State of Technology #100

Elsewhere         Apple’s plan for $5B Cupertino HQ         Zuckerberg: Facebook Home on iPhone decision is ‘above my pay grade’         26 Time Management Hacks#preso         Top 10 Things to be informed about in Life#quora         Bizspeak Blacklist: From HBR of all sources!
Architecture Unhosted: “Serverless” SaaS Doctrine
Code The Orange Algorithm Coke Uses ‘The Black Book model includes detailed data about the myriad flavors—more than 600 in all—that make up an orange, and consumer preferences. Those data are matched to a profile detailing acidity, sweetness, and other attributes of each batch of raw juice. The algorithm then tells Coke how to blend batches to replicate a certain taste and consistency, right down to pulp content.’
Design 6 Innovative Dashboards Worth Learning For; and Dashing – ‘The exceptionally handsome dashboard framework’.
Essay Where’s _Why? Or, a Cultural History of Ruby. ‘The Little Coder’s Predicament arises from the following problem: We live in world of astonishingly advanced technologies, easy to use and all around us. Your grandmother has a smartphone. Your 2-year-old can play with an iPad. But the technology behind such marvels is complex and invisible, abstracted away from the human controlling it.’
Mobile 12 points are needed to uniquely identify a fingerprint. A new study published in Nature that  ONLY four ‘spatio-temporal points’ are needed to uniquely identify 95% individuals.
SaaS Top 7 Startups from YC 2013 Demo Day
Service How P&G Uses ‘Decision Cockpit’ for over 50,000 employee
Social Is Bitcoin Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven?
Tool Create Powerful Demo in Chrome
Hack Google Maps: Treasure Hunt Mode
Etc          Best Metaphors for DDoS attacks          Nobody just talks anymore Parting Thought “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” —Haruki Murakami

State of Technology #98

elsewhere         Twitter turns 7 years – ashort official videoand a look at7 lives Twitter changed forever in 7 years         10 Most Popular Ted-Ed Lessons         Tech behind six-dimensional color space for iPad         How to raise $75M for charity and other 10 Lessons from World’s Best Presenters         Spotify’s Agile Manifesto and emphasis on ‘Servant Leadership’
Architecture Superhero.js– Every resource to build Large Javascript apps in one page
Code Ineffective Sorts (and it’s already been Github-ed)
Design **No to NoUI
Essay Touch-Screen Generation ‘Touch technology follows the same logic as shaking a rattle or knocking down a pile of blocks: the child swipes, and something immediately happens. A “rattle on steroids,” is what Buckleitner calls it. “All of a sudden a finger could move a bus or smush an insect or turn into a big wet gloopy paintbrush.” To a toddler, this is less magic than intuition.’
Mobile *** How the world has changed between 2005 and 2013 – in ONE photo off St. Peter’s Square
SaaS How a startup uses variety of SaaS tools to manage entire business
Service Mayor Bloomberg’s Data Squad and how they caught restaurants illegally dumping cooking oil in sewers, without ever leaving the building.
Social Themakermap – ‘print’ a body part with help of someone near you
Tool ‘Coding in Browser’ and other Top Developer Requests for Firefox Devtools
Hack Chrome Maze (best played with Phone or Tablet)
Etc          Who really invented the Smiley Face?          15 Years of Apple Homepages Parting Thought ”Deliberate strategy is goal-oriented. It asks, “What do we want to achieve?” Emergent strategy is means-oriented. It asks, “What is possible, with the means we have at our disposal?” – ‘Experimentation is the New Planning’; Fast Company

State of Technology #96

elsewhere        Five ‘interesting’ moments with Andrew Mason        Startup to extractprecious metals from fly-by asteroids       10 Ted Talks to Reimagine Your Business       World’s First Bitcoin ATM     The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
Architecture Under the Hood: Building out Infrastructure of Facebook Graph Search
Code Apparently, Marissa Meyer made‘No More WFH’ policy after looking at VPN activity and logins for remote workers.
Design Why was ‘~’ chosen to represent Home directory?
Essay Evolution of Google Street View
Mobile We spend 23 full days a year on our phone!
SaaS Website Performance Data has never been more readily available  thanks to Navigation Timing Specification. E.g., to calculate page load time via the performance object – var loadTime = performance.timing.loadEventStart - performance.timing.navigationStart;
Service Anonymized Search Data via browser toolbar handily beats FDAwarning system to find Drug Side-effects
Social ‘New Social Media Startup Launches, Shuts Down Within 45 Minutes’ – Onion
Tool Great list of (almost) Free Tools to create Media Assets (video, animation, 3D models)
Hack How Japanese Kids Learn to Multiply
Etc          Mountain Viewhosts 2nd highest number of sites among world’s Top Million            ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People’ Parting Thought “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats” – Howard Aitken

