On my trip to Africa the most inspiring thing that happened to me happened on my last day, on the Nairobi international airport. This post isn’t about technology, but about globalization and, well, maybe in a small way how technology is only an enabler, it just has made things easier – but it doesn’t do things for us.

It was still couple of hours before the flight would start to board but we were already at the gate. And sitting next to us was  Phil. I don’t remember if his name was really Phil, I just think he looked like a Phil. Now, Phil was a huge, white, bald, old guy with diabetes and thick glasses. Really huge. He was wearing a traditional Kenyan suit/robe-thing. He looked like a fat white Masai. He was dozing off and told people around him that they should feel free to wake him up if he started to snore. He wouldn’t mind.

Phil really was a Buddha. He was out there. I don’t know if he knows it.

One thing lead to another and Phil started to tell why he was in Kenya. I don’t think he has ever been to any other country. Phil’s from Virginia, USA. He’s a schoolteacher.

I don’t remember all the details correctly, but that’s okay, because the details don’t matter. You see, Phil’s dad had some money, but he was in a home. Got MS. Now, being a good Christian, he had donated a bunch of money to missionaries to build a church in Africa. Church of Nazarene. Now, Phil was a good son and visited his father now and then. His dad was a bit sad about there being a church after him somewhere in Africa and he was there in a nursing home on the other side of the world. So, naturally, Phil goes and says “Gee, dad, if I could just go there and take pictures for you, I would.” So, his dad takes out his check book and asks “Would you? Here’s some money, it should cover your tickets?”. Here Phil said to me, “Who was I to say no to my dad?”

So, Phil got himself a passport and all the other stuff. He only knew that the church was somewhere in Kenya and that it was called Church of Nazarene. And that he knows no-one there but that didn’t stop him from booking a trip over the weekend to Kenya. Someone might think Phil was either simple or just insane, but, I don’t think that. He was just this unassuming guy.

At some point during his story, another flight arrived and people started to come in through the doors of our gate. There, sitting on an airport’s plastic seat, around 9pm in the evening, with the red robe on, this guy starts to greet all the people going past him, “Welcome to Kenya, hope you have a nice stay”. Most of the people don’t even blink in his general direction. Some say thanks. Some smile. But I bet most of them felt at least something. So what if you can’t please all the people who just don’t care when you can make some people feel a bit better?

So, anyway. A day before he’s leaving he gets an e-mail from some missionary that yeah, the church exists and they can take him there. So, he goes to Kenya, gets on a jeep, takes out his digital compact and starts taking a lot of pictures of the church and gets back to USA to go back to work on Monday.

Back in US, he goes to visit his dad with hundreds of pictures and he’s dad’s all excited – but he doesn’t even look at the pictures. He almost pushes the pictures away and asks “Do you wanna go over there again?” And, again, who’s Phil to say no?

“At this point I realize that I’m going visit that church every year for the rest of his life.” And so he does. Phil’s not that into the whole Church of Nazarene thing, he’s a schoolteacher. So, this one time he asks if he could visit a jail in Kenya. Normally this would be totally impossible, but as it happens, there just happens to be this guy who’s the head priest of all prisons there in the group. And well, at this point Phil’s been there for some years already so he has some street cred and the doors to the jails are open for Phil.

I totally forget if we wanted to teach these guys something or if it was something else, but anyway, Phil’s visit is a success. He starts to visit the prisoners in addition to going to see how his dad’s church is holding up, all this in over a weekend. Many years pass. I didn’t ask, but I guess his dad’s passed away since I understood he doesn’t visit the church anymore. He still visits Kenya every year for a weekend and goes to visit the prisoners.

To drive the point home: This guy takes a long-haul flight every year at the same time, for a weekend, to visit these guys. And these guys wait him like he’s Santa Claus. And to them, he is just that.

I guess these prisoners don’t get much visitors and I’ve no idea who they think Phil is back home, I don’t think Phil has any idea who they think he is. But they write to him. Last year, the prisoners asked if Phil could get them a electric piano. Now, hauling something like that from USA would be impossible and expensive, so he just arranged the piano there otherwise. These guys don’t have even clean water or anything, and they ask for a electric piano and this guy delivers. He knows that there’s a very small chance that these guys actually get to use whatever things he can procure for them, but I guess it’s the gesture that counts. Someone actually cares.

Coming back to the robe Phil is wearing. It’s not Phil’s first, and not his last. The prisoners make them for him. This year, a tailor took a measures of Phil so they can make a new one for him when he comes to visit next year. Again, these guys who are living in conditions I can’t even imagine are making these robes for this one guy who comes and visits them every year.

Now, Phil says he’s ready to die. He says it’s really great to know that you’re ready to go. This is not exactly something I look forward to hear before a 8 hour flight, but he might have a point. I’m not ready to go. Phil has had an heart attack and he tells how excited it was to be transported to ER by a helicopter. Phil said he’s on VA so it was all covered. He hasn’t talked about religion at all before this point, but it’s hard to escape the Buddhist vibe from this guy.

I told Phil that for the sake of the prisoners, I really wish that he makes it next year.

There, on Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, among all the people coming and going, mostly young western tourists going to volunteer to build something and who are there to naively save the world, was unassuming Phil who no-one took seriously. I shook his hand and thanked him for being a human.

–
Phil also told when he got his heart attack at home and somehow made it to the hospital, a doctor came to see if he had got all the necessary medications. A nurse would go that yes, except for one that’s barcode didn’t register into the system. The doctor then took the medication and gave it to Phil noting to the nurse that the needs of the patient went before some accounting system.

Thinking that this guy wouldn’t have been there telling me how he gives hope to more people ever year than I ever will because of a nurse wouldn’t give some stuff to save his life because she couldn’t register into a system is something that really scares me.

–
It’s wrong to say Phil said he gives hope to people. He never said that. He just told what he does and how he ended up doing that. I got the impression that the people who he teaches don’t know what he does over a certain weekend in September. Why he keeps doing that, he never said.

–
I honestly don’t remember all the details correctly. I wrote this to tell you about Phil. I decided to wait for some time before writing this down so I could think the whole story over and better distill it to the point that there are way too few Phils around and too many people to whom Phil is a lifeline.

Why I decided to publish it is also in some part due to this post.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So, my review today will be short, so short that I won’t talk about more than one feature. And that feature may disappoint you, I know it. But, in the greater picture of things, I think it’s pretty cool.

Stepping over from Windows half a decade ago, I had to adopt a new behaviour. I was forced to use iTunes, which meant that I had to import my whole library into it to make full use of this software and it’s ability to organise music. The iPod also affected this, which, prior to the iPhone/Touch, delegated its entire user-interface to iTunes also, allowing people to create intricate smart- and playlists, download podcasts, etc. in the software, whilst letting the hardware be controlled by one button only.

My musical behaviour on the computer had become somewhat bloated, less spontaneous than before. Leopard (10.5) innovated on this a little, by introducing Quicklook, which, through the space bar, allows for the quick previewing of most files, which is especially nice for movies and occasionally nice with music as well. The problem with the latter is that when you shift the focus to another app, as ADD-affected/music-listening people tend to do frequently, the music stops… quite literally. So it wasn’t a perfect solution.

Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced an improvement to that feature, one that is already affecting the way I listen to music on my Mac. Quicklook still works the way it always did, but what’s new is that you can quick look within an icon. By hovering over a music file on your desktop and changing the display in the finder to large enough icons (they need to be made a certain size (64×64 on my Macbook) for this to work), you will see a play button on the icon, which, when clicking, plays the track or video. And you can keep playing it while you do your other stuff, such as me typing this blog post.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me. No need to fire up iTunes just for that one file and my need to ADD has been satisfied.

/End Review.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Hello Seb, could you please introduce yourself?

Hi Jeremy. Well, my name is Sebastien Blanc and I am the Business development director for YoolinkPro, a Paris-based start-up developing a micro-sharing Platform for professionals.

Things have changed and knowledge now is increasingly on-line. We all spend loads of time googling the Internet for information about customers, about markets or to solve work-based issues. Yet when we find an interesting document we rarely do anything with it.

YoolinkPro changes that. The service allows you to save, share, tag and discuss information you find on-line. It allows you to bring the knowledge you find on the web into your company to increase productivity.
– What’s Yoolink business model?

We are mainly targeting SME. So our business model is really flexible. You can subscribe to the service and pay a monthly fee depending on how many people are going to use the service. It starts at 34€/month for 5 people.

For departments or teams within large companies we offer special plans depending on needs and of course we offer tailor-made developments to ensure the product meets each customers’ needs.
– What is YoolinkPro’s market?

