lectura de weekend

The height of fashion | In-Depth Analysis | Marketing Week
“If you bought the first Harry Potter film, then you are probably going to buy the next one,” he reasons. “But if you’ve bought a pair of red shoes there’s no certainty over what you are going to buy after that because you might already have a red dress. It’s more about understanding a customer’s preferred brands, styles and price point, then engineering that to a point where the product served to them is relevant.”

Gilt Taste: The Indignity of Industrial Tomatoes
Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s.

Cabin designs: The aeroplane cabin of 2050 | The Economist
“Guessing the future and putting forward dreamy designs is a sensible activity for any technologically obsessed company. It makes them look dynamic and creative, without committing them to any definite action.”

Anthony Weiner’s Fear: Being Invisible to Women – The Daily Beast
I was surprised when, early in the conversation as a college student served us iced tea in the diner, he said to me that one of the worst things about getting older is that you become “invisible to women.” It’s not just that they aren’t interested in you, he said, “it’s that they don’t see you.” Not many men admit this, I think, although I am sure that many men in their 50s and older, and not a few in their 40s, must feel it. And I suspect that it is this sensation of invisibility that makes some men—especially politicians and actors who have made careers trying to be loved in public–make ridiculous spectacles of themselves as they get older.

“It Just Works.”
Apple has been going out of their way to avoid using the word “syncing” with regard to iCloud. That implies that files exist in one place and need to be moved. But again, even that’s too technical for the story Apple is weaving. With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices. The truth is that they exist on your machine, then on iCloud — again, the “truth” — in a cycle. But you don’t need to know any of that. They just exist. Who cares where as long as they’re right there on all your devices when you need them?