Top 10 Funny Baby Videos

Hey guy, even though this was a very old youtube video, but I do love the baby laughing, let’s enjoy!!

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet-Too-Soon and the Quality of Speed

The Penn State scandal left a lot of people blind sided, and no one more so than Ashton Kutcher. AsKashmir Hill describes in her ‘Google before you tweet’ post, Kutcher was tragically behind the news in a medium where, to quote a conversation I had with Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin, “Speed is Quality.”* Kutcher’s speed and immediacy has indeed been an important quality of his online success, since few genuine celebrities are willing to ride bareback as he has on Twitter.

The Penn State scandal left a lot of people blind sided, and no one more so than Ashton Kutcher. AsKashmir Hill describes in her ‘Google before you tweet’ post, Kutcher was tragically behind the news in a medium where, to quote a conversation I had with Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin, “Speed is Quality.”* Kutcher’s speed and immediacy has indeed been an important quality of his online success, since few genuine celebrities are willing to ride bareback as he has on Twitter.

But Kutcher’s quick retraction and promise to have his tweets vetted by his PR company didn’t salvage his reputation as much as slowing down a bit and reflecting (in public) on his need for speed would have. As online content producers, we’re all in this position of balancing our concern for propagation (now, now, now!) vs. persistance (and then, and then, and then…) Barring a takedown of the internet by Conficker, what you post or tweet will be with you forever. No question, the odds of something embarrassing surfacing in front of a potential employer, a curious electorate or future father-in-law can always be cut down by some prophylactic Googling. But slowing down is in itself a quality and one that can lead to better content, especially in its persistant form.

I’m a busy guy , and I don’t post as often or as immediately as I would like to. And though I sometimes feel like I’m letting the team down, many times I find that if I wait a beat something will emerge that gives me an original angle on something that I would have missed if I felt compelled to file immediately.

As a case in point, I write a blog for the City of Portland, Maine, calledLiveWork Portland that promotes the creative economy here to artists and entrepreneurs from away who might consider relocating to Portland. Last weekend I was covering a creative economy conference in Camden, Maine, called Juice 3.0. I wanted to write a post about what was distinctive about the creative entrepreneurs that I met at the conference and the kind of innovation culture that I see developing in Maine. Sure enough, a few days after the conference, The New Yorker shows up in my mailbox (yes, the physical magazine, not the app!) and Malcolm Gladwell has an article about Steve Jobsas a “tweaker.”

Gladwell’s point about Jobs is that his “sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him … and ruthlessly refining it.” But even more important than his revisionist recasting of Jobs’ creative genius (still formidable) is his description of the origins of the Industrial Revolution in England:

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

And there I had it! That was my lead, that was my angle. What I had seen at the Juice conference was that the intersection of the creative economy and the innovation economy in Maine was being powered by a larger than average concentration of “tweakers.” What I have found in Portland and now in this network of innovation clusters spreading throughout the state is that kind of engineering of the possible that powered the Industrial Revolution and could well power the Post-Industrial one. And not only that. Just as I managed to get Ashton Kutcher into the headline and the lead of this post (quite organically, I think) I managed to get Steve Jobs into the LiveWork Portland post!

Paradoxically, learning to slow down can help you speed up when you need to. Years ago, I studied tai chi with the great William C.C. Chen, in New York. I was surprised to find out that many of Chen’s senior students were boxers and that the ultimate goal of this slow, peaceful, controlled movement was fighting. But sure enough, if you speed up those slow arm and leg movements you’ve got some dynamite punches and kicks at your disposal.

* See Lewis’s inaugural post at Forbes where he says , “In the ruckus of the online universe, quality is evolving. Right now, it’s more about timeliness.”

advantages and disadvantages

NUTS: Apple Faces IPhone Glitches, Google Comforts Android Partners

Apple tried to fix its iPhone 4S problems but may have made them worse, while Google reassured handset makers it will keep fighting for Android.

News Under the Sun is a weekly column rounding up all the events on in the mobile industry. Want the news but don’t want it every day? Subscribe to our weekly Facebook or Twitter page.

Apple Addresses iPhone Problems

Apple released an iOS 5 update to address numerous complaints about iPhone 4S battery drainage and bugs in iCloud documents.

The upgrade is available for all iPad and iPhone models from 3GS onward. However, users said the update isn’t working, and may be making the problems worse.

A researcher also discovered a pivotal flaw in Apple’s iOS software that allows mobile apps to download new commands from a remote computer. There are no signs hackers have taken advantage of the flaw, but the company is working to fix the problem.

Another iPhone 4S glitch mutes outgoing calls, affecting all three major U.S. carriers and adding to the growing number of glitches Apple’s newest device is experiencing. IPhone 4S users complained of a yellow tinge on some screens and Siri outages as well.

Apple is working on a fix for its auto-correct feature in the iMessage app, which users have complained about since its 2007 release. The fix unveils a “suggestions bar” with several options for correcting text.

In spite of these problems, Consumer Reports Tuesday said it officially recommends the iPhone 4S, granting Apple’s device a highly coveted approval.

Apple said it has “no plans” to release Siri on older devices, preferring to keep the voice-activated assistant exclusive to the iPhone 4S. Apple fans who want the company’s latest gadget will have to buy the newest device in order to get it, keeping demand for the 4S high.

In addition, Apple is giving iPhone 4S shipment priority to its own retail stores. Device sales continue to surge, but Apple’s U.S. carrier partners are seeing less frequent shipments as the company wrestles with the logistics of meeting demand.

With the device’s popularity soaring, Apple is now selling unlocked versions of the iPhone 4S, which allow customers to jump between carriers without being tied to a contract.

true or false??

Report: Facebook will give users more say over privacy to settle investigation

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook is nearing a settlement with federal regulators that would require the world’s most popular online hangout to obtain approval from its users before making changes that expose their profiles and activities to a wider audience, according to a report published Thursday.

Citing people familiar with the situation that it did not name, The Wall Street Journal said Facebook has agreed to make the changes to resolve a nearly 2-year-old investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
Both Facebook and the FTC declined to comment to The Associated Press.

If the settlement is approved by FTC’s commissioners, it would require Facebook to get explicit consent from its 800 million users before changing its privacy settings, according to the Journal.

Seeking a user’s prior consent is known as an “opt in.” Facebook sometimes makes changes that it believes will improve its social network and then leaves it to users to reset the things that they don’t like — a process known as “opting out.” Companies introducing a feature or service generally prefer an “opt out” system because fewer people take the steps required to get out of the changes.

The FTC opened its probe into Facebook after the website made changes that automatically showed users’ names, pictures, hometowns and other personal information available for anyone on the Web to see. That upset people who had deliberately programmed their privacy settings to confine that information to a specific group of friends or family.

As part of its proposed settlement, Facebook would also submit to government reviews of its privacy practices for 20 years, according to the Journal.

The audits are similar to the scrutiny that Internet search leader Google Inc. agreed to undergo earlier this year. That agreement settled an FTC investigation into Google’s handling of people’s personal information in February 2010 when it launched a service called Buzz to counter Facebook. Buzz exposed the email contacts of unwitting users, a breach that the FTC considered to be a deceptive practice.
Google is now in the process of closing Buzz to focus on another social network called Plus that debuted in June.

In an interview with Charlie Rose shown earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he believes the website’s changes over the past year have given users greater control over their privacy.

“I think we’re going to need to keep on making it easier and easier, but that’s our mission, right?” Zuckerberg told Rose. “I mean, we have to do that because now, if people feel like they don’t have control over how they’re sharing things, then we’re failing them.”