Mikkel Marius Winther

Mikkel Marius Winther is interested in the way the Internet is changing the way we communicate and the consequences it has on society and everyday life. He works at Google and he loves technology, music, art, and writing about himself in the third person.



2 months ago
1 note

Meditation documentary films on Kickstarter

If you are interested in meditation you may want to check out these two Kickstarter projects:

On Meditation is a series of short portrait films that explores the meditation practices of several notable meditators, including Ven. Metteyya Sakyaputta, author Peter Matthiessen, and Congressman Tim Ryan.

Naked Mind is a documentary film about “the effects of meditation and its potential for collective evolution.” I am personally a bit frustrated about the focus on the woman who claims to be able to do a dark retreat for 40 days without eating or drinking (she says she absorbs steam instead) but they will have a scientist monitor her with an infrared camera so maybe we will simply see an entertaining debunking. And there are interviews with a lot of interesting people so it may be worthwhile anyway.

3 months ago
I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time.

—My boss, Larry Page, in an interview with Wired.

7 months ago

Project Re:Brief

What happens when you take five legendary creatives from the golden age of advertising and ask them to re-imagine their iconic ads for the digital age? That’s the idea behind Project Re:Brief, a documentary directed by Doug Pray.

Here’s the synopsis for the film:

Project Re: Brief is an inspiring story about the need for creative thinking in the face of enormous technological shifts in the way we communicate. In a beautiful collision of minds and media, Project Re: Brief is a grand experiment whereby Google partnered with five of the brightest “old-school” legends from advertising to re-imagine their most iconic creative work from a half-century ago for the modern web.

Directed by Doug Pray, and the same team who joined him to make the Emmy-Award-winning film and PBS hit “Art & Copy,” Project Re: Brief is a film that aims to shake up the ad industry and inspire new ways of thinking. While shifting formats and media platforms is one thing, as we learn from our heroes of the past, the basic tenets of human storytelling haven’t changed.

You can watch the entire film online here.

8 months ago

Best comeback ever

Quoting this comment on Reddit verbatim as it’s one of the best snappy comebacks I’ve ever read.

I was working at a big box home center on September 11, 2001. By lunchtime on that day we had sold out of US flags and would be out for some time until we could get more in. Customers would come in and just be beside themselves that we didn’t have any. They couldn’t understand a JIT inventory system where we would carry a week or two’s worth of inventory and then get in a box or so every few days.

By that Wednesday afternoon my nerves were as frayed as everyone else’s and I got to my breaking point as this customer screamed at me that he just couldn’t believe we didn’t have any US flags in stock. Finally I lost it and and told him, “Sir, we had plenty on Monday, but you didn’t want one then.”

9 months ago
82 notes

venomous porridge: App.net isn’t just a country club

dwineman:

Anil Dash echoed Tess Rinearson in calling [App.net] a “country club”; others have alluded to its slightly-less-than-diverse demographics. Most of this criticism stems from a perception of the service as a Twitter clone that costs money. Which is totally fair because right now, that’s all it is. But it’s also a bit like calling the web in 1993 an AOL clone for rich white college students. Fair, but entirely missing the point.

Best description of the potential of App.net I’ve read so far. I still have some reservations but I’m also excited about the potential (especially for when they figure out how to not charge every single user $50 for write access.)

You can find me on App.net here.

10 months ago
2 notes

My favorite podcasts

Because someone asked on Twitter, here’s a list of my favorite podcasts. I guess most of them are pretty well-known but if there is anything in the list below you don’t know, definitely check it out.

Podcasts in English
This American Life – the best podcast out there, period. Stories about a different theme each week. Just absolutely perfect.
Planet Money – easily digestible background information and stories about economic issues concerning the U.S. and the world.
Back to Work – about life, getting things done, and, well, anything and everything really.
Buld and Analyze – about iOS development and the Apple ecosystem. And coffee.
The Critical Path – probably the best podcast on the 5by5 network in my not so humble opinion. About the mobile industry seen through an Apple-centric lens.
Hypercritical – John Siracusa complains about things.
The Ihnatko Almanac – a nerdy take on comics, books, tv series, movies.
Roderick on the Line – John Roderick and Merlin Mann talk about stuff.
Zencast – lectures on different aspects of the Buddhist path and guided meditations.
The Talk Show – the reboot of the world’s #1 Apple podcast.
You Look Nice Today – Merlin Mann, Scott Simpson and Adam Lisagor talk about… just listen to the damn thing.

Podcasts in Danish
Orientering – news and background.
Fup i farvandet – comedy podcast featuring Mikkel Malmberg and Morten Wichmann.

Update
Got a lot of great suggestions over on Twitter. Thanks, guys! Here’s a list of the podcasts people have suggested:

Podcasts in English:

Buddhist Geeks
WTF with Marc Maron
The Moth
Freakonomics
Radiolab
The Guardian Tech Weekly
The Bugle
Fresh Air
Mac Power Users
Enough
The Non Breaking Space
The Big Web Show
All Songs Considered
On the Media

Podcasts in Danish:

Sommerkabalen
P1 på plejehjem
Interne Affærer
Fodboldmagasinet

11 months ago
6 notes

Think Different: Why Windows Phone 7 Will Never Take Off

pgetzen:

I recently had the opportunity, through my university, to attend a 12 hour Windows Phone Hackathon. The premise was this: “You have 12 hours to build a somewhat functional Windows Phone 7 app.”

…

Then I started looking at apps (both stock and 3rd party), and I realized something. Every app looked the same. Every. Single. App.

Even colors were the same. Our Microsoft programming guide even told us that we should use the system’s foreground and accent colors to give the app a uniform look.

Interesting thought. I guess the Windows Phone apps I’ve been playing with do tend to look a bit similar.