On a side topic, how facebook decides to acquire companies? Any idea?
Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
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Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#22The horrible beast swallows up another good idea. :(
At least they aren’t gobbling up a generation of talented youth and putting them to work plastering optimized and personalized little text ads on everything ;-)
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#23Facebook is up to something really big. Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin ( http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/ ) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards. Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some…
I doubt Facebook would build a hardware device. Instead, I think they'll do a 'social OS' that uses Android for all the low-level stuff, but with the Google apps all replaced with apps that have deep Facebook integration (messages, contacts, photos, etc.). Microsoft Bing apps (e.g. Maps) could round out the features that FB doesn't build themselves, and they could use Amazon's Appstore in lieu of Android Market. But…
More likely built on WP7 than Android. Microsoft + Facebook are all ready in bed with Skype
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#24Facebook is up to something really big. Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin ( http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/ ) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards. Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some…
Push Pop also won an ADA... I think you're on to something.
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#25Facebook is up to something really big. Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin ( http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/ ) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards. Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some…
No no no, there's no way a Facebook phone would take off (especially in the already crowded market). Facebook's environment is built around iterating quickly, with okay solutions, and checking for bugs by pushing it out. It's a great hacking spirit and probably fun to work with, but is really ill suited to hardware and consumer products (look at how long it even took Google to get used to having discrete releases)
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#26Congrats on flipping your startup. It's pretty much what everyone is doing nowadays. Change the world... whatever.
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#27Sad to see. This was the only promising execution of ebooks for the tablet age, and Facebook is where it goes to die? I know they probably got obscene amounts of cash, but it is still disheartening to see innovations swallowed up by decidedly non-innovative companies.
Have you seen Inkling? They're doing amazing stuff in this space.
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#28Facebook is up to something really big. Awhile ago they brought on Brandon Walkin ( http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/ ) who is, arguably, one of the most detailed-oriented user interface designers on the planet. He's also a very talented Cocoa developer and apps that he's worked on have won Apple Design Awards. Next, they acquired Sofa, another Apple Design Award-winning design & software firm who have created some…
No no no, there's no way a Facebook phone would take off (especially in the already crowded market). Facebook's environment is built around iterating quickly, with okay solutions, and checking for bugs by pushing it out. It's a great hacking spirit and probably fun to work with, but is really ill suited to hardware and consumer products (look at how long it even took Google to get used to having discrete releases)
A Facebook phone is really just any gingerbread phone the hardware maker is currently making minus Google apps plus Facebook apps.
Obviously Facebook is making a huge effort to change their design DNA.
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt Facebook would build a hardware device. Instead, I think they'll do a 'social OS' that uses Android for all the low-level stuff, but with the Google apps all replaced with apps that have deep Facebook integration (messages, contacts, photos, etc.). Microsoft Bing apps (e.g. Maps) could round out the features that FB doesn't build themselves, and they could use Amazon's Appstore in lieu of Android Market. But…
Facebook won't build their competing phone OS on top of android - Google controls android and Google is facebook's biggest competitor.
"Google controls android"
Meh, they control it to an extent. The core open sourced Android (gingerbread atm) is clearly "good enough" that all anyone has to do to credibly fork it and still deliver a high end device is bring as much to the table as Google itself does.
That's not a herculean task although only a handful of companies qualify and most of those are better off jumping through Google's hoops to get the full experience anyway. Facebook probably isn't one that wants to jump through Google's hoops though.
I'm not saying the FB phone will be a success. Clearly some people want it. Let's go benefit of the doubt and say it will be technically awesome. Well so were a lot of other flops. I think a FB phone is one of those things on a knifes edge that could be a Vista/Zune/Edsel level flop or could be the iDevice killer every tech pundit has been waiting on for the last decade.
Re: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook
#30Sad to see. This was the only promising execution of ebooks for the tablet age, and Facebook is where it goes to die? I know they probably got obscene amounts of cash, but it is still disheartening to see innovations swallowed up by decidedly non-innovative companies.
While I thought Our Choice was a pretty snazzy product, and I think it's a shame that they're discontinuing work on their publishing platform, they did have a somewhat conservative approach to ebooks. No selectable text, "interactivity" that was pretty much limited to embedded videos and charts, and so on. What made it special was the incredibly "fluid" interface, meaning there wasn't a single button or control, you…
Push Pop's first publication did have a novel interface, but it was fundamentally no different than what we are used to. It was a book with other forms of media embedded within it.
I can get behind Inkling being revolutionary because it seems to me (focusing on their Social Learning feature) that it is closer to Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex. It is like the memex[1] in that it is taking advantage of the interactivity and social capabilities of current tech to create an interface that better matches the way we learn. The way we learn indirectly from others via books (where information is frozen and up to you to learn from it) and the way we directly learn from each other (mainly communicating about a topic in a conversational manner).