Archives for the 'hardware' Category
MacBook Air Song: New Soul (Yael Naim)
I’ve been listening to a lot of pretty-girls-with-pretty-songs this weekend; it started with listening to Ingrid Michaelson on infinite repeat, and then I saw Juno, and I’m apparently a sucker for fiesty brunettes who can sing. So it was a delightful surprise to hear the song chosen for the MacBook Air ad: New Soul by Yael Naim, an Israeli-French singer (relatively) big in France. Check out the whole track, and the weirdly wholesome-yet-trippy video.
Kudos to Apple (and their ad people) for picking the song – it works perfectly. Aurgasm highlighted Yael Naim and New Soul last October, which was when I first heard it. I wonder if an Apple ad can create a hit?
bug labs boston meetup
I stopped by middlesex last night to check out the Bug Labs boston meetup (thanks to AVC for the tip). A broad cross-section of the bug labs crew had come down (in an RV, apparently) from New York to chat, and all seemed incredibly passionate about the product and its prospects. (As an aside, it hit home how much journalism has changed when Dan Bricklin whipped out his microphone and started interviewing Peter Semmelhack, the Bug Labs CEO).
It seems that as much Bug is building a hardware platform, they are also out to create (or re-create) a culture and ecosystem of hacking hardware.
Most of the things one could do with the bug, one can already do with another open platform – the PC. The advantage of bug would seem to be as much in the software platform and community/ecosystem that they will enable as it is in the hardware. On the hardware side, because it is a portable, battery-powered device with sensors, there may well be all sorts of unanticipated applications out in the physical world. Of course, for hardcore hardware hacker, products like gumstix already let one build anything — but to go to the trouble of building something from scratch, you need to know what you want to build a priori. Bug may start off with some obvious uses, but then allow new configurations and applications to be discovered. The modular connectors, modular software, and platform for transmitting and applications will let applications evolve out in the hands of users.
This got me musing again about a much deeper, biological question that I’ve been interested in for a long time: What is relationship between modularity, hierarchy, and evolution? How does one determine the optimal level of abstraction at which evolution should occur? How does that vary with population (market) size and mutation rate (~cost)?