Yoick - Hightechwire

OK, so when I out running or mountain biking, my Garmin 305 tells me to pick up the pace or slow down when I’m going to fast, but my music is piped full on, all the time.

Now there’s a solution:

PersonalSoundtrack, a tiny wearable computer, detects your walking or running speed and plays songs from your music library that match your pace. Song speed is adjusted in real-time to match subtle variations in your gait, while larger, deliberate pace changes cause the device to change songs. You simply put it on and begin moving; that’s it.

Most computational devices require the user to adapt to the machine. PersonalSoundtrack offers, instead, a symbiotic relationship: both human and machine actively adapt to each other in real-time. The ‘interface’ is one’s natural gait. There is no optimal or pre-defined experience, encouraging meandering, wasting time, and loitering.

Gotta love it! Well done Greg Elliot - but can I upload this onto my sunglasses? 

There’s a great article on  Guardian Unlimited titled, Can Britian produce a success like YouTube?…this could be replaced by numerous aspirants around the globe - including my home country, Australia.

The answer is…absolutely. I would be surprised if we don’t see more success stories from outside the Valley.

The trick though is to produce a pipeline of successful [YouTubes/Skypes/Googles] …and that requires a bit more deep thinking …especially around the ability to find a replicable model.

My theory revovles around having a solid clay pit with enough resources to allow one to throw clay against the “consumer” wall - quickly and relatively unformed, an alphaworks which incorporates a sufficiently discerning alpha evangelist userbase/community who can reliably advise what will work and what needs to fall back into the clay pit.

I’ve been struggling to come up with a definitive term for such a clay pit - incubator doesn’t resonate, development studio is so ’95, but the term I keep glomming onto is “maketank”.

Interested in thoughts on developing this meme…

According to Michael Arrington,

Blog networks are hot investments right now, particularly as they continue to take traffic from established (and high-overhead) news websites.

We’ve covered a few blogpires gaining venture investment recently, including GigaOm, B5 and PaidContent and definitely agree with The Crunch that this an area worthy of focus. Michael’s post covers the investment by Sequoia in Sugar Publishing.

Key points to watch out for are:

• differentiation - as more and more blog networks emerge (remember, it doesn’t take much effort to build a swathe of blogs) the ability of a network to rise above and garner attention will be key;
• retention - blog followers can be fickle, it doesn’t take much for them to switch their attention, so look for unique ways of keeping readers coming back;
• growth rate - make sure you check on the veracity of customer acquisition …the numbers should show astronomical, sustained growth.

and if you want to participate in the burgeoning Yoickpire ….give us a yoick!