[JonMyers]

I’ve been following this Kickstarter and noticed the project lost about 25k in value (assuming my browser hasn’t done some weird caching) – I figured this was the place to ask.

Anyone know what happened?

[JonMyers]

@CandleLab – there’s some really good advice here. Walker’s advice is spot on about the pre-ordering customer concept.

I’ve observed while movies, and some other types of media see their funding goals reached on Kickstarter, the campaigns that generally have the most success are products. Thus, the pre-ordering. People are probably more likely to pre-order products over experiences.

My buddies Jimmy and Doug recently killed it with their campaign to raise money for their backpack. I’ve been privy to its development from the beginning. Their campaign took a year and a half to execute on, along with lots of press strategy and outreach at launch.

It’s a lot of hard work.

Aside from the hard work it takes to execute a successful campaign, creating incentives or products that would be appealing to people outside of Columbus and your fan base might be a challenge. Old Familiar did it, but they started with a solid product that had mass appeal.

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Another option – you could just roll your own crowdfunding[/url] site and host the campaign yourself.

[JonMyers]

Check out the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.

It’s an excellent exploration of artificial intelligence, and how we define the very nature of intelligence itself.

[JonMyers]

I switched over to Feedly. The service has been down. I’m assuming it’s the rush of people from Google Reader.

I like the visual design of the Feedly iPhone/ iPad apps. Nice clean white space, good text/ line height proportions, it has nice typography, and the visual presentation makes articles feel like a magazine. A la Flip app.

The user experience is a little clunky in my opinion. Navigating articles is goofy. There’s no real (infinite) scrolling in article groups. You can gesture through article groups (i.e., design), flipping the pages upward, but the pages tile and groups snap to the bottom of the page then disappear, which means the bottom of your hand is always covering articles at the bottom. Thus, you’re constantly moving your hand away to read article titles at the bottom. Again, wonky, and not really well thought out for the use case of skimming lots of articles quickly.

If you use the NYTimes iPad app (the UX they likely boosted), you’ll know what I mean.

It’s the best solution out there right now, but no where near perfect.

[JonMyers]

You commit three felonies a day:

The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.

More:

In response to a question about what happens to big company CEOs who refuse to go along with government surveillance requests, John Gilmore offers a [url=https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/008815.html]case study[/url] in what Silverglate is talking about.

We know what happened in the case of QWest before 9/11. They contacted the CEO/Chairman asking to wiretap all the customers. After he consulted with Legal, he refused. As a result, NSA canceled a bunch of unrelated billion dollar contracts that QWest was the top bidder for. And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put him in prison for insider trading — on the theory that he knew of anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for the government, while the public didn’t because it was classified and he couldn’t legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock knowing those things.

This CEO’s name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he’s still serving a trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

[b]You combine this with the uber-surveillance allegedly being undertaken by the NSA and other governmental agencies and you’ve got a system for more or less automatically accusing any US citizen of a felony.[/b]

http://kottke.org/13/06/you-commit-three-felonies-a-day

[JonMyers]

Bingham said:
Why is everyone fucking trying to gang up on Obama? It’s Bush’s goddamn fault to begin with!

Obama is somewhat irrelevant in this case.

Establishing “fault” means nothing, and the political finger pointing is a bit baffling. Perhaps that’s the social engineering at work. We’re taking the bait. At any rate, not being skeptical could be the kiss of death.

Once your personal data is stored (it already is being stored, just not centralized), mined, profiles are formed, and patterns of behavior are established (real or not), you simply cannot predict how that information will be used or by whom in the future.

This is the danger.

How will this be used in the future?

It can be used for personal grudges, political maneuvering, blackmail and lots of mistakes will be made. It will be used in this fashion. This is the narrative of this planet, which is as old as time – see Joseph Campbell.

Power corrupts.

Once the Utah Data Center comes on line this September the reach and scope of this will undoubtedly intensify.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

You don’t have to be a tinfoil hatted paranoid to grasp the threat to personal liberty the unchecked monitoring, interception of our digital lives, storage and profiling of citizens presents.

Everyone should be very concerned.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve done nothing wrong.

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I’m not saying all the interception and storage of digital communications is bad. Not all of it is bad, there are (tons of) legitimate security reasons, but the lack of transparency around this matter should be alarming to everyone.

