August 2012
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An officer of the Department of Corporations asked Systrom how Instagram made money.
“That’s a great question,” said Systrom. “We do not.”
Instagram had considered various means of making money but “nothing came of it,” Systrom explained.
” —Business Insider: Instagram’s Financial Report: No Revenues, $2.7 Million In Losses, $5 Million In The Bank (via iamdanw)
“Ironically the criticism of John Portman’s hotel atrium designs is that the focus of these large buildings is interior rather than exterior. The buildings are considered exclusionary to the people outside on the city streets. My memories of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco as a place where I could enjoy the beauty and comfort of a grand hotel as a person seeking shelter from the streets defies that criticism. The Hyatt Regency San Francisco is a hotel I have visited for over 30 years, yet I was a registered hotel guest for the first time in 2008.”
—Ric Garrido of the Loyalty Traveler blog, quoted in How John Portman Reinvented the Lobby with Visual Excitement. One for Slavin.
“The placards are written using the London Underground Font, with special permission from Transport for London”
—Paralympic Opening Ceremony on the placards in the Empowerment section.
“51 percent of respondents, including a majority of Millennials, believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing.”
—Citrix press release: Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey (via Ian Gowen).
“British sculptor Cornelia Parker has big plans.
“I’d love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology,” she said while in San Francisco recently to install her two-work show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. No land artist or found-object sculptor has thought this big before. And, in Texas eight years ago on an artist’s residency, Parker got as far as interesting NASA in her proposal to send a meteor back into space.
“They seemed very enthusiastic,” she said, “but I think they had a lot of political problems around that time, there was all this anti-NASA stuff. Then I got back to London, and tried to do it long-distance, and it was much harder. And there was all this talk about why are we spending American tax dollars supporting a British artist. It got a lot more problematic. So I thought about approaching the Russians.” A ripple of laughter announced that that move never got beyond the thinking stage.” —Kenneth Baker quoting artist Cornelia Parker in Parker doesn’t stop with lightning and fire — she’s even eyed outer space, from the SF Chronicle in December 2005.
“I’d love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology,” she said while in San Francisco recently to install her two-work show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. No land artist or found-object sculptor has thought this big before. And, in Texas eight years ago on an artist’s residency, Parker got as far as interesting NASA in her proposal to send a meteor back into space.
“They seemed very enthusiastic,” she said, “but I think they had a lot of political problems around that time, there was all this anti-NASA stuff. Then I got back to London, and tried to do it long-distance, and it was much harder. And there was all this talk about why are we spending American tax dollars supporting a British artist. It got a lot more problematic. So I thought about approaching the Russians.” A ripple of laughter announced that that move never got beyond the thinking stage.” —Kenneth Baker quoting artist Cornelia Parker in Parker doesn’t stop with lightning and fire — she’s even eyed outer space, from the SF Chronicle in December 2005.
“While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.”
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Feargas O’Sullivan: Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs for The Atlantic Cities.
He’s got a point. It’s getting increasingly hard to spot the difference between Shoreditch, the Mission, and Williamsburg.
“Today then, it looks to me as if great swathes of public institutions, politicians and media, academics and public intellectuals have given up on truth, and see no value in sincerity.”
—Tom Coates: A New Sincerity.
“Fact-checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs and you know what? We’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
—Neil Newhouse, Republican pollster, quoted in an ABC News story: Romney Power Team Dissects 2012 Together in Tampa.
“Twitter also prominently displays the total tweets I’ve made and accounts I’m following (7,199 and 679 respectively). I’m not not sure what these really tell anyone – they’s certainly be a poor method of evaluating whether to follow me or not. Just because computers are good at adding up, it doesn’t mean we should display numbers everywhere.”
—Frankie Roberto: The problem with numbers.
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The practice of purchasing Twitter followers is not only causing controversy for Real Housewives and presidential candidates. In Saudi Arabia, a senior cleric has condemned the practice as “dishonest and mendacious”, following a revelation that several high-profile Saudis were buying “phantom followers”.
While we mock the surfeit of fatwas emanating from the Saudi clergy – tackling everything from personal grooming to Mickey Mouse – this one seemed to genuinely hit the nail on the head. Prior to his pronouncement, the manager of a Saudi marketing company had told the press that it had sold “bundles” of Twitter followers, Facebook fans and YouTube “likes” to “sportsmen, businessmen, poets and clerics”, but preferred not to name names. Soon after this revelation, Sheikh Abdullah declared that not only was buying Twitter followers really sad, it was also sinful and dishonest.
The term “fatwa” may conjure up images of death sentences and men demonstrating with effigies on spikes, but at its most prosaic, a fatwa is merely a religious opinion that deems something to be unacceptable – the Sheikh simply issued a sobering condemnation of online behaviour and the excesses of social networking.
” —Nesrine Malik: A Twitter fatwa may seem odd, but it’s a sign of our times in the Guardian’s comment section (via new-aesthetic).