Ed White

I'm fortunate to have seen RendezView from its early days. It was clear they had something special on their hands even though it looked a bit like Windows 3.1 (engineer art and all that) and in the time since then I haven't really seen another tool that makes it so easy for teams to work on complex projects together and easily stay on the same page. Imagine a Zoom presentation where everyone is...

I just finished the book and enjoyed it a lot. It covers the stories surrounding why ARPANET came into existence, how it was made, and how the networking community took the ball and ran until it had transformed into the internet. What I found interesting about the book is that it does not focus on the technical wizardry required to bring the network into existence (though there is some of...

When SoundCloud started shutting down accounts because of remixes, I immediately thought they were missing out on a huge opportunity to create a business innovation. They got big off people's remixes (very YouTube of them), and an easy licensing scheme would have probably let them take it to the next level. Loudr seems to solve that problem, or at the very least shows it's possible to fix....

I was just having a discussion about this with a friend last night. Sound Cloud (or at least its users) got big from creating remixes of modern songs, but those are now being taken down because of copyright infringement. This product doesn't solve the problem of notability--piggybacking off a song's popularity--but it does solve the problem of getting guaranteed legal building blocks for their...

My wife is a photographer. She's not world-famous, though she has at least one world-famous picture. http://dallasnagatawhite.com/2012/07/lava-hike/ When "Lava Kiss" (the internet's name, not ours) went viral, we totally lost control of the image. It's used a lot without our permission, but we've all but given up chasing all but the most egregious infringements--like sites selling "male...

Kind of a fluffy read, but I enjoyed it and think it has plenty of actionable information and insight about what makes products appealing at a biological level. In particular, it demonstrates the power strong branding which leads to unconscious associations with a certain color, sound, etc--Great information about how to build a sticky, memorable brand.

This is a great companion book for Hooked by Nir Eyal. One takes the angle of personal and organization improvement, the other takes the angle of product design. Together they form a relatively complete picture of the nature of habit, and its use as a tool in a variety of domains.

As a creative, this is possibly very exciting. My wife and I have created images which have been seen around the world, but for which we often don't get credit--some content aggregator just lifts the image from wherever it was shared, strips the metadata, and reshares it without ever giving compensation or even credit. It's a major, MAJOR pain point that we don't have some mechanism to control...

The author has a TED talk in which he describes one of his case studies, the story of Justine Sacco. Might be worth watching to get an idea of what's in the book. http://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_what_happens_when_online_shaming_spirals_out_of_control#t-310767 I picked it up when it came out, since I do think this is a real issue and the increasing number of online witch hunts is...

This is one of the few books that I don't openly recommend because the insights are so powerful, I'm afraid those who I recommend it to will be suspicious I've been using the techniques on them! It's an excellent book with knowledge which could almost be considered a weapon--a must read.

Storytelling Animal draws on neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology to explain why humans are compelled to tell stories. In the book, Jonathan Gottschall explains why it evolved, its uses in society, and how we react to stories at a biological level. I found this book while looking for research about the neurological basis for what humans perceive as beautiful. This book doesn't...