All of these malls and choices seemed fun for a while, but Prime cult members have now won their freedom. They are opting for a simpler and more efficient form of consumption.

After the Cult of the Mac — the Cult of Amazon?

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“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

Great piece showing why it may be time to move past ad-based business models.

(via Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye)

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I’m delighted to see that Mozilla is fighting for user freedom again, and has broadened its thinking outside of Firefox, setting its priorities on identity and apps.

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In about 3 weeks, they completely changed their strategy — and now they’ve got significant traction and raised $40M more funding. I am amazed.

(thanks to Jean-Christophe Fann for the link)

Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

Each of these companies’ business models takes something from us — we just have to decide what we prefer to give away:

• Money,
• Freedom,
• Privacy.

Personally, I try to balance my “spending” between these companies (and others), to avoid relying too much on one supplier and sacrificing too much of either assets.

From my perspective, unless major breakthroughs are made in cross-platform development, distribution and synchronization between native apps, native/client-side apps will fade again as open web technologies will catch up.

In other words, the web isn’t dead — it’s just taking some time to build the right open tools to match what closed ecosystems have been able to achieve.

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[...] the overreaching conclusion was that on Facebook, people befriend others who are similar to them rather than becoming more similar to their friends over time.

In other words, tastes influence who you become friends with, but your friends have limited influence on your tastes.

(via Mike Elgan on Google+)

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1. I can’t find a direct link to the study. If you have it please let me know in the comments.

I then spent some time thinking about what they mean and wanted to summarize and share the 5, actionable lessons that I took away:

1. Think small: many successful innovations did not start with a grandiose vision of the world, but by doing something small the right way. Everyone can innovate, no matter how niche their specialty today — and so everyone should.
2. Disruptive innovations are crappy: incumbents tend to focus on the needs of current customers; disruptors see an opportunity to serve the needs of new ones, often with a simpler product. Think of innovation as “removing features” just as much as “adding features”.
3. Innovation is combination: it often comes from bridging multiple fields together. Spend time discussing “how to change the world” with people outside your field.
4. Passion and perseverance are key: it takes time to uncover the right (technology + business model) formula. Work only on something you are passionate about.
5. The 70/20/10 portfolio: innovation efforts can be prioritized using the “Three Horizons Model”: 70% of the effort should go towards improving existing technology on the current market, 20% with existing but unused technology or on adjacent markets, 10% on new technology or on new markets. Don’t spend all your resources on the shiny new stuff.

In the current economic context, innovation matters more than ever. But innovation is hard — because change is hard. So I hope that these lessons and Greg’s corresponding principles can help bring more innovation to all of us.

There’s plenty to read on best practices of doing a startup or architecting a successful social network or going viral, but sometimes it takes a different path – an unconventional approach – to the problem, to achieve something incredible.

To me, these are complementary. Winning requires both experience and fresh ideas — having some general knowledge of best practices (and past failures), and combining them (or challenging them) into a new approach tailored to the problem at hand.

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