Envelope / Develope

           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...