We are developing sales on different markets, the main ones being communication agencies, R&D fuelled companies and public organization. We have customers in Western Europe but France is our main market. Our average customer is a 30-40 person company but we are currently implementing tests in companies way larger than that. We’ll keep you posted!
- Is Enterprise 2.0 an evolution or a revolution? Let me ask the question differently, do you think large companies are ready to switch to Web 2.0, online services like Yoolink?

That’s a good question and I think many people are discussing it in depth: Dion Hinchcliffe or Denis Howlett to name but a few. Personally I don’t think it’s a revolution per se. You can’t get into a company – large or not – by saying everything they are doing is crap and they have to change it all. They were making profits way before you existed. So talking about revolution is not likely to drive up sales.

If you want to work with large groups, I think you have to start with a small team of highly motivated users and then use them as a base to spread within the company. It’s a one-step-at-a-time approach. And I think dropping the buzzwords is also a good idea. Or to put it differently, you solve problems rather than bringing in some fancy technology. People call me back a lot more since I started talking about operations instead of 2.0.
– What is Yoolink’s secret sauce? What makes you better than del.icio.us and Wordpress altogether?

Wordpress is not really a competitor. We are working with people who are using both YP and Wordpress. Wordpress is used to communicate with people outside a company and YoolinkPro is an easy way to share information within the company. Both services can communicate with each other.

As for Delicious there are of course some common features. But it is definitely a service for private users, not for professionals. YoolinkPro offers features a company really needs that private users don’t: privacy, guaranteed quality-of-service, support, storage, etc. When you address companies, you have to meet higher standards.
– What are you most proud of at Yoolink?

Our interface. We definitely have a good interface. We often have a “wow” effect from people during presentation. That’s something we really enjoy and that is critical in users’ adoption of the service.
– What will you be most proud of at Yoolink in 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? In other words, what will be Yoolink’s next major landmarks?

Our next landmark is a business one: break-even. That’s what we are working toward. Bringing the service to companies, solving their problems, developing new ways to work. I hope my portfolio of happy customers is going to be what I am most proud of in 1 year!
– Do you find easy to get bloggers write about Yoolink Pro?

Well if you want me to be honest I’d say it is one of the hardest things I’ve encountered. From a more general point of view it is really difficult to get visibility as an IT start-up when you’re not US-based. It’s as if being American boosts both your product and your brand…
– Is blogging and twittering most useful when it comes to building a community around the Yoolink brand?

Definitely. We worked a lot on PR and media a couple of month ago. And then we realized that a single twit or blog post from a good analyst was worth more in terms of users than several articles in major on-line newspapers. Besides, with twitter and blogs we can actually exchange with our users and not just publish information…
– How does the Yoolink team look like today? And tomorrow?

We are a small but efficient team. There are 6 people, three of whom develop the service, 1 designs it and 2 develop the Business. Everyone is highly motivated and devoted and the CEO – Sunny Paris, former founder of Weborama, a listed company – is bringing loads of energy and vision to the team. I think the team is going to remain the same for a while, at least until 2010.
– How is Yoolink funded as of today? What are its capital development perspectives?

We raised 500k€ last June from industrials and BA and we have a really low burn-rate. So we don’t plan to raise money in the short term. Once again the focus is on business development.
– On a more personal standpoint, what is your next move?

I have many in mind. The one coming the fastest though is to try running the semi-marathon in less than 1’30!

Many thx Séb.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So gadgets, by which I mean anything that costs in excess of €200 and more probably in excess of €1000. How do you keep your gadget habit safe? Three things that really-really-really matter:

• Common sense: I don’t need to explain this much, but not leaving expensive stuff unattended is probably rule 101 of common sense. That said, we are all human and common sense will never protect us 100%.
• Backups: I’ve had 2 moments of stress regarding my laptop in the last month. The first was installing Snow Leopard, which didn’t make it very clear whether I was upgrading Leopard or formatting the whole drive. Luckily it was the first, but it was stressful for about 30 min. The second was when I couldn’t find my laptop waking up and had 2 hours at breakfast to reflect on “how important are those pictures/documents/memories really?” Nothing with bits in it is really life-changing in my experience, but still it kind of feels like an extension to our human brain.
• Theft insurance: I currently pay about €200 per year on this, covering about €5000 of property and, at my age at least, it’s a real stress-reducer, especially with things that can easily get lost. You can think logically, you can backup, but having to buy a new laptop out of your own wallet kind of sucks.

So, just a short message to all the gadget lovers out there. Technology rocks, but so does a little insurance. If you have any ideas of your own of how to keep your gadgets safe, feel free to share in the comments.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use Wordpress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

But what I’d really love is: a laptop with a projector built-in.

Apple changed my life when it introduced the in-built camera in the laptop. It changed many people’s lives from all demographics, I imagine, who starting thinking about the possibilities for collaboration through Skype or otherwise.

The one thing that I miss from my laptop (occasionally) is the lack of big screen-size. It doesn’t make a difference for writing or surfing, but it most certainly does for graphic work, media-consumption, or gaming. I would love for it to be super-simple to enlarge the screen, simply by having a type of projector built in.

Of course, I realise that projectors run hot and because of that cannot perhaps be compressed to a very small size. I don’t know what the model no. is for the ASUS depicted above and how it makes it work, but I’d love for this to become a standard.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Retro Programming sucks?

I love this idea, but my no. 1 thought is that the context differed largely for him as a kid and for kids now. 1. there’s peer influences. I know that home schooling is a semi-big deal in the US (tried it once, it sucks) and that a large factor of that is keeping your kid isolated from bad influences.

In the scenario of CreatoComputer2009(TM), you would have to keep the “bad” influence of innovation and gadgetery around kids to a minimum, to allow your kid to use CreatoComp. Because as soon as that kid sees that all the other kids have to work nada to have a working computer, the whole experiment implodes.

Vs. 1978, where everyone had to work at making these wiry beasts, people dared calling a computer, work.

You can take this analogy to anything retro really: cars, movies, Asteroids the game. Compare that to any modern invention and people (except for the nostalgic crowd) quickly turn away.

I agree that to create creative & creating people, you have to confront them with difficult problems to solve at an early age (perhaps). I do think that it needs to be built upon the platform that we are now living with: super-connected graphical interfaces that operate in the digital realm mostly and involve minimal wiring or soldering. I also think that our understanding of education is evolving to the extent that even playing games can be considered a type of learning, which seems fairly compatible with being a child also.

You know there’s only one answer to this problem, right?

Vincent.
(P.S. I know, 2 posts in 2 days. Doesn’t mean that I’m back though, more confused about whether I want to come back. Gotta love the limbo that is August…).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (”beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved  XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

On my last blog, on food & retail, I ended with a conclusion as I don’t like long silences and having people guess what’s going on.

The short answer to that is that I will be taking an extended leave of writing for Tech IT Easy as I currently have other professional and private matters to focus on. My definition of extended leave is not that I will no longer write, just that I will write when there’s time and inspiration, but no longer on a daily schedule.

I still very much love to put my thoughts to paper, so expect a post whenever the mood hits me. For the rest, I don’t speak for anyone else on Tech IT Easy, all of whom are busy as well, and I sincerely hope that they too will find it within themselves to keep you (and me) updated on their thought progression when they find the time.

Vincent out

I’d say, thanks for all the fish, but instead I’ll leave you with the most amazing video of fish I’ve ever seen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The human body is a machine and everything, from hours in the day, to food and exercise, to making money, to relationships, are all pieces in the machine of life. There’s only so many hours in the day is a well-familiar phrase to most of us and reflects the difficulty in balancing different activities and responsibilities, with some just falling off the map.

I am not saying that I plan to stop blogging, but I do think that we all need to make choices in our lives which will affect other, previous ones, like domino blocks.

Dynamics…

I just bookmarked a blog post on delicious on forming sales teams in a startup. It’s a good one and you should all read it. As I tagged and bookmarked however, I immediately thought, hey, I’m pretty sure no one on my company will read it. Why? Maybe because we already figured it out… Maybe because we figure stuff out as we are doing it… Your choice.

Blogging or any kind of writing for public purposes brings several complications to business people:

• it is public knowledge, meaning that the competitive advantages are slim: I don’t think this is a major factor, as most innovations are combinations of different ingredients that may or may not be public knowledge. Great artists steal, as they say.
• Writing is processed explicit knowledge from something that was previously implicit and needs to be made implicit again by the reader for it to be useful in a practical context: I’ve written about the knowledge-generating company and the knowledge spiral twice before. Another phrase, “You can’t help yourself, because your *self* sucks!” also comes to mind.

It’s the latter that represents the greatest challenge to authors and consumers of their work. I’ve also previously written about the benefit of formal education, which, I think, tries to recreate the knowledge spiral, turning explicit knowledge into the implicit kind, to be used by students in their work later on.