—

Lastly, another crux of the matter imo is how and why was this information leaked in this fashion. The timing of this with the visit of the Chinese president to the US is probably not a coincidence.

Read between the lines here. There is plenty of international gamesmanship at play.

This stuff isn’t exactly new. The scope, sophistication and complexity is just deepening:

[JonMyers]

Snarf said:
New York is a constant buzzkill these days.

It’s so…generic and unwelcoming. For a big city I’d rather visit Toronto or something.

+1 – I don’t miss it.

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AirBnb is awesome. I’ve used it in a lot of places from NYC to Thailand to Chile.

As with most disruptions incumbents bribe politicians to legislate out of existence, this won’t make it go away. It will just force it more underground.

[JonMyers]

I also agree that blogs are here to stay.

What is dying is formulaic blog posts and content. There’s a saturation of the 450 word posts, the list posts, the “why you shouldn’t do x posts, review posts, infographics, and so on.

With more and more people adopting tablet devices, there’s a growing market for better researched, long form content.

The blogs with more staying power may likely better serve this audience with long form content, and be the source, the mini-university for their respective niches.

[JonMyers]

asil said:
What is anyone using as a PayPal alternative on eBay? I’d taken an eBay break for a while but have been selling again recently. So far I haven’t had any issues – as a seller payments have been showing up immediately, I move them to my bank account immediately, funds show in a few days as always, no problem. But this new policy is wack and I’d like to start looking into other options just in case.

I use Stripe[/url] as an alternative to Paypal. It’s awesome.

I ditched both my merchant account (costly fees) and Paypal (sketchy policies, pain in the ass).

I don’t think you can use Stripe directly on eBay, but you can use third party clouding accounting software like Ronin[/url] to generate a secure payment form your clients/ customers can pay through or just run your own auctions with Auctionful [/url]and Stripe.

[JonMyers]

Parking

[JonMyers]

Another cool use for your iPad is the app – Air Display.

It allows you to extend your laptop’s display to the iPad as a second screen.

It’s great if you need extra screen real-estate, want to work in a cafe, and are used to using a second screen.

[JonMyers]

Ohh yeah, definitely.

With the companies and now startups around Columbus, there’s a nice market for creative services in general.

I know this thread is more focused on graphic designers, whom I presume are doing illustrations, print work and so on. It would be cool to see a list of visual designers (interface) for web and mobile applications here as well.

A lot of designers do double duty on the above, but I thought it was worth mentioning given how broad ‘design’ and graphic design tends to be.

[JonMyers]

Anti- yeah, regulators have already sprung into action. This probably isn’t a bad thing:

The U.S. is applying money-laundering rules to “virtual currencies,” amid growing concern that new forms of cash bought on the Internet are being used to fund illicit activities.

The Treasury says money-laundering rules apply to ‘virtual currencies.’

The U.S. is applying money-laundering rules to “virtual currencies,” amid growing concern that new forms of cash bought on the Internet are being used to fund illicit activities. Jeffrey Sparshott reports.

The move means that firms that issue or exchange the increasingly popular online cash will now be regulated in a similar manner as traditional money-order providers such as Western Union Co. They would have new bookkeeping requirements and mandatory reporting for transactions of more than $10,000.

Moreover, firms that receive legal tender in exchange for online currencies or anyone conducting a transaction on someone else’s behalf would be subject to new scrutiny, said proponents of Internet currencies.

The rising popularity of virtual currencies, while no more than a drop in the bucket of global liquidity, is being fueled by Internet merchants, as well as users’ concerns about privacy, jitters about traditional currencies in Europe and the age-old need to move money for illicit purposes.

Web Money Gets Laundering Rule

[JonMyers]

I don’t know on that point. Although not completely analogous, with El Chapo, Russian mobsters, and every other criminal syndicate holding massive amounts of dollars the same could be said.

myliftkk said:
If RMM (that’s Russian Mobster Money not Rockmaster, btw) is moving to Bitcoin, that one more reason not to use it period.

[JonMyers]

Yeah, I have definitely heard of it for trade in illegal goods, then again, cash and cellphones enable the exchange of illegal goods as well.

With more inevitable banking collapses, currency devaluations and bankrupt governments, it will be interesting to see if Bitcoin will get more legitimacy and buy-in as time goes on.

[Author]

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