Polaroid: you don't know what you have until it is gone

Interesting article in Newsweek about the demise of Polaroid in analog form and it resurrection in digital form. 8mm film is being revived the same way. How many music videos and ads have you seen with what looks like 8mm footage? Country music videos are great for this. Though more subtle, Kodachrome is going through a similar revival.

This article raises an interesting point that we see reinforced every day in our scanning service. People that are truly happy with our services embrace the use of scanned slides and negatives as a memory tool. Those that are unhappy tend to be in the camp that thinks that digitized film should look like images shot today, on fancy digital cameras.

Do you want your Kodachrome to look like Kodachrome - highly saturated colors and contrasty - or like a modern image with fluid tonalities and colors? If you use the images simply as documents of an event, the latter may be appealing. If, instead, they are remembrances of times, people and places past, meant to trigger emotion and memory and to encourage discussion and storytelling, then Kodachrome should look like Kodachrome.

RedCamper: There's a use of old film that I didn't think of

Check out RedCamper for a very cool and interesting use of tourist and travel slides. We see these slides every day at Pixmonix.

Many of the examples shown on the website are tourist 127 slides - particularly Ektachrome - that have faded to red. These slides recover very well most of the time. (We show an example of the recovery of this sort of faded Ektachrome slide on this page of the Pixmonix website.)

Please check out these products at RedCamper and help out a small business person who has a cool product and is trying to make ends meet in this harsh economy.

Tour de France

Great day today for Lance Armstrong, but more so an inspirational performance from Cancellara to hold the yellow jersey.

Now the real question: what the hell is Ben Stiller doing presenting the yellow jersey? And, could he have at least looked happy about it?

The New New Thing, Michael Lewis

The New New Thing, by Michael lewis

This book is a sort of biography of Jim Clark. Clark founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape (most notably). The book spends much time looking at Clark's compulsive need to move on - from one business to the next, from one wife to the next, from one boat to the next - and how this helped to bring about the Internet revolution (and perhaps more important for some) the Internet bubble of the 1990s.

I spent most of the book just thinking what an ass Jim Clark is. I'm not sure if I should be nastalgic for the boom or angry over the whole thing. I spent the boom years at Intel, wondering what life would be like over the hedge. I toyed with a couple of ideas with fellow Intel people, but never made a move away from the comfort of the big company until long after the bubble was over. (The guys I was kicking ideas around with are still at Intel). So maybe I'm just a little bitter that I didn't partake in any of the tremendous riches created during the period.

Pixmonix has a decidedly different approach. I am not interested in venture capital and extremely rapid growth. We have more of a small (but growing) small business approach while at the same time leveraging all of the web and new media tools that are out there. This is a traditional small business but with a decidely new economy approach: you can appeal to people outside of your geographc area and still be a small business using web tools. In some ways, this is the true legacy of Jim Clark and his ilk who made and lost fortunes during the bubble years - they left behind a great deal of infrastructure that is now useful, even without venture capital, even though nobody had a clue about how to use it at the time of creation. I don't know how the sailboat industry fared; I suspect that the rise of Wall Street has continued to fuel the boat industry even after Silicon Valley returned from the stratosphere.

The book is a good read. If you were even tangentially involved in the tech boom of the past 20 years, you will find it interesting.