Envelope / Develope

You are in 2011, Christmas time and some of the last minute preparations are left for online transaction with the whales of e-commerce, like Amazon or Zappos or smaller players - Altrec , REI . One of the e-book providers in Canada with a large brick-and-mortar presence is Chapters . And in this time and age, it takes six hours to receive an e-gift from Chapters !!!! I don't know what went wrong but my inclination to support a local business versus Amazon when the ingrained quality of service is years behind subsides substantially. Not only I HAD to buy and admit the humiliation of not having the egift for the owner of a Kobo reader BUT, in the same day I HAD the delight of handling the egift for a Kindle owner. Transaction went smooth, no headaches, normal service in this time and age. Why all small players in US can do it elegantly and Chapters with its almost monopoly of book stores in Canada has a sub-par delivery? I will trust less and less any kind of innovation or keepi...

I am following Seeking Alpha just to understand how people are investing and how they build an argument about investing. You have to understand not only the argument but also the position of the author: does she buy the stock, does she have skin in the game or is just a concerted effort to push stocks and create momentum. Keep in mind that transactions happening in seconds based on the arbitrage positions discovered by complex algorithms are the norm in hedge funds. "Many, sadly, fit the description of the American adage (often attributed to Mark Twain) that a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top." I have the same impression about some of the websites pretending they know what are doing. I remember it dearly because although I canceled the notifications for certain web sites promoting their investing letters, it was impossible to stop the flow of offers. That's a sign of very compelling investment ideas... Following the great investors (...

Is there more to be added than a sentence to any photography? asks a critique. In my opinion it is, but depends on the emotional rapport created by the photography or by the resonance with your past/experience. And the same is valid for any "frozen-in-time" type of art, be it painting, sculpture, architecture or the like. The large difference is the response it has in culture by affecting your life or being connected to a large population through personal intertwined events. The problem with photographs/paintings/art facts and other hard-to-remember artifacts is that they have to be around you as anchors in order to live on posterity. It is much easier with music but I predict the video would become the new anchor replacing the main artifact anchor in everyone's life.

           I am using a few atom/rest readers to have a common point of collecting my news. As I read a lot, it struck me about a trend in the web-news media. The arguments for an article are very much personal and based on social connections of the author with some of the people in the midst of the events rather than analytical and documented with solid sources or numbers. Some of the articles are simple author's opinions about what is connected dots  - events, stories, people - all culminating with a take away usually stated in the title. Very seldom you will see more then three extra independent sources, like stats, numbers from non-governmental agencies, data from industry chambers, etc.. In today fast-food and fast-media consumption the slow pondering on the pertinent amount of available information is not considered.          I agree that people empathize with social struggle and life ...

                I wonder why the Darwinism principle is not functioning for a corporate environment?! I've seen a lot of small/medium companies built on wrong/old ideas but still surviving. For me it's like a long illness, you won't feel it, everything seems normal, but the aim is totally chaotic and when you are totally out of sync with the economic reality, the company will be crushed.              I'll tell you about my experiences working for a few companies as contractor. In one company, let's name it VoiceX, they struggled to come on the market with a stable product for almost 4-5 years. A lot of people came, understood the business and left the company but a few of them were persistent and stayed through the thin and thick. When I arrived there, there were at least 8, max 12 developers, mostly with at least a few years with the company...

The Kobo reader is the Chapter's Books response to the digital invasion of the ebooks. In one of my assignments, analyzing the eReader market, I concluded that Kobo is the Toyota of the eReaders. Definitely Kindle has the top marks in design, although I have to use one to find shortcomings as I will present my complaints and suggestions to Kobo's designers. The bad - The price is no longer an advantage. When I bought mine, the difference in price between Kindle and Kobo was almost 100$. Currently Kindle is at the same price level. Several studies discovered that under 100$ price is the tipping point for mass adoption for ereaders. The good - The price/performance/options is good enough for above average users. The bad - I am annoyed to have the same set of celeb's sayings displayed when I start reading. Let me allow to change them. The bad - I can navigate only page by page. You can add a scale to jump in tens or hundreds of pages. When you share the reader and y...

Recently, the CBC broadcasted a bio-reportage of the photographer Annie Leibovitz. The bibliographical reportage is interesting for several reasons: it shows there is no theme or obsession about photography, at least at the beginning of her career. It started at Rolling Stone magazine by supporting the articles of a few big writers. I am biased, but the question of what would be durable twenty years from now, the articles or the shots from RS magazine? And the rest is just life and a lot of wasted shots, with some of them brilliantly captured. Another theme is about experimenting, camera being the "third-eye", registering more than an image but also the history of the situation. Ms. Leibovitz had a camera in hand almost in all unimaginable situations - when people slept, taking their cloth off, arguing or living on the edge. Short lenses were preferred, drugs were permitted in the shot as a hidden personage but mostly I liked the "after-emotional-storm" / "p...