Author: Björn Jeffery

First seed investment

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Clue, an app that enables women to track their menstrual cycles, has brought on three new investors to its latest seed round bringing its total investment to €1 million thus far. Clue received €500,000 from a previous seed investment round in February 2014. The angel investors joining are Björn Jeffery, CEO of Toca Boca, and previous Spotify executives Andreas Ehn and Sriram Krishnan. “Confident, scientific and not pink” is Clue’s style. I made my first […]

The Bling Ring

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I’ve become strangely fascinated by The Bling Ring. It’s not a new story, but it’s one that illustrates how celebrity culture can get the best of people – even the ones in the periphery. And how meta it quickly becomes when the people admiring and trying to imitate the celebs, become just this through the process.  If you haven’t heard about it, this is a very brief summary: A bunch of teenagers want to live […]

Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites

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What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. (…) And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this […]

Mineblock

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“About a year and a half ago, Haig began working on an ingenious device called the Mineblock. A physical object powered by the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer and not much larger than your hand, the Mineblock does just one thing: run a private Minecraft server.” (via Mineblock envisions a troll-free Minecraft universe – Kill Screen – Videogame Arts & Culture.)

Following the poodle

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This production manager Arno I mentioned,” Freeman says, “he was the second barista I ever hired and he was a German literature major, and Goethe was a big thing for him. And I remember reading some of Doctor Faustus a while ago—you know, to get to know Arno better—and there is a great, great metaphor in it that I’ve been thinking about so much. It’s the prevailing metaphor of my last 18 months. In the […]

Just Have Less

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The appeal of Maier’s designs is similarly aided by clubbiness and artificial scarcity. With the Cabat, small production runs insure that it is not seen everywhere and thus retains what Steele calls its “stealth luxury” appeal. “One of the most interesting aspects of fashion in the past ten years has been how much of it has been like a secret Masonic handshake,” she told me. “Only people in the know will recognize what you have, […]

Ghibli announces closure

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oh-totoro: STUDIO GHIBLI ANNOUNCES CLOSURE Toshio Suzuki has announced the closure of Studio Ghibli. Here’s a translated version of the news article: “Just moments ago, Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli producer, announced on the TV show of the MBS Jounetsu Tairiku chain effectively as announced as sources close to the studio, Studio Ghibli will close and production studio anime, leaving himself only as a company that will manage its trademarks. As stated in the program’s producer, […]

Media houses are clueless

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So how should advertisers be re-looking at their relationships with media houses? – I think it’s pretty tough, because the media houses are clueless. The average media company in the world is in pretty poor shape. A few will survive. A few newspapers will make the transition from a print product to an electronic product as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have done. And the Financial Times, which is perhaps the […]