Stamped is a new network of sorts for iOS, and the idea is that you “stamp” things you really love and highly recommend to your friends. You can stamp pretty much everything—restaurants, books, music, movies, et cetera. You can see what your friends have stamped and stamp it yourself, or add it to a to-do list of things you need to try.

What Stamped gets really right is that it’s fun to use, because it’s so simple and such a beautiful app. It’s fun to go through and make a list of sorts of your favorite things in the world, and to see what everyone else likes, too.

With enough people using it, this could be very, very useful; imagine you’re traveling and using Stamped to see what restaurants around you are most liked, or have been stamped by your friends—that’d be a great way to find somewhere to eat without sorting through reviews on Yelp. It could work as a sort of travel guide.

Ron Johnson:

One of the most common comments I heard was that the Apple Store succeeded because it carried Apple products and catered to the brand’s famously passionate customers. Well, yes, Apple products do pull people into stores. But you don’t need to stock iPads to create an irresistible retail environment. You have to create a store that’s more than a store to people.

This short little piece captures what’s different about Apple’s approach as a whole. They don’t make things to make money. They make money so they can keep making great things. They start with the product first—with building the best product possible—rather than how to make money.

And that little thing, which seems so obvious, makes such a huge difference in what kind of company it is and what they do.

Chris Foresman has a great look at how the iPhone 4S compares to a high-end point-and-shoot and a DLSR.

It’s incredible that a camera this competitive with “real” cameras can fit in your pocket. And is a phone.

Walter Isaacson:

He had three things that he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks and photography. He really wanted to take these on. I didn’t go into details about these products in the book because it was implicitly Apple’s creations and it’s not fair to the company to reveal these details. But, he did talk about the television. He told me he’d “licked it” and once said, “There’s no reason you should have all these complicated remote controls.”

God, I hope they’re still working on textbooks. There’s so much potential being squandered in education because it’s so staid and controlled. I’d absolutely love to see Apple enter the education market more directly.

With iTunes U, the iPad, and their own textbooks, they have the resources to do something incredible.

Here’s HP’s design video for the Envy, what they apparently consider their finest notebook ever.

So what I’ve gathered is they looked at a MacBook Pro, tried to copy it as exactly as they could (and failed), then added things to make it distinctly HP. Ugly as hell, in other words.

Walt Mossberg:

To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple’s.

“Underwhelming” seems to be the right word.

Chris O’Brien fears Apple’s success was dependent much more on Jobs than we have recognized, and thus he thinks their “golden age is over”:

That is the question the book left me asking: Who is the person at Apple who will wake up at 3 a.m. and realize that the latest product is all wrong? Will that person have the courage and standing to walk into Apple, announce he “doesn’t love the latest product” and persuade the company to scrap it and start from scratch after months of work? Jobs did that over and over in his career, Isaacson notes, and his charisma and self-confidence made even folks like Ive willing to follow these gut-wrenching U-turns.

I don’t think this issue is settled.

Jobs focused on making sure Apple is not dependent on one person. The first thing he did was make sure that Apple only hires really, really talented people that genuinely care about what the company is doing. Hiring smart people who believe in the company’s goal is the first thing that should be done, and they have no problem there. Second, Apple is organized to make creating great products as much of a reproducible process as possible. Each department isn’t a self-contained unit where they look out for their own interests above the company’s; rather, they’re integrated into a whole. The online store team, for example, doesn’t control the photos used on the store, and Jony Ive’s design team works on the entire company’s products, rather than just for a certain product division. Third, they’ve tried to capture management’s decision-making process into a set of case studies so the company’s next generation of leaders can be systematically exposed to how they think—and the cases are taught by Apple’s executives.

Fourth, and most important, Jobs’s obsession with making the product as perfect as possible and doing truly incredible things permeates the company. That standard of work is expected of everyone not just by each employee’s manager, but by the employee. They expect it of themselves. This, long-term, is what can make Apple successful—this feeling of what Apple stands for and exists to do. Everyone understands it, and everyone wants to honor it.

That’s the common purpose that’s directed Apple since Jobs returned and has made sure everyone is working toward the same goal. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep egos and the tempting desire to put your own career goals above the company’s in check when everyone has a shared purpose. Jobs perfectly embodied this, because he started the company and embedded it with this obsession with making great things, and also because he unswervingly stuck to it. Jobs rarely wavered from it and thus, as the company’s leader, kept everyone in the company pointed in the same direction and working toward the same goal.

Unfortunately, though that is probably the most important part of what makes Apple such a fabulously great company, it is also the most ephemeral. Apple is at no risk of losing it in the next few years, but as time passes and that direct connection to Jobs passes, too, it will be all too easy for it to begin fading. What happens when Apple’s management is firmly divided over a decision, but there’s no one that holds everyone’s utmost respect to make the final decision while retaining their reverence, and thus their dedication? It’s very easy for someone’s ego to get bruised when they lose a battle they feel very strongly about and decide there’s better opportunities elsewhere. It’s easy to make it about your career, rather than the company’s best interest, when there’s no one that inspires that respect.

