Clay Newton's quick bio: Clay Newton is an artist and designer, raised in the wine country's illustrious Napa proper. After spending three years as an apprentice of sorts at Richard Carter Studio, working at the French Laundry (pre- & post- Thomas Keller) and Trefethen Vineyards, he jumped the hills for Davis to attend the University, majoring in Art Studio with a minor in Sociology. His first kid, ZZ Anne Newton, was born in November 2005. Clay's technology career started in the bowels of the UC Davis IDEA Lab, where he studied under Randal Packer, Lynn Hershman, and Jon Winet. Jon later became one of Clay's close friends and collegues. In 1998, Clay started working for Eve.com which was really his indoctrination into the fast and furious dotcom mentality. When crumbled under the weight of idealab!, Clay was lucky enough to be able to cash into a house in yet another less-than-illustrious locale: Richmond (as of this writing in 2005, Richmond is the 11th most dangerous city in the US -- oooo scarey!) From Eve, Clay moved on to iEngineer which morphed into Assentive Solutions. When Assentive died a fiery death, Clay bounced over to Virage (2 hr commute hell.) After the third round of layoffs in 9 months, he shifted gears to Navis which tried to devour his soul but only took away a portion of his liver. In 2005, he joined Bank of America as a VP of Interaction Design. In the summer of 2006, Clay moved back to Napa and now telecommutes all the time.
White Screen of Death
Thursday, January 20, 2005
  Audio player war
Creative is having a cow, and their ship is sinking. I am pretty confident that the fundamental reason behind this is a misunderstanding of their users and the actual market space they are competing for.
    Apple wins with the iPod because:
  1. It is simple to use.

  2. The "techmology" is close to invisible: the techiness of the item is obfuscated by minimalist design.

  3. The actual number of features exposed by the iPod is minimal as well.

  4. Creative still thinks in terms of MP3s. Apple simply refers to songs.

In many ways, I think that the MP3 vs. song thing is one of the most significant. Most non-dorks don't give a rat's what format a song is in, they just care about being able to get to it easily and have it sound good!

Calling them MP3s is not necessarily directly preventing them from succeeding, but what it is doing is continuing to confuse people who just want to listen to music rather than thinking about their music like a dork.
 
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
  OpenMind Commonsense
Really interesting Commonsense archive at MIT.
 
  TLA of the day!
NOD: Neologism of the day.

Pretty goddam dorky.
 
  Neologism of the day! CAPTCHA!
CAPTCHA is an acronym for: completely automated public Turing-test to tell computers and humans apart.

These are the fun squiggly word things you see often when signing up for a new web-mail account or buying tickets for a show online. I guess it still qualifies as a neologism, despite the fact that it is commonly used and was introduced in 2000.

It seems to me that the acronym is somewhat redundant in that Turing-tests are designed to tell computers and humans apart.

More about captchas on Wikipedia...
 
Monday, January 17, 2005
  Self-inflicted Seisure
Self-Inflicted Seisure
 
  Number1
Number1
 
Saturday, January 01, 2005
  New tattoo: Veronica
Veronica


You can ask why I got this tattoo, but I won't tell you straight. Suffice it to say that it is an inside joke.
 
the junk drawer since 1999.

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Name: Clay Newton
Location: Napa, California, US
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