I really like Tony Hsieh’s approach to business. Here’s an mp3 to his talk at the Web 2.0 conference:

In this presentation at the Web 2.0 Conference, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh talks about his first business selling pizza in college, starting Link Exchange after college, and how he eventually ended up leading Zappos as the CEO. Tony discusses how his experience at Link Exchange influenced him to focus on corporate culture as a top priority, and why he thinks culture is so important to a company’s future growth and success.

Tony talks about the internal vision of Zappos not just to be an Internet footware merchant, but to be a brand that is known for an excellent customer experience. He goes on to list a number of specific techniques that the company uses to enhance customer service, and explains why he thinks that the telephone is still one of the best branding devices available.

[via IT Conversations]

I just think this video is pretty cool. It’s done in Processing, which is an open source computer language setup for visual effects.

A while ago, I happened to see the movie “Moon”, and recommended it. Well, it looks like they’ve put the first seven minutes of the movie up on the internet. You can watch it here, courtesy of the Independent Film Channel:

I was pretty impressed with the compositing movie editors are able to do:

[via Fubiz]

Also, the same video made it to YouTube, but for some odd reason, the guy who uploaded it there removed the movie-production studio’s name from the beginning and end of the video.

I stumbled on this while reading Penny Arcade: they’re doing a video-blog/Reality Show*, but only for a limited time. Click the image below to see the videos.

* They’re calling it a “reality show”, but I don’t see any physical challenges, infighting, or any disgusting “eat this live snail/spider/scorpion” contests, so I think it’s more similar to a ‘day in the life’ documentary.

(Clicking on the images will lead you back to their source.)

Cool New Flash Drive

I picked up a new flash drive recently. This is a 4GB flash drive that I picked up for $15. (All the electronics are stored in the black plastic area you see here.) A quick look at Amazon reveals that they’re selling 128 GB USB flash drives. I’m amazed how small this stuff is.

John Carmack and Apple

John Carmack recently commented that working with Apple is a big pain. I know how companies like to control their image, but there are some times when it gets ridiculous. Retaliation for saying the wrong thing about them?

“My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it’s a rollercoaster ride,” he told Kotaku. “I’ll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I’ll say something they don’t like and I can be blacklisted for six months.”

Working with Apple on iPhone games has been no different, Carmack said, but he is happy to see that former collaborator Graeme Devine is now working at Apple in the iPhone Game Technologies division. (Source)

You’d think that someone as big as John Carmack would have enough weight to avoid getting these kinds of punishments.

Google Chrome

Ever wonder why Google made Chrome, and started pushing it on www.google.com? Aren’t there already a perfectly good browsers (Firefox, Safari)? I was confused for a while until I thought about this.

Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum – in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011. (Source)

Google’s business is advertising. Maintaining its advertising sector means staying on top as the number one search engine in the face of upstarts like Microsoft Bing. Sure, Google can keep paying Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine (which, by the way, Bing doesn’t appear on the Firefox Search-Dropdown at all). But, someone at Google must’ve realized that they don’t want to be at the mercy of Firefox. The more marketshare Firefox has, the worse the negotiating position is for Google. I’m sure Google doesn’t want to get in a bidding war with Microsoft over Firefox’ search window. Someone at Google obviously realized that even if they can take 20% marketshare from Firefox, that would reduce Firefox’ negotiating power, and save them a lot of money. Ideally, Chrome would eat-up all of Firefox’ marketshare. Chrome users are, by default, pointed to Google’s search-engine. It just makes sense for Google to drop a few million on their own browser rather than pay-off Firefox year after year.

So far, Google Chrome has made a strong showing; 30 million users after just 10 months, which is a heck of a trajectory. Firefox is around 330 million users (24%), and IE still has 2/3rds of the browser market.

Smart people saying dumb things:

In the smart-people-saying-dumb-things department, I ran across the comment below on a blog recently. (To be fair, I can’t actually vouch for Brad Armstrong being smart.)

Seriously?

The internet has enlightened me to how misunderstood the software and the software industry is. I like the “big corporations” spin; it’s always a good way to side-step people’s critical thinking centers of the brain. Maybe I should comment about the legal system being a right of all Americans, and therefore, he should have to work for free. I think it’s entirely fair to call someone a hypocrite if they demand that software developers work for free, while they work a job that pays their bills. Only full-time volunteers (40-50 hours/week) and people who give 100% of their income to charity are allowed to cast that stone. It’s irksome that software developers have to justify getting paid for our work.

I’m also thinking of becoming an anti-physical property believer. Everything should be shared with everyone. That’s the best way to meet everyone’s needs. The big corporations don’t want us to share because sharing means buying less stuff. This means that you’re a wicked and evil person if you stop me from borrowing your car, watching your TV, using your computer, and sleeping under your roof. Oh, and I’m inviting all my hippie friends. They don’t shower because it messes up the natural oils on their skin. If you try to stop me, I’ll just have to “beat the system in order to fight the big corporations who own the corrupt legal system” - i.e. I’ll take what I want. Ownership is a scam created by the big corporations!

Here’s an interesting story from the BBC. There’s a company creating a system that records a race-car track and allows players to virtually drive the track alongside real drivers. There seems to be several parts to this system:

First, they drive a car (like the google-maps car) over the racetrack. In addition to taking 360 degree images, they have a system to detect the distance to everything. Using that information they construct the geometry and images for the 3d world. (This is a whole lot easier and more accurate than constructing race-tracks in a 3d-modeling package.) The results look photorealistic, with every little puddle and asphalt crack included:

The second part is that they allow you play the game during actual races. I assume they do this by taking GPS information from the actual cars, and using it to create virtual cars in your game-world. Obviously, there’s a problem here in that the other cars cannot actually interact with the player.

I think the first part is the more interesting part. The idea of using a special camera system to construct a virtual world from real-world objects seems pretty interesting. I could imagine them using it to construct game worlds out of downtown areas of cities. The game-world would then be very realistic, with every bit of graffiti or cracked window included in the game. Game artists wouldn’t have to manually add those details. The downside to this approach is that I’m not quite sure how they’d deal with people or cars, which you’d want to edit-out. And the game-world might look too photorealistic. You don’t want your animated characters to look cartoonish and out-of-place because they’re walking around a photorealistic game-world.

Google Maps could be a whole lot more interesting if it was a 3d world, rather than a series of photographs every 30 feet.

Seems like this could be useful for controlling both virtual characters in MMOs, and for game developers animating characters in single-player games.

A couple interesting charts from Information Is Beautiful.

First, a chart of troop deployments in Afghanistan. The US has the most troops there, but I was surprised to see that on a per-capita basis, the US is #6 in the number of troops in Afghanistan.

The second image is the revenue from music sales over the past 35 years. It’s split-out by format. Admittedly, I think this chart could be clearer. Interesting how CD sales peaked in 1999 at $16.4 billion/year, and it looks like it’s down to $5.4 billion/year in 2008. Meanwhile, online music sales are a scant $1.6 billion/year — far too small to make-up for the dropoff of CD sales. No wonder the music industry is going after filesharing. Wouldn’t you if you saw something a 50% drop in revenue in the last ten years - an amount equal to about $8 billion. That sounds like 8 billion reasons to go after filesharers.