Worse, this could result in the organization ossifying into different departments, with their employees loyal to it rather than the company. If that common purpose begins to fade and become more abstract than it is now, that could happen. Why look out for the interests of the company as a whole when your job is tied to the project you work on? This process starts slowly, subtly, and innocuously—but once it’s done, there’s little to be done.

What can be done, though, is to make sure it never starts. This doesn’t mean glorifying Jobs as some sort of god amongst mortals, because that would be just as debilitating. Rather, they have to continue to do justice to the common purpose he built. Take big risks when it means you could do something incredible. Obsess over making products perfect. Only hire the best, and the people that have that same excitement about making great things. Don’t put up with people who are only there to advance their career. And don’t ever waver from this—it has to be instilled in the company, every day, because a company is an ever-changing combination of people, and they constantly need it reinforced.

I don’t know what will happen. I suspect that Apple will be successful for quite a while regardless, but building an organization that can perpetuate its values is very, very hard, and so it is possible Apple will degenerate into a more normal kind of company at some point. But they have the chance to be one of the few organizations that institutionalize excellence and can reproduce it over decades.

Dan Moren at Macworld has a great primer on iTunes Match.

It’s certainly a convincing service: never sync your iOS device with iTunes again for music, free up space, and still be able to listen to any song in your library. That’s pretty neat.

I’m starting to think, though, there’s a sweet spot between iTunes’s own-all-your-music and Rdio’s listen-to-anything-you-please. Maybe a subscription service that allows you to purchase albums for a reduced price?

I’m not sure what it is, but there’s value in both models. I love being able to discover new music on Rdio and throw it on while doing work, but paying a subscription for music I don’t own seriously bothers me. I don’t want my music to go ever disappear—it’s too important.

Tony Fadell:

His voice rises. “What is our form of architecture? What is the thing that lasts of beauty? That’s the business. We want to make multiple products that all relate together, so that the business is there to continually drive innovation. It’s not just ‘hey, we took the hill, let’s go find another hill.’ And then this dies.”

Beautiful.

Mixed is the word.

Joshua Topolsky:

The device is decently designed, and the software — while lacking some polish — is still excellent compared to pretty much anything in this range (and that includes the Nook Color). It’s a well thought out tablet that can only get better as the company refines the software.

Topolsky likes it as an Amazon ecosystem content device, finds the hardware uninspired and, in some places, perplexing, and its choice of third-party applications disappointing.

David Pogue, with the best line of the Fire reviews:

You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger.

Wired’s Jon Phillips:

All of which leads us back to what the Fire can actually do as a day-in, day-out mobile workhorse. Is it tablet that people will grab again and again for web browsing, book and magazine reading, casual gaming, and more?

No. It’s not that kind of tablet.

Which makes me wonder: what kind of tablet is it?

The reviews tend toward liking the Fire for watching, reading or listening to Amazon-purchased media, being unimpressed or mildly satisfied with the browser, and annoyed by jerky animation and a too-small screen for reading magazines. In other words, it doesn’t compare at all to the iPad.

But at $199, that might be good enough for the masses who haven’t purchased an iPad because $499 is too much for them. We’ll see. Amazon’s strategy is to target people who just want to browse the web, watch video, check Facebook and play some games—people who the iPad is too feature-rich for. And that’s a smart strategy, because there’s plenty of those kinds of people, and at $199, the Fire is close to being an impulse purchase.

I’m curious what happens, though, if Apple drops the current iPad 2 to $399 or even $299 (along with a retina display-equipped iPad 3 at the current price-points). I can’t see any reason to purchase a Kindle Fire when there’s an iPad available for $100 more. Apple isn’t going to let Amazon carve up their customers into different segments and force Apple to sell to only the high end of the market.

Chris O’Brien fears Apple’s success was dependent much more on Jobs than we have recognized, and thus he thinks their “golden age is over”:

That is the question the book left me asking: Who is the person at Apple who will wake up at 3 a.m. and realize that the latest product is all wrong? Will that person have the courage and standing to walk into Apple, announce he “doesn’t love the latest product” and persuade the company to scrap it and start from scratch after months of work? Jobs did that over and over in his career, Isaacson notes, and his charisma and self-confidence made even folks like Ive willing to follow these gut-wrenching U-turns.

I don’t think this issue is settled.

Jobs focused on making sure Apple is not dependent on one person. The first thing he did was make sure that Apple only hires really, really talented people that genuinely care about what the company is doing. Hiring smart people who believe in the company’s goal is the first thing that should be done, and they have no problem there. Second, Apple is organized to make creating great products as much of a reproducible process as possible. Each department isn’t a self-contained unit where they look out for their own interests above the company’s; rather, they’re integrated into a whole. The online store team, for example, doesn’t control the photos used on the store, and Jony Ive’s design team works on the entire company’s products, rather than just for a certain product division. Third, they’ve tried to capture management’s decision-making process into a set of case studies so the company’s next generation of leaders can be systematically exposed to how they think—and the cases are taught by Apple’s executives.

