"Interaction Design" Posts on ValleyZen

You already know it all about the fabled “Über Entrepreneur” (as he was billed by the Churchill Club yesterday) Elon Musk. How he dropped out of the graduate program in Physics at Stanford after only two days, how he co-founded PayPal and was the largest shareholder when it sold to EBAY in 2002 for 1.5 billion, and all about his latest accomplishments and adventures with Tesla and SpaceX.
At ValleyZen we like to report on what we don’t know about yet, what’s new, what is in the imaginative space. In a Sumi-e painting that’s like the negative space, the space between brush strokes where all possibilities lie. People in Silicon Valley are comfortable with things that haven’t been defined yet and with what is uncertain. That’s exciting.
Yesterday we met with Elon and…
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Go all access with us at Tim O’Reilly’s home, as he graciously opens his doors to ValleyZen.
Join us in an exclusive video experience where twisting country backroads lead to the home of the Founder & CEO of O’Reilly Media. ValleyZen was invited to O’Reilly’s Sebastopol dwelling which is nestled on 6 acres of farmland–far from Silicon Valley hustle and bustle, and tucked between California earth and sky.
O’Reilly is candid, open and relaxed, taking us on a tour of his home, his kitchen, and even his treehouse. This video is filled with action, movement, and satori!
The trailer below shows a few minutes of highlights taken from footage shot over the course of an entire morning…
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Logitech Co-Founder Daniel Borel is celebrating the creation of ONE BILLION mice. “That’s enough (end on end) to stretch to the moon and back,” he told a packed Stanford Memorial Auditorium gathered to honor the 40th anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s landmark 1968 “DEMO” at SRI that signaled the dawn of interactive computing.
Don’t Miss ValleyZen’s exclusive VIDEO interview with Daniel Borel:
Daniel Borel on One Billion Mice
Zen “out-of-the-box” thinking in Logitech’s (sometimes shocking but always interesting) advertising
Logitech’s early roots, founded on a farm in Apples, Vaud, Switzerland
Tech Incubators: Swiss Farms vs. Valley garages…
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“ValleyZen will be the first to know when we pull the trigger,” said Ron Gutman, Co-Founder and CEO of Wellsphere. A sleep-deprived but adrenalized team gathered around him at Wellsphere headquarters in San Mateo yesterday morning. Having worked around the clock the past few weeks in preparation for today’s launch of Wellsphere 2.0, they seemed none the worse for the wear.
“Welcome to our office,” said Dave Kashen, Co-Founder and CFO.
“It’s NOT an office, it’s a WellHome,” quipped Gutman…
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Daunting lines wrapping Kipling street tighter than Apple shrink wrap don’t inspire you to join them. However, luck, timing, and circumstance collided. We were able to avoid the lines altogether.
Yesterday, umbrella shaded iPhone fans wilted in California sun. As of this morning Apple Palo Alto, Apple Stanford, Apple Los Gatos, and the AT&T store on El Camino were all “out of stock.” But on Saturday I chose twilight to step into the glass doors at Apple Stanford…
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ValleyZen’s Bill and Drue spoke with Prof. Hiroshi Ishii after his Stanford lecture for Prof. Terry Winograd’s CS Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Ishii granted ValleyZen an exciting satori-inducing interview at Drue’s studio. Watch the video…
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Retailers and publishers are perturbed at Google over a new feature “Search within Site” (SiS). Why have so many web feathers been ruffled? Google has offered this functionality for at least 7 years, but a larger audience is only just now becoming aware and in some cases upset by it. Why’s that?
Ever wanted a great example of the impact that Zen-like, intuitive, experiential user interaction design can make? Here it is…
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The Transformation of Tangible to Intangible
Sixty years ago the value of productivity and wealth was determined by the value of the tangible property you made or possessed…In the 1960’s that all began to change. Information technology was silently converting tangible property to the intangible with the value of the intangible determined by the value of the intelligence it contained and not the tangible property. Resources consumed and standards of living were going to be highly impacted. A personal story that illustrates…
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Minutes ago, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington posted a less than flattering post on Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop. (To learn more about Alltop, check out the video interview I did with Guy on the eve of the launch of Alltop beta.) TechCrunch has removed the post, as twitterers and bloggers…
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Do you have an iPod? We have somewhere between ten and fifteen in my family. About all of the versions are represented among the family’s iPods. From the initial version with all the controls contained in the little wheel in the middle to the version with no wheel but controlled by a touch screen.
In the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s I represented one of the creators of stereo hi-fi components for general consumers. Companies in that industry were pioneers in designing, building and creating demand for a hi-tech consumer product to be bought by consumers from retailers. For sure, there existed a small community of audiophiles who were heavily into hi-fi. Many were not considered to be well-adjusted citizens, although they made good salespeople for hi-fi components…
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