infinite to venture

New forms of media take a while to go mainstream; but, when they do, it is often because they are inspired by what came before. Referencing a more familiar, mainstream medium has often proven to be a successful strategy, as these examples show:

• Early radio broadcasts were self-promotions for department stores, who also happened to own the radio stations in an era before radio advertising or listener sponsorship.
• Early TV broadcasts were basically “radio with pictures.” (Check out Queen Elizabeth’s 1957 Christmas broadcast, her first ever.)
• Early music videos almost always featured the band performing, and even more often an extended closeup of the lead singer. (Watch “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.)
• The first GUI-based operating systems featured desktops, folders, and windows — all metaphors drawn from the physical world.
• Some of the first websites were little more than online bulletin boards populated by hyperlinks to other parts of the web. Tim Berners-Lee himself called his site an Online Virtual Library in 1991.
• Who can forget that endearing “You’ve Got Mail!” sound that played when you logged into AOL from your 28.8k dialup modem? Your mailbox was, of course, a metaphorical one that helped bring email to the mainstream.
• Facebook’s initial UI was based on the traditional facebook given to Harvard College students at the beginning of their first year.

John Allsopp made this point elegantly in his canonical blog post entitled A Dao of Web Design, written when Web 1.0 was at its peak of the hype cycle in 2000. He drew a connection between the oldest and newest forms of media at the time — the written word and the browser-interfaced webpage, respectively.

Allsopp did not make this point nostalgically, however. He was instead worried that the web, still in its infancy, was headed in a dangerous direction, mainly due to its dependency (perhaps over-dependency) on its printed parent:

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang. “Killer Web Sites” are usually those which tame the wildness of the web, constraining pages as if they were made of paper – Desktop Publishing for the Web. This conservatism is natural, “closely held beliefs are not easily released”, but it is time to move on, to embrace the web as its own medium. It’s time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature [emphasis added].

Almost 12 years later, we are experiencing a new revolution in the webpage, but this time the stakes are higher. Why? Because of an onslaught of mobile devices. Continue reading →

When Steve Jobs died, I decided not to write anything. There wasn’t much I could say about Steve, having never met the man and knowing little about him as a person. Yet, like most of us who have dedicated our lives to advancing technology, I felt a strange affinity for him. I read the outpouring of anecdotes, watched countless product intro’s and interviews on YouTube, and even read his official biography by Walter Isaacson (which was excellent, by the way).

Even after absorbing all I could, I found myself at a loss for words. The problem with saying something profound about Steve Jobs is that, no matter what you might say, Steve has probably said it already himself…and said it more eloquently.

Continue reading →

I tend to think of the pursuit of technology as a humanitarian endeavor. Inventions like the printing press, steam engine, transistor, polymerase chain reaction machine, and the internet have all created immense social value, in addition to private wealth. I go into work every day hoping that I can play a small part in the invention and subsequent commercialization of the next big thing.

You see, I am a bit of a Singularitarian. Not that I believe that 2049 is the magic year when we will all upload our brains to the internet (the extreme version of Marc Andressen’s “Software is Eating the World“), but I do believe that the information content of the world will only become more organized and that our thoughts and intentions will only become more intertwined and connected. This tide cannot be reversed, especially when it comes to the proliferation of digital media.

Not everyone thinks this is a good thing. The last chapter of Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur tells the story of one well-known dissenter: Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. Continue reading →