Get your button on this week at Mesh.
I’m at Mesh today and tomorrow talking internet, apps, and marketing with a whole conference centre full of smart people. Our buttons will be there too. So check the side of your cooler, and then be sure to come say hi.
That’s a lovely quip from Paul Graham, but it really isn’t as dramatic as it sounds in the context of Ragnar Sass’s 5 Accelerator Lessons.
Still, there’s valuable insight there, so dig in.
Cheers to Mark Davis at Autodesk for his whiteboard work.
The nastiness of e-books.
Reading large volumes of text requires effort. It’s quite simply tiring. Over the (hundreds and hundreds of) years, we’ve developed standards for reading that help us get through large swaths of text by mitigating the effort it takes to do so.
This is why prose books are as wide as they are, why there are page layout standards like the grid, margins, and line spacing. And why there are additional typographic standards which address clarity and ease of reading, including type structure, letter spacing, line length, optical alignment, ligatures, and, of course, justification and hyphenation.
And it’s here where e-books fall flat on their face.
(Source: swiss-miss.com)
Toronto, tech hub of the world.
Six years ago I attended a symposium on Toronto’s roll in the tech/design landscape in North America. At the time it was said we were 3rd in north America for the volume and quality of ICT skilled workers following New York and San Francisco.
This week, Rip Empson, janitor at Techcrunch, shared Startup Genome’s findings on How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up. And it seems we’re holding on to our ranking in the global context.
Automating retail.
Product-free retail is interesting, but not as exciting as QR-code-free automated retail.
There’s still the point with QR codes where they don’t really work with produce, fragrances, or other things you want to touch and feel. And they’re slow for consumers. If you want to give all that up, you’d be better off shopping online and saving the trip to the store along with the patience and arm strain of photographing everything.
Both Toshiba and Fujitsu are working on automating the checkout process with smarter scanners.
