The Galaxy Note? It won’t fit in a pocket or your hand, the two places you’re going to want to put your phone. For some reason, five million people don’t seem to care. Five million people purchased this distended LED baking sheet not caring that it’s too big to use well. For them, more is more. For them, a screen that’s too big is like something from a Mountain Dew commercial; it’s just awesome! The Note is a big, neon top hat of a handset—look at me and my giant phone, everyone. Look at how big it is. A shiny bauble. I can’t wait to go home and look at my big phone.
Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle on the success of the Galaxy Note. Spot on.  

Source: Gizmodo

Grabbed these from Indiana Radio’s awesome online gallery of antique radio dials. Looking through the entire collection is an interesting study in layout/interface design, since it highlights so many different approaches to displaying the same information. 

Source: indianaradios.com

A Look Inside the World of Stolen Credit Card Numbers

“This is the central paradox of this marketplace. In order to get in, you have to be a verified credit card thief. But in order to do business, you have to show that you can deal honestly.”

It appears that the crowd-sourced trust strategies E-bay uses to validate vendors applies to the criminal underworld too. Check out the fascinating NPR Morning Edition audio segment here. Oh — and check your credit card statements. 



Source: NPR

Nostalgia has always been the residue of progress: The further we go into some ostensibly utopian future, the more we long for a simpler past. To put it lightly, indie has seen its fair share of technological progress over the past decade. Any information that an artist tries to keep under wraps will succumb to the digital tides of instant-gratification and endless supply. Try asking 10 30-something music junkies to talk about the last 10 years. Eight of them will talk longingly about the days in which music was a little bit harder to obtain, and how it felt somehow better as a result. But how is this idea manifesting itself visually?…..


If it’s not totally ended the need for high school reunions, Facebook has served as a personal nostalgia generator for many of its users. Like a lot of others, I assume, I add people I knew in high school not because they ever were or ever will become my friends, but because it’s fun to flip through their photos a trigger a simple memory of sitting down the row from them in Algebra…..

A selection of many excellent quotes worth highlighting from a feature I just came across entitled This is not a Photograph by Eric Harvey written for Pitchfork. In the feature, Harvey discusses the trend of indie music artists using Polaroid snap shots as albums covers, and connects it back to an obvious sense of nostalgia, longing for eternal youth, and a dash of marketing prowess. Posted originally in September of 2010, the trend has only grown since then, to the point of becoming cliché. 

Source: pitchfork.com

Now, here’s why iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion pack such a deadly punch against so many companies: Together, they strengthen Apple’s lock-in strategy with vertical integration. Many consider Apple to be the most vertically integrated company in the world: All Apple hardware and software are designed in-house, and Apple also runs its own digital content store, iTunes, along with the App Store and iBooks store.

The new features in iOS 5, iCloud and Lion tightens Apple’s vertical integration of its software ecosystem by amplifying its “lock-in” goal. The vast majority of the new iCloud tools introduced Monday are exclusively for Apple customers, designed to bridge the iOS and Mac operating systems to make the experience more seamless, convenient and irresistible than ever.

Brian X Chen’s analysis of the impact of Apple’s WWDC announcement. The man’s right on the money, but this is just another step in a plan Apple has followed for years.  

Source: Wired