Linked List: April 12, 2011

Tuesday, 12 April 2011

TSA Pats-Down Six-Year-Old Girl 

Keeping us safe.

Photo-Lettering 

New headline-setting web service from the typographic aces at House Industries.

Acorn 3.0 

Lots of new features (layer styles!), now available in the Mac App Store, and limited-time price of just $30.

Bond Mixology 

Nice work from Jay Thrash: an iPhone-optimized website based on the data from the now-defunct Atomic Martini’s list of all drinks consumed by James Bond in the movies, replete with recipes.

Dave Winer: ‘AOL Is Doing Layoffs the Wrong Way’ 

Dave Winer:

You prepare for the layoffs quickly and quietly. Then one morning you do them. All of them. And then have a company meeting and you tell the people that that was it. No more layoffs. You’re on the team. And then have a good story about how you’re going to lead them to prosperity. [...]

And what you don’t want to do is what AOL is doing. Week after week cutting off limbs. So that everyone inside the company is thinking they’re next.

Right. Who’s left at an AOL-owned site who isn’t looking around for a new gig?

Could Have Saved Cisco $600 Million 

Yours truly, back in May 2009:

I like my Flip, but I think the whole Flip class of pocket video cameras is ultimately doomed — the distinction between “still” and “video” cameras is quickly disappearing. Soon they’ll just be “cameras” that do both.

That, of course, was written a month before the video-shooting iPhone 3GS debuted. Flip got pinched on two sides: smartphones got cameras that were almost as good (quality-wise), and point-and-shoot still cameras started shooting video that was way better.

‘Windows App Store’ Screenshots Leak 

MG Siegler, at AOL/TechCrunch:

I swear this looks familiar…

The End: Cisco Shuts Down Flip, a $590 Million Mistake 

Ryan Kim:

Cisco is giving up on its barely two-year-old $590 million purchase of Pure Digital Technologies, announcing today that it is closing its Flip business unit and cutting 550 employees as part of a larger restructuring. The move comes after clear signs that the outsized deal was not paying off for the technology giant, which is in the midst of refocusing its business on its core networking business.

AOL Shuts Down Download Squad 

Violet Blue:

In a surprise move Monday night, popular software blog Download Squad became the latest tech casualty in Huffington/AOL’s so-called ‘consolidation’ of its content sites. In an end-of-the-day email, Download Squad’s staff was told that the blog was closed and they were jobless, effective immediately.

From that moment, no further blog posts were made on Download Squad.

The staff should have done what the crew at Engadget did — start quitting AOL months ago and get a new gig ready outside AOL.