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shift toward what is now known as contextual computing

Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, while not magnificently intuitive, feed you book and video recommendations based on your behavior and ratings. Facebook’s and Twitter’s valuations are premised on the notion that they can leverage knowledge of your acquaintances and interests to push out relevant content and market to you in more effective ways.

four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.

Value Exchange Is the content valuable to the end user in some way? Entertainment has value, but so does utility. In either case, you need to understand what your audience values rather than just assuming they have an innate fascination in your brand talking about itself.

People want news they can share around the vending machine at work or via their Twitter handle.

When we see others doing something, we are often more apt to make that same choice ourselves.

one of the best ways to improve any experience is to simplify it--to remove complications, unnecessary layers, hassles, or distractions, while focusing on the essence of what people want and need in that particular situation.

Offering simplicity within a complex domain is likely to be so appreciated and valued by customers that it ends up being perceived as a luxury.

One way to carve out a luxury niche is by simplifying--by making it easier for customers to use a product or service without having to waste time thinking about it or sorting through too many options.

Even the illusion of progress causes an accelerating effect.

Take time to reflect on and acknowledge how your work has progressed. All it takes is a pause to get the satisfying sight of all your own kind of accumulating Bionicles rather than letting them slip past you, unrecognized sources of fuel.

Your motivation surges the closer you are to reaching your goal. Something about seeing the finish line lights a fire, even when you’re not always on the right track.

"There’s you, the person, and you have your full identity in yourself," he says. "But you know contextually when to wear certain things. You might wear one thing to a funeral, you might wear one thing for a Saturday night. You understand those contexts. And those never change your identity, so to speak, but they do start to communicate some kind of intent. And that’s what we’re trying to figure out right now. How do you create some kind of contextual mirror to create intent."

"Monolithic solutions are a necessity of yesterday, because of the permanence and cost of communication," Hendrix wrote in his opening remarks for the project. "Now we’re in an ephemeral and affordable age, and mass distribution at low cost is possible thanks to the digital revolution."

"The digital revolution let us make more complex identity systems, but what’s the point?," he says. "At some point, you start asking, 'why do I need 10,000 configurations of a mark? What’s it really saying to me?"

Facebook's new commitment to "mobile first" design

Now that nearly half of Facebook's users are accessing the network from their mobile phones every day — and soon, more than half will — Facebook is beginning to prioritize that experience first.

Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are: “Flexbox4,” “Regions5,” “Grid Layout6.”

Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.

We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed. In other words, instead of this… <div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div> … we need more of this: <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>

What are the key steps of the invention process? I describe it with my model, the Innovation Engine. First, there's an internal part. People normally start with imagination, being able to conjure ideas up in your mind. You need a base of knowledge with which you can work; if you don't have a base of knowledge, then you don't have a toolbox for your imagination. You also have to have the motivation and drive to solve the problem, because getting beyond the obvious answers requires a tremendous amount of activation energy.You need the imagination, you need the knowledge, and you need the attitude, which is the spark for this process, but there are also a lot of external factors that people do not take into account. What are these external factors?You need an environment where creativity is supported: everything from the physical space you're in, to the people you're with, the rules, the rewards, the constraints, the culture, and the resources present. All of these things have a huge impact on how an individual, a team, or an organization functions from a creative perspective.

How can managers create an environment nourishing to creativity? I've talked to some executives about this question, and they say, "My job as a manager is to create a habitat that fosters innovation." The innovation engine can get sparked anywhere--it's a kind of Möbius cube--there's no beginning and no end. If you're a manager, your job is to create a habitat that stimulates the imagination of your team, of your employees, of your colleagues.

One of the most common things that people say during a brainstorming session is "let me build on that." It’s a great way, even if you're going to take a tangential turn from what someone just said, to validate what they said and come up with an interesting segue to something else. You want to keep moving forward and going beyond the first wave of ideas and the second wave of ideas and keep pushing. The worst way to brainstorm is when everyone has their own ideas and nobody has taken [one another’s ideas] in different directions. Everyone feels a sense of ownership for their own idea, and then when you make the decision about what you're going to do, you have a lot of "Well, I like my idea," "I like my idea."

Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

At a time when every new piece of tech or service seems to be an app or digital entity, we’re craving the tangible.

When you first load a webpage, the first thing that happens is it generates an impression, which is then forwarded to an ad server. So far, so good, but you might be surprised by how much that ad server knows about you. Using information gathered from Internet cookies, social media, and more, an ad server is capable of generating a unique profile of various metrics, almost like a QR code, that contains everything it knows about you: how old you are, your relationship status, what websites you browse, where you're located, etc. With that code generated, the ad server tries to match it against a pre-sold inventory of ads, almost like a key fitting into a lock. If the key fits, the process ends there, and an ad is returned that advertisers believe jibes with your unique personal profile. But it's what happens if the server doesn't have an ad that matches where things gets interesting.

Without a pre-sold ad to serve you, an ad server forwards your profile to an international ad exchange, where a network of different ad servers examine it and bid on it in real time. In a fraction of a second, a host of third-party servers around the world go into a bidding war for the opportunity to show you an ad, with the highest bidder taking the prize and filling your eyes.

Twitter is a ticker tape of the stock market of human interests.

what ultimately sets Twitter apart from the likes of Pinterest and Facebook is its immediacy. While Facebook is ultimately focused on documenting the life of its users, and Pinterest is all about cataloging their interests, Twitter is about what is on your mind.