Beverley
@beverley
I am a Technology Entrepreneur quietly building humble but handy Internet businesses.
Beverley
phrase, now famously used in reference to Steve Jobs, “reality distortion field”, where the hype or belief in something is an illusion of its actual state.
David Mannheim • The Person in Personalisation: The Story Of How Marketing's Most Treasured Possession Became Anything but Personal
And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives
... See moreThe Browser Company • Optimizing For Feelings
People naturally remember musical language, and I would encourage writers to inject their prose with a bit of music. When you’re writing, think about repetition and variety. Crescendos and rests. Pace and punctuation. Read your work out loud, and feel the rhythm of the words in your voice.
Derek Thompson • Why Simple Is Smart
By contrast, consumer software tools that enhance human agency, that serve us when we are most creative and intentional, are often built by hobbyists and used by a handful of nerds. If such a tool ever gets too successful one of the Marl-serving companies, flush with cash from advertising or growth-hungry venture capital, will acquire it and kill... See more
Ivan Vendrov • The Tyranny of the Marginal User
If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?
(Not Boring) Software Inc. • No More Boring Apps | (Not Boring) Software
At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said.
Walter Isaacson • Steve Jobs
Tech and
A renewed interest in human curation, a slow move away from big social, a clearer understanding of platform incentives, the economic feasibility of subscription businesses, and builders driven by a new set of values – combined, it feels like a good time for Internet businesses that are both human-scale and profitable.
The more reliant a task is on a large and private dataset, the more likely it is that a workflow application will be dominant instead of a model. The best software companies function as a system of record, a repository for the most important data (customer IDs, product analytics, or credit card numbers), and they’ll be able to offer superior
... See moreI strongly dislike giving unsolicited opinions or advice to those who haven't requested it. However, I've inherited a trait from my parents that earned them both respect and resentment. While I strive to express it with more tact, that trait is an unshakable moral drive to be brutally honest… almost all the time.