Fourth, and most important, Jobs’s obsession with making the product as perfect as possible and doing truly incredible things permeates the company. That standard of work is expected of everyone not just by each employee’s manager, but by the employee. They expect it of themselves. This, long-term, is what can make Apple successful—this feeling of what Apple stands for and exists to do. Everyone understands it, and everyone wants to honor it.

That’s the common purpose that’s directed Apple since Jobs returned and has made sure everyone is working toward the same goal. It’s a hell of a lot easier to keep egos and the tempting desire to put your own career goals above the company’s in check when everyone has a shared purpose. Jobs perfectly embodied this, because he started the company and embedded it with this obsession with making great things, and also because he unswervingly stuck to it. Jobs rarely wavered from it and thus, as the company’s leader, kept everyone in the company pointed in the same direction and working toward the same goal.

Unfortunately, though that is probably the most important part of what makes Apple such a fabulously great company, it is also the most ephemeral. Apple is at no risk of losing it in the next few years, but as time passes and that direct connection to Jobs passes, too, it will be all too easy for it to begin fading. What happens when Apple’s management is firmly divided over a decision, but there’s no one that holds everyone’s utmost respect to make the final decision while retaining their reverence, and thus their dedication? It’s very easy for someone’s ego to get bruised when they lose a battle they feel very strongly about and decide there’s better opportunities elsewhere. It’s easy to make it about your career, rather than the company’s best interest, when there’s no one that inspires that respect.

Worse, this could result in the organization ossifying into different departments, with their employees loyal to it rather than the company. If that common purpose begins to fade and become more abstract than it is now, that could happen. Why look out for the interests of the company as a whole when your job is tied to the project you work on? This process starts slowly, subtly, and innocuously—but once it’s done, there’s little to be done.

What can be done, though, is to make sure it never starts. This doesn’t mean glorifying Jobs as some sort of god amongst mortals, because that would be just as debilitating. Rather, they have to continue to do justice to the common purpose he built. Take big risks when it means you could do something incredible. Obsess over making products perfect. Only hire the best, and the people that have that same excitement about making great things. Don’t put up with people who are only there to advance their career. And don’t ever waver from this—it has to be instilled in the company, every day, because a company is an ever-changing combination of people, and they constantly need it reinforced.

I don’t know what will happen. I suspect that Apple will be successful for quite a while regardless, but building an organization that can perpetuate its values is very, very hard, and so it is possible Apple will degenerate into a more normal kind of company at some point. But they have the chance to be one of the few organizations that institutionalize excellence and can reproduce it over decades.

John Gruber at Çingleton:

If things go right, if they go the way I think they’re going to, these next five years, we’re never going to work harder, we’re never going to be under more pressure, and we’re never going to have to solve tougher problems… But the only thing any of us is going to regret, is if we don’t aim big enough.

Hell of a talk.

Khoi Vinh just announced his new company, and it’s Mixel, a social collage-making app for iPad.

It lets you make collages—Mixels—from included photos, your own, or ones you pick up from the collages other people are creating. Mixels are saved and posted publicly for everyone to see and build on themselves.

Here’s Khoi Vinh explaining the idea for it:

Even better, for the very first time in decades of personal computing history, we have an ideal digital art device in the hands of a mass audience, a huge and still-growing user base composed not just of professional artists and early adopters, but of people from all walks of life who are embracing the liberating simplicity of this new platform.

That’s big. It changes what’s possible for visual self-expression in a huge way. Now anyone can do this — anyone. They just need the right software. Creating that software is what my co-founder Scott Ostler and I are trying to do with our new company.

It looks quite well done and it’s certainly an interesting idea that I think is a natural fit for children especially, but it does require connecting it to your Facebook account to use. That doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers others, especially because this is an inherently social application and I don’t think Khoi would allow his application to abuse it, but that does limit its users to people old enough to have an account. Why not allow people to create their own Mixel-specific account if they’d prefer it?

I may be way off on this, but I think children are the biggest group of potential users for this kind of application, and it should take advantage of it to drive its use. I’m sure plenty of adults will use it, but kids are the ones who can see it as a way to create something really fun and meaningful to them, rather than just a trivial app to goof around with. So get those users, get kids hooked on it, and build off of that into something even greater. I’m not sure targeting adults is the best strategy for Mixel.

Raven is a new web browser for the Mac.

They have some great ideas, and it’s also nice to see someone trying to make web browsers better. That’s something we haven’t seen in a long time, besides Google and Apple.

Here’s what happens when you use focus groups to test Apple’s “1984″ ad.

If this isn’t the best example of why relying on market research is a very bad idea, I don’t know what is. And, for that matter, what can happen when multiple people or groups are given control over what amounts to art: they can destroy its integrity.

(Via Jessica Watts.)