Bertrand Doux

"Sir John Sawers is due to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service in November. In what the Mail on Sunday called an "extraordinary lapse," the new spy chief's wife, Lady Shelley Sawers, posted family pictures and exposed details of where the couple live and take their holidays and who their friends and relatives are. The details could be viewed by any of the many millions of Facebook users around the world. - Bertrand Doux

"Publishing the story on its front page and the pictures on a double-page spread, the Mail on Sunday said the information "could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists. - Bertrand Doux

"Daniel Libeskind builds on very big ideas. Here, he shares 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture -- raw, risky, emotional, radical -- and that offer inspiration for any bold creative pursuit." - Bertrand Doux

Passionate and inspirational speech by the architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site - Bertrand Doux

"As the architect tells New York Magazine, “We didn’t just fill up the tower, we’ve taken space away from the apartments to create the gardens,” which are actually balconies tucked within the envelope. “It’s as if nature has come back into the city.” - Bertrand Doux

Here is what an insanely great Web product looks like to the average user right now and through the next 3 years: - Bertrand Doux

@Mitch: hehe - Bertrand Doux

"Bureaucratic inefficiency and secrecy around government data have been hallmarks of our federal government. The country’s new chief information officer hopes to mutate governmental DNA in the direction of openness by releasing a massive amount of data about everything from swine flu to train schedules to the public, in a machine-readable, mashable way via government’s upcoming Data.gov service. - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"When the site launches at month’s end, it will give American citizens an unprecedented level of information about our country. “The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.” - Bertrand Doux

“We’re in a classic deep recession and recessions recover,” Schmidt said, noting that the high-tech bubble that popped earlier in the decade gave that sector some relevant experience. Schmidt added he felt the current business cycle was “in the bottoming process now” and that a month from now, “things will be better.” - Bertrand Doux

"Nike engineers constantly tinkered with what they referred to as a "smart shoe," a sneaker with built-in sensors that would automatically record the length and speed of your runs. They started to brainstorm. They cooked up various demos, even sketching a shoe with an embedded iPod. Finally, Parker picked up the phone and called a friend who worked at Apple—CEO Steve Jobs. After that call, teams from both companies got together at Nike headquarters. "We talked about the idea of Nike+ and actually had a little storyboard that showed it," says Tchao, who worked at Apple for 10 years before joining Nike. "Steve called it 'the speedometer for sports,' and we thought that was an interesting way to describe it. People drove around in cars before speedometers, and today you can't imagine driving without one." - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"With Nike+ and other tools, dieters don't have to calculate the caloric content of meals manually; they can just log in to FitDay to enter the information in an online food diary. Keeping a training log doesn't mean busting out a pen and paper at the end of a run. It's as simple as listening to music on an iPod while exercising. The power of self-tracking is even more profound. Using... more... - Bertrand Doux

"friend who worked at Apple" ;D - Daniel Schildt

Details: http://blog.flickr.net/en... - Bertrand Doux

Works nicely, thanks for good work with Flickr. :) - Daniel Schildt

"Shot in 2007 by British psychologist Richard Wiseman, a simple card trick—the backs of the cards in a deck are magically transformed from blue to red. But during the course of the video, Wiseman's shirt, his assistant's shirt, the tablecloth, and the backdrop all change color, too. Most viewers watch the card trick unspool and miss the other alterations. Attention, it turns out, is like a spotlight. When it's focused on something, we become oblivious to even obvious changes outside its narrow beam. What magicians do, essentially, is misdirect—pivot that spotlight toward the wrong place at the right time. - Bertrand Doux

More here: http://www.wired.com/science... - Bertrand Doux

"To kill some time in a diner, Teller was practicing his version of Cups and Balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick popularized by ancient Roman conjurers. It involves a series of "vanishes" and "transpositions" as the balls appear and disappear underneath the cups. Teller hadn't brought any props, so he used wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses. Somehow, this made the trick even better. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins as Teller variously palmed them, squished them, and moved them from cup to cup, the illusion persisted. "The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them," he says. "Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn't grasp it." They eventually worked this version of Cups and Balls into their show, and audiences loved it. But the magic community—whose cardinal rule is "Don't tell 'em how it's done"—reacted with outrage and even threats of physical violence. Penn and Teller were exposing an ancient secret! Two arty geeks were destroying the mystery! - Bertrand Doux

For more: http://www.wired.com/science... - Bertrand Doux

"LEGO has teamed with electronics designer Digital Blue to create a line of LEGO-inspired consumer electronics for creative kids and nostalgic adults alike. Announced earlier this year, the final product will be available this fall, and the line includes digital cameras (1.5 megapixel), walkie talkies, MP3 players, boom boxes and alarm clocks, and USB drives constructed of iconic LEGO components--but not actual bricks that you can snap apart. - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

“I was originally an engineer,” he tells me, “and I joined a small company called HAL after university… In 1992, HAL was facing a financial crisis, and I was appointed president in order to help reconstruct it. At that time I was completely unable to read financial statements. I was a game developer. So I was forced to study the financial aspects of running a company." Having turned HAL around, with the help of Nintendo, Iwata felt honour-bound to repay Yamauchi when the latter offered him the chance to become Nintendo’s youngest board member in 2000. - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"When I was appointed president, I started to wonder about the future of the video game industry. At that time, the market in Japan was on the decline, and if we had carried on doing exactly the same thing, it would have been difficult to maintain sales. We might even have gone into terminal decline. I really thought that we needed to attract new players to games, and persuade those who... more... - Bertrand Doux

Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling the community to create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the Web. At Yahoo! Search, we’re proponents of open formats that accelerate the structuring of the Web and that improve the community’s overall ability to understand the Web. You can read more about this new format, which just launched today, on the Common Tag Website: http://www.commontag.org/Home - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"Adding too much value" is a classic challenge for successful people. As leaders we need to make a transition from technical expert to developer of people. One of the greatest leaders I know once said, "Achievement was about me. Leadership is about them." - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"P&G and Johnson & Johnson are now spending about 4% of their ad bugets on online display - Bertrand Doux via Bookmarklet

"Internet boosters have been waiting a very long time for the consumer packaged goods guys, who are responsible for a huge swath of offline advertising spending, to move onto the Web. Astonishing that it’s taken until 2009 to get them there, but you’re not going to hear many complaints right now. - Bertrand Doux