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Nokia just launched a tablet called Nokia N1, which is a big surprise to the market. Well, turns out it's actually the Chinese company Foxconn who is manufacturing, distributing and selling the Nokia N1, which looks extremely similar to the iPad Mini (exact same dimensions and design). It's maybe not so surprising given that Foxconn is the company that manufactures the iPad and iPhone for Apple. Basically Foxconn is pissing all over Apple by taking the iPad mini hardware and installing a Nokia version of Android on this. Take a look at the device here, and tell me you don't think it's a total ripoff of the iPad http://n1.nokia.com.

I don't care that much that Samsung, and now also Nokia/Foxconn is stealing (or being hugely inspired to put it nicely) from Apple. I just think it's really a shame that these huge companies are not putting money and resources into innovation.

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/moocs-failure-solutions

According to research MOOCs are the least effective at serving the students who need the educational resources the most. MOOCs are not really intended for the educated academics who have the mindset, discipline and personal drive of an academic education implanted already. MOOCs are intended for the people who for some reason didn't get the chance to attend university or who dropped at some point.

There is a huge problem with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). People don't finish their courses. They drop out. Why?

One of the arguments in play is that they are not individualized enough. The promise of reaching the masses through technology has standardized the MOOCs to a degree where they don't fit the student on an individual level.

That argument makes a lot of sense since all good teaching is individualized, but there might be more to it than that. Time and experience will show.

Your social media world is broken. It's cluttered with content you have no real interest in and people you don't really know.

If you want to find great stuff out there you have to go through endless streams of status updates that don't matter to you, and most of the time people don't really have the particular interest you have, but tend to repost other people's stuff just because it's fun.

It makes it hard to find not just the right stuff out there but also the right people. Why spend so much time on otherwise good social media platforms if they can't give you what you need?

In short, social media is ready for its next generation. It should be a breeze to do a simple search and find just the media files you need in a few seconds. It should be a rule, rather than the exception, that you automatically see who is interested in that very same media file you are. And, it should be a natural thing for you to remix your favorite media files into a cool little narrative and share it.

We believe in the value of open source in many ways, but we also believe in designing great user experiences rooted in what we call digital aesthetics.

In all simplicity it's about making things beautiful, and you can only do that in a controlled environment. It's extremely hard to create consistent beauty in a fragmented reality - and let's face it; open source is a pretty fragmented reality.

Having said that we are firm believers that open source environments are necessary drivers for innovation. Open source is the grassroot undercurrent of all new things for the simple reason that it sets people free to create what they want on an individual basis - without asking anyone for permission.

We love that, and we support that. But the moment you want to take something from grassroot level and make it bigger, you have to design it for a specific purpose, and that purpose must have a controlled environment to grow big in. Otherwise it's like growing bacteria outside of your front door instead of in a lab.