Food, tech, disruptions

Disruptions: Silicon Valley's Next Stop: The Kitchen - NYTimes.com: ". . . .“The food system is bizarre and ineffectual and completely lacking in innovation,” said Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Hampton Creek Foods, which makes imitation egg products using plants. Creating a successful food company requires a lot more than just a good idea. There are government rules and regulations and competition from entrenched conglomerates with vast distribution systems. These obstacles will not be easily overcome. But these start-ups are trying to do that by behaving like the most successful tech outfits that have gone from ideas to multibillion dollar businesses. Some have programmers writing code to test out snacks and determine the types of ingredients that can go together. Some approach management in the same way start-ups run their operations, using a process called Agile methodology, in which project managers work in very small teams with programmers and have software development practices like Scrum that are intended to move and build products very quickly. Essentially, they are organizing the development of food products in much the same way that tech start-ups organize code. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Mobile race, Apple, Google, Microsoft

Anybody's game: Mobile world divided between Apple, Google, Microsoft - NBC News.com: "...In the third-quarter sales numbers from Kantar Worldpanel, it's clear that it's more or less a two-horse race in the U.S., Australia and Great Britain. Android takes up a bit more than half of all sales, iPhone is about a third — 40 percent in Apple's home turf, the U.S., less elsewhere. But leave the English-speaking countries and things get a bit more unpredictable: the other countries in Europe, for instance, are far more Android-heavy. In Spain, Android accounted for an incredible 90 percent of all smartphones sold. Germany, France and Italy showed similar but not quite so serious trends...."

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Chinese Mobile Game Company Chukong Goes Social

The Daily Startup: Chinese Mobile Game Co. Chukong to Go Social - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ: "Chinese mobile gaming company Chukong Technologies Inc. has raised $50 million led by new investor New Horizon Capital, to make its games social and to cement its role as a distribution platform before filing for an IPO next year. The Series D infusion, which VentureWire learned was done at a post-money valuation of $500 million, brings total outside funding to $83.2 million."

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Google Answer to Silicon Valley in London

Tour Google's Answer to Silicon Valley in London: Video - Bloomberg: (Dec. 2 Bloomberg) –- Silicon Valley is number one for tech, but not if Google has anything to do with it. Over the last year the internet company has attracted thousands of bright entrepreneurs to it's London Campus, in an attempt to fuel the UK capital's start-up scene. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Oculus Rift, Virtual Reality, Reality

Oculus Rift Brings Virtual Reality to Verge of the Mainstream | MIT Technology Review: " . . . .What could make the product so compelling is the combination of price and performance. At $300 for a developer kit, studios used to spending thousands of dollars on video game development hardware are likely to see it as a relatively small gamble for a piece of technology that could have a big impact on the tech landscape. (Indeed, when development kits were put up for sale on the Oculus website in September of last year, they sold at a rate of four to five per minute.) . . . ." (read more at link above)

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Japan Winning in Mobile Games

How Japan Is Winning in Mobile Games - WSJ.com: "... In Japan, each downloaded game earns three times the global average on Apple AAPL -0.57% devices and six times the world-wide norm on Android devices, according to App Annie. "The download is just the start,'' says Jun Otsuka, Line's global business manager. "The real grunt work is in running the game." The stream of cash from games has even pushed Japan to overtake the U.S. in app revenue on phones and tablets overall, according to an App Annie report being published Wednesday .... " (read more at link above)

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Hunter Hamster Studio adapts Snail Bob to HTML5 (video)

Hunter Hamster Studio adapting its Snail Bob series to HTML5 in collaboration with Spil Games | GamesBeat: "HTML5 is different because browsers and mobile devices can all understand it. This is opposed to iOS or Android native apps, which developers need to build specifically for those operating systems. “As we move toward an even more instant-gratification world, gamers care more about how quickly they can get into a game,” said Prigg. “Being platform agnostic helps us deliver games more readily to more people.”"

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Free Gaming Apps, Disney Struggles

Will Disney Interactive finally make it pay? --

Disney Struggles to Make Its Free Gaming Apps Pay - NYTimes.com: "The company is clearly making headway in its overall games business — no small feat considering that gaming troubles have contributed to more than $1 billion in Disney Interactive losses in recent years. The company is now the No. 3 publisher of mobile games for Apple devices by downloads, behind Electronic Arts and Gameloft. Disney says it has 90 million monthly users of its gaming apps, providing a vital network of players to which it can market new offerings. The Playdom social games division of Disney, which started out focused on Facebook but has shifted toward the mobile market, has had a difficult time finding hits. . . ."

