Erik Kain:

I do think that the internet is the future of television, and that the current model is flawed. I don’t like the fact that high-quality television requires de facto subsidies from the myriad other low-quality channels out there. But the contradiction remains: a la carte cable or stand-alone services would save customers money, but would also vastly restrict what sort of quality programming would be available.

My thoughts exactly. Brace yourselves! Cord cutting is coming, and it’s gonna stay.

Spiegel Online wrote on this topic in German.

Now the iPad feels crappy :/

via Hypercritical #67

Circle’s CEO Evan originally wrote, er, a mail that was automatically sent after I downloaded the App contained the following text:

Hi Timm,
I am a Co-Founder and CEO of Circle and I noticed that you downloaded our app today.

I wanted to reach out and thank you for trying it and see how your initial experience was. We made Circle to help people know when their friends and networks are nearby and we hope that you find it useful!

We are just getting started (you’re one of the first to check it out!) and I’d greatly appreciate any ideas on how we can improve or any problems that you run into and we will fix them fast! Below is my personal email and cell phone. Feel free to reach out 24/7 with any ideas or just to say hi. Thanks again and I hope to chat sometime in Circle - I am always at the end of your “Networks” in the app.

Cheers,
Evan

Hi Evan,

It’s very kind of you to reach out to me. I want to let you know that I removed Circle from my device and deleted it in Facebook after playing with it for a few minutes.

But I want to start of with something positive. Your app looks very, very nice. I also looked at Highlight and think it really doesn’t look that great.

Now, why did I remove ‘Circle’? I just don’t see how it holds any value for me. And I don’t like things that are too tightly integrated with Facebook. Spotify for example is really, really great, but the fact that they now require a Facebook account creeps me out.

Back to your App: Why Facebook? There’s a ton of people there, I get it. But Facebook did, in fact, get out of the location game a while ago and stopped innovating there, so the guys at Foursquare do their thing, and they do good. I like and use that service a lot. I can share the venue I’m at with my friends, and they see it and act accordingly. That’s much more useful than the sole location or distance you relate to. I don’t understand why you don’t use the Foursquare api or connect your service to Foursquare in some other way. Instead, there’s the connection to Facebook I already mentioned that doesn’t make any sense to me. Yes, there are people, but they need to install your app nonetheless, don’t they? And why don’t you offer a twitter-, a google- and an openID-signup/login if you want to make the signup process a breeze?
No offense, but I don’t believe that you just did it to make the signup process slick and simple. Everything I saw makes me think that you want access to people’s profile info, for whatever reason. Well, the Path guys have their customers’ (you might say: their products’) address books, why shouldn’t you get their workplace info, highschool year and so on?

If that’s not true, and I’m almost sure it isn’t, it’s still bad design (again, no offense, just my opinion). The whole location-thingy makes sense on a per-venue-basis.

I hoped that your app offers kind of a better Foursquare radar (maybe including people I follow who attach their location to tweets or people who check-in using Facebook), but sadly it’s far from it, especially because I need to invite all my real friends to use Circle nonetheless, despite the tight integration with Facebook.

Regards,
Timm

I just watched ‘Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol’. What a bad movie. Embarrassingly so, really. By all means, it’s a ‘Blockbuster’: High prodction value, multiple well-known actors and so on. I just can’t understand how such a movie can turn out so bad. It’s not that I had expected a deep, meaningful film. I expected action, explosions, jokes and so on, but I also expect good craftsmanship. The Budget of $145 million should enable the crew to consult someone to tell them: ‘That’s crappy, don’t do that’ from time to time. Apparently, this only applied to the first 18.5 minutes of the film which are okay. After that, it’s down.the.hill.

• Jeremy Renner’s character is an analyst. Okay. So, when running along the waggon trains, he has to ask: ‘What was your scenario?’, alluding to an (illogical) move Cruise’s character performed in the previous firefight. You can’t use the bad design of a character (Renner’s) to explain a part of a story that doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know if that’s bad character design, a (bad) joke I don’t get or an attempt to hint to the fact we learn later on: That Renner’s character isn’t really an analyst. Well… you may think I’m nitpicky here, but please just watch the scene and tell me your 7-year-old son couldn’t have written it better and more logical.
• How did the Russian agent and his team even find the vehicle in which Cruise’s, Renner’s characters and the secretary meet up?
• The whole storyline about Cruise’s character’s wife –> Who cares? It’s meant to create a ‘Happy End’ moment, I get that. And it’s a construction that gives Renner’s character something to mourn after. But it’s so disconnected from the actual story, I can’t believe it. And: Who cares about the wife? I recently watched MI:III and didn’t care at all. I don’t know anything about storytelling, but an emotional link to a character the viewer is supposed to have feelings about might come in handy. Just an idea.
  The same applies to the mourning of Paula Patton’s character, with the difference that the scenes in which her lover died enriched the film.
• A nuclear missile that already has launched and is flying a few hundred meters above New York City(? Seattle?) as highest point of the climax? - yeah. That’s just too much. Perfect for a parody like ‘Austin Powers’, but bad for a film that takes itself serious. Even Simon Pegg doesn’t save the day, the jokes are more like… I wanted to write ‘slapstick’, but looked it up and it doesn’t fit. Let’s say the jokes are bad.
• If, for a $ 145 million dollar movie, you can’t get a digital sandstorm that looks the part, just spare it. Reminded me of an EMP, just brown colored. The explosion in the Kremlin also looks bad. Bad special effects for itself really don’t make a film bad, don’t get me wrong. When a crew just doesn’t have the money to get good special effects, that doesn’t make the film bad. But for over $100 million, there should be someone in the crew who identifies an effect that looks crappy and should be abandoned or worked around.
• When Cruise’s character enters the server room from outside the Burj Khalifa, he very clearly pivots around the point where he’s attached to the cables that were erased in post-production. That scene could’ve been cut differently, I think. Otherwise, they just could’ve let the cables in the movie.

I do like action movies that are dumb and one-dimensional. I like movies that are stupid. But I don’t like movies that pretend they’re good movies but aren’t. In this regard, ‘Ghost Protocol’ is like ‘The Expendables’ (don’t even get me started). Could’ve been great, could’ve been okay, but went for ‘very, very bad’. Damn, I hate waste of resources. Therefore, I’m glad that ‘The Avengers’ turned out how it did. It’s no masterpiece, not innovative or mindblowing, but it is rock solid, good craftsmanship.