Photo sharing site Fotolog has been acquired by French company Hi Media for $90 million. The service is popular in Europe and Latin America, but not so much in the USA. Fotolog’s 2007 revenue is expected to reach $2.3 million. I think the purchase price is quite high, considering that Hi Media paid a 39-year multiple and that Fotolog hasn’t been able to establish its service in the USA, yet.
Archive for August, 2007
Done. 
The new site will be up and running later today or tomorrow.
Another topic I’m watching closely is data visualization. Here’s an excerpt from an article I found at SmashingMagazine.com:
Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.
Information Architects Japan, for example, created a mindmap to visualize the 200 most successful websites on the Internet (click on the image to enlarge):
Time Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of American population in its map and Forbes Magazine uses visual hills to show the density of millionaires in the USA.
There are lots of possible ways to visualize data, some of which are described in the article mentioned above - worth the read!
I’m considering buying a new cell phone this year, so I was doing a little research. I found interesting news on Samsung. The Korean electronics maker has quietly surpassed Motorola to become the No. 2 seller of mobile phones. In this year’s second quarter Samsung shipped 37.4 million devices, Motorola shipped 35.5 million. As said, the company “quietly” achieved this milestone (it didn’t even issue a press release). This leads me to the conclusion that Samsung is up to much greater achievements. Samsung’s telecom chief Gee Sun Choi said Samsung was going to catch up with market leader Nokia, which sold 100 million mobile phones Q2 2007. If Samsung is serious about achieving this goal, and I’m sure it is, the company must get into the Chinese mass market, but China is a highly competitive market where Nokia and Motorola are still the market leaders and where lots of local brands have gained the trust of Chinese consumers.
Patent firm Polaris IP has sued, well… the Internet? Maybe not the entire Internet, but Polaris IP has sued Google, Yahoo, Amazon/A9.com, AOL, Borders and IAC/Ask.com. I don’t know any details and I don’t know what exactly their patent covers, which is for an “Automatic Message Interpretation and Routing System”, but it’s interesting to see that Polaris IP has the nerve to fight some of the biggest players on the Internet.
When Jim woke up early in the morning he did not know that this was to be the most fucked up day in his life.
Curious? Stay with me then.
Mark Cuban’s thoughts, and he has a point:
Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.
(…)
Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn’t the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.
I’ve been a supporter of this theory for a long time. People usually tend to ignore the good they could do to larger number of people when they find themselves confronted with the bad luck of an individual, and in most cases they decide to help the individual. Paradox there, of course. Yet, that’s how people act and it is what they say is noble, too.
In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Clive Thompson makes a thought-provoking claim: Geeks like Bill Gates are better suited to understand the world’s problems than non-geeks.
I couldn’t agree more. While most people would help a single stranger who has been hit by a bad blow of fate, they’re just as good at ignoring the equally bad or worse situations of millions. People who can think in giant numbers, on the other hand, are more likely to see the misery of the masses in Africa, for example.
“The problem isn’t a moral failing: It’s a cognitive one. We’re very good at processing the plight of tiny groups of people but horrible at conceptualizing the suffering of large ones,” says Thompson. “The guy [Bill Gates] is practically a social cripple, and at times he has seemed to lack human empathy. But he’s also a geek, and geeks are incredibly good at thinking concretely about giant numbers. Their imagination can scale up and down the powers of 10 — mega, giga, tera, peta — because their jobs demand it. So maybe that’s why he is able to truly understand mass disease in Africa. We look at the huge numbers and go numb. Gates looks at them and runs the moral algorithm: Preventable death = bad; preventable death x 1 million people = 1 million times as bad.“
Pan’s Labyrinth, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is one of the more interesting fantasy movies that made it to the big screen in the last few years. It’s a movie that is fascinating, because it ropes you into a world that is both as beautiful as a fairy tale and sadistic. Here’s the trailer:
