March Madness - Academic Style

March Madness is officially here! Though, instead of showing you my legit bracket, I decided to add an extra one to my list of yearly brackets: A bracket based off of Forbes' best colleges list. Granted, college rankings tend to be very subjective, but other academic-based indicators for brackets such as APR (academic progress rate) aren't so great either. InsideHigherEd's bracket had Kentucky in the Elite 8 - just a little over a year removed from Calipari being criticized for his team having mediocre academic standards. So, that doesn't bode well for the APR system. 

Here's the Bracket. The numbers next to each school indicates the rank Forbes gave:

It's no surprise that Harvard won, but there were a few upsets along the way. Although not the best* way of completing a bracket through the means of academics - it's certainly a better route than APR or anything of the such. 

*I also tried to do this through combining SAT scores and GPAs of those admitted to these schools and then come up with an arbitrary number, but the range of both indicators were too wide (as well as "unknowns" all over the place), so the margin of error would be too high for me to even try. Though, if I had all information for every school precisely, it would be the absolute best to go about it. 

The Fall of Angry Birds

Trey Smith writes on his blog:

“One of the things I talked about was an in-depth analysis of Angry Birds VS Tap Pet Hotel and how premium .99 games were going to be overtaken by free to play games. That sounds obvious now, but remember, this was 12 months ago and at the time I held the webinar Tap Pet Hotel was only a few months old. Many people on the webinar didn’t really know how social games worked.”

This has been something I've been noticing as time goes along as well. It's actually pretty incredible - out of the top ten most grossing apps on the iPad, seven are free-to-play games.

In the case of Angry Birds, however, I honestly feel like it's fading away. Smith disagrees, saying "I would also like to clarify that I don’t think the Angry Birds brand is going to die out", but not all games last forever, especially on an ecosystem like iOS. Remember games like Super Monkey Ball? Granted, it already existed on other consoles before coming to iOS, but the popularity came and went. The same is in store for Angry Birds.
 

Remember when Apple's Stock was $90 Three Years Ago?

Apple's stock has kinda been successful the last few years. Google's been alright too. 

Who Cares if Samsung Copied Apple?

James Allworth, of the Harvard Business Review,

“Given the underlying reason that Apple has been bringing these cases to court was to enable them to continue to innovate, it’s hard not to ask: if copying stops innovation, why didn’t Apple stop innovating last time they were copied? Being copied didn’t stop or slow their ability to innovate at all. If anything, it only seemed to accelerate it. ”

He makes a valid point. While Apple claims that Microsoft stole their ideas in the 1990's (and ended up losing), they did innovate in ways that have revolutionized the world in the 2000's. However, what he doesn't point out is that Apple was at the top of the world in the late 1980's, but as we all know, Apple was pretty much left in the dust in the late 90's until Steve Jobs came back to save them. Microsoft, however, was at the top of their world selling copies of Windows left and right, on innovations that (according to Apple) copied Apple. What would happen if Apple won the case? They most likely would've not been 90 days away from bankruptcy in 1997, which would have left them lots of room for innovations during that time. Jobs was able to come back and save the sinking ship, but imagine if he wasn't there either?

“Some might say copying. But to me, it sounds like a perfectly functioning competitive market.
”

One thing is to borrow a few things from someone else (like Apple did with Notification Center [don't even try arguing with that, Apple folks]), but another thing is to steal. I mean, have you seen some of these Samsung icons from 2007/2008? There's a fine line between seeing what someone else is doing and improving upon it, another thing is to outright steal it and claim it's yours. 

Final notes

I get that everyone copies each other and that these kinds of things happen all the time. Maybe, a company really liked a design from another company, so they made a design that was somewhat similar to that. That is competition. But what Samsung has taken from Apple is downright shameful. There's a Tumblr page that outlines different Samsung products that look very similar, if not identical, to Apple products. I'm not saying the patent system works, I'm just saying that in cases where a company is blatantly stealing a design, I say go after 'em. Make your own stuff, Samsung.