“Design + Business” is a school of thought that hits at the heart of an identity crisis that I have personally struggled with: should I design or should I study finance/revenue and build a business. I find my self struggling to balance between the two as I work on startups, solve problems, build apps or productize ideas. Form vs function is often conflicting in my mind…
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Here you'll find some tasty snippets for your brain to feast on regarding startups, technology and design.
D + B School
At Fred’s Ranch
Panorama of the stables and corral. Fred is getting a lesson.
In late 2010 I had the pleasure of starting a company with a friend in California. During my time there, I stayed at Fred’s ranch while we both worked on a new startup called Needly. Fred’s ranch is a beautiful backdrop to the countless hours we invested in brainstorming, whiteboarding and problem solving.
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Titanium Mobile Docs App
Here’s a quick and dirty app launching the Titanium Mobile docs site as a self contained app.
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How to upgrade Debian Lenny to Squeeze
I use Slicehost and typically provision Debian Lenny. But, after trying to install Beanstalkd, I found out that Lenny doesn’t support the required package, libevent-dev (1.4+). Time to upgrade my slice to Squeeze.
Here’s how to do it:
Edit sources.list
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Change any word Lenny to Squeeze, (or from stable to testing) and save it. Backup your original file, just to be safe
Updating and upgrading
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
sudo aptitude full-upgrade
Thats it. You will be prompted with a few screens to authorize the upgrading or removal of certain packages and/or dependencies. Take note of which packages will be altered before you proceed.
After this, you should be on running Debian Squeeze. Note: It is better to use Squeeze instead of testing.
References
Disruption: eBooks, The End of Windowing and The Agency Model
…In effect, Macmillan is trying to do exactly the same thing that many other media companies are desperate to do — from newspapers to music labels to movie companies — which is to replicate the pricing model of an analog, real-world business in digital form.
In other words, (windowing) tries to artificially reproduce the kind of scarcity (and thus pricing power) it used to have in one medium in a medium that doesn’t even know what scarcity is.
Sooner or later, that attempt will fail (among other things, iTunes appears to show that flexible pricing actually leads to lower sales).
For now, Macmillan and other publishers have managed to convince Amazon and Apple to accept the new agency model, but those sandbags aren’t going to last for long.
via gigaom.com
My take: “Macmillan, like most publishers, is attempting to protect their existing printed business long enough to readjust their production, sales and distribution model to digital media, rather than print media. Until then, their pricing model for eBooks and print media will be closely related and will walk in tandem towards a new model; at least in theory.”
“What we are seeing is a change in the business model of content distribution. There are simply more efficient and effective ways to subsidize the cost of transporting information.”
“Content is a service and a book is the conduit and container.”
Posted via web from Digital Publishing Trends – Semantic Press