# The loonie turns 20 tomorrow.
# That baby on that Nirvana album is now this pimply dude who’s old enough to drive.
# I’m shopping at The Bay and they’re playing Salt ‘n Pepa through the PA system.
Month: June 2007
Disruptive innovation: 10 years later
It’s been ten years since Clayton Christensen published his seminal business book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. I had the good fortune to read it three years ago.
Newsweek sat down with Christensen this week to answer some lingering questions, discuss how the word “disruptive” has been used and abused over the years, and probe his predictions on whether Apple iPhone would disrupt the wireless market.
Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive.
Download Dezza’s Mac screensaver
A couple years ago while living in China and Hong Kong, my friend Dezza got bitten by the photo bug and began documenting his travels.
He’s gotten pretty good at it – his photos have been featured in JPG Magazine, among other publications – and now a collage of his photos is now available as an official Mac OSX screensaver on Apple.com.
Called People of the Middle Kingdom 1.0, it features, and I quote: “beautiful, positive, and thought provoking photography shot in China.” Nice going, Dezza!
I spy with my little eye on Google Maps
I know, you were just minding your own business. You were probably pensive and didn’t notice that tinted van driving past you that day. Even if you did, you definitely wouldn’t have guessed all those funny black boxes on its roof where rapid-fire panoramic cameras. And I bet you didn’t realize that, several months later, the population of the Internet – that’s some 6.5 billion people – can now look at you, and we’re blogging and caching and archiving and indexing you for all of eternity:
Maybe you got lost and you wanted to ask for directions. Or your car broke down and you want to use a phone. Or it’s for a friend…yeah that’s it, a friend. Or maybe hey, sometimes a Daniel Steele novel just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Google Street View currently covers a handful of American cities. So for the watched, it’s become a bit of a privacy concern. For those of us who live outside these cities, it’s simply been good fun watching you guys.
Don’t worry, we won’t tell.
Beware, our words are backed by cheese curds!
The work of Bitcasters and 2KGames in partnership with the Canadian Historical Society and Historical Canada comes this very unique way of learning Canadian colonial history – HistoriCanada, a free expansion pack for the PC game Civilization III: Conquests. They’re also donating 100,000 copies of Civ3 to high schools.
The game starts off in 1525, nine years before Cartier first lands in what is now known as Quebec. Setting the stage for the upcoming cultural collision, players get to play one of the seven First Nations, England or France, to fight for territory.
In this way, players can create their own alternate virtual history, based on real geographical and culture variables. Maybe a history where the Europeans are driven from the New World, or where the French becomes the dominant society. It’s a cool way to teach students that history is more than dates and places and people with funny hats. [via Shacknews]