is there anything lance armstrong can’t do?

[business week]

“Starting an online interactive pornography firm where woman will use the iphone 4 to video chat with potential customers on a pay as you go basis.

Hours are flexible, pay will increase as the business builds. Woman will receive a free iphone 4 to use as personal time when not working. Woman will talk to potential clients and chat with them and perform various acts as desired by clients. All information will be confidential.

Payment will be based on percentage of sales volume and performance. Potential launch date of the company is 9/1/2010 or based on feedback received.

Woman will receive, as before mentioned, a free cell phone and a very competitive salary.

Please send information and pictures – we would like to launch sooner than 9/1/2010.

Woman must be at least 18 years old.”

[craigslist]

142 years ago this week pennsylvania native christopher sholes had his patent approved for the first  typewriter. his wasn’t the first, others can be traced back another 100 years, but it was the first commercially successful one adopted by many. to create the tool, sholes followed some key design principles to improve his product.  he selected a target audience (stenographers) and made incremental improvements of the prototype until it met their needs. of his last improvements to the tool was the qwerty keyboard that we all still use today.

[photo courtesy of valeriana solaris, wikipedia]

[gizmodo]

[pc world]

those socialist swedes have offered to lend a hand by sending a few “skimming boats capable of 50 tons of oil per hour from the sea and hold about 1,000 tons at a time.” they’re currently on standby and once they’re activated, it’ll take several weeks to get to the gulf.**

maybe it’s just me but it seems like they (bp, the feds) could raise the urgency level around this mess.  it’s like they’re trying to pass a health care bill or something.

* reminder: the oil rig that sank on april 22nd, at the time of this article, it’s may 8th.

** in other words, the boats won’t arrive before memorial day if “activated”

fast forward to the social media age where you are required to check every email account you have, your facebook updates, your twitter updates, your friends facebook and twitter updates, and and every other site you can imagine.  news came that threadsy, a social media aggregator (or as they say, universal social inbox) launched to the public this week.  according to c.e.o. rob goldman, threadsy “provides social context around the messages you receive. Get a message from a friend and Threadsy “pivots” to also provide you with a rundown of that person’s recent tweets, posted photos, etc.”

i’ve had an account since the beta* and while i’ve got to admit, the constant and bells and flashes are  a kinda overwhelming (it’s clearly for a generation younger than me), it’s actually a great place to go to get everything i have an account for (and everything my friend’s have an account for)—I just need to remember to log in.  i’m looking forward to the mobile app that they’re working on as i think it will make my mobile life even better.

watch mr. rob** announce the launch here.

* full disclosure, i know the c.e.o.
** $10 goes to the first person that adds a comment to this post explaining this reference (excluding 630).  for reals.

photo via camp huckins

or at least iEasy. the first ipad application for people seeking a special someone need not wait much longer.  at the end of this month, the dating company skout.com will be the first company to build for that platform.  the new application will have similar features to the iphone app “members can enter search criteria, such as age range, gender and physical preferences, and a HotMap will show in real time the locations of active Skout users who fit those criteria” but some features will be souped-up like “its screen is large enough to let the user view the map while simultaneously chatting and searching through another member’s photos.”

don’t you worry though, skout may be the first app out of the gate but others are developing tools too.  for example, one company called gelato is changing it’s entire design to capitalize on the ipad, “It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s perfect for dating sites,” says steve odom c.e.o. and founder.

according to the new york times, the u.s. army has fallen in love with powerpoint, “Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.” secretary of defense prints out his ppts and reads them each morning; the president and his team use ppt to explain complex things; and general mcchrystal gets at least two ppt briefings a day.

not everyone is in love with the program and the resulting decks.

• general petraus calls his daily ppt briefings ‘agony’.
• another general (mccaster) calls the decks made in ppt ‘dangerous’ because “it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable”
• my favorite, is an essay called “dumb-dumb bullets“written by retired marine colonel thomas x. hammes, hammes talks about how much time is wasted and how much is lost through powerpoint, “Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides. Time is wasted on which pictures to put on the slides, how to build complex illustrations and what bullets should be included. I have even heard conversations about what font to use and what colors. Most damaging is the reduction of complex issues to bullet points.”
• finally, one general said it makes the army “stupid” and he’s has banned the use of the tool in any of his meetings.

i feel like snoop dogg when he said “you don’t have no love for the west coast?” i think “you don’t have love for the ppt?”. i agree that powerpoint is over-used and masks the important issues with pretty colors and sharp pictures–i call it getting ‘mckinseyed.” i was also surprised that there were no women interviewed for this story — back in the day, one of the groups at a firm that shall remain nameless was nicknamed “chicks making slides” a riff on “change management services”–at the time, the value that was placed on powerpoint skills and the women who made them.

• altered vision
• lightheadedness
• dizziness
• involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching
• confusion
• nausea
• convulsions
• cramps
• disorientation

a cross between symptoms associated with a woman’s menstrual cycle and a really bad migraine.  the warning is not for everyone in good health, instead it’s for drunks, pregnant women, old people, and those that are sleep deprived.  check out the warning here.

if you can stomach it, here’s the clip i was thinking of.  replace pie with tv.