The dynamics of business is that there are expenses—YOU, the team, the office, etc.—which need to be recuperated by your work—the work you do for customers, after which they pay you. It leaves very little time for reflection, e.g. through blogging, etc., and for making things explicit, e.g. through blogging, etc.

I’m still a big fan of Michael Gerber’s E-myth revisited, which is really about writing that franchise manual for your business, so you can both understand the processes happening in your company, and expand on those, by more easily passing on knowledge. It’s Taylorism, of course, or Scientific Management, or any of the other management methodologies that followed in the past century.

But these activities require time, time which people inside organisations usually do not have, and hence prefer to outsource to outside consultants, who then need to make their knowledge explicit and again implicit in the minds and methods of their clients’ organisation.

It’s a real nightmare for people (like me) who think to much and always aim for something higher. And who want to blog. And who want to do good business…

Thoughts?
Vincent

(Picture courtesy of Fisica & Psychica)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Reasons why Starbucks bothers me include, most of all, that it is not a coffeeshop with a European target-audience. We Europeans have plenty of choice and tradition in terms of coffee, and I have no problem finding a place of atmosphere with some kickin’ coffee at half the price of one of those Americanos (which, btw. taste terrible). The only attraction of Starbucks is for me as a take-away place, but that was not really the aim of the business, as described in Schultz’s book.

Starbucks was meant to be a “3rd Place,” a place where people can temporarily reside that is not their office or their home, and that is where Starbucks, in my opinion, fails. It should also not seen in isolation from other chains, like McDonalds, Subways, and the many “CloneBucks’s” that have arisen since the writing of Schultz’s book—it is basically a manual for how to start your very own Starbucks and, apart from its partnerships, it’s a low-tech business. Right now, when you enter a Starbucks in say, Cologne, Germany, it will look exactly the same as the one in Paris, France, and that act of replication already devalues the concept in my eyes. All Starbucks Cafés are very clean-looking, unlike a Hard Rock Café for instance, which doesn’t make them all that much better than a McDonalds (Café), which serves coffee equally well.

End complaints about Starbucks, a chain I had all but given up on.

The most depressing part of this business is the ease at which McDonalds managed to replicate its basic features, ……… but let’s not forget that the Starbucks people aren’t stupid and learning goes both ways. Clearly, McDonalds (another business, I’m a fan of) has strong process-advantages, which are also quite apparent to the observer and can be benefitted from by outsiders. Something that, it turns out, Starbucks exploited and will hopefully lead to a more efficient machine of a business, while (hopefully) placing the focus back on the “3rd Place” idea.

And now, it has been revealed, Starbucks is trying to get back into that game with its “community coffeeshops initiative.” While I don’t think that this will drastically improve the Starbucks offering, I do hope that it allows for more creativity and individuality down the road.

That said, there is still a lot of room for “3rd Places,” also in terms of building chains of them, they just need to be better designed to actually be a 3rd place. From books, to music, to zen-gardens, people like me are still looking for the equivalent of what was before probably known as the “gentlemen’s club,” by I mean, in an entirely un-sexist way, a place where you can go and relax, alone or with friends.

Starbucks seems to have gotten lost on the path and retreated down to the level of commoditization. It make me wonder if perhaps these types of qualitative initiatives simply cannot be undertaken quantitatively, without losing too much in the process.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

it has good momentum to spread virally (one of the most watched in bing and this is how i found out ) and i am checking if and how often i will stumble over it

basically I blog …water, being in hiatus mode  as well

enjoy

Georgia

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I think there is a certain danger here, if Apple doesn’t fight it, which it does, while Palm Pre continues to try and gain access anyway. It seems very shady on Palm’s side, but doe sit have a case here? I will discuss the strategic implications, as far as I can identify them.

Apple, as we all know, is a very interesting company. It is very vertically integrated, building hardware, software, and has a large influence on the connection between them (e.g. mobile internet), as well as the content provided on them (e.g. music, movies, the app store). Some would call this a monopolistic situation and it seems strange that it gets away with this, while Microsoft, with something that is, for now, as trivial as a browser, does not (in the EU at least).

iTunes is a powerhouse for media and mobile software, but this can be segmented into different areas and different phases. The iPod was released at the beginning of this decade (phase 0), shortly after iTunes, which then built up a power-position for music (phase 1). As the iPods became mobile computing devices, more content was being shipped via iTunes, such as video and those little games (phase 2). Finally, 2 years ago, the iPhone was released, with about a year later, the App Store (phase 3).

Music, phase 1 of ITunes’ power play, is the area which the Palm Pre (to my understanding) is impeding upon. You could easily see Video being the next thing to sync, though I’m not sure if this is possible now. Unless the iPhone takes a step back towards a more web-app-based approach, I don’t see the Palm Pre being a threat to Apple on the App Store front.

Apart from a phase-based perspective, there is also the matter of the lowest common denominator (LCD). Why do people buy mobile Apple products? I would argue that nearly everyone buys an iPod, because of playing music (and not so much video), while a growing niche segment buys the iPod Touch and iPhone for applications and games, as well as media. The LCD is music and it continues to be of strategic relevance to Apple, even with the hyping of their App Store, where Apple will continue to stay entrenched indefinitely.

So, from a strategic perspective, Palm Pre does not stand a chance. Apple will continue to make iTunes incompatible with each future version. Legally, on the other hand, I am not nearly qualified enough to make that assessment, though I think the “cow argument” may apply. If Palm Pre keeps trying hard enough, and continues to get a user-base that desires this link, there may be a legal argument towards loosening Apple’s grip on mobile media.

Since iTunes isn’t very profitable for Apple, I’m not sure what the implications will be for it, but I expect them to fight ’till the last breath.

Vincent
(Picture has no relation to this topic, but is of a cool movie nevertheless)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I was like a child in candyshop to discover that in the US you can actually get onflight wireless internet, by GoGo  . Prices from 6$-13$ and a subscription predator at 30$. Killer detail: power dependency. Oups! But still impressive and probably can harm only some revenue and not the strass of the idea and its execution.

Because girls often are used to dieting, I waited until landing to JFK where I supposed that I could get some free internet. Spoiled uh? Yes because in Athens Airport you have a net-spa of 45min for free. Not the case in JFK where you can get power for free…but for internet you are serviced by Boingo. Really jealous of their presence (119,801 hotspots worldwide), I opened my eyes wide for precious lessons from their model and how they manage their business. Prices around 4$-8$ and a subscription model for 8$-10$ per month (119,801 hotspots… )

First Impression score for Boingo was 0.5 points.

1 for growth (119.801 hotspots…  )

1 for interactivity: very charming welcoming chat at registration, good simulation of natural communication

-0.5 for hope turned into undelivered promise: interactivity only on a hook level, if you don’t agree buying their subscription, the chat machine dumps you rudely, not replying at any other question chatted.

-1 for security: no paypal (ok fair enough but a bit destabilizing) What killed me was having to tap my credit card info which figured unmasked on my page.

Should I write stg about sense of privacy in public places or shall I go talk to the nice guy that came suddenly behind my back and asked me how I connected to the internet?

Georgia

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

At our financial trust, I’m currently filling out a pretty long survey from the Luxemborg statistical office (STATEC) regarding our level of “internetisation.” It’s not easy being digital in a world where you often deal with highly sensitive data, sometimes coming from individuals who do not like dealing with you through digital means. The very word “Trust” in our company description, already forces you to ask the question: can clients trust us using digital communication?

The answer is in most cases No. Go to any bank and try to get significant things done and they want you to sign for it. Same with notaries (and doehetzelfnotaris.nl does not automatise the signing part). The financial sector is particularly stuck in what I would call “the old world,” though not, I would say, without good reasons.

My question to you is:

• is there such a thing as fool-proof communication, which cannot be falsified by any means?
• Is there a surrogate for being there in person and signing your name?

I don’t know of any, but I always assume that our readers are smarter than me.

Chime in, if you can.

Vincent
(Picture of a Robot Accountant. Waah!?)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

My Macbook’s fans are running like crazy.

Apart from the obvious, that there needs to be better memory / processor management for tabs—optimally, unused tabs should use minimal percent of both—another big problem is the lack of visibility of what you have open in your browser. As soon as I have 10+ tabs open and a number disappear of the page or are in different browser-windows, I have no overview, not to mention little idea of what little flash- and other widgets are being opened in each page.

Some innovations, I’d like, are:

1. Grouping of tabs by domain-names, similarly to how Windows allows you to group windows by app.
2. The ability to control whether Flash is being loaded, what kind of flash, and what kind of other apps. Yes, I know about flash- and ad-blocking, but something more elaborate.
3. Better than 2, a common webpage standard for how much memory / processing a web-page should typically take. And perhaps a browser-imposed limit as to what pages get loaded or not.
4. An indication of where a tab is when I’m trying to load the same webpage or domain-page. E.g. I use Netvibes often, each of which has 5-15 widgets in each tab and thus consumes a fair amount of power. When I can’t find the right tab, I open multiple instances, which obviously slows down the browser some more.

