The Editorial Board of the Washington Post has weighed in on ICANN’s upcoming push to create more top-level domains. The Post is wondering what, exactly, is the point?

“A potential disaster,” declared Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz during a congressional hearing last week. An invitation to extortion, cried a coalition of businesses. A crippling blow, warned a group of nonprofits.

Who knows? It will definitely be a change, and it’s going to cost some coin. But for regular people, not corporations (although some consider them people, apparently), it remains to be seen whether it will matter all that much.

I don’t think Kickstarter is a great service because my project is up there. There’s some amazing projects up there. Lots of them.
I’ve already backed PenMoto, which is magnetic ring to hold your Wacom pen. If you use a Wacom tablet and pen, you need this. Just watch the video if you don’t believe me. The project successfully ended, but I have feeling they won’t turn you down if you try to buy one.
This morning I also backed Typestache Playing Cards. Some of the nicest playing cards I’ve seen. The creators claim these cards are being made to help promote their Typestache iPhone app. It’s ironic because I think the cards are the real product. While I know I’ll use playing cards over and over, I’m not sure how many times I’ll put typographic mustaches on people with my iPhone.
Twine also looks super cool. They say, “Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing.” And they’re already over 800% funded. Insane.
I wrote about Kickstarter around this time last year and I’m just as excited about it now.
I think about Kickstarter like I think about iOS. They’re both strong, well-designed platforms that attract the best talent. There aren’t just a few great applications on iOS and there aren’t just a few great projects on Kickstarter. There’s great work in every category on each platform.
Welcome to the new economy.

via

Instagram is one of the most used applications on my iPhone. So I was happy to see Apple pick them as iPhone App Of The Year for 2011.
Nate Bolt at TechCrunch boils down Instagram’s popularity to quality, audience and constraints (via Working Title).
So it pained me to read news like this one at CNet (via The Brooks Review):

“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.

The optimistic and delusional side of my brain read the CNet article in the context of the Android version of Instagram they’re working on. Having advertisements on Android is a natural thing – it’s how Google pays the bills. And it’s how Google encourages developers to pay their bills. But there’s other ways to pay the bills.
Right now Instagram is free. Maybe hindsight tells us even just charging $.99 would have been better than giving it away. Maybe charging for Instagram would have also prevented it’s rise in popularity. Maybe not.
My hope is that Instagram will figure out a classy way to integrate advertising that doesn’t disrupt the experience. Even better, offer a premium, ad-free version. I’d be willing to pay and I bet many others would be too.

via Letterology

via mds

buy art

Type-O-Matic markets themselves as “…the only confidential, hand-typed transcription and postal service with online ordering – on the planet.”
Below is one of the machines they draft letters on.

via Letterology

My Kickstarter poster project is now live, and I’ve explained the idea behind it, so now I thought I would share why the design is structured the way it is.
The Golden Spiral.
The Golden Spiral is created from the Fibonacci number sequence – 1, 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …
You’ve probably seen it before:

My friend and fellow Daily Exhaust contributor, Jory, was the one who suggested I use it. Like any tool, the golden ratio is only useful if you know how to use it. I knew how to use it, but initially I didn’t know where I should use it.
It also brought to mind an image I came across this past year of the Apple logo:

I thought it only fitting I use sacred geometry for someone like Steve Jobs. So I just laid the Golden Spiral graphic above over my original design and started experimenting with shapes. Eventually I ended up with this:

And if you flip the grid horizontally, you can see how I positioned the other elements:

Aside from the silhouette of Steve Jobs, every shape with the brain/gears group is positioned and sized according to this ratio. Every circle diameter corresponds to the size of each box within the grid:

Even without seeing the spiral grid laid on top of the design, the elements just feel balanced. In no way does it guarantee a beautiful design, but if it’s used right, it can make all the difference.

John Paczkowski at AllThingsD reveals Acer CEO J.T. Wang has a plan:

“We will shift our strategy to improving profitability from pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable products,” Wang told Dow Jones. “Ultrabooks will become our key growth driver next year as customers want a lighter, thinner notebook with longer battery life. Selling more ultrabooks will also help improve our profit margins as they command higher prices.”

So you were (still are) shipping cheap, unprofitable products?
I’m proud of you, Wang. Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.
I still find this whole ‘ultrabook’ category hilarious. Once ‘netbook’ became a bad word, PC makers needed a new word for the (supposedly) new category, when in reality it only came into being when they realized the MacBook Air was a serious threat to their laptop businesses.
This whole process to stop shipping crap could have been started years ago, but it seems PC makers are only interested in improving the quality of their products after they’ve bottomed out and their back is up against a wall.
Did I mention I’m tired of writing about Apple?