This is not quite what you think. This is not about building an animation studio, but about using the techniques that Pixar leveraged into their great success to produce your own great success.

As a brand, Pixar–with 14 consecutive No. 1 box office hits and $7 billion in worldwide ticket sales–has come to stand for consistently wondrous excellence, thanks largely to the leadership of president Ed Catmull and chief creative officer John Lasseter, and an era of oversight by longtime owner Steve Jobs. And much has been written–most recently, Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.–about how exactly the company goes about creating lightning in a bottle time and time again. Recently, Disney has adopted some of its tactics that helped push its hit film Frozen to a $1 billion box-office smash.

But the question remains: can that kind of success be replicated anywhere?

Thoughtful stuff, well worth the read.

It’s the nature of the App Store that as soon as original hits the store, the cloners start their copiers. There’s been a lot of talk about Flappy Bird and the huge number of clones it spawned. But it’s true of just about every successful app.

From the team that created Threes:

It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Duh.

But there’s another side of that daze that we wish to talk about. The rip-offs.

I think this is a terrific read. The comments come across as honest, not bitter, and I think the points made are fair ones. I would suggest that you start by reading about the game 2048, if you are not familiar with it. And, of course, give Threes a try.

Be sure you don’t miss the email exchanges between the creators as the game evolves. Great stuff.

Yesterday, Microsoft released Office for iPad (here are the App Store links). They then tweeted this little gem:

Office 365 is here for iPad. First 50 people to bring in their iPad starting 3/28 will get @Office free for 1 year. http://msft.it/6017gImP

Good idea on Microsoft’s part, though I think they should give those out to all comers. Get everyone on the train. [Via 9to5Mac]

While one of the big holdups for Office for iPad was getting the software just right, another was Apple’s policy that apps that sell things — including subscriptions — use Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism and hand over 30 percent of that revenue to Apple.

This had been a big sticking point historically, so it was one of the key question marks looming over this launch.

Indeed, Microsoft does offer Office 365 subscriptions within the just-released Word for iPad and the other Office apps and, yes, it is paying the 30 percent cut, Apple confirmed to Re/code. Microsoft declined to comment on the matter.

Wonder if that was the real sticking point that kept iPad versions of Office in the can? Maybe the previous regime refused to budge, newer thinking prevailed? Just a thought.

To understand why Oculus Rift matters, it helps to know who John Carmack is… He’s responsible for Quake, the first true 3-D game, which begat Halo and Call of Duty and all the rest of it. Carmack did for computer games what Masaccio did for painting: he turned a plane into a space.

Carmack is a genius.

If you are going to invest huge money in a college education, it seems reasonable to at least consider the financial benefits of that education over the long haul. The surprise winner in all this? Harvey Mudd College.

Interesting read. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Bonnie Cha takes the new Office suite for a spin.

Office for iPad is free to download, and gives you the ability to read Word documents, work with Excel data and present PowerPoint presentations at no extra cost. But, like Office Mobile, to really unlock the full potential of the suite (editing and creating documents), you need an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $99.99 per year for the Home Premium edition (students get a bit of a break with an $80 Office 365 University edition; the $70 Office 365 Personal edition will also be supported when it launches later this spring). This gets you five downloads of the full Office suite for Macs or PCs and five tablets.

For Office 365 subscribers, it’s a no-brainer. Office for iPad is a great addition, and you should definitely download it. It’s certainly the best iPad office suite I’ve tested to date. For everyone else, it may come down to how much you use the Microsoft Office suite in your professional or personal life, and how much you plan on working on your iPad. If your answer is “not much,” or it’s simply too expensive, there are capable and cheaper alternatives like those from Apple, QuickOffice and Documents to Go.

Follow the headline link to watch Satya Nadella discuss Microsoft’s cloud and mobile strategy and, more importantly, watch the rollout of Microsoft Office for iPad.

I have to say, I find Nadella likable. Certainly more likable than that last guy.

Microsoft today announced Office for iPad, a trio of apps that bring Word, PowerPoint and Excel to tablets. Those should be showing up in the App Store shortly — around 11AM Pacific (2PM Eastern), to be exact.

I’m looking forward to seeing it.

I’m happy that Gibson honored Skunk with his own model, but I was never a big fan of the Firebird.

BusyContacts is a complete replacement for the built-in Contacts app on OS X that is designed to make creating, finding, and managing contacts faster and more efficient.

From the same company that brought us BusyCal.

Journalists spotted that ministers at a cabinet meeting were no longer using Apple tablets, and minister Nikolai Nikiforov confirmed the changeover “took place not so long ago.”

He said the ministers’ new Samsungs were “specially protected devices that can be used to work with confidential information.”

Something smells fishy here.

Nikiforov denied that Russia was clamping down on US technology in response to Western sanctions imposed over its takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

Ah, that was it. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Political bullshit is what it is.

There is a ton of great data to sift through. Amazing how big an impact Flappy Bird had on the App Store.

To cherry pick a few comments, there’s this:

Even though it was only available for nine days in February, Flappy Bird accumulated a huge number of downloads in that time, taking it to the top of the monthly rankings on both iOS and Google Play. However, its influence extended beyond its own rank, as publishers battled to fill the void left in its wake. This was particularly evident on iOS, where an additional four games inspired by the phenomenon appeared in the Top 10.