All of this is relevant, I feel, both because of the “shift” we are seeing towards “Browser-OSs,” but also because there is a trend towards buying less powerful single-purpose machines often for use on the road. A bloated browser can use as much battery as running a game, the difference being that most mobile travellers know better than to run a game on the road.

Rant over. Would love to hear about Firefox extensions or Browser innovations that overcome some of these problems.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies.

Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the x- and y-axis and pressure modified that loop. It was an interesting idea, because it didn’t look like just pushing buttons to make sound.

Fail whale at LHS

UCB: Raymond Yee, “Mixing and Re-mixing Information”

A lecture from a course on web mashups. Yee has written the book, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The students need to plan and work on a mashup project. There were lots of interesting ideas, but I was worried that most of them were remixing for remixing’s sake and didn’t add value along the way.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Our contact at UC Berkeley had warned this place was mostly for children, and sure enough, this is a place to avoid unless you’re 7 years or less. Almost as complete waste of time as our Google visit.

We had also pizza available for but no-one from UC Berkeley came (we were too scary). Except one guy, whose name I forget. But he took some of us for drinks downtown, so that was great.

Digital Chocolate / Trip Hawkins

Hawkins really loved "Bowling alone"

Trip Hawkins talked a lot about how leverage is the key to successful business and what are the differences between the supply chain in when he was at EA and in operator-controlled world of mobile gaming. He told how he built EA so that it was NFL who wanted them to use their brand, not the other way around. This is why he sees that his competitors who just put out license games based on movies will ultimately be driven off the market, because they do not control the IP.

He thinks that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and how the rest don’t get it: “If you’ve played around with Storm or Android you know, wow, these suck”. In his view, the others had focused in Features (”What it is”) and not on Advantages (”What it does”) and not at all at Benefits (”Who cares?”).

Digital Chocolate’s game development doesn’t depend on the device, because they change all the time and they can publish all their games in every device. This is the only way to make the business work in the mobile space. Hawkins doesn’t see that there will be any standardization, because that would move the leverage away from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.

He also believes that the social starving that began around 1950’s because of TV is the reason people are so keen on the social gaming and internet services and is the driver for “omnimedia”. His suggested reading are The Innvator’s Solution and Bowling Alone. Even in the old days, he didn’t see gaming as waste of time. When playing, he said that “I was thinking, learning and motivated”.

He recommended that we try Tower Bloxx, their Facebook game. I was a bit disappointed, the game itself isn’t that bad if you want to kill time, but it is really spammy. Not only is more screen real estate spent on questionable ads than on the game, not only does it notify your timeline every time you play the game, not only the “social aspect” is just a high score table of your friends, but it also spams your friends every time you play to add the game. Not exactly what I’d expect from the guy who’s partly responsible for the great games EA pushed out in the early days. I asked why is it that as a former hardcore gamer, the only interesting game I played last year was World of Goo. In his opinion this down to how big corporations work and can’t innovate. If Tower Bloxx is Digital Chocolate’s answer to this, I don’t think it’s just big corporations.

Sun Microsystems / Mårten Mickos

FAQ: "If heating is a problem, why is it black?"

We were given the tour at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. They showed the SunRays and other stuff and it was pretty nice to see up close the Black Box.

Afterwards, Mickos gave us a presentation about open source development and MySQL. He said that MySQL is like “New Orleans” of web apps in that if you want to control an important river, you need to control the important cities and this was the reason Sun acquired them. He also anticipated the question about superiority of Postgres, which is probably asked from him all the time. “When I joined MySQL, Postgres was better. Some say it still is. But who cares?”

He also started a discussion about “Why are web companies so closed?” – a poke directed among others Google, who benefit a lot from GPL software, but due to a loophole in the agreement can get away without publishing their improvements because the software isn’t redistributed. This is what he calls the hypocrisy of open source: “People just want to get stuff for free”.

Like Hawkins, he said that the most important thing for startup business is category-leadership. One advice he gave for Finnish start-ups was “not to be Finnish”: MySQL didn’t have sales offices in Nordics, only in the US. Other thing was that if something sounds good in Finland, it takes 10-15 years for until it’s widely accepted as a good thing, so don’t go to market too early. “There’s still time to make a Google-killer”, he said.

This was one of the best sessions we had, not only because Mickos isn’t there anymore and looks like Sun won’t be either but also because we got vodka and swag. You could see there was an economic crisis, because elsewhere we didn’t get anything.

Nexit Ventures / Michel Wendell

Wendell, from Nexit Ventures, a VC firm interested in Nordic IT startups, told how the VC market works and what kind of mistakes Finnish companies usually make. He told how he ended up in the business of helping Nordic companies make it in the US. Being a VC has lot to do with knowing people.

Lots of interesting discussion, but it was late in the evening and it’s pretty hard to upstage either Hawkins or Mickos.

IDEO

We got a standard theme park tour at IDEO. If you have seen the documentaries on TV or at YouTube, there’s not much to see. I was surprised that they actually avoid any systematic or analytical approach to design and focus more on a holistic, iterative and therefore probably pretty expensive (to the client) approach. As a case study they presented Nokia N-Gage platform they did concept work for. A surprising choice, because not only being old was also a spectacular flop. I guess they thought that being from Finland and the course given by ex-CTO of Nokia, we’d be interested in Nokia or something. If we were, we probably didn’t need to come all the way to Palo Alto for that.

Stanford University / VHIL

At Stanford, we got a nice presentation from Jeremy Bailenson from Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He was talking about the Proteus Effect, or how avatars change humans and their behaviour. For example, even though Blizzard has nothing in World of Warcraft code that gives advantage to taller avatars, they nevertheless level up faster than shorter ones. Also, taller avatars get better results in the Ultimatum Game, the real world height of the human is irrelevant. As I’m interested in behavioral decision making, it was nice to see that it might be possible to do empirical studies in virtual worlds, where we can control many variables that social sciences haven’t been in the real world.

Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto

First NDA of the tour. They showed us some research projects they were working on and had the worst slides of the tour. Most of us came out there frightened how out of touch Nokia can be.

Stanford University / Entrepreneurship Week / “Next Big Thing” Panel

Tim Draper, Tony Perkins and Michael Moe talked mostly about Twitter and iPhone and how making revenue is irrelevant. Draper really loves the free trade. Apparently ad-supported business model is the next big thing.

These guys were either drunk or lived in a bubble of their own. Probably both.

IBM Almaden Research Center / Ray Strong

There's pr0n in it, I'm sure.

Strong talked about how IBM tries to predict the future. First of all, the Almaden Research Center looks like a super-villain’s secret lair from Bond movies (it didn’t help that the guy we met had a Bond-esque name). Forget Google, this is the place to visit. There was the world’s first hard drive in the lobby, which was a nice monument to how long IBM has been in the game.

The main thing Strong told was that it isn’t possible to predict technology in to deep future, only in to the business horizon of up to 5 years. This is what they told to an unnamed government agency that wanted them to do so. As government usually gets what it wants, IBM decided to find a way to do it. They brought in people from academy, futurologists and social scientists. Their approach is half scenarios and half technology landscapes, but their ideation emphasizes backcasting from deep future (>50 years) using trends that can be with high probability assumed to continue.

One problem with scenarios has been that it’s really hard to transform them into strategic actions a company should take. IBM tries to close this gap between scenario planning and strategy by using what they call signposts. These signposts are future events that are both recognizable (when they happen) and actionable.

Strong also talked about how predicting future, it’s important to stay in the qualitative side of things, not only because quantitative side of things usually doesn’t work and might be harmful because of the tendency to use numbers to calculate expected values or other figures, even though they are full of uncertainty and can be harmful.

This was by far the best visit during the tour.

Google

NDA. It was a standard theme park tour. It was pretty clear that Google is exactly as “open” as SEC demands it to be, not an inch more. I guess many for many of us the myth of Google was totally burst.

To be fair, this was the only place where our contact wasn’t executive level so we might have gotten a better experience with a more suitable contact. Even though our host was great and all that, he probably wasn’t the right one for our group.

HP Labs

Runner-up in best architecture for a research lab.

NDA, but they mostly showed published academic research about nanophotovoltaics or something to that end. Our guess is that they didn’t want to tell us anything but out of courtesy showed something. When they talked about things I could understand, they talked about MagCloud and how HP is transforming from a printer and computer company into printing and computing company.

Next day, couple of us went to see the garage (more like a shack) Hewlett and Packard started from and what is considered as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Not much to see, but at least it had some historical value.