State of Technology #94

Elsewhere        #InternetisEatingtheWorldBillboard Hot 100 has now YouTubevideos; Nielson TV Rating expanding to include Netflixand Amazon Streams        50 Disruptive Companies 2013        WhenFacebook ‘Emergency Response Team’ got call from ‘FBI’, they did not know it was a War Games drill!        10M Tweets confirmsNapa, California is the happiest city!        John E. Karlin, who designed the All-Digit Dial pad, dies
Architecture Engelbert’s Dilemma: Ease-of-Use vs. Efficiency
Code We naturally perceive scale logarithmically, but education imposes linear thinking. “If kindergarten children are asked to point to the correct location for a spoken number word on a line segment labelled with endpoints 0 and 100, they place smaller numbers closer to 0 and larger numbers closer to 100, but they do not distribute numbers evenly….they place numbers in a compressed logarithmic mapping. They perceive numbers logarithmically.Fourth graders, however, map linearly rather than logarithmically. But if one asks an adult member of the Mundurucu – an Amazonian indigenous group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little formal education – to complete the same task, the logarithmic mapping occurs again.”
Design ##### “Is the Homepage dead?” “…how much traffic was coming to major news sites “through the side door”—aka article pages. Less than half of visits to nytimes.com start on the homepage. More than half of Buzzfeed’s visitors come from search and social. And a mere 12 percent of visits to The Atlantic start with the homepage.”
Essay Inside the GIF Industrial Complex “What started as an Internet trifle had become a marketable skill. Hypnotizing amidst a Web of distraction, the GIF has evolved from an obscure file format to an art movement to a pageview crutch. What was once a retro rebuke to the busy commercialization of the Web has in some ways become a part of it. The GIF renaissance was beautiful until it wasn’t”
Mobile Native iOS to HTML5 Porting Tool
SaaS Service to track changes in Terms of Services
Service Buy things with a Tweet
Social Assignment: create a Youtube Hoax video that gets 100K hits. Result: 42 Million hits.Here’s how they did it.
Tool FotoForensics– to check ‘degree of photo doctoring’ (they’re doing all cool stuff like identify a person’s shoe size from a photo)
Hack Wadsworth Constant ‘URL parameter “&wadsworth=1” which can be added on to the end of a YouTube video URL to load the video at 30%.’
Etc          How Harlem Shake went all viral          Cryogenics for RAM: at-196C with Liquid Nitrogen RAM can hold data for hours without power. Parting Thought “Visualization can surprise you, but it doesn’t scale well. Modeling scales well, but it can’t surprise you.” –Hadley Wickham

State of Technology #92

Elsewhere         Amazon and theirnewly launched Virtual Coin         How Etsy Grew Number of Female Engineers by 500%         World’s largest Natural Sound Archive is now Online         15-year old’s game-changing Cancer Innovation         Google has indexed publicly accessible Printers and unprotected Network Cameras feeds
Architecture High Performance Networking in Chrome Chrome gets faster as you use it. This feat is accomplished with the help of a singleton Predictor object, which is instantiated within the browser kernel process, and whose sole responsibility is to observe network patterns and to learn and anticipate likely user actions in the future.
Code Resources to Start building great visualizations using D3
Design
Cities of Future and how to drone-proof it Essay “Internet has no erasers?” How temporal services like Snapchat is making social media erasable.
Mobile Does Mobile Performance Optimization Still Matter
SaaS Functional Thinking: Why functional Programming is on Rise
Service Commenting Threads: good, bad or not at all
Social Pre-web use of bounded asterisks
Tool Two useful Open Source SQL editors
Hack
18 Complicated Ideas explained using ONLY the 1000 most frequent words in English  text editor that would force the user to write with only the 1000 most frequent words. He then invited scientists to describe what they do using the editor.   Etc          Meat industry consumes 80% of antibiotics produced          Encyclopedia of things considered Harmful(‘complexity, postmodernism, SQL etc’)   Parting Thought Best Science & Engineering Visualizations of 2012

State of Technology #90

elsewhere         A “different” resume         Land-book– Collection of Best and most Inspiring Landing Pages         What gets most crowd-love in Kickstarter         How Reddit ranking algorithms work         Dartboard number distribution change is in Beta
Architecture Beginners Advanced Guide to HTML and CSS
Code If-less Programming
Design Author of “ping” wrote about its genesis
Essay How Strava is changing the way we ride
Mobile Designing for the Empty States
SaaS ***** Comprehensive guide to SaaS metrics and how to measure it
Service Things users do NOT care about
Social The Best of Quora 2012 – eBook (Warning: Time sink)
Tool Fake Data (“rabbit holes”) to thwart hackers
Hack Technologies to prevent yourself from being captured on camera or video
Etc          26 Architects and the buildingsthat represent them in 90 sec          Are links Bluebecause Sir Tim Berners Lee chose it randomly?  Parting Thought “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline” – Edward Tufte

State of Technology #88

elsewhere          Best of 2012 in Kickstarter          Watson hadmemorized entire ‘Urban Dictionary’          Web and Mobile Revenue Models          Facebook Release Engineering – How it Pushes Twice a Day          Technical Skills that you can learn within a Day
Architecture Latency numbers every developer should know(Slide the bar to see how it changes with time)
Code Web Developer Checklist
Design Talks to Help You Become a Better Front-end Engineer in 2013
Essay Top 20 Insights to Make Ideas Happen
Mobile App Design Trends for 2013
SaaS Why MongoDB never worked out at Etsy
Service Top Logging & Monitoring Services
Social Steve Souders writes a brief and usefulnote on ‘Perception of Speed’ ‘If I had written the code I would have cleared the page as soon as the link was clicked. But in a masterstroke of creating the perception of faster websites, browsers instead don’t erase the old page until the next page arrives.’
Tool Build your own Keyboard –Part 1, 2
Hack How todivide a number by 3 without using *, /, +, -, % Operators
Etc          Philip Greenspun onManaging Software Engineers          Innovation Pessimism Outlook(Economist) Parting Thought ‘Major innovation comes most of all from the unexplored no-man’s land between the disciplines.’ – James Burke on the importance of multi-disciplinary thinking in this fascinating talk