Lethargic Academia, Fast Media

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Doctors are stereotypically smart people. But health care sucks when it comes to use of IT. How do you explain that? That also applies to academia. Academics are even more stereotypically smart than doctors. But they lag behind when it comes to use of IT. That is a disservice. Because service is affected.

Mendeley injects some pace into academia with fast, big data

managing documents online is a pretty busy space right now ... Mendeley .... the site has become a big hit with academics and researchers, signing up nearly 2 million members from universities and institutions all over the world, because it allows them to keep tabs on all the research papers, documents and files ..... “The biggest problem in academia is the long waiting time: it can take three to five years from the time you have done research to get it published — all the decisions you make in an academic career are based around that time lag” ....... Between them, the site’s members have uploaded some 260 million documents, representing around 65 million unique research papers and studies — around 50 percent larger than any of the existing commercial databases. By mining those documents and watching activity around them, Mendeley’s able to help institutions understand the trends as they emerge… not years afterwards. ...... get to life-changing discoveries faster .... ResearchGate ... Digital Science

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A Gaming Amazon

Amazon is one of those companies that has built such a strong infrastructure that they feel they can go into anything and everything. Apple is doing tablets? We will do it. Zynga is doing gaming? We will do it.

Amazon jumps into games: New studio makes its debut with a Facebook game

Amazon Game Studios ... launched the studio’s first social game on Facebook .... Amazon’s first social game is called Living Classics

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Zynga Recipe

The downslide in its stock price has not changed the fact that Zynga has quite a corporate machine in place. It is still there.

Inside Zynga and the making of its next hit, ChefVille

a mix of folks with vast experience in gaming, going back to the glory days of Activision..... there are a lot of moving parts at Zynga .... what a fine-oiled machine the company is ..... the team working on ChefVille was passionate about food ..... the game can make everyone “better cooks.” .... a senior designer who wanted to do a “Next Gen” food game to follow up Zynga’s “Cafe World.” .... all Zynga games are tested with pods of people, each focused on a specific aspect of the title. Those pods are comprised of artists, writers and engineers ... the external focus groups that really lets the team know what people dislike before they ship something into the wild .... Zynga’s development process is so iterative, that the company is really making a “big complex toy.” By bringing in both hardcore and novice game players, the ChefVille team was able to pick apart what they were building and make sure that it hit all of its goals for engagement. ..... We let people play with it and sit back and watch. We build the next level of features based on feedback. We have ideas internally, but community matters. ..... The team that I sat down with has built games on literally every platform known to man. ..... With this new social element, a gaming studio now has a unique connection with the player. Games run 24/7 and are constantly being updated and tweaked ..... Zynga knows whether it has a hit within minutes of shipping the game. ..... Zynga travels to other cities to pull together groups of players for testing purposes .... Instead of worrying about whether a game can scale, Zynga teams can focus on making the game absolutely awesome, monetization ready and full of social hooks. ..... the moment of launching a game is when the work really gets started for a company like Zynga. ..... The company also makes sure to pay attention to all channels for feedback, including Twitter and its own support site. ..... you can’t say that Zynga doesn’t have a platform which is extremely powerful to launch games from. ..... The engagement levels on ChefVille are so deep that my jaw dropped a few times. There are always things running in the background, everything on the screen is clickable. ..... The level of detail and connectedness for ChefVille is unlike I’ve ever seen on any game

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Curiosity Did This

Curiosity did this.

NASA announces $1.1 billion in support for a trio of spaceships

with the aim of having American astronauts flying once more on American spacecraft within five years. ..... The next phase of NASA's commercial spaceflight effort — known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability, or CCiCap ..... NASA wants to have at least one commercial space taxi carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017. ..... the space agency has had to depend on the Russians to fly American astronauts at a cost of roughly $60 milllion a seat ..... Sierra Nevada is testing its Dream Chaser space plane, which looks like a miniaturized version of the space shuttle. .... NASA is spending billions of dollars to develop the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle for deep-space exploration, as well as a heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. Those spacecraft are being designed to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s

The public-private partnership in action is of great interest to me.

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Zynga Fixes

Mobile is a trend, it is a tsunami, and it is not new, it has been going on. So the thought that Zynga should place a major emphasis on mobile is to state the obvious. Mobile is going to be the central computing experience for most people. They are out and about but they are connected, they are online. Mobile is where the center of gravity is headed, if it is not there already. And that has implications for numerous companies, many industries.

Being metrics driven is important. But being only metrics driven can feel empty. Creating games is artwork. You can't get rid of the metrics, but you can't be a slave to the metrics either. What makes for a great actor? A great director? A great movie? What makes for a great game?

There's A Major Flaw In Zynga's Plan To Fix Itself

It has no choice but to figure out mobile. Zynga's mobile users are growing three times faster than its web users. ...... Farmville, which first put the gaming company on the map, has led to a slew of other "ville" attempts, like Castleville, Cityville, YoVille, PetVille and FishVille. Most have not been able to attract the same user-base as Farmville. .... "The 'With Friends' network is the same strategy as ville games," says the source "Pick a franchise that has one hit and double down on the franchise as each game performs worse and worse."

Going mobile is as much a strategy as going online is. That is a broad direction. Then you have to figure it out.

Wall Street is even more metrics driven than Zynga. Way more. It looks at cold, hard cash, earnings.

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