And this:

Television advertising appears to be becoming an increasingly common marketing channel for mobile game publishers. While successes have been evident in Japan for some time, including titles such as パズル＆ドラゴンズ (Puzzle & Dragons), the practice is now spreading to Western markets. In February, Farm Heroes Saga, Big Fish Casino, and Clash of Clans all saw gains in rankings following TV commercials aired in the United States.

And this:

Despite its shortened stay, Flappy Bird amassed enough downloads to remain in the top spot for monthly downloads on the iOS App Store. Its influence extended much further than that though, with one analysis finding a Flappy Bird-style game being added to the iOS App Store every 24 minutes. Splashy Fish was the most successful of these in terms of downloads, and publisher redBit stated it was being played 250 million times per day. The phenomenon also brought three more similar titles – Ironpants, Fly Birdie, and Flappy Wings – into the Top 10 for February. In addition, another of .Gears Studios’ titles, Super Ball Juggling, extended its strong performance from late January to join the Top 10 in February. Even a month after it was withdrawn, Flappy Bird mania hadn’t subsided – four of the top ten titles by daily downloads in the United States were inspired by the game. For those who missed the original the first time around, there may still be hope – creator Dong Nguyen has suggested that he might restore Flappy Bird to the app stores.

This is absolutely fantastic.

A 22-year-old woman from the Netherlands who suffers from a chronic bone disorder — which has increased the thickness of her skull from 1.5cm to 5cm, causing reduced eyesight and severe headaches — has had the top section of her skull removed and replaced with a 3D printed implant.

How fortunate is this woman that 3D printing technology was available to her surgical team. I can’t get over how cool this is.

You’ll now be able to tag up to 10 people in a tweeted photo:

Tagging people in a picture makes conversations around photos fun and easy. And tagging doesn’t affect character count in the Tweet — you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters at your disposal, making it easier to connect with your friends. If you’re the one being tagged, you’ll get a notification. You can adjust notifications, as well as who can tag you, in your Settings. To learn more, read this Help Center article.

You can also attach up to 4 photos in a single tweet:

And now, you can also share a series of photos that automatically create a collage. Just tap on a preview to get the full image and slide through the group. The ability to upload multiple photos is starting to roll out today on iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and twitter.com. Whether you’re on iPhone, Android or twitter.com, you can view Tweets with multiple photos.

I’ve tested both of these features on the official Twitter app. They work. Not sure how much work is involved in adding these features in 3rd party apps. Hopefully, the Twitter team gave them some advance notice, so they can roll both features out quickly.

On March 27, 2014, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals an all-new iPad smart cover configuration that includes a keyboard panel. One of the aspects of this design which differentiates itself from Microsoft’s Surface tablet cover is that Apple’s keyboard has been uniquely designed to double as a multi-touch gesture keyboard eliminating the need for a touchpad.

A user may provide input to iPad by striking the smooth surface overlay above a particular key and provide input to the iPad by sliding gestures.

In order for the keyboard to receive touch input, the keyboard may be configured to detect the location of one or more touches or near touches at the surface of the keys based on measurements of physical phenomena that occur near the surface when those touches or near touches occur.

This is a patent, not a product design, so the implementation details will obviously evolve from what’s laid out in the patent drawings. But I like the premise, the idea that you can gesture on the surface of the keyboard itself.

We were excited to see what we could do with iBeacons at the show. We focused on using iBeacons in a way that was both exciting and appropriate for the event. We settled on check-in to speed up people getting their badges and a game to help people investigate the show floor and highlight how beacons can help explore large environments.

Great to see.

I recently revamped the way I travel, so I found Michael Lopp’s article interesting.

If I just made $2 billion, the last thing I’d be doing is defending the sale—I’d be knee-deep in Heineken bottles.

Clearly, it’s good when price cuts happen, but as noted in the story, this is the 42nd price cut for AWS since its introduction.

In my short time leading BlackBerry…

Blah, blah, blah

But, when curiosity turns to criminality, we must take strong action.

Blah, blah, blah

This may mean you see a few less blog posts with photos and rumors…

Nobody gives a sweet flying shit.

askTog:

Before delving into what an Apple smartwatch might look like, we need to understand why, right now, people not only think they don’t need a smartwatch, they flat-out don’t want a smartwatch.

Long piece on the subject but Tog brings up some interesting points as to what he sees as the advantages and disadvantages of a smart watch.

SFGate:

The first MacWorld in 1985 looked much different than the current incarnation, which peaked with more than 50,000 attendees at Moscone Center several years ago.

The show starts this week and, while it is the barest shadow of what it was in its glory days, it’s still a show I miss going to if only for the friends and colleagues who are there.

It’s always important to understand what happened in attacks like Basecamp suffered through.

Many of you may already know Rams’ principles, but if not, it’s worth a read. Note the similarities to what Jony Ive designs for Apple.

If you ask me, that is the real story here — realization that there is a glass ceiling to advertising especially as we shift gears and move away from the old desktop advertising ecosystem to a smaller, pocketable ecosystem that is less prone to cheap optimization tricks and is also limited by available attention…

I buy that argument, but Zuck said they don’t plan to make money from selling the Oculus hardware and would use it for advertising and virtual goods. If Facebook is looking for additional revenue streams, I’m not sure they found it.

Modine’s award-winning diary becomes an immersive audiobook experience performed with original music and sound effects.

There are some great rewards if you pledge to support this project.