Asymco: It takes nearly $1 billion/yr to run iTunes

Maybe there’s a reason no one can beat iTunes.

For the last few months my team and I at Roundarch have been working with Bloomberg Sports on Decision Maker for iPad.We’re happy to announce it’s now live and available for purchase from Apple’s App Store.
Decision Maker is an application that lets you analyze any two NFL players using custom algorithms that determine who the optimal choice is.The player with the higher B-Score is the better bet that week. B-Score, the ‘Bloomberg’ Score, is based on factors that include his Performance, Opponent Matchup, Team Support and Game Conditions for that week.

We tackled the project holistically, from concept and Human Experience flow down to the user interface design, iconography and branding. One of the goals throughout the project was balancing simplicity and complexity. It had to be simple enough for novice fantasy players but also provide the complexity and details advanced fantasy players look for.
We encounter this simplicity as soon as the application loads – select a player from column 1 and one from column 2 (or use the auto-complete fields in the middle) and click ‘Run The Numbers’. Alternatively, you can refine your search from All NFL to just a position or team through the settings button at the top of each table.
Once we Run The Numbers, we’re taken to a head-to-head view of the results of our player comparison. Once again, we’re start out in the top half of the interface with the most essential information – do I sit this player or do I start this player?

As we move down to the lower half of the screen, we can view the details that make up the scores. Even for those who might not initially want to see or understand the data presented below, the interface is designed to encourage users to drill down and explore the various factors. Everything is tap-friendly and provides more context and information – from the risk/reward chart overlay to info tool tips, to radar chart tips.


A big thank you to everyone from Roundarch and Bloomberg Sports who made this application a reality.
iTunes App Store: Decision Maker – Football 2010 for iPad

The NYTimes asks, What Is It About 20-Somethings?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

This is a trap, right?

Microsoft is baiting me with their new commercial for Windows Phone 7.

Because they wouldn’t deliberately be presenting their new phone/phone OS as a mirage in the desert that declares, “The Revolution is coming”, right?

(via Electronista)

via Analogue

via Good Old Valves

BusinessInsider on The Difference Between Apple TV And Google TV:

Google wants to turn your TV into a computer. Apple says people specifically don’t want computers on their TV.

Bingo.
It’s the difference between a company run by engineers, and a company run by designers.

William Gibson, in an op-ed piece for the NYTimes:

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.