Rochelle King: Your Biggest Rival is Your Best Asset

In our jobs, family life, and social circles, conflict is difficult to manage. In this 99U Talk, Spotify's Global VP of Design Director Rochelle King reminds us that tension is essential in any creative endeavor. Instead of running from confrontation King says, "the biggest thing that I've learned about dealing with conflict is that it's fundamentally about the mindset. Explicitly embracing conflict actually allowed me to take control of it."

16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans ends 2015 with a recap of sorts of his research by presenting 16 mobile theses (and corresponding posts.):

1. Mobile is the new central ecosystem to tech.
2. Mobile is the internet.
3. Mobile isn’t about small screens and PCs aren’t about keyboards - mobile means an ecosystem and that ecosystem will swallow ‘PCs’.
4. The future of productivity.
5. Microsoft's capitulation
6. Apple & Google both won, but it's complicated. 
7. Search and discovery.
8. App and the web.
9. Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time.
10. Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers. 
11. The unclear future of Android and the OEM world. 
12. Internet of Things.
13. Cars.

14: TV and the living room

The tech industry spent a quarter-century trying to get to the TV set to take it online - that was going to be the mass-market computer. Now it looks like this might finally be happening, but it’s almost a side-show - Microsoft declared Xbox is no longer a strategic asset, TVs are accessories to the smartphone, and it’s the smartphone, not the TV or PC, that delivered the computing revolution and took computing into the living room. 

15. Watches.
16. Finally, we are not our users. 

Go to his blog and read all of them, it is an important rabbit hole to fall into. 
 

The 14th thesis resonated with me as I begin the year pondering television, filmed content, advertising and technology and how they are not so much converging but running on parallel tracks that sometimes touch and often depend on each other for survival. 

The birth of the web

CERN takes a look at the beginning of the web and how it flourished because the original software was made public domain: 

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine - the original web server - is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world's first website to its original address.

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open licence, as a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. Through these actions, making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

The very first web site. 

Know When to Stop Checking Your Phone and Go to Sleep

By now we’ve all heard the importance of getting enough sleep. Yet many of us let our technology sabotage us getting a good night’s rest. Research has found that anxiety, due to fear of missing out, plays a major role in how we (mis)use our devices. A majority of smartphone users feel uncomfortable if they aren’t in direct contact with their phones 24/7/365, even waking up to check their phones at night. To reduce your nighttime anxiety and get the sleep you need, practice not reacting to your phone’s notifications. Simply don’t check your phone every time it beeps. Try to check your phone only every 15 minutes, then every 30 minutes, then every hour. Once you build up your tolerance, try not checking your phone at all at night. Or if you’re still struggling, keep your phone outside your bedroom at night. It’s unlikely you’re missing something that important.

Source: Adapted from “Relax, Turn Off Your Phone, and Go to Sleep,” by Larry Rosen

Alex Blumberg: Your Best Selling Points Are the Mistakes You've Made

Startups often have "creation myths" about their early days. But real life is much messier than that. To prove this, former This American Life producer Alex Blumberg recorded nearly every painstaking moment in creating his new podcasting company, Gimlet Media. With plenty of audio examples, Blumberg highlights the ups and downs of turning your creative art into a business, culminating in a cringe-worthy pitch to a venture capitalist.

"The story that you tell, it's like you're killing it all the time," says Blumberg. "But deep inside every single person who has ever tried to start a business, I'm sure, has had a pitch like that—if not worse."