All pictures by me. All rights reserved. Originally published in my private blog, but I decided to get rid of it so I republished this thing here for people interested.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Some of us may feel the inclination to write, feel free, but above all, enjoy the weather and the happy people.

Take it easy,

Vincent

(Picture: Pink Floyd. I’ve never heard the album, but I like the tech-sunshine mashup)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

- Friend : blah blah blah;

- Georgia: blah blah blah;

… when I saw my self posting a thing I couldn’t recognise having thought of. Neither remembering having thought in a previous conversation. chilllll.

- Friend : are you nuts? why are you saying this?

-Georgia : (confused) ehhh, because it must have been this or that or the other thing.

-Georgia : but I am telling you that the place has changed blah blah blah

Ecstatic I was watching myself from a certain distance. crazy uh? It happens a lot to push back thoughts but it was the first time I experienced doing it at real time. It felt like dreaming !

As tech-savvy TIE readers you realize that this is actually a particularity that this this lovely peer-to-peer program has and lets your profile being simultaneously active with different IPs. All it takes to experience this chilling story is having logged in from a different pc. (DIY)

So what’s the blog deal?

Well, it had never occured to me to experience  how older people might feel with technology, sometimes. Understand in theory yes, but live it never.
There it goes, now I can discuss with myself on skype and with mom in real life.

no comments please, I am moved.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I just finished going through the Lesson’s Learned blog post on “The Principles of Product Development Flow,” which I think is an excellent review of a book that I does not seem to be on public release yet for us Europeans. Well, you could order it from Amazon.com.

I’m fascinated with things like lean manufacturing, total quality management, agile development, etc. Basically, product development, which Eric enticed me with, as it’s the crucial link between invention and commercialisation (aka the definition of innovation).

That said, product development is something that you best learn in university and not (just) from a book. Several reasons:

• anyone can say that they read a book
• there are no tests at the end of books, no accreditation for you.
• it’s a singular view at a problem, while in a course you (hopefully) get presented with multiple views
• you equally don’t have your peers or teachers to discuss problems and solutions with.
• And, the most important reasons of all, a good university provides a link between theory and application, by providing you with opportunities for doing internships and/or jobs.

None of this is sadly provided by books and is why I feel that reading a book on product development and management will only help someone actively engaged in this activity and/or doing a study in this field.

That said, I think that those are all areas where bloggers, authors, companies, and educational institutes can do a lot about improving the system of learning and particularly the link between learning and application.

Just my point of view, I’d love to hear yours.
Vincent
(Picture courtesy of sinesoflearning.blogspot.com)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

“Blackberry owners will soon be able to download music wireless tracks to an application that will help the smartphone compete with those made by Apple and Nokia. … Most tracks will not have copy protection software, which restricts how many devices the music can be moved to.”

It’s the word “most,” which has triggered today’s rant on PR, technology, media, and more. First of, what kind of statement is that most tracks will not have copy protection? Why not all, why not none?

Looking at the past, we all know that copy protection, aka DRM, has plenty of negative associations attached to it. And, as with most negatively perceived technologies, it has been hacked so often that the word “protected” has just become a PR term. Copy protection is not a feature, it’s a handicap, but clearly most songs on the Blackberry platform will not be handicapped, which is… a feature??

We all know that optimally, no producer (or organisation associated with music production) would allow music to be released DRM-free. But the very fact that protection means Zilch, means that actually there is no point to implementing any kind of DRM-system, except on the request of the owner(s) of particular songs (which probably happened here). So, instead of all or none, we get “most,” which is just BS. I already predict that this new initiative is going to fail, by the sheer indecisiveness of the PR message alone, which is a reflection of how little thought-out the business strategy must be.

My point in all of this, infused by a single expression of vagueness, is that somehow technology has spun out of control. There is a system of checks and balances in place, there is a self-correcting mechanism at play, but no one has the complete overview of how it works and when it will work. In the case of the recession, for example, things will balance themselves out again. And hopefully we will get a system in place, the more open the better, that will regulate what is happening. But there will very likely be many casualties of war.

In the case of media and profiting from it, it looks bad, very bad. The word “most” perfectly reflects the uncertainty of where it is all heading, but anyone can see that with production and distribution becoming cheaper and more decentralised, there is hardly any need for centralised music companies, except to build systems that track what is out there and rate it (e.g. CBS/Last.fm, Hypemachine) or to fund the more expensive part of the formula: getting on TV/radio (which will also disappear at some point) or setting up a concert (which will hopefully never disappear, but is hopefully self-sufficient).

Sadly, the only solution I see to saving “the industry” is to silo everything off, which is arguable already happening when you look at the behaviour of businesses like Pandora, CBS/Last.fm, and Hulu) and sue the crap out of anyone infringing. That would make everything nice and predictable again, but only if you could make it impossible to go from one side to the other. Star wars.

Some systems where this is the case, more or less, would be gaming consoles, and you would need the same for audio and video content. But because the light and the dark side (traditional media vs. new media vs. piracy) are not separated, you will continue to see a shift towards freeing everything until the only thing predictable will be that there is no money to be made from media, just from the products (e.g. merchandising) and services (e.g. concerts) around it.

Yes, I continue to be very down on traditional media. Feel free to lift my spirits in this area.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Back when I followed 300 people on Twitter you couldn’t pay me enough to read my Twitter-stream. I called it trying to drink from a waterfall several times and you all know what happens when you drink from a waterfall: you fall in!

No, the only way I read Twitter content and pretty much the best way to catch my attention these days is to @vincentvw me, just because I have an rss-feed just for that.

The traditional, “writing for success” way? Write a compelling title. But that has back-fired on me as a reader more than once. You can also write posts to p*ss off people, which is pretty effective, but leads to stuff like death threats.

I like the idea of pinging someone personally, à la the Twitter reply, much more. What I would like is something as follows:

A system that gives people the option to register with their names, contact-details, and interests (in the form of tags, maybe). And when, and only when, that particular interest is being written about, then you get pinged.

I guess you could already do this with some fancy Google tracking or just by subscribing to a tag-based rss-feed (Delicious allows for this, not sure about other platforms). But I see this as a great way for blogs to become relevant once more. It would also force bloggers to connect more with their readers’ interests and perhaps lead to a stronger community feel.

What do you think?

Vincent
(Picture, called “Emptiness is form,” is courtesy of Scott Snibbe.)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

For a reunion event of people all over the world that I am co-organising, of which a certain part cannot show up, I am planning to give the latter a chance to send their greetings recorded across the internet and shown in either video or audio-format (with picture) at the event.

However, I am a need of the appropriate service that can facilitate this process. Essentially, I am looking for:

1. Something that is web-based and does not require a user to install software on their computer
2. Something that will take video and/or (preferably both, but not necessary) audio
3. Preferably at an adequate resolution / audio quality to be played on a large screen in front of a large room of people
4. Something that I can export into an application like iMovie for Mac or Windows Movie Maker
5. As this would likely be a compilation of 50 or so people, something that requires minimal effort on my part, except for setting up the service, doing the downloading, and post-editing.

I realise that this is likely unknown territory for many of you, as it is for me, but I think would actually generally be pretty cool and hope to brainstorm about your ideas and/or the possibilities/limitations with you.

Any ideas?

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of Kimpton Middle School)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

• selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
• applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
• and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The second consequence is that I’ve been thinking a lot about the implications of virtual OSs. With Google OS recently having been announced, which is supposed to integrate flawlessly with Macs and Windows, assumably Android, as well as being designed for Netbooks, I wonder if Intel, with it’s multi-core processors, has not created a situation where nothing else matters, hardware-wise, except to have a powerful enough processor? In other words, have hardware-manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, and to some extent, Apple simply become irrelevant?

Take Sony for instance, which has just announced its first “Netbook.” It’s one selling point?

“Like other netbooks the Vaio W has a 10-inch screen, but its display has a resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels rather than the more common 1,024 by 600 pixels. That means more of a Web site can be fitted onto the screen, and the user will have to scroll less, the company said at a launch event in Tokyo on Tuesday.” (emphasis my own)

Not much to write home about, except if you absolutely need to use a Sony, and bear in mind that that company was at some point a premium manufacturer of technology. The PC market has long been commoditised of course, ever since IBM opened its hardware up to the world, but with the rise of ultra-cheap PCs & laptops, I think they are digging their own grave.

I think that, as I wrote in a comment to a recent post, Netbooks are a failed experiment and, to add to that, unless either drastic changes in the cost-structure can be made to increase profit-margins, or new business models can be found (e.g. a similar hardware-service bundling to what has been happening in the mobile phone space), I think that we won’t be hearing from netbooks after 2010 onwards.

