Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

-More at Newsweek

Seems we’ve gotten a little too comfortable in our success as of late. I think its time we bucked down as a country and stop being so lazy.

Word of mouth is casual, yet the active sharing of brand – positive or negative experience with a good or service. Virality is causal, yet the passive compound effect of interconnections being maxed out.

Word of mouth doesn’t scale. Virality does.

Read the rest of a great article about the difference between word of mouth and virality from Andrew Weissman’s blog.

A night shot from the archives. Look for more photography to come

Dear Nintendo,

We’ve been in a business relationship for quite a while now, and to be honest, I never used to have any complaints about my job. I mean sure, my line of work has never really been considered “easy” by any means, but in the early days it just felt so much more… rewarding.

Do you get what I’m saying guys? I wasn’t too fond of chasing a huge ape up a series of ladders, but with that fine-ass Pauline waiting for me, I didn’t mind. Same thing with running around Mushroom Kingdom, I don’t mind taking out a few Koopas since I know Peach is going to be waiting for me. (“At another castle”…God that joke gets so old)

But recently, you’ve been forcing me to do shit that just isn’t in my job description. I remember the first time Shigeru called me up. “Yo Mario, wanna go to a party? How about 8 of them?” And of course I said yes. That’s because my idea of a party is knockin back a few cold ones with some buds, some drinking games with the ladies, and maybe Superbad. But no, you twisted fucks’ idea of a party is to have me and all the assholes I hate run around in circles for twenty minutes. That’s not a party, that’s a track and field meet. Which brings me to my next point.

Have you seen my waistline in the last few years? I would assume not, because you’ve got me playing more sports than Michael Jordan. What on God’s green Earth gives you the slightest thought that I would make a good soccer player? Have you seen how long a fucking soccer field is? It’s rediculous. While we’re talking about rediculous things, whose bright idea was it for me to compete in Olympic events against Sonic of all people? He was about to retire anyways, but no Nintendo, you just had to bring him back and have him compete against me in track events. What were you thinking? He runs so fast you can’t see his fucking feet.

Finally, as I’m sure you’re all well aware, for most of my life, the enemies I have faced have all been relatively tame, being dispatched with a simple jump or three at the most. Now you want to take me and make me battle to the death against a man with a gun? I can punch him, he can shoot fucking bullets at me! You’re all assholes, I hate you.

Die in a Fire,
Mario

Via Seamantics.com (their site is currently down though.)

What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth.

What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.

And while mobile platforms have been around for a while, they never really gained passionate traction. Palm sorta had it for a while. Windows Mobile has been getting better. RIM is the current choice for business email on the go.

But just like there were a lot of players in the portable music space, there were no clear leaders. Until Apple came to town.

The same thing is happening today in the mobile space. Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian. They’ve been players, but no one has broken out big. No one has managed to grab both the business and consumer markets like Windows did on the desktop. Until Apple came to town. At least that’s my prediction.

Apple has the superior product, the big momentum, the cool, the lust, the business hooks, the consumer hooks, the customer experience, the interface, the design (interface and industrial), the smooth development environment, the vision.

And, maybe the secret key to it all, they have the commercial platform that makes it possible for a developer to actually sell, distribute, and update their software with the flip of a switch. And don’t forget the customer experience revolution — buying and it-just-works installation of iPhone software will be as one-click easy as buying music from the iTunes store. It’s all wrapped into one beautiful package. A package that only Apple can deliver.

This is brand new big shit. It all started today.

Via 37signals.

While I don’t quite agree with the 20 year part, I do feel like this is going to up the competition bar for a lot of other companies. With this SDK (Software Development Kit- Lets people make their own programs) release, Apple is now in the Business Enterprise market and will put even heavier competition on Blackberries. It dosn’t stop there though, Apple could now be a direct competitor for mobile gaming platforms. I feel like they could very easily turn into the wii of mobile gaming. Apple has a piece of hardware that has touchscreen, accelerometer, camera, microphone, stereo sound, hardware video acceleration, vibration and a keyboard – not much that you couldn’t make with that.

I’m very excited to see where this goes. And my regrets of going to the iPhone from my Blackberry Curve vanished back when they added IMAP e-mail support.

I picked them up day of and listed them. By the end of the auctions I had made nearly 1000 dollar in excess of my own PS3 purchase. I ended up listing my own machine as well, as the demand was insane. All told, I cleared nearly 2000 dollars in profit. I still haven’t bought a PS3 actually.

I received death threats, e-mails from people saying I was “a monster” and someone claiming I was “selling her child’s Christmas away!” Someone even went so far as to contact Ebay and claim I was selling porn. People were livid at the profit being made.

Read the rest of the story here.

In other news, I’ve finally got my house re-arranged for the winter. The bed is once again coming back into the living room due to heating issues. I’ve got this wonderful heater in the floor that dosn’t do a very good job of distributing the mass amount of heat it puts out. It’s also incredibly difficult to re-light the pilot light on it.

Here’s some pictures of the new room setup.

The TV is over where the bed was last year. Also notice the sweet speaker stands that took forever to build.

Evidently Verizon has a little problem with their new FIOS service. They seem to burn down a majority of the houses they install it in.

Not that I want my house burned down.. but I can’t wait until this comes to my area. Plus by then they should be able to get it installed with maybe just minimal smoke damage.

This is a video my friends and I put together. Last summer was the first time I’ve tried wakeskating and I have to admit, it was a lot of fun.

The idea of wakeskating is similar to wakeboarding, but there are no bindings. You wear shoes and basically just ride on a piece of wood while getting pulled by a seadoo or boat.

I picked up on it pretty quickly, but must admit I’m not anywhere near as talented as Jeff and Matt (the other two guys in the video)

And also if you haven’t heard about the new blog I’m running go over and check out Words.ThePhotoboothCompany.com might be some fun stuff there too.

They hadn’t and it worked very easily on the display model. I thought it was a little funny, so I took a picture of the phone and uploaded it to flickr. The internets took over from there.

I made the front page of Digg yesterday

Was on the unofficial apple weblog

Macenstein site that published to digg

And to clear up a lot of rumors about this picture, it is not photoshopped, it is not fake, and is infact an apple store phone.

I see no issue with doing this, as the phones are meant to be played with, and I did nothing but go to a website in safari on the phone. So all the people yelling about vandalism need to quiet down.

I’m guessing that by this time tomorrow my 5 minutes of internet fame will be over.

A Vision Of Students Today

20/20 Report on “Stupid in America”

Here is some quick info for you ebayers.

Link to a lot of info on how to become successful selling on ebay.

ebook about the same topic for download.

there… go read and become a better ebayer.

via Seth