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Xbox One, PS4, Chromecast, home entertainment and gaming

Why Million-Console Debuts Don't Guarantee Success for Xbox One and PS4 - Businessweek: "....the companies are betting that people will be willing to pay a large premium for much more powerful, cinematic gaming experiences. But they’re also packing in digital entertainment options that extend beyond gaming. The idea is that to justify a price tag of $400 (Playstation) or $500 (XBox One), people will need something that also serves as a portal for Internet video. This could be a challenge, given that the most popular video streaming devices cost less than $100...."

Ever hear of Chromecast? It costs $35 and plugs into your TV. It runs on Android. With Chromecast, Android is a home entertainment platform. Android is also a gaming platform.

Would you rather spend $35 or $400-500?

Merry Christmas!

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Federal Government #FAIL, Waterfall Method Guarantees Failure

Nobody does development like the Feds do -- no wonder the Obamacare website healthcare.gov was such a disaster --

How Willful Ignorance Doomed HealthCare.gov - Clay Shirky - POLITICO Magazine: "...Like all organizational models, the waterfall method is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, the waterfall approach insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers. This is a perfect method for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on...."

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Art Appreciation iPad Game, Artistico

Mobile Games Startup, PlayArt Labs, Brings Its Art Appreciation iPad Game, Artistico, To The iPhone | TechCrunch: "The game’s design has been created by a children’s book illustrator, which gives the app a narrative feeling — of being a journey through art history. It’s this educational tone that PlayArt Labs is hoping will help it stand out in the crowded mobile gaming space. “For us, gaming is an outstanding tool to put art and culture into the hands of both casual gamers and art lovers. Our platform allows users to immerse themselves in art by learning about each art masterpiece through deep exploration into the paintings, history, and artists,” the startup says. “We believe that our genuine education-focused approach to experiencing art will both differentiate us from the rest of the pack, as well as open up a new category of cultural gaming.”"

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Miami, Art, Architecture, Tech

Under Nick Korniloff, Art Miami empire grows - Business Monday - MiamiHerald.com: "While Swiss import Art Basel Miami Beach has been the headliner act in South Florida since it started in 2002, Art Miami’s history goes much deeper. The fair debuted in January of 1991 in Miami Beach, catering to South Floridians and snowbirds with international dealers. “It made sense to establish an art fair in Miami as a winter destination and as a gateway, as they promoted it, to Latin America,” said Bonnie Clearwater, director and chief curator of Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art...."

Miami's new vice – an addiction to star architects | Art and design | The Observer: "From here, Miami can go in two directions. It can do what almost every other aspirational city has done in the past 15 years, which is to behave like a teenager let loose with a platinum credit card in a luxury store. It can buy itself more and more skyscrapers and cultural monuments of diminishing usefulness. Or it can invent new ways to renew itself, as yet unknown, based on its inimitable fusion of South and North America, each of which has powerful and distinct ideas about how to make cities."

SIME MIA 2013: "SIME MIA is a joint venture between SIME, Europe's first and funkiest digital business event, and MIA Collective, which organizes events in Miami focused on Media, Internet and Art. SIME MIA is launching for the first time December 3rd at the heart of beautiful (and sunny) South Beach. SIME MIA offers a unique blend of international thought leaders and a meeting place for great people, great ideas and new business opportunities. We are inviting the hottest new companies, entrepreneurs and business leaders from Europe, the US, South America and Asia for two knowledge packed days culminating in the annual Art Basel festivities."

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Websites, Web Apps, Running Faster Techniques

Beyond caching: Google engineers reveal secrets to faster websites | PCWorld: " . . . To improve performance, and better manage memory, developers should use an approach similar to the one used by the middleware library Emscripten, which is being used to build high performance HTML5 web games. Emscripten converts code written in C or C++ into JavaScript, allowing it to manage memory from within the application itself. An Emscripten-based program will pre-allocate a block of memory from the system. The programmer, along with Emscripten itself, decides when memory is no longer needed, and Emscripten returns this unused memory to its pool of internally available memory. The JavaScript engine does not do any garbage collection on the program and so would not affect the performance of the program. Generally speaking, programs written with this technique can run two to four times faster than typical JavaScript programs and do not suffer from the occasional lag in performance that GC operations can cause, McAnlis said. . . ." (read more at link above)

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