What I Learned from Trying to Innovate at The New York Times

John Geraci in Harvard Business Review:

The Times is a perfect example of company-as-organism. Employees at the Times rarely go offsite for lunch or meetings. When you work there, your network is inside the building. That’s where all of the action is, where the valuable information is traded, where the battles are fought, and where the victories are won. When the Core Team or the Newsroom Team or the Beta Team finds a solution, it is a Times solution. Naturally there are inputs and outputs to the company, but like an organism, these are discrete — a mouth, a nose, an ear. At the Times, the Strategy Team pursues and manages strategic relationships for the company, takes in the resources needed to stay alive, and channels those to the rest of the organism. It’s the model of the companies our fathers and mothers worked at. And it worked great for them.

But in today’s world, it doesn’t. Companies with the organism mindset are too slow to adapt to survive in the modern world. The world around them changes, recombines, evolves, and they are stuck with their same old DNA, their same old problems, their same old (failed) attempts at solutions.

The future of computing

The Economist on the evolving speed of computer hardware evolution:

IN 1971 the fastest car in the world was the Ferrari Daytona, capable of 280kph (174mph). The world’s tallest buildings were New York’s twin towers, at 415 metres (1,362 feet). In November that year Intel launched the first commercial microprocessor chip, the 4004, containing 2,300 tiny transistors, each the size of a red blood cell.

Since then chips have improved in line with the prediction of Gordon Moore, Intel’s co-founder. According to his rule of thumb, known as Moore’s law, processing power doubles roughly every two years as smaller transistors are packed ever more tightly onto silicon wafers, boosting performance and reducing costs. A modern Intel Skylake processor contains around 1.75 billion transistors—half a million of them would fit on a single transistor from the 4004—and collectively they deliver about 400,000 times as much computing muscle. This exponential progress is difficult to relate to the physical world. If cars and skyscrapers had improved at such rates since 1971, the fastest car would now be capable of a tenth of the speed of light; the tallest building would reach half way to the Moon.

The impact of Moore’s law is visible all around us. Today 3 billion people carry smartphones in their pockets: each one is more powerful than a room-sized supercomputer from the 1980s. Countless industries have been upended by digital disruption. Abundant computing power has even slowed nuclear tests, because atomic weapons are more easily tested using simulated explosions rather than real ones. Moore’s law has become a cultural trope: people inside and outside Silicon Valley expect technology to get better every year.

But now, after five decades, the end of Moore’s law is in sight. Making transistors smaller no longer guarantees that they will be cheaper or faster.

Original Apple Interface Designer Susan Kare at Layers Design Conference

Kare discusses her history with Apple and icon design.

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.”

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.