Apple Receives AFB’s Prestigious Helen Keller Achievement Award – June 2015

In case you missed it: Apple is making great strides forward in terms off accessibility and usability of their devices. This doesn’t just help people with special needs, this makes usage of the devices easier for everyone!

AccessWorld: Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired is a monthly periodical for anyone who uses or wants to use assistive technology, provides technology training, has students or clients who use technology, needs to make purchasing decisions, or wants to keep abreast of technological trends and events.

Source: Apple Receives AFB’s Prestigious Helen Keller Achievement Award – AccessWorld® – June 2015

Thank you, Taylor Swift! Apple Reverses Course, Will Pay Artists During Apple Music Free Trial – Mac Rumors

Thank you Taylor Swift! Very much and without any sarcastic connotation.

Bringing this issue to the general public’s’ attention was (is!) important. Managing to do it the way you did, saving both yours and Apples face is no small feat and a testament to your diplomatic ability.

I can only hope that more high profile artists choose to make the improvement of the reality of the contemporary middle class music industry workers the central message when talking about compensation. It is so vital for the tech industry to start to understand that while they think they are fighting a fight against the behemoth that the labels and their huge catalogs are, they are really hurting the small, middle class industry and their individual service people that are in control of their business themselves.

And as a side note: in the case of tech vs music industry the economic principle of substitution is not the issue. Because listeners aren’t substituting one song for another one, they are merely substituting the technical way of receiving the same song.

Again. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Source: Apple Reverses Course, Will Pay Artists During Apple Music Free Trial – Mac Rumors

Does technology really create freedom?

Mail Freedom

Today I dropped of two letters that my 6-year old daughter wrote yesterday. She created the envelopes herself using old magazine pages.

This got me thinking once again about technology and the common claim, that technology inevitably leads to more freedom. Ttry to write an Email to someone using your headers and formatting instructions that you designed.

I understand that in the interest of interoperability and basic digital computing instructions premises that it’s important to come up with standards of communications. And it does have its perils if everybody is on the same page.

But some freedom is lost when you’re not able to just stick a stamp on it and send it off.

Please post links to other creative packaging in the comments.

Startups: Innovation Through Inferiority!

I know I write this too often, but I’ve been thinking exactly what this article puts into the right words. Disruption is all fine and dandy, but what does it really do for a society and especially the middle class?

What this means is that Silicon Valley venture-backed startup companies generally make worse, not better products. Their main advantage is that they are cheaper and therefore more accessible to the average person, which enables populist-sounding marketing. So Airbnb is cheaper but worse than a hotel; blogs are cheaper but worse than newspapers; user-generated content in general is free but worse than professionally produced content.

Startups: Innovation Through Inferiority!.