivotal boss Paul Maritz talks up plans for new firm
EMC believes that the third era will be one of mobile devices, cloud computing and big data…. "We don’t want you to build an app in Amazon’s cloud and have to pay Amazon a tax for the rest of its lifecycle."
—EMC World: Pivotal boss Paul Maritz talks up plans for new firm
SAP Takes It All to the Cloud
“We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”
Bowl Cherries, circa long ago
Was the Renaissance something that you put on and took off like a diadem, or was it something you did even while you slept?
The Money Shot
At Stanford, Systrom opted to go abroad to Florence, Italy, for the winter term of his junior year, where he focused on photography. A teacher there persuaded him to switch from his Nikon to a plastic Holga that took square photos, a choice that would be echoed later at Instagram.
The trouble with our increasing clock speed
Through it all, we don’t have to become hermits. But we must not allow ourselves to continue being junkies.
How would you define work in a networked world?
Most of these dynamics predate the internet, but digital technologies are magnifying their salience. People keep returning to the mantra of “work-life balance” as a model for thinking about their lives, even as it’s hard to distinguish between what constitutes work and what constitutes life, which is presumably non-work. But this binary makes little sense for many people. And it raises a serious question: what does labor mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality is monetized and personal and professional identities are blurred?
