Chris Anderson: Follow the Money

In this 99u talk, 3D Robotics founder Chris Anderson shares three lessons he learned transitioning from Wired Magazine editor to helming a 275-person drone company. From “paying” his children in juice for assembling the early prototypes to building a massive factory in Mexico, Anderson’s journey was random and often accidental. But thanks to some healthy ignorance, open source technology, and some rising tech trends, Anderson’s new venture is a successful one, boasting over 100,000 customers.

The key for building a company, he says, is to not wait. Ride the tides of community and macro trends, and keep iterating. “Everything we learned about manufacturing, about the products, we learned by actually doing it.”

Meet The Man Who Saved Apple

Patrick Hanlon profiles Craig Tanimoto for Forbes:

Lee Clow, Chiat/Day’s worldwide creative director and one of the creators of ‘1984’ came into the room. He walked along the walls looking at ideas, pausing at some and totally dismissing others. He was looking very quickly to get an overview of the work. When he came up to Tanimoto’s campaign he stopped and looked.

He turned to Tanimoto and said. “Shouldn’t it be ‘Think Differently’?”

“No,” answered Tanimoto.

Clow thought about it for a minute and agreed. “You’re right.” He turned to the group and announced, “Everyone’s working on this. I want to blow this execution out.”

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive

The New York Times: 

NYPL Labs, started in 2011, has been known for experimental projects aimed at spurring users’ own tweaks and remixes. One scholar used its What’s on the Menu? project, which enlisted library users to transcribe its collection of 45,000 New York City restaurant menus, to create a new “data curation” of the collection. An engineer at Google has created a Google Cardboard application for its Stereogranimator, a program designed to mimic the proto-3-D effects of old-fashioned stereogram viewers.

Items from the digital collections have also found their way into projects like Urban Scratch-Off, a “map hack” that lets users scratch an aerial photograph of New York, lottery-ticket style, to reveal aerial shots of the city in 1924, and Mapping Cholera, which tracks an 1832 epidemic using geodata harvested from maps belonging to the library.

The new release will “reduce friction and make it even easier for people to get their hands on out-of-copyright material” owned by the library, Mr. Vershbow said.

25 Years: How the Web began

25 years ago there was the Internet, but there was no Web. Then, Tim Berners-Lee proposed creating an Internet-based hypertext system and the Web was on its way. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols revisits the history: 

In 25 years we've gone from the Web being little more than a thought experiment to where we keep up with our friends on Facebook, where we get all our news, and we sit down in front of our Internet-connected TVs every night to watch Netflix movies. Indeed, had I dreamed where the Web would take us today in the early 90s I too would never have believed it.

The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable

The year's most notable directors join for The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable. The directors include Quentin Tarantino ('The Hateful Eight'), Tom Hooper ('The Danish Girl'), Alejandro G. Inarritu ('The Revenant'), Ridley Scott ('The Martian'), Danny Boyle ('Steve Jobs') and David O. Russell ('Joy').