I have been spending my summers at the beach pictured above since I was 6. Located in between Tarquinia and Montalto, precisely here, “my beach” is the kind of place you know it’s not that amazing or impressive, but all your friends are there. All your laughs and bad jokes and summer adventures. Today, the beach is still my favorite place to think. The vastness and the equality of the sea help me put things in a better, more reasonable perspective.

Often, I think about the memories we have, and how as humans and technology connoisseurs we can preserve those memories from being obliterated like sand marks by the sea. When I was a kid, I didn’t have an iPhone readily available to take photos and videos, to save them for those times when I want to look back with the smile of an old friend to the me of 10 years ago. Look how stupid you looked in that t-shirt, you idiot. Remember when you...

Grant Brünner:

In the past month and a half, we have seen an incredible land rush to utilize Kickstarter to bring back classic game franchises. It started when Double Fine Adventure launched, and ended up raising over three million dollars. Leisure Suit Larry, Wasteland 2, and Shadowrun Returns soon followed. Are they riding the coat tails of Tim Schaefer? Who cares? That doesn’t matter — we’re getting a bunch of crowd-funded games by people who really care about the franchises.

I do like this trend. I just wish there was a Kickstarter to convince even more game developers to do Kickstarters.

Todd Hoff:

It’s been a well kept secret, but you may have heard Facebook will Buy Photo-Sharing Service Instagram for $1 Billion. Just what is Facebook buying? Here’s a quick gloss I did a little over a year ago on a presentation Instagram gave on their architecture. In that article I called Instagram’s architecture the “canonical description of an early stage startup in this era.” Little did we know how true that would turn out to be.

Cool follow-up the tech that handles Instagram’s infrastructure.

My ongoing coverage of the Instagram acquisition over at MacStories. After my take on today’s news, I am commenting on the best coverage found on the Internet – I am glad not everyone is acting like this. Courtney Boyd Myers had another particularly good story at The Next Web.

I typically don’t care about acquisitions, but I find today’s news one of the most exciting things that have happened to mobile and photo sharing in a while. I use Facebook, I use Instagram, and I am genuinely excited about the promise of Instagram’s essence and nature being kept alive. I am one of those people who are intrigued by Facebook’s internal culture, and who think the company has basically won the race to the de-facto social network product.

I hope Zuckerberg understands they could elegantly transition Instagram to becoming a Facebook product without ruining it. They should use Instagram as a way to...

In 1888, New York journalist David Goodman Croly published Glimpses of the Future, a “compilation” of predictions about the future “to be read now and judged in the year 2000”. I found the original link on Reddit, which pointed to this roundup by Greg Ross, based off the original book as digitized by Duke University.

I decided to collect a few additional predictions by Goodman Croly about the technological innovations we’d see in the future.

On “pictures and voices” in education:

Sir O. – It seems to that in that case a novel or romance could best be given in a public hall, with a stereopticon for the scenes, characters, and actions, and the graphophone to give voice to the conversations.

Mr F. – That would make a kind of drama to it, although without actual actors. It would be pictures and voices. And that reminds me, I do not see why the stereopticon is not more used in schools...

“Bada bing, bada boom – that’s exactly what we’re looking for”.

Rdio VP of Product Malthe Sigurdsson tells Janko Roettgers of GigaOM the company is working on a Pandora-like radio functionality to improve the “passive listening” experience of the service.

“We need to get better at passive listening,” Sigurdsson told me during a conversation at Rdio’s office in San Francisco this week. The move in a way echoes some of the things developers have been doing with Spotify apps, and both point to a bigger problem for music subscription services: With unlimited access to millions of tracks, choice can be a challenge.

Roettgers reports how, for music streaming services, which give you unlimited access to millions of songs for a monthly fee, the real issue becomes discovering artists and finding out what you want to listen to, exactly, among all those releases and available artists.

For the past 6 months, I have been using Rdio and am very happy with it...

MG Siegler has some good points about why it would make sense for Apple to release a 7.85-inch iPad. I still don’t agree with this, though:

But even at a high level, all of this is too technical. The bottom line is that there isn’t a week that goes by without someone coming up to me and gushing about the iPad, but wishing it was a bit smaller. Not everyone feels this way, of course. And that’s why Apple will keep the 9.7 inch model as well. But there are plenty of folks out there who want a smaller version.

Like I said, of all the people I have talked to in the past two years about the iPad – not just “nerds”, as you would suspect from a tech writer – no one ever asked me about a smaller version. In fact, in my experience, people are typically afraid a screen so portable and relatively small could make for a bad reading experience for prolonged sessions. And that’s exactly what Apple...

Such a minor, yet nice improvement on the Dropbox website: you can now drag & drop files from your computer and onto the browser using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Dropbox has been making some great improvements to its website lately. I like the new interface, and the photo viewer has been revamped as well. I use the Dropbox Mac app all the time, but drag & drop support in the browser is going to help me share screenshots publicly a lot faster than before.

On Tuesday, Instagram launched its long awaited Android application. Co-founder Mike Krieger shares the details behind the “tools and techniques” that power Instagram (via 512 Pixels).

The last few weeks (on the infrastructure side) have been all about capacity planning and preparation to get everything in place, but on launch day itself the challenge is to find problems quickly, get to the bottom of them, and roll out fixes ASAP.

I find this post fascinating also because my girlfriend signed up to Instagram yesterday, and she was pleased to find out “it’s just an iPhone app” after all the talk she heard about it. It’s an app – with lots of cool tech behind it.

Also: Instagram’s growth as an “iPhone app” has been pretty amazing.