The birth of the iPod
“[Jon] Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple’s supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter — considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players — but Toshiba didn’t have any idea what it might be used for. ‘They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,’ Rubinstein recalled. ‘I went back to Steve and I said, “I know how to do this. I’ve got all the parts.”’ He said, ‘Go for it.’”

Also features this quote from Steve Jobs on design: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Viral video vs. Super Bowl ad
”’Dove Evolution,’ a 75-second viral film…has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows ‘Ellen’ and ‘The View’ as well as on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year.”
Jon Stewart on YouTube
Jon Stewart: “We get an opportunity to produce this stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it. I mean, we know that’s the game. I’m not suggesting we’re going to beam it out to the heavens, man, and whoever gets it, great. If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.”
Microsoft spins negative assessment into positive blurb
Microsoft took just the first sentence of this quote and used it out of context as a positive blurb: “If you’ve never used anything but Internet Explorer, you won’t be able to wipe the grin off your face. But next to rivals like Firefox, Opera and Safari, IE 7 is a catch-up and patch-up job. Some of its ‘new’ features have been available in rival browsers for years.”

Samsung/Bang & Olufsen phone
$1275 cell phone is designed to be used upside-down with a round keypad at the top, not the bottom (the screen flips if you prefer the more traditional way). The round center of the keypad acts as a dial, which is used for navigating through the menus.
Three bucket pricing
“What is better: buckets or custom pricing? Buckets. How do I know we learned this? Since changing the pricing page on our site, our sign-ups/trails have increased 30%. We had VERY good conversion rates prior to that. This bump is great. What’s amazing is our actual prices are identical, but just by presenting our pricing in three easy to understand buckets, conversions of first time visitors to trials have increased about 30%.”
Color Palette Generator
“Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.”
Strobist offers advice for photographers who use small, shoe-mount flashes
“Why small strobes? Because that’s all you really need. Larger strobes have their place, but they tend to spend a lot of time in trunks and stuffed under beds. But the small, everyday strobe is always in the waistpack ready to go. And it can yield great results when used more effectively and creatively.”