Posted by on under seeming paradox, video side, lten, previous products, screen technology, poor kids, video interview, r600, innovator, mary lou, cool thing, qi, olpc, dilemma, pixel, sunlight, improvements, toshiba, africa | 
viralMeme sends in a piece from OLPC News featuring a video interview with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepson. The interview goes over some of the improvements in the company's extremely power-eficient screen technology that will show up in the next generations of the OLPC. The article links a video side-by-side comparison among Pixel Qi, Kindle, and Toshiba R600 displays in sunlight and in shade; Pixel Qi is arguably more readable than Kindle, and in full color. Jepson refers to Clayton Christenson's 1997 classic The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining a seeming paradox in high-tech: why companies that listen to their customers aren't the ones that innovate. According to the article it's mainly because "the next big market isn't with your current customers. It's with a vastly larger group of would-be users who couldn't afford your previous products, or couldn't carry around the huge devices of previous generations." Jepson says "The cool thing about the Pixel Qi technology is, you know, poor kids in Africa got it first... It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tagi: seeming paradox, video side, lten, previous products, screen technology, poor kids, video interview, r600, innovator, mary lou, cool thing, qi, olpc, dilemma, pixel, sunlight, improvements, toshiba, africa
Posted by on under social networking site, japanese department, e store, medical purposes, sun damage, skin type, smoothness, beaten path, mica, dilemma, department stores, skin care, starters, philips, gadgets, audience, cameras |
We've already seen a few Japanese department stores employing
virtual makeover machines, and it looks like Philips is now hoping to bring a similar service to an even wider audience. Dubbed "Crystalize," the company's latest
off the beaten path device makes use of some cameras normally used for medical purposes to take extreme close-up shots of various parts of your face, which are then analyzed for four different conditions (skin type, redness, sun damage, and smoothness). That will apparently cost you $90, which will also get you recommendations for various products to improve your skin (for which Philips apparently doesn't receive any remuneration), and access to a social networking site for continuing service. For starters, however, the service will only be available at one store in Santa Monica, but Philips says it plans to make it available "across the world" in 2010. Video after the break.
Continue reading Philips' Crystalize service promises to cure your skin care dilemma
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Philips' Crystalize service promises to cure your skin care dilemma originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink |
Email this |
Comments
Tagi: social networking site, japanese department, e store, medical purposes, sun damage, skin type, smoothness, beaten path, mica, dilemma, department stores, skin care, starters, philips, gadgets, audience, cameras
Posted by on under film fight club, project mayhem, twitter, core idea, unfair advantage, main goal, follower, fight club, followers, fairness, dilemma, cares, ace, stern, lt, pers, credit card |
In the film
Fight Club (the book has a slightly different plot), the members of Project Mayhem's main goal is to blow up the buildings that contain credit card companies' records so that everyone's debt is reset to zero. (Yes, I know this wouldn't actually work, but never mind that for now.) Yesterday, two Twitter users,
Allen Stern and
Louis Gray, proposed the same idea for Twitter. That is to say, with the
new suggested users list (SUL) now in place, they'd like to see Twitter reset the follower counts of users (either just those that have been on the SUL in the past, or everyone) to zero, and start over. The core idea behind this is that anyone on the SUL leading up to the change has gotten an unfair advantage in terms of the number of followers they now have on Twitter. Leaving aside the fairness of it, it certainly is true that just about every person with over a million followers on the service only got that many because of the SUL. And while you may wonder why anyone cares about the number of followers they have, for some accounts, such as those tied to blogs, a huge number of followers is beneficial in terms of clicks coming into the site when links are tweeted out. TechCrunch has certainly benefitted from this, as have a number of other large blogs on the SUL.
Tagi: film fight club, project mayhem, twitter, core idea, unfair advantage, main goal, follower, fight club, followers, fairness, dilemma, cares, ace, stern, lt, pers, credit card