What also seems clear is that software companies, with their much more favourable profit margins, are winning this war, and, pretty soon, they won’t have to think about hardware at all any more. Instead of writing for a “spec,” you just need to write for a virtual space, which can run anywhere or everywhere.

Arguably, hardware has always been enslaved to software (except for one company), but I see the Sony’s & Samsung’s of today becoming the Nokia’s & Motorola’s of the future.

Since I’m not a technologist (more of a technology philosopher), I may be drastically oversimplifying. What do you think?
P.S. going to stop signing my name for a while. I’ll see if that makes a difference. V.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Full QWERTY and dual screens. Eat that iPhone. Also works as a fishing net weight.

It was a good rumor because it sounded plausible until one starts to seriously think about it. Yes, Nokia is one of the few handset manufacturers who doesn’t have Android plans so it just a matter of time, right? Not exactly. Sure, some might think Android is a better platform than S60 and yes, in my opinion, the current S60 UI and user experience are a crapfest but at least it’s Nokia’s own crapfest. And that’s the important thing.

The reason why other traditional cell phone manufacturers are pushing out Android phones is that it doesn’t really matter what software runs in their phones as long as it sells. And of course Android sells, because carriers finally get to bill for data usage when mobile users discover the web.

Does SonyEricsson, Samsung, HTC have a smartphone that matters? They all pump out smartphones on different platforms and don’t really focus on building an ecosystem across their phones. Their main customers are phone operators, who’ll eventually brand the phones and fill them with their own software and sell them to their customers. This is ture for Nokia too as far as Nokia the mobile phone manufacturer goes. Nokia, however, isn’t just about manufacturing hardware. Take SonyEricsson as a counterexample. As a part of Sony, SonyEricsson is more about extending Sony’s brands (Walkman, Cybershot) and not solely about mobile phones. Same goes for Samsung. Nokia, on the other hand, is a brand on its own and has interests in all aspects of mobile communication.

SonyEricsson is a good example also because it shows what would happen to Nokia if it’d adopt Android. Those who remember time when it was just called Ericsson, the company actually did have pretty nice technologies and phones. Today, that history is pretty much nonexistent in their phones.

Unlike the other phone manufacturers, but like Apple and Google, Nokia has a wide application ecosystem. Nokia is betting a lot on services, even though Ovi Store and other Ovi services haven’t caused similar nerdgasms like Apple’s Apps Store. In fact, one might say that Ovi services are a source of a lot of nerdrage instead. Nokia would also need to port its Nokia Maps and Mail for Exchange support over to Android, just to mention few. Also, why invest in Qt if you’re going Java?

The only way for Nokia to remain relevant in the marketplace is to own the software its phones and services run on. It’s about vertical integration and it’s about mattering in the smartphone market. This vertical integration is why Google and Apple suddenly matter in smartphone business. Vertical integration is why Apple still matters in the computer business.

This is also why no other mobile phone manufacturer has taken Symbian seriously. It would give Nokia, their #1 competitor, immense strategic power. The reason Windows Mobile has zero traction in mobile phones follows the same logic.

As Trip Hawkins, whose Electronic Arts was first to bypass the game resellers and went straight to retailers, has put it, “it’s all about leverage. If you don’t have it, you lose”. With Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS for netbooks, there are many unhappy netbook manufacturers who decided to build something on Android. On the other hand, by bypassing the need for a real OS and focusing on the Web, netbook manufacturers can try to cut costs – at the expense of becoming dependent on Google.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

From the Official Google Blog:

Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

I have nothing to say that I haven’t already said before.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Moving over the WordPress content

There are couple of issues we hit during the migration, and might be good to know for anyone who plans to do the same. Many Google searches were used and multiple blog posts were read in order for our migration to happen, so hopefully this summary makes it easier for future generations…

Preparing for the migration

Our blog had its own domain name already on WP, so one thing to keep in mind is that you need to update the nameserver records from wordpress’s to whoever you’re planning to host your site. However, this is the last thing you will do. Just make sure you have access (or you know how to contact the right guy) to change the  nameservers.

Install Wordpress

Next, install Wordpress on your new host. For example, we initially installed it at techiteasy.webfactional.com. Many hosts allow you to do 1-click style of installs with takes much of the pain away.

Copy the settings over from your wordpress.com blog as well as you can to your new. Make sure you keep the same permalink structure. Do set your blog URLs to your temporary URL instead (in our case, techiteasy.webfactional.com).

Don’t get fancy just yet, but just go with the admin account. We’ll get to user accounts later.

Install plug-ins and themes

Another thing to note when hosting your own blog is that you’re now responsible for security issues in your blog. This means that there are couple of plug-ins you’ll need to install. If you allow user-registrations, you really need the WP-reCAPTCHA -plugin. Also remember to set-up the Akismet-plugin with your Wordpress.com user account API code.

On some hosts WordPress’s normal way of sending e-mail doesn’t work (like at our webhost, Webfaction) and you need to install Configure SMTP-plugin instead. Also, if you want to keep your experience similar to what you had at WP.com, be sure to install Wordpress.com Stats and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Some other plugins you might want to consider are Google Analyticator (If you’re into Google Analytics), Google XML Sitemaps and WP Super Cache.

Back-up Wordpress.com

First of all, do a backup of your blog at wordpress.com. Don’t worry about images or other content, they’ll join your post texts when you’ll import the backup to your new blog later.

It probably goes without saying that all content that arrives to your blog after this point isn’t in the backup, so you might want to do this when it’s quiet in your blog and afterwards remember to manually add all the “missed” content.

Import backup

Our back-up file was about 12 megs in size, which turned out to be a problem because you need to upload the backup using WordPress’s web admin panel. Some web hosts will allow you to override PHP’s maximum file upload and script execution times (default is 2 MB), but some don’t (In WordPress’s Restore page you’ll see what is the effective limit). Even though we did increase both limits, uploading the 12 MB backup didn’t work. At this point I did wonder what use is a back-up you can’t restore.

Your best (and almost only) way to work-around this is to split the XML file into smaller chunks. You need to retain the headers and footers in each chunk, but otherwise it’s quite straight-forward.

You probably want to change to the new site pretty quickly after importing, so you might want to do some of the tune-ups mentioned here only later. What you really should do now is  to now check that the URLs you care about look the same in your new site as they do in the old one (fe. www.techiteasy.org/2008/09/01/random-post and techiteasy.webfactional.com/2008/09/01/random-post).

Fix user accounts

At least for us, user accounts did not transfer smoothly over. First of all, the usernames are wrong and you probably can’t login with them. On top of that, your author links are probably screwed on the new blog. To fix these, you need to do some SQL to fix the entries in database. This isn’t a clean solution, but so far seems to have worked for us.

The easiest way is to create a new account with the same username you have at WP.com and then transfer all the “old” account’s posts to you (and then delete that old account). This takes care of the author URL’s to remain same as previously.You can transfer the posts to your new account by noting your new and old account IDs in the wp_users table and then doing UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author = <your new account ID> WHERE post_author = <your old account ID>. You can check from WP’s admin panel that your new account should have all your posts and the old account should have zero. You can now delete the old account.

If you want to have another username, you need to change the user_nicename field in wp_users table to your WP.com username, if you want to keep your author URLs.

We also had some problems with duplicate and non-working categories, but for most part those are easy to fix using the WP admin panel (except for the categories that show up as numbers, no idea where they came from).

Change nameservers

Image search gave this for "nameservers", but changing them isn't as hardcore or cool. Beards are recommended, though.

Once you change your domain’s nameservers to your new host, it can take some hours before DNS caches around the intertubes get updated. In the meantime strange things can happen and people might end up at different places or your blog might be unreachable. Also, if you take advantage of Wordpress.com’s Gmail integration, remember to copy over those DNS entries too. (We didn’t, so no idea how that is done.)

Now is the time to go to your new blog’s settings and change the blog URLs to the “real” ones (in our case, from techiteasy.webfactional.com to www.techiteasy.org).

You might want to use something like IntoDNS to check the status of your DNS entries and that they’re working.

Once this is all clear, you might want to use Google’s webmaster tools to see if there are any problems with your site. You can do this earlier, but you need to verify the domain to access all the stuff (and you can’t verify it while on WP.com).

This is also a good point to send e-mails to other authors of your blog of all the changes you’ve done (Sorry, guys) and that they might need to create new accounts.

One nice side effect is that people who access your blog’s ancient address (yourblog.wordpress.com) are redirected to your new place as long as you’ve subscribed to WP’s own domain thing. This also goes for RSS feeds. However, it’s a bit troublesome trying to access your old blog’s admin panel anymore at WP.com, because even that tries to redirect to the new one. Once you get there, though, you might want to write an entry explaining that the site has moved for the time when your domain add-on runs out at WP.com.

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much that. Now what you need to do is to keep on cranking out blog posts.

