Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- Amazing: Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice – The Next Web. "It took me a while to get around to watching this. At The Next Web, Microsoft demonstrated the results of research to stitch together several pieces of technology that are all now reaching maturity. Speech recognition, translation, text-to-speech dictation, and the use of snippets of someone’s voice to make another language sound like they’re speaking it. BabelFish analogies aside, this is remarkable stuff that might actually bring the world closer together. The fun starts at 7:30 if you’re lazy, but the explanation is interesting too." (Alistair for Hugh).
- Pinterest, You Are Drunk. "Nothing too serious for the holiday break. So here’s something a bit lighthearted. Pinterest makes it easy to collect pictures of things. So easy, in fact, that maybe sometimes you shouldn’t. I give you: Pinterest, you are drunk." (Alistair for Mitch).
- 10 Timeframes – Contents Magazine. "Paul Ford muses on time." (Hugh for Alistair).
- How We Think About Technology – The Atlantic. "A few weeks ago, Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, was looking for a way to make an ebook. I said: try PressBooks (disclosure: that’s my company!)… Alexis wanted to make a (free, giveaway) ebook of the best tech writing from The Atlantic from the past year. Here is that ebook… 334 pages of great tech writing – which you can download for free on your Kindle, or as a PDF, both formats built and published by Alexis using PressBooks." (Hugh for Mitch).
- Everything Is Marketing: How Growth Hackers Redefine The Game – Fast Company. "This is the kind of stuff that I have (obviously) been preaching for close to fifteen years now. Marketing is not just advertising and, because of the nature of digital, great ideas can come from coders too. This Fast Company article looks at people they call, ‘Growth Hackers’ – a hybrid of marketers and coders who are simply leveraging the tools and technology to get more people to use their products. From the article: ‘Run down the list of the web’s biggest start ups from Hotmail to AirBnB to Groupon to Spotify and you’ll see a startling fact: tactics that no one would have previously described as ‘marketing’ turned out to be the marketing steroids behind their business growth. For Hotmail, it was inserting an email signature at the bottom that turned every email sent by one of its users into a pitch for new users. For AirBnb, as Chen pointed out, it was Craigslist integration that allowed AirBnb hosts to use Craigslist as a sales platform. For Groupon (and Living Social) it was the ‘Refer 3 Friends, Get the Deal Free’ offer that paid users to share deals with their friends. And for Spotify, well, next time you’re on Facebook, consider for a second how much free ‘advertising’ they get by broadcasting the songs your friends have listened to.’ It’s a gem of a read and validates just how much marketing continues to evolve… and how many new and interesting opportunities exist to find new customers." (Mitch for Alistair).
- Is Lack of Space Killing Creativity? – Dharma Bytes. "This piece came to me via the always-perfect, Nilofer Merchant. We often joke that certain people may have too much space between their ears, but this article takes that thought to a whole new level. With each and every day, we get filled with everything from work, commute, family obligations, holiday shopping, Facebook updates, tweets and blog posts (like this one) that we may, in fact, be in a position where we simply don’t have enough space between our ears to let the creativity in to flow. You may call it ‘daily distractions,’ but we all need the physical and mental space to practice and exercise our creativity. Read this article. Think about it. Find some space." (Mitch for Hugh).
Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.