When stamps become paintings

Federico Pietrella is an artiste and a collector of date stamps. And for the last 15 years he has been crafting date stamp paintings to a perfection.

“Fascinated with the notion of time, he tries to capture each moment by using a date stamp set to the current day, and inking it onto a canvas to form a grainy photographic image. It can take him up to two months to produce a picture.”

Source: illusion.scene360.com

Is your television a furniture or an electronic toy?

I would say furniture. Why? Because when people buy it, it is more often from an aesthetic interior design point of view than anything else. From the wall location to the corner of the  room where it will fit, it is pre- planned to enhance the look and feel of the room. Many a turf war fight between a man and woman have been fought on the location of the TV in a room.

And then you buy it. The latest LED+ 3D 200 inch monster in the market ( no there aren’t any like that, but just felt like saying). THe pride of your room ultimately stands there with a sea of cables weaving in and out of it. Cables for the home theatre + cables from the set top box + cables for the DTH cabling + cables for the electrical main., cables from the extension chords…

Fucking ugly. ( <tangent>- we need a wireless world)

IKEA gets it. Ikea understands that furniture need to enhance the look of a room through design. Not just provide utility. As a long standing buyer of Ikea products, because of their cheapness and design acumen, I can vouch for their excellence in maximizing space. 

So when IKEA decides to get into the HDTV space and launches their own HDTV model titled Uppleva, you go…hmmm very Swedish. But there is more to this TV than being Swedish. 

Ikea’s pitch with the Uppleva is that it is a critical element of your living room and part of your furniture arrangement and design pattern than just another electronic toy. Their pitch is around user interfaces and around integrating the entire home television Eco -system ( and their cables) with the furniture flow of the room.

And the pitch works.

Now given their pedigree, if their OEMs and supply chain fire in , I don’t see why they can’t start making a serious claim to own your living room.

And I bet you that living room will look good. 

This Uppleva is going to sell some. Serious. And they have got the TV retailers by the balls. I cannot imagine TV makers ( read Sony/ LG/ Samsung ) suddenly entering the furniture zone, which controls the decision making on the TV buying process. 

Kaggle - A Kickstarter for Big Data

So you have got kickstarter for all the artsy rebels. But what do you do about the geeky nerds whose only talent is data crunching ?

You create a platform called Kaggle. Then you ask all those data driven organizations who have a problem to solve, to upload the problem with relevant sets of data, convert it into a contest ( with  a sizable prize money) and invite the best data crunchers across the world to try and solve it. Neat?

It is.

Now think about the future of all those consulting organizations who are charging in millions to solve your big data analytic problems. They are now competing against freelance ninja’s who do not have organizational beaurocracy to contend with.  

Kind of like the Bounty Hunters.

The Individual with talent is increasingly scoring over the organizational factories with manufactured talent. 

Is this the rise of the Individual over the brand? The rise of the Lynchpin?

James Cameron and a 24 foot vertical torpedo

He is an award winning filmmaker with a penchant for technological perfection. So much so that for Avatar, he took 20 years to conceive the utopian planet Pandora and create the 3D “swing camera” which was first used in that film.

He is also known to be a diving enthusiast. 

So this time around James Cameron in association with National Geographic has designed a 24 foot vertical torpedo. The entire project has taken 8 long years in the making. The intention - to take a 7 mile long vertical dive into the deepest part  of the Mariana Trench - the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. Deeper than the height of Mount Everest.

So we are talking about a physics major turned truck driver, turned Oscar winning film-maker who has designed a 24 feet torpedo submersible  to take a 36,000 plus feet dive, all alone, strapped in the cockpit of a machine he has built himself.

All this - just to find out what actually is there and to film it.

To make it clear at  the bottom of the trench, where the plates meet, the water column above will exert a pressure of 1,086 bars (15,750 psi), over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.  That means his 4000lb sub will have over 4,344,000 lb of ocean crushing in on it. If it withstands being crushed then that alone is a wonder of technology. 

The sheer audacity of the idea is mind blowing.

Welcome to Project Challenger Deep.



Can you be the next Steve Jobs ?

Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, and a man responsible for building many silicon valley start-ups into successful companies. In his recently titled blog post, “Frighteningly Ambitious Start-Up Ideas” Paul gives seven ideas where next generation entrepreneurs can start looking.

But it is this paragraph on Steve Jobs that made me go Wow. Yes this is what Lynchpins should do.

Writes Paul :

“ 5. The Next Steve Jobs


I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply “no.” I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he’d qualify it. But he didn’t qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever’s currently in the pipeline. Apple’s revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

So if Apple’s not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can’t seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn’t: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what’s possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users’ minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.[3]

Now Steve is gone there’s a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that company, the “next Steve Jobs,” might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn’t have to. He’d just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.”

Yes. Yes. Yes and Yes.

The musician in Jonathan Meur

Jonathan Meur has a passion. It’s making music. Yes, I see him almost everyday as a colleague going about life- surviving, working, making it count. But then there is this creator that lurks inside, pushing  him every now and then to walk across to a sidewalk cafe, plug in his acoustic guitar and a Korg workstation and sing. Sing his own words. His own tunes. His own compositions. 

Indie musicians have it rough. Sidewalk cafe’s , roadside Esplande’s, here and there gigs…these are the moments that keep them alive. Push them to extend their boundaries and keep creating amazing music. Music that has not yet sold out to labels or their marketing. Music that is about the art and not the money. Music that is created after backbreaking effort, at the wee hours of dawn, inside subway stations, over coffee table napkins, because the day is about survival, about ensuring that a salary cheque comes into the mailbox. 

But what separates them from “we the living” is the power to believe and the passion to keep at it. Anywhere between 5-500 fans, or bystanders. It doesn’t matter. The arpeggio comes live, the piano sustain keeps going, the harmony makes the emptiness disappear. 

No Jon and I are not great friends. Hell we don’t even know each other. But this is not about that. It’s about the human ability to create something out of nothing. 

No Jonathan Meur is not on Vevo. Or Spotify. Or Billboard. I don’t even know whether he will cut an album someday. But this song, is as good as I have heard anywhere. In terms of  originality, lyrics, tune and composition, it made me feel as good as any good song does by artistes who have a gazillion views on Vevo and million downloads on iTunes.

The video sucks. Cos people like me( who think they know a lot about filming and photography) sometimes screw up in trying to experiment with exposures. But the audio is good. The song from what i understood was written by Jon while coming to work in the subway. It is about Strangers. 

And Jon and Gabriel make four minutes of magic out of it.

And I hope Jon makes that album which does get a million downloads one day.