À Ásia e avante

Porra, q bizarro!

Up to 43 percent of the world’s Online population will reside in Asia by 2013, according to projections from Forrester Research, and China will account for 17 percent of the global Online population. In mobile, eMarketer forecasts China will have 1.3 billion subscribers and 957 million mobile Web users by 2014. The consultancy projects there will be more people accessing the Web on their cell phones in the country than the entire population of the U.S. in 2010. This is an impressive statistic to say the least.

Via

R.I.P. Flash

Given just how unamused Steve Jobs is by pornography, he’s got some unexpected support from that quarter. Wolfgang Gruener of ConceivablyTech has spoken to the founder of porn firm Digital Playground, who claims that he is ready to say goodbye, albeit breathily, to Flash and embrace, in a most unwholesome way, you understand, HTML 5.

De tudo de novo que você vê pela internet, tenha uma certeza: não é novidade porra nenhuma, a indústria pornô online já deve ter usado há algum tempo. Foi assim com sites, monetização, utilização de fotos, áudio e vídeo, transmissão real time e por aí vai. Os caras são uma espécie de bússula da internet. Steve Jobs, apesar de não querer pornô em seu iPad, deve tá amarradão com essa notícia.

George Parker e Cannes

Esse maluco é engraçado e tem uma visão bem ácida do mercado, como se pode ver neste texto:

On Monday, they had a piece titled Cannes Grows Up… Which is the usual ad trade reportage, head firmly shoved up arse exercise, talking about how from next year it will no longer be an “Advertising” festival, it will henceforth become known as an “Effectiveness” festival… Which means exactly fucking what? Perhaps it’s like deciding that the “Oscars” will no longer be a festival for motion pictures, but will become a once a year gang-bang dedicated to determining which movie increased the sales of popcorn by the largest margin, while signing up the highest number of pre-death, crypt buying, vampire movie watching fucktards!

De longe, essa é a melhor definição sobre os festivais:

Advertising award shows have always been a bit of a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” inside joke for those of us in the business.

Via PSFK

“The barrier”

“The more time people spend on such games as “FarmVille,” the harder it is for them to switch to a different diversion, said Atul Bagga, an analyst at ThinkEquity. If you are playing games you like and you have invested dollars in it, you start becoming more attached to your avatar, more attached to your place,” Bagga says. “The barrier for those guys defecting from “FarmVille” is much higher.”

Da Business Week

“Continuous Augmented Awareness”

We’ll move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one we might call “continuous augmented awareness.”

Esta mudança obviamente tem a ver com os computadores enquanto extensão de nosso cérebro, inclusive com chips e implantes. Mas isso também diz respeito a alguns remedinhos:

In pharmacology, too, the future is already here. One of the most prominent examples is a drug called modafinil. Developed in the 1970s, modafinil—sold in the U.S. under the brand name Provigil—appeared on the cultural radar in the late 1990s, when the American military began to test it for long-haul pilots. Extended use of modafinil can keep a person awake and alert for well over 32 hours on end, with only a full night’s sleep required to get back to a normal schedule.

O autor, James Cascio, sabe bem do que fala:

While it is FDA-approved only for a few sleep disorders, like narcolepsy and sleep apnea, doctors increasingly prescribe it to those suffering from depression, to “shift workers” fighting fatigue, and to frequent business travelers dealing with time-zone shifts. I’m part of the latter group: like more and more professionals, I have a prescription for modafinil in order to help me overcome jet lag when I travel internationally. When I started taking the drug, I expected it to keep me awake; I didn’t expect it to make me feel smarter, but that’s exactly what happened. The change was subtle but clear, once I recognized it: within an hour of taking a standard 200-mg tablet, I was much more alert, and thinking with considerably more clarity and focus than usual. This isn’t just a subjective conclusion. A University of Cambridge study, published in 2003, concluded that modafinil confers a measurable cognitive-enhancement effect across a variety of mental tasks, including pattern recognition and spatial planning, and sharpens focus and alertness.

Um debate interessante:

Little by little, people who don’t know about drugs like modafinil or don’t want to use them will face stiffer competition from the people who do. From the perspective of a culture immersed in athletic doping wars, the use of such drugs may seem like cheating. From the perspective of those who find that they’re much more productive using this form of enhancement, it’s no more cheating than getting a faster computer or a better education.

É, o futuro tem tudo para ser muito escroto.

Da mesma reportagem da The Atlantic do post aí de baixo.

“Nöocene epoch”

Mais um texto foda da The Atlantic. Nada menos do que uma bela resposta ao clássico artigo do Nick Carr sobre o google e a nossa estupidez.

Scientists refer to the 12,000 years or so since the last ice age as the Holocene epoch. It encompasses the rise of human civilization and our co-evolution with tools and technologies that allow us to grapple with our physical environment. But if intelligence augmentation has the kind of impact I expect, we may soon have to start thinking of ourselves as living in an entirely new era. The focus of our technological evolution would be less on how we manage and adapt to our physical world, and more on how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we’ve created. We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds. As that epoch draws closer, the world is becoming a very different place.

Parte interessante sobre cigarro e café:

The rise of urbanization allowed a fraction of the populace to focus on more-cerebral tasks—a fraction that grew inexorably as more-complex economic and social practices demanded more knowledge work, and industrial technology reduced the demand for manual labor. And caffeine and nicotine, of course, are both classic cognitive-enhancement drugs, primitive though they may be.

Se o artigo do Nick se chamava Is Google Making Us Stupid?, este vem com o sugestivo título Get Smarter. Eis o por que:

The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language.

if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

Linda Corporative Identity

Belíssimo projeto de identidade de marca. Sempre que o processo é apresentado o resultado final é mais degustativo.

LINDA means pretty, beautiful in Portuguese and it is a brand developed for Michele Pampanin, who holds all their copyrights.
I tried to put the whole personality and all that the ‘client’ is and represents through a strong tea brand.
My sources of inspiration and the development of work you can see immediately below, as well as links to sites where it was featured.

Acredite, tem muito mais sobre o processo aqui.

Fundamental Dynamics

Slide tosco porém interessante:

“Conspiracy is optimistic!”

Steve Jobs em entrevista a Wired, em um distante 1996:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

Xerox, P.A.R.C. e uma espantosa imbecilidade

PARC significa Palo Alto Research Center, Centro de Pesquisa da Xerox. Pelo final dos anos 70, o Steve Jobs visitou o PARC e, segundo relatos, anotava freneticamente em seu caderninho enquanto via as invenções do pessoal da Xerox que lhe ajudariam na Apple. Nas palavras do prório Steve:

When I went to Xerox PARC in 1979, I saw a very rudimentary graphical user interface. It wasn’t complete. It wasn’t quite right. But within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would work this way someday.

Quase tudo de revolucionários dos últimos 30 anos saiu das mentes que tarabalhavam no PARC, e a Xerox, incrivelmente, não se aproveitou de nada:

PARC’s ground-breaking inventions like the graphical user interface, ethernet, and postscript as inventions had a large impact on the world but didn’t contribute enough to Xerox’s bottom line.

Tudo isso por que as invenções extrapolavam a atuação da empresa na época. Hoje em dia parece que a lucidez iluminou os manda-chuvas da Xerox e agora eles alugam o R&D da PARC para outras empresas.