Industry News

Charles Fishman’s They Write the Right Stuff is an incredible profile of the engineers who write software for NASA’s space shuttle missions:

How do they write the right stuff?

The answer is, it’s the process. The group’s most important creation is not the perfect software they write — it’s the process they invented that writes the perfect software.

It’s the process that allows them to live normal lives, to set deadlines they actually meet, to stay on budget, to deliver...

A week or so ago, we asked if Google News will also be impacted by the mobile-friendly algorithm.

The answer is what I expected, that no, not yet.

Stacie Chan, who I have been pestering on this question for over a week...

Dave Pell—in the context of Facebook’s plan to host news sites’ content natively—explains what tech people are good at (and usually not good at) in Don’t Take a Flying Leap:

But building a really successful app or site does not mean you know more about education than educators. Disrupting the photo-sharing space does not qualify you to disrupt higher education. Or to understand the health system better than doctors. Or to understand the woes of urban poverty better than those who have...

When someone performs a search at one of the major search engines, the search engine focuses upon returning as quick and helpful an answer as possible. Part of that can involve looking the query up in a “trending topics” database to see if...

I know, we just covered huge chatter around a Google update last Friday but there is no doubt in my mind, Google is testing algorithms maybe around Panda or Penguin or the doorway algorithm is being released or maybe a whole new beast.
This morning the...

Douglas McGray’s How Carrots Became The New Junk Food is not about carrots. I mean it is, a little bit. But it’s mostly about product positioning and marketing.

“Everyone else pitched baby carrots as an antidote to junk food,” [Jeff] Dunn says. “Where [ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky] came out was almost the exact opposite. We want to be junk food.”

They realized that junk food is desirable. So instead of pitting carrots against that industry, they decided to play to its...

My favorite SEO tool isn’t an SEO tool at all. Don’t get me wrong, I use and like plenty of great SEO tools. But I realized that I was using this one tool all the time.

Chrome Developer Tools how I love thee, let me count the ways. Chrome Developer Tools

The one tool I use countless times each day is Chrome Developer Tools. You can find this handy tool under the View -> Developer menu in Chrome.



Or you can simply right click and select Inspect Element. (I suppose the latter is...

Beth Kowitt’s How Ikea took over the world is a great look inside the Ikea machine. For me, the biggest takeaway is how research and prototyping drive everything Ikea does. On research:

One way Ikea researchers get around this is by taking a firsthand look themselves. The company frequently does home visits and—in a practice that blends research with reality TV—will even send an anthropologist to live in a volunteer’s abode. Ikea recently put up cameras in people’s homes in Stockholm,...