Month: March 2012

chipotle: If I had one bit of advice to someone thinking of a startup—including myself, at times—it would be this. Solve a genuine problem, even a trivial one, that you actually have, and that isn’t being adequately solved by an existing solution. Then think about how you can get money for solving that problem. Be wary of scenarios in which your revenue base and your customer base have no overlap.

Coyote Tracks: When to call bullshit

Why Lytro?

Radical Camera Lets You Pick What’s Blurry And What’s Not (AllThingsD)

Lytro's revolutionary new camera reinvents the point-and-shoot camera, allowing you to focus or refocus your photographs after you take them.

Walt Mossberg found it easy to use.

I’ve been testing the Lytro and found it does just what it says. I was able to take rapid-fire shots that looked good on my computer, and that could be focused and refocused, uploaded to the Internet and shared. I consider it a revolution in consumer photography, with more benefits to come.

But then maybe he did not.

But the main drawback to the Lytro I discovered is that it takes a while to learn how to spot and frame pictures that show off the camera’s refocusing abilities. Also, in many common situations, such as taking a simple picture of a single face or object, the refocusing ability just doesn’t come into play, since it works best when there are multiple objects arranged so that some are in the foreground and some are in the background.

So the camera that is touted as helping people take better photos without any specialised training — presumably because they are too lazy to learn how to focus on the right subject - still requires training for effective use? I suggest spending half of that $399 on a decent point-n-shoot and the other half on a photography course.