Maintaining your blog on your own does add a bunch of overhead. You need to make sure your setup is up-to-date and secure. On the other hand, you have complete freedom to tweak every aspect of your blog. For us, the benefits of latter were big enough to do the change. If this had been my personal blog, I wouldn’t have bothered.

The migration is far from simple and there are lots of things that can go wrong, so do set a good amount of time to do the migration (fe. a weekend). Basically as long as you don’t update nameservers, you have a nice test environment where to test out different aspects of your new and shiny blog. The only problem is syncing the content (including comments) between your “live” and test sites.

So far, I’ve been very pleased by the set-up Webfaction has and do recommend them. Full SSH and their custom domain/app/site panel are excellent. It beats hands down many of the other hosts that I’ve used so far. Even though with the latest WordPress that doesn’t mean so much because you don’t have any reason to dig into the system with FTP or SSH because everything is available from the web interface.

Photos by Bethany L King (CC BY-ND 2.0) and rangerdawson.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

But the other thing I noticed with June’s Recap (and noticed before on my recaps for S+FnR, but forgot), is that it enables you to draw a thread between your thoughts. Blogging every day means that, often, you don’t have the time to reflect much on what you wrote about before. But subconsciously you do, of course, and I like how I was able to relate different topics to each other. The same applies, incidentally, to living too hard…

The opposite of blogging too much is blogging too little, of course. That’s when you start thinking too much and don’t realise that people will have forgotten your one (imagined) bad post by the time you post the next one, and the next, and the next… So, dormant bloggers, get blogging!

That’s it really. Too short and introspective to post on TIE?
Vincent
(Picture courtesy of www.bennettlakehouse.com)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

If you are interested in contributing to Tech IT Easy, either as a blogger or guest writer, please write to us!

This month, I’d like to thank Georgia for writing about guerrilla marketing. Last month, I forgot to thank Jeremy for publishing his interview with social marketeer, Michelle Greer, and Georgia, for writing about Mint.com.

Let’s get to the favourites (in no particular order):

• The “captain’s chair” phenomenon, in which I identify a problem that many one-person-companies-growing-into-SMEs face, the centralisation of leadership around the founder, and the lack of processes that facilitate delegation. Expect more posts about this.
• A short guide for surviving Windows [aimed at Mac-users], in which in a series of a few posts, I start discussing how to survive that “traumatic” move. While I have certainly managed to, I am now happily back on my Mac at work. Even so, I am writing this post on Windows Live Writer, through Parallels (it’s what I call an anchor-app, something that ties you to an environment). Related: Awakening from the OS X vs. Windows War and Battles in the Virtualization Space.
• Media’s Basic Duty to tell the Truth (P.S. Blogs are not Media), in which I, again in a series of posts,  defend Techcrunch’s reputation, in regards to their accusation towards Last.fm. My premise: blogs (like ours) are not media, but some professional blogs, like Techcrunch, have become its equivalent and thus (have to) respect the same principle of reporting the news as accurately and honestly. I don’t want to generalise though, I think that Arrington’s posts in particular, can be much too emotional, provocative, and definitely more blog than pro-media.
• Where do Good Ideas come from?, in which I propose four areas and write about the ease of implementing these ideas. Two supplement posts: On having Heroes in your Craft and The Right Mix between Idea and Execution and One reason not to blog (at least not to blog about your plans) (I sure do blog a lot about idea generation… ).
• What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?, which comes down to that I would like a device that records everything that I do, in whatever format needed. Some complications: a. do we even want it? How would we process the information? I think that suitable devices already exist, from your camera phone to more specialised and expensive methods.

That’s it for this month. May’s recap can be found here. Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned.  Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

• The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
• The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits  of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
• The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
• The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
• The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
• The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

• I can’t run Windows Live Writer—simply the best blogging software on both the Mac and Windows—through Crossover, because it was built in .Net. And .Net apps don’t work in Crossover.
• You can use the free Virtualbox from Sun to run your virtual OSs (a great development environment!), but if you want to launch Windows apps from your Mac, you need to pay for either Parallels, Fusion, Crossover, or any other commercial variants for this purpose. Basically, a software like Parallels allows you to place a shortcut to a Windows app onto the Dock or the Desktop, which will launch Windows + the app, when you click it.
• The best Windows user-experience on the Mac is through Boot Camp. It would be a million times quicker to boot if you were able to hibernate on the Windows side and safe sleep on the Mac side. If you don’t want to risk losing your unsaved data however (why would it be unsaved?), you’re probably better off booting the traditional way (3-5 min. out the window right there). Well actually, it used to be an official feature, now it isn’t.
• Sharing your OS X documents with your Windows ones (in other words, using the same folder for both OSs) is very possible when you use Parallels. When you use boot camp however, it all of a sudden gives you a convenient error.

Georgia, in response to my post about the OS War being over, wrote that she thought that this whole discussion is about standards. I think that the edges are getting very blurry and I eventually see hardware, on the PC-side at least, becoming pretty irrelevant. In the meantime, however, you get these little annoyances, beyond stuff like Office for Mac being inferior to Office for Windows, which make me wonder if they are here by design or because they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. I’m betting on the first.

Standards, for now at least, are still causing wars.

Vincent

(Picture is of course of the game Virtua Tennis 3, and has absolutely zero to do with this post)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

If I ever succumb to the temptation to blog like I did last night, feel free to shoot me. Now, back to our regular programming…

Last week, I wrote about having heroes in your craft and how I found it noteworthy that some examples are more effective than others in everyone’s path to self-improvement. I attributed it to the vague concept of compatible brain-patterns, but really I think it’s a much more simple idea. The reason that my writing heroes have an influence on my craft is because I practice it. In other words, there is a right mix of idea and execution (I would call it semi-right as there’s much room for improvement).

There are plenty of blog posts about this. Most well-known to me is Derek Sivers’ blog post about the “execution multiplier” that makes ideas more or less valuable:

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO- EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

More recently, Sarah Lacy wrote a post on Techcrunch, entitled “Is Execution More Important than Vision?,” where she differentiates between entrepreneurs that are visionary vs. those that are good at execution. In other words, she categorises people as either fitting in the one or the other.

What is clear from all of these is that ideas unapplied are essentially worthless. Which to me means three things:

1. That if you have ideas in an area that is difficult for you to execute on, you’re probably better off focussing on areas where you can execute them.
2. Or, that it is equally important to find the right resources (skills & knowledge, network & team, money & customers) for your idea as it is to have the idea.
3. That you ultimately need to move towards a system of rapid iteration or rapid prototyping, because, as we all know, ideas are ideas, and the reality will more often than not change your original product idea. The quicker you can test them out and improve them, the better your chances of making a commercial success.

It’s a bit of a leap from my post about writing heroes to executing entrepreneurial ideas, I know, but I think it makes sense.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Here goes:

• The New Yorker’s Out Loud series: I find myself listening to a variety of topics through this 10 min. podcast, from Barbar the elephant and how its idea was inspired by French colonialism; to the murder of Russian investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya; to the history of (the horrible) auto-tune, which can make anyone a vocalist.
• Big Ideas, which is a Canadian educational broadcast on iTunes, and basically showcases some excellent lectures on topics ranging from: the sense and senselessness of stretching; to Naomi Klein on her book, The Shock Doctrine; to author Robert J. Sawyer on why Star Wars shouldn’t belong to the science fiction genre and is actually quite a devolution to that genre.
• Scene Unseen, in which two students of film go back and forth on movies that came out this week, as well as picking some pretty damn interesting DVDs to watch. A must-listen for film-lovers!

Of course, there’s also iInnovate, Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, This American Life, and the, now finished, Game Theory podcasts, some of which I’ve written about before on this blog, and which are most definitely worth checking out.

As might be clear from this selection, to me, thought inspiration (or leadership) can come from all kinds of directions, not just technology or business expertise.

Have some podcasts that you find interesting? List them in the comments!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

• 01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
• 04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as  it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
• 09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

The way that heroism works for me is that I start writing like these people. Scoble has this habit of asking himself questions like “Why do I like Friendfeed? Here’s 120 reasons..” Somewhat banal, when you think about it, because it’s like you’re saying “Why am I so right? Here’s 1 million reasons…” I actually adopted it for a few blog-posts, then I dropped it. Fred Wilson writes essays, shorter than Paul Graham’s (thank god), but still I like the flow of the text. And for a while, I’m sure, I tried to sound like Fred Wilson. And Penelope Trunk just has a very personable style, for lack of a better word.

That’s not to say that I will now try to write like Ms. Trunk, or that I even do it intentionally. Back when I was a kid and tried to write fiction, I always remember that it read like Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Isaac Asimov, depending on who I was reading at the time. It wasn’t on purpose, it was more like my brain adopted the writing style more easily than say, if I spent time with an accountant and tried to replicate what he/she did.

