Ikea is planning to introduce furniture with built-in home entertainment systems later this year. The range includes three designs, all of which incorporate an LED TV, 2.1 sound system with wireless subwoofers, Wi-Fi for smart TV features, and DVD / Blu-Ray players. The company is planning to launch in Sweden, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal in the fall, with a worldwide rollout in spring 2013. The furniture is intended to hide away cables, and will come in a number of different color options.
I was just doing an exercise for a course called Foundation of Innovation where I had to model different fictional business models for IKEA in the year 2021 when I read this article.
There is already a video on YouTube introduction IKEA UPPLEVA. Since design has become a lot more important consumer electronics in the last years (thanks Apple) this seems like the next logical step. When I first moved into my room I had a detailed plan how to arrange furniture and where I put my electronics and cables. It was a pain in the ass and every time I buy a new piece of consumer electronics or rearrange my furniture I want to cry. There are so many cables and stuff and they are ugly. For that reason I bought an Apple AirPort express and that improved the situation a lot. I do not longer have to have cables for my stereo and my printer on the desk. They are now hidden behind my desk and currently I’m quite happy. But the situation is far from being perfect.
It definitely would be nice if the furniture would help me in the task of organizing electronic devices and cables. However, I don’t think that I want my home entertainment system integrated in my furniture. Especially I don’t want to replace the furniture when I want to replace my TV or stereo.
This article was sponsored by the society “I want to buy a TV again but I don’t know where to put it and I also don’t have the money”.
Video comprising one episode of Madmen incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent. The video has been linearly edited, no digital effects were used and all jump cuts and repeats are in the corrupted file.
The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
It also avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete.
Apple could, I think, grant Phillips his wish and allow the use of your phone number as an Apple ID. But they have to let you use your (email address) Apple ID for iMessage, because they want to allow iMessage for all iCloud users, not just iPhone owners.
On the iPhone I can add email addresses and my phone number to my iMessage account. On OS X and the iPad I can’t. That sucks.
Koding provides a cloud-based development environment (via UARRR). It is currently in private beta and I hadn’t had a chance to try it out, but I’m thinking a lot about moving my development environment into the cloud.
However, I do not mean to move the actual editing part to the cloud, but rather I want to store my code on a server, which also runs my development server. The server is, of course, private and only I can access it and I want to use it solely as a development environment. When I want to work on a project, I want to ssh into that server, mount the servers file system in my local system and continue to use Sublime Text 2. If I’m finished coding I still would push it to another Git server and I would also deploy it to another server.
The main advantage I see in this approach is that I would be able to access my development environment from nearly every computer in the world. Even from an iPad or an iPhone. I probably would still need my notebook for the main development, but then I would at least be able to do a quick bug fix when I don’t have my notebook with me.
We have seen some incredible amazing stuff you can do with JavaScript nowadays, but I don’t believe that a web-based editor can replace a desktop editor any time soon. Please proof me wrong, but I think there are some fundamental flaws in web-based editors. First of all, my screen is not that big, I don’t want to waste space in my editor for browser chrome. I want to have the chrome when I’m browsing, but I don’t need to have when I’m sitting in front of the same window for several hours. The second big problem are shortcuts. If your editor is browser-based you loose a lot of easy to activate shortcuts. You would not be able to press Cmd+S to save the document (if you do not want to override the browser default) or duplicate a line using Cmd+D. I hate it when I’m writing an article in WordPress and want to save it by pressing Cmd+S but that doesn’t work. That would be even worse when I’m writing code. Browsers were made for browsing the web, not for writing long texts or code.
If you should be able to create a web-based editor that is comparable to Sublime Text 2 or TextMate and put it in a custom browser chrome (no waste of screen space, no useless shortcuts) sign me up. I definitely want to see that.
