infoneer-pulse:

Adult entertainment studio Pink Visual announced the release of an API yesterday so Web and mobile developers can take advantage of the company’s content to create dynamic games, websites and native applications. There was once a time when this would have been significant news. It is not. The porn industry was once the leading pusher of technological adoption. If porn adopted a new innovation, it indicated that tech would likely flourish.

The classic example of this is VHS. Betamax was a better technology but it was more expensive than VHS. So, porn went with VHS and that became the dominant standard for nearly 20 years. The early rise of the Internet was also filled with porn and, like it or not, has been part of the definition of the Web for nearly 20 years as well. The time has come for porn to move over. If you really want to see what the next great Web technology is, the best place to look is at cutting edge game developers working with HTML5.

» via ReadWriteWeb

The net effect of recent information technology on the porn industry is shifting the value position towards individuals from the publishing companies. Cheaper and better communication is empowering the million headed crowd of amateur porn producers working in their own bedrooms with their home video equipment and is ultimately draining the industry from R&D resources which can be spent on technology innovation.

7 October 152 infoneer-pulse Permalink

I wonder why Susan Wojcicki is picking the word “innovation” in the head line when it could replaced by e g “success”? Could it be that innovation is the holy graal of success these days…? ;-) 

Interesting read though… Click and read more about the pillars:

1. Have a mission that matters
2. Think big but start small
3. Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection
4. Look for ideas everywhere
5. Share everything
6. Spark with imagination, fuel with data
7. Be a platform
8. Never fail to fail

23 September 18 Permalink

Welcome to the world of flexitime schooling which will see a child in Spain educated through Skype from the UK and a mother who splits her son’s education between home teaching and school. Hollinsclough Church of England primary school in Staffordshire is the first in the UK to introduce a part-time policy for pupils.

[…]

Now she has 11 full-time pupils, 10 part-timers and as many as 15 to 20 families coming in to join the school’s learning “hub” – which arranges events such as simulations of archaeological digs and arts activities for children.

The school’s motto is to provide what the parents want for their children, said Mrs Mountford-Lees. “I recently asked them what they would most like and some of them said for their children to learn Latin.” She is now trying to arrange for a private tutor to come in and provide the classes.

(via @per_infontology)

This is a really interesting concept which starts to break down some of the traditional views of what a school is.

To me the important part is that this model was made possible by slack in the system. One key part was a school and a teacher with too few pupils, the other key part was home schooled children who searched for a part time teachers with a certain skill or knowledge.

In the civilized world schools and school systems are almost always so optimized and efficient (read “stuffed”) that there are neither time nor space to be innovative. If innovation needs something it is white space to innovate in, and that is true in the educational system as well.

29 August 102 Permalink

infoneer-pulse:

And the winner is: Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., which has just received patent number 8,000,000 for a device to help people with a certain type of vision impairment see better.

Patent No. 8,000,000 is not actually the 8,000,000th patent granted in the United States. Patent No. 1 wasn’t issued until 1836; the approximately 10,000 earlier patents used a different indexing system. About 8,000 of those early patents were destroyed in a fire.

In recent years, the number of patents applied for and received has skyrocketed, and the Patent Office has struggled to keep up. There are approximately 700,000 applications waiting for review. One million patents were issued in the last five years.

» via The Atlantic

18 August 12 infoneer-pulse Permalink