David Barboza, for the NYTimes on company, Xiaomi, the Apple Knock-off Extraordinaire of China:

China is notorious for its knockoffs. But now comes a knockoff of one of the gods of American ingenuity: Steven P. Jobs.
In a country where products like iPhones are made but rarely invented, Lei Jun — entrepreneur, billionaire and professed Jobs acolyte — is positioning himself and his company as figurative heirs of Mr. Jobs. The Chinese media have nicknamed his company, Xiaomi, the “Apple of the East.”

The title is a stretch, by almost any measure. But Mr. Lei nonetheless is carefully cultivating a Jobsian image here, right down to his jeans and dark shirts. He is also selling millions of mobile phones that look a lot like iPhones. Chinese consumers — and deep-pocketed investors overseas — seem to be believers.

And yet Mr. Lei’s biggest believer may be himself. He bounds onto podiums to introduce new cellphones. He proclaims things that may, to many, sound outlandish. For instance:

“We’re making the mobile phone like the PC, and this is a totally new idea,” Mr. Lei, Xiaomi’s chief executive, said during an interview at the company’s spacious, high-rise headquarters here. “We’re doing things other companies haven’t done before.”
It brings to mind a quote I love by fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto:
Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.
Yamamoto is absolutely right. All creative people—artists, musicians, writers, designers, athletes—all start out by imitating their idols. This is how you learn. Copying is a meaning to an end with most creatives, true creatives.
For people like Lei Jun though, copying seems to be the end, not the means. There’s no desire to try and copy Apple with the intention to at some point leap-frog them and do something better.
At least with Android there’s are clear lines of departure between it and iOS. Android started life copying iOS very closely, but because the philosophies of Google and Apple differ so much, Android has charted it’s own hackable, “open”, ad-monetized course.
Imagine what Xiaomi is doing with aping Apple’s product and software design in any other industry. Imagine Kia copying the design of the 458 Italia by Ferrari. Or if Nickleback decided to clone the sound of Radiohead and call themselves TelevisionLegs. You can do these things, but it doesn’t make it right or admirable.
I can’t respect posers.

In her March 2013 TED Talk, Amanda Palmer asked not how we make people pay for music, but how we let them.
What a great talk.

I’m in the process of weeding through all my starred links in Google Reader before the service shuts down next month.
This meaning I’ll be posting a lot of links you might have already seen. Or haven’t seen.
The thing about great links is they usually have an solid shelf-life.

via The Dugan

@whoisgambles

Screen Junkies presents mechanics on the mechanics of Fast & Furious

I’m a documentary junkie, and this one looks good.

CNN reports a group of men who devoted their lives to hunting powerful storms died in the middle of the chase.
How can you feel bad about a story like this? These crazy motherfuckers died doing what they loved to do: chase tornadoes.

Last week everyone was talking about Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report which she presented at the D11 Conference on Monday.
A lot of the content in the report is information we nerds and geeks already know about the Internet and computers and mobile devices, but there’s also a lot of eye-opening information.
The slide that stood out the most to me was this one:

I’m 36-years-old so I remember the left side image. I’ve experienced the right-hand side too.
This isn’t a post to talk about how the future is doomed for the kids today. Every generation says that. The kids are going to be fine. Millenials are going to be fine. Hipsters are going to be fine. Everyone is going to figure shit out.
… but it is worth noting the differences between both scenes above.
In the 1990’s photo, the audience has a one-to-one connection with the musicians on stage. It’s direct, focused and visceral. It’s how I experienced every concert in high school and college.
In the 2010’s photo, the connection is no longer one-to-one between the audience and the performers. A middleman has been inserted between the two sides. What this means is the priority is to capture a great version of what’s happening, not to experience the performance. I know this because I’m guilty of pulling out my iPhone and recording bits at concerts in recent years. It’s a tempting and easy thing to do, but I’ve quickly found myself feeling like a cameraman doing a job and not a guy at a concert enjoying a great band with my friends, beer in hand.
Keep this in mind next time you’re at a event. I’m not saying ban yourself from recording anything (if it’s allowed), but limit it. Make sure you’re you’re taking in the experience with all your senses.
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather remember going to a great concert, than remember recording a great concert, ignoring the band and my friends (and my beer) in the process.

via

Newt Gingrich is having problems with calling these crazy contraptions “smartphones” (via The Verge):

To call this a “cell phone” or a “handheld computer” fails to capture the change that has taken place. It is a change in kind, not just a change in scale, and just as drivers of the earliest cars called them “horseless carriages”, our language has not caught up.

So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.
Hey dumbass, the automobile was indeed called the horseless carriage first, but what do we call those crazy vehicles with tires and steering wheels now? I believe the word is “car” and that’s short for “carriage”. And that spot in front of the steering wheel you put your Newt Gingrich bobble head figure? That flat area? I believe that’s called the “dashboard” because back in the horse carriage days, horses would “dash” and kick mud and shit up on the people in the carriage, so a board was required to shield people.
The point is, there’s a lot of things that should be keeping Newt up at night, but renaming the smartphone should not be one of them.
I can think of a whole bunch of more pressing issues he should be tackling.

BGR on Microsoft still not getting the whole tablet thang:

Windows-based tablets haven’t been big successes so far, whether they use the desktop-centric Windows 8 or the tablet-centric Windows RT. iMore’s Rene Ritchie does some sharp analysis of Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign and concludes that the company simply does not understand why people are buying tablets in the first place. Essentially, Microsoft doesn’t get that its central criticism of the iPad — that is, that it’s more of a toy that can’t be used for doing serious work — is precisely why consumers are drawn to it in the first place. Simply put, consumers have PCs at their offices if they want to do work. When they’re at home, they want to play around with their tablets instead; they like having toys.
As Clay Christiansen famously points out in The Innovator’s Dilemma, most innovations aren’t taken seriously when they debut and by the time they gain momentum, it’s usually too late for competition to respond. My favorite one was when people in the media and some people in the government thoughts the Internet a fad back in the 1990s.
The iPad might look like a toy because kids love them, but when I’m on business trips I see iPads being used in first class seats and then I see them again when I’m in client meetings at Fortune 500 companies.

via Head Like An Orange

Via my brother, MarkMulvey.
He sorts through 95% of the shitty music out there to find the good stuff.
So you don’t have to.
Welcome.