I think each of us have brain-patterns that fit a certain craft best and for me it happens to be writing. Which is interesting, because I also read and talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, yet I am not one right now and wondering if I ever will be. Food for thought.

Have you experienced the same thing in your craft? How do you take in information from your heroes, though conversations, reading, observation, interaction, or other means? How effective has it been for you? And is it something that stays with you always or just in the beginning of your life? And, the most important question of them all… Who are Your Heroes?

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Exploration / Rest: Spending 3 days in Paris and 2 days celebrating the national day of Luxembourg was great for thinking about life, discussing various topics and plans, and brainstorming ideas. It is in a way the anti-thesis of working life, which is focussed on making you into a machine, constantly moving, constantly following a routine, and not breaking out into new creative patterns. Ease of Implementation: Ideas are often abstract and need a lot of work to make them useful.

Iteration: This the primary way that companies innovate, by constantly developing routines, slightly adapting them over a long period of time, until version 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.infinity, etc. It is why (consumer) products are the way they are. Ease of Implementation: when you actually have new ideas they face the challenge of breaking existing patterns that are cemented into operating companies and more difficult to change. Still, new ideas are often based on practical data and should thus be more easy to implement.

Deconstruction: This is what I call the Sherlock Holmes way or the “where have you last seen it?” way. You are faced with a problem, e.g. finding something you lost or figuring out how an electronic device works. The best way to do it is to break it down into small steps or pieces (deconstructing) and then reconstructing the reality again. In technology, you might also call this reverse engineering. Ease of Implementation: much like iteration, it is based on realities that already exist. Ideas are often better than what came before, because you’re an outsider, taking something apart and throwing away the junk. Ever lost a piece of text you wrote due to your computer/software crashing? I guarantee that your version 2 will be shorter, more to the point, and better.

Conflict: I was discussing this with Jeremy this weekend, regarding the building of teams that can challenge each other. It’s a destructive and constructive process all at once and I think the benefits usually outweigh the risks. Ease of Implementation: It’s difficult to find that kind of talent and the right mix, so I would say that implementation is not easy. It should however be at the top of the agenda of any organisation who wants to be an innovator in its field.

Other ways to come up with fresh ideas? The floor is yours!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Watching this movie in bed this morning, recuperating from a very exhausting but great few days, I thought about the meaning of it all. And because this is a business and technology blog and I can’t exactly write posts about the meaning of life, I’ll write about what I think it means in a business context instead.

In sales, which by its nature of convincing people to spend their hard-earned cash on a product or service, has a bad reputation, you can either sell a widget (Sindbad) or you can sell a life (the sea). But really you should sell the widget, within the context of the life. So, in other words, the most convincing sales method is to sell an Experience.

Right now, I am sitting at a terrace in the Place Guillaume II in Luxembourg, listening to live music, and drinking my third tea. Had the context been, pardon my French, merde, I would’ve left after the first tea. Had the tea been bad, I would’ve left also. But because the context and the product/service are good, I have become a repeat-customer, at least for today.

I don’t think this is restricted to B2C only. In business-to-business, which is the area I operate in, we also sell services which have to either fit within the context of the customer, or create an entirely, new and better context for him. So, for instance, our financial trust manages certain financial affairs for customers who want to settle down their company or savings in Luxembourg and enjoy certain tax- and other advantages. The context/product combination is even more clearer in this case, as we are in fact offering a country as our product. Of course, we still have to do a good job, but we convince our “Marinas” to come here and work with us, through a big-picture sale.

I hate it when salespeople try to convince me about their product without having considered for one second what the financial or other benefit is for me. And there is an incredible amount of these negative experiences out there, which I think is the primary reason for why sales gets a bad rap. If you instead think of it as selling a cruise on the sea, or, better, an sea-adventure with Sindbad, I think you’ll generate much more positive returns.

Of course, this doesn’t always work for a cheap product like tea, where the margins are so low (actually, I think the margins are at about 70%, but 70% of 2 euros is not a lot) that you would rather sell more, more quickly, than spend too much effort on the context and in the process sell more slowly. The difference is perhaps that with a product like tea, the location matters a lot, which means that you have to spend more on rent and include that in the cost of your product.

End of thought for today. If you’re in sales, sell the experience, not just an expense, and I think your quality of working life will increase. I prefer a happy paying customer than just a paying customer, don’t you?

Vincent

(Picture of The SS Rotterdam returning home from her last voyage)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Since Tech IT Easy was founded by a Parisian, I felt it was good to go to the source and have a “vision-refresher” as it were. At its peak, this group-blog featured 15 writers, the majority of which was from France or situated there at some point. Many are now spread across this planet and it’s sites like Tech IT Easy that represent a small node where we can occasionally brush against each other (in an intellectual way) and exchange the wisdom we have learned.

Meeting several Tech IT Easy authors, Steve Danino and Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, it reconfirmed to me the intellectual spirit in which this weblog was founded, as well as the search for something, anything, but probably tech- (and/or business!-) related. Many of our authors enjoy a solid educational background, which is both good and bad. Good, in the sense of the value it brings. Bad, because there are many opportunity costs in life and even more so for well-educated men and women. It is clear then that we all write when we can, but more often than not, we cannot.

It is all the more important then to get more (and more and more) fresh blood onto Tech IT Easy to replace those that have moved on, and to connect those who are “old” to those who are “new.” The vision, my vision for Tech IT Easy has always been that of building a community of talented people who directly and indirectly assist each other to make our world a (technological) marvel.

Does that work in practice? In my opinion, only if people work hard at making it happen and the effects are far from direct or instantaneous. Rather, if I need to speak to an interesting person in France (or anywhere really) or bounce a complicated idea of someone, I’ll often look up one of our Tech IT Easy members and vice versa.

A few blog posts that I thought were great and directly showed off the value of some of our members, were Remy Miralles’s posts about being a software developer, and Cecil Dijoux’s (who is incidentally also a musician by night) posts about High Availability Architecture. I have met neither of them yet, but I know the day will come. These posts are more the exception to the rule, which is that, on this weblog, we often do not market ourselves, but instead think out loud and whatever opportunities happen because or outside of it, are the individual’s own. The risk is that sometimes you of course do the opposite of marketing, but hey…

It is the nature of the beast that is blogging that its value is hard to determine. We host this weblog for a negligible amount and the 45 min. a day that I spend blogging on it is also negligible in terms of expense. We could value this blog by asking for money, but apart from some unobtrusive monetisation exercises on the horizon, we will not make a serious effort at that… because it would create a different kind of pressure and hence different kind of focus. But, who knows…

The value that Tech IT Easy has to me, remains to be that node, out of which occasionally there is some new strings that are formed, either intellectually or through building up a new relationship or venture. Everything else is… soft tissue.

In the words of the once great Arnold, I’ll be back!
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword of this head-on-the-sand brainstorming : Guerrilla Marketing
Always very impressive.
Knitting sockets for street-lamps, waking up your co-citizens,  or printing you “tete” (head) on the floor out of the metro to sell records or ray ban glasses…. ah ! fascinating – respect for the brand / checked . prescription circle short-circuited and the brand needs a promotion to an icon.
I had kind of forgotten of this silly risky stuff going back to my mentally safe and rigid country-cocoon. Until a few days ago I stumbled over a campaign made for Media Markt from Leo Burnett that is actually a guerrilla marketing study-case. click it!
Media Markt Junkmen.
In two words the guys used an ancient  hoaxing mechanism for the real world and attempted to turn it into a sales channel. Actually  since it had a guerilla conotation the guys just tested reactions without really managing the channel. And of course they raised comments, digs and lifted eyebrows in various shapes.

Doesn’t advertising need it’s own R&D space? Second life what? Real life needed… To my attention, there are no real start-ups in the advertising space (end-to-end) so this risk had to be integrated into a big corporation’s structure like Leo Burnett. (ok maybe there are, but that’s another post)

Three comments from my side.
one : they and us have to get used to it, interactivity is here.
two : guerrilla has the same connotation as innovation, as for now (this is why geeks like that stuff)

three : next week, the time I hold my breath underwater I am going to take this further — How do you turn  guerrilla heroes and heroism into sustainable business and transform surprise to respect from the mass and their structured values ?

some of your good ideas might help me … breathe better

Georgia

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Concept iPhone keyboard – a composite made out of  an iPhone + a Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

I’m actually quite surprised that something like this isn’t possible. The iPhone screen would make a fine portable screen and the touch keyboard is pretty terrible for typers (at least my polls have revealed). With the current bluetooth keyboad even, I would think a simple synergy was possible and I don’t at all get why Apple does not allow for this to work.

Let’s make some noise!!!

Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2009 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.