Corning Envisioneering

Corning's A Day Made of Glass shows off the company's vision for the future.

Corning’s vision for the future includes a world in which myriad ordinary surfaces transform “from one-dimensional utility into sophisticated electronic devices.” -- Corning CEO Wendell Weeks

I'll take that glass iPhone, please.

 Also see Corning's timeline of Innovation.

Audacity of Hope Is A Failing Strategy

I'm still dumbfounded about the iFlowReader tantrum in blaming Apple for the failure to profit on ebook sales.

It's hard to understand the audacity of complaining about your own, let alone any, failed venture in such a volatile, competitive market when that market maintains the intense and immediate interest of players like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Apple, and so on.

Companies like these don't generally broadcast their intentions about these things, but even the casual observer doesn't really have to read between the lines. The role of the traditional agent and middleman isn't necessarily essential any more.

Seth Godin recently wrote,

"...we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades." 

Don't you think Amazon has been preparing for this for a while? Apple knows it too, and has its own model. "Razors" are big business.

The smartest players have longer views than the iFlowReaders ninnies of the world who are attempting to play in a big game with bigger players. They have to be prepared for the potentiality of getting smashed around a little.

To establish a business on misplaced and ill-informed hope, and then to gnash teeth and cast blame at others for failure seems eerily familiar. As if we've seen this strategy at play over the last several years elsewhere. Could we not maybe borrow the term "audacity of hope" to reference this behavior too? It has that foul smell of false hope paired with the audacity of a spoilt child - a sure-fire formula for failure. Someone needs to change a diaper.

iFlowReader Cry-babies Blame Apple For Own Bad Decisions

"Apple is giving us the boot by making it financially impossible to survive" - iFlowReader babies

You based your entire business on the insanely competitive, reeling e-book market; modeled your survival upon one platform, and relied against hope that Apple would maintain a hyper-awareness of you and your hastily considered business needs, above that of their own multivariate interests. Shouldn't you fail just for that alone? As John Gruber put it, "It’s not that Apple is opposed to middlemen — it’s that Apple wants to be the middleman. It’s difficult to expect them to be sympathetic to the plights of other middlemen."

What is stopping you from creating your own original content and distributing that through your iFlowReader if you want to? Or you could sell the source code as a whole or several components for other developers to buy. Or you could re-purpose it. Opportunity abounds.

"They want all of the eBook business on iOS and since they have the unilateral power to get it, we are out of business and the iFlow Reader is dead" - iFlowReader babies

Or how about you create your own hardware and software platform that is so effective the rest of world attempts to copy it, and then you can be the middleman there!

For all those bloggers out there coddling these babies with sympathy, you are creepy. If I was your parent I'd swat all your butts for encouraging this, and send you to your rooms. You're grounded.

Art and Tech Installations

There's something about that combination of creative art, science, and technology - the fantastic merging of the imaginary into actual reality - that creates these compelling experience engaging multiple senses simultaneously.

Here's an interactive installation by the Barbarian Group which presents a physical wall of digital swaying grass dynamically influenced by passers-by, and images of car-innards projected onto automobiles, creating the illusion of something like those cut-away illustrations, but in real life.