I like Owl City. This is independent of my appreciation for Owl City. At their best, Owl City has a tendency to take me back to the late nights in my humid converted-attic bedroom the summer before my sophomore year of high school. To sum up a thousand-word essay in a sentence, it was the summer I really started letting my imagination free. Needless to say, it was a very formative ten weeks.

By that measure, Owl City’s new EP Ultraviolet does not disappoint.

The first track, “Beautiful Times,” features Lindsey Stirling on the violin. The music is full, lush, and steady, matching the song’s patiently optimistic lyrics. Lindsey’s violin helps drive home the song’s theme of seeing even a “fight of my life” being “beautiful times.” It’s followed by “Up All Night,” an infectious dance song that seems to be about a missed connection, though anyone that’s had a person (or other thing) on...

I appreciate a lot of things, and I like a lot of things. They are not necessarily the same things.

In my personal dictionary, when I appreciate something it is usually on its more concrete qualities. I appreciate the workmanship of a well-built desk. I appreciate the fuel efficiency of a moped. I appreciate the cuss out of my laptop’s battery life. These are all quantifiable qualities: I can back up my appreciation with numbers and comparisons.

I also appreciate less-quantifiable things. I appreciate the way an illustrator uses facial expressions to convey emotion. I appreciate an author’s use of language to set a mood. I appreciate a composer’s ability to weave chords and melody together and a drummer’s ability to play the cuss out of some drums. These things are less quantifiable but still concrete to some extant.

All of these things add up to a healthy appreciation for something...

It was a little over a year ago that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings laid out their strategy:

“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

I would argue that this has happened. They’ve surpassed HBO in number of (paying) subscribers, essentially proving the market for streaming internet television separate from a traditional pay TV (cable, satellite, IPTV) subscription.

So let’s have some fun. If we take the assumption that television will move online at face value,¹ what options could a television viewer have 5-10 years from now?

The New HBO: Netflix

Netflix is leading the way in premium online video, both in marketshare and mindshare. They see themselves as maintaining this premium brand, and their long-term manifesto specifically mentions having a top-tier viewing experience, including no commercials.

Today, if you ask people what the best channel on cable is, they’ll...

I am a big picture thinker and a perpetual dreamer. I love taking an idea and fleshing out the concept, and I’m continually inspired by the potential that today’s technology affords. If I’m in a room with a like-minded person, things can really take off.

So what would happen if you put me in a room with over one hundred?

My wife and I attended Greenville Grok, a conference designed around conversations and bringing people together. It’s put on by The Iron Yard, a local startup accellerator / code academy / coworking space, and it was started by Matthew Smith who realized he enjoyed the conversations and hangout times at conferences more than the keynotes and formal talks.

While there are a couple of keynote speakers at Grok, the emphasis is on what it calls “10-20s”: ten- or twenty-minute discussions on one topic in groups of eight to ten. My groups included software developers like...

They really shouldn’t. I want to set expectations up front, and when you’re talking about either Apple or Nintendo, people (myself included) are going to have Opinions. But let’s back up a bit first.

The ideal

A good merger is one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By that, I mean that the two companies coming together amplify each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.¹ The best mergers will emphasize the second more than the first.

Let’s look at the Apple-NeXT merger in 1996 as an example of a successful merger. NeXT was a small company that made what they considered to be the best operating system in the world, NeXTSTEP. Their computer, the NeXTcube, was used for a variety of advanced computer uses, most notably by Tim Berners-Lee to create the first web server and web browser. They also had Steve Jobs, arguably one of the best business...

It was the middle of the night in the middle of winter my freshman year when God spoke to me.

I was skirting the edge of depression and worrying about the future. In this particular case I had worked up the courage to walk across campus to see if some girls I had been hanging out with were around. They weren’t. On the way back to my side of campus I stopped at the lake to calm myself. The part of my brain that I should never listen to (yet always do) was yelling again about how much trouble my future was in. In this case, it was how my fear of approaching women and my general personality and just absolutely everything about me was going to mean that I was not going to find my wife at college even though most people do and that meant I was never going to find a wife in general and so on.

So I went down to the lake to pray.

Now, when I say “pray,” you should read “talked and sometimes...

Apple didn’t sue Samsung because they had a touchscreen phone. They didn’t sue because of rounded rectangles. They didn’t sue because of icons arranged in a grid.

Palm added all those together to get WebOS, which was easily distinguishable from iOS.

Microsoft added all those together (save rounded corners) to get Windows Phone 7, which was easily distinguishable from iOS.

Google added all those together and made the Nexus series of Android-powered phones that were easily distinguishable from iOS-powered iPhones.

Samsung added all those things together and arranged them to be as similar to the iPhone as possible. They ignored advice from Google warning them not to do so. Instead of pouring creative effort into improving on what iOS had to offer, they focused on copying what iOS had to offer.

That is why Apple took then to court, and that is why they lost.