The coming weeks, I’ll be pretty busy with a business development project in the technology sector. As usual, I cannot discuss it in depth (ok, it’s Fight Club, we bash each other half to death every week and can’t talk about it), but I want to discuss some stumbling blocks that we’re sure to be hitting. To give you an idea, some of the questions are now:

• Patents and their limitations: while we have filed for a number already, the issues are whether there is prior art and how to deal with it, as well as whether patents are really enough protection against competitors. Since, I’ve attended a pretty interesting New Venture seminar last week on IP, I think that will be my next post.
• The usefulness of market research: I breached this topic before already, but I don’t believe in researching innovations that consumers cannot touch yet, and will instead focus on expert-input, I think, as well as getting a testable prototype ready as soon as possible (we’ll be looking for subjects!). I hope to have something more to write about it soon.
• Pricing strategy: this is really exciting! I’m reading the excellent book “The strategy and tactics of pricing” and am in the position to apply some of it’s lessons now. Thoughts about it to follow on Tech IT Easy soon, but to give you an idea, it’s about the battle between costs, what the competition charges, and what your customers want to pay for your product.
• Dealing with bureaucracy: Since, we’re going to be applying to an incubator, it might be interesting to see how that process goes.

In other, equally important news:

• Verteego: You may have noticed a new badge on our site. It’s the Verteego sustainability badge, which links to a report analysing our weblog. I’ll be trying to increase our grade a little there/here and will write about my impressions. I didn’t even know that I can take leave for pregnancy-reasons, wow!
• Public transport in the Netherlands: I don’t know how it is in your country, but we’re doing exciting RFID-related stuff here. Starting February, we’ll be going through the transition of going from a stamp to a beep, and I’ll write a little about my impressions here.

That’s all I can predict for now, and I hope to make it all a reality soon! Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy!

Vincent

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I get a lot of Twitter-followers, based on keywords like, eh, ‘Screenplay’ and ‘Consulting,’ and it annoying to say the least. Why? Because I don’t believe in mass-networking and I will explain why in the rest of this post (there are other reasons, this was just the trigger).

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of experience in market research and I’ve become pretty good at it. From selling myself over the phone in a minute or less, to overcoming gatekeepers, to learning to really listen to people, to arranging personal interviews and transcribing the results, to designing and co-ordinating mass-research campaigns, and analysing them, I feel I’ve seen a lot and I’ve also seen a lot bad practices.

Why does market research get a bad rap? Because a lot of it focusses on getting as many results in as possible. It’s called “statistical significance,” for the newcomers to this field, and it means that getting the answers of 10 people is less subjective than getting the answers of 2. Of course you have to take into account that there are different types of market research: those that lead to clear outcomes and those that lead to lot’s of data that can be analysed and interpreted. Being a practical guy, I much prefer the first as the other kind often feels like a waste of money to me.

How do you design an outcome-focussed research campaign? Pretty simple: you get as close as possible to the outcome and you test it. In tech-world, this would be developing a prototype and testing it. In web-world, this would be something like A/B-marketing, where you design different versions of the same page and test their effectiveness on different samples. Of course, you can conduct plenty of market research before also, but as a favourite lecturer of mine once told me: “how do you research innovation (i.e. something new)? You can’t, because people really don’t know how they feel once the innovation is there.”

The other kind of market research, the one that produces a lot of data, is a gold-mine for journalists, analysts, and consultants. They all love to deal with abstractions that can be applied to many different situations. “Research showed that people are getting tired of green advertising. Therefore, we can write an article/report/advice to our clients that green advertising sucks.” The end, pay me.

That is not to say that more results does not provide a more unbiased perspective on a problem, but it’s just not as simple as asking a lot of people the same questions. There are ways around that, such as collecting demographic and psychographic data and I don’t want to cheapen that. I’ve written before about how statistics only matter as much as where your data comes from. But I’ve also written that triangulation is a large part of my research philosophy, which means getting different perspectives on the same issue. Yes, kind of like A/B marketing. So, I do desk-research, I do web-based surveys, I do interviews with consumers and experts. All of which provides me with a more objective view of the solution to a problem.

Networking, and now we come to the gist of it, is also a philosophy with different flavours. One, the Twitter-kind, focusses on buzz-words, reciprocity (I follow you, you follow me), and the masses. Facebook and LinkedIN are more about: so, how do you know this person? Similarly, in real life, business cards are the equivalent of Twitter: “I’m a consultant, here’s my card, can I have yours?” And friendships, both business and personal ones, are the ones that are about: “so, how do we know each other again?”

I have yet to get much value out of the web, so my cynical view on Twitter may be too cynical. I have also, as yet, received fairly little value from business cards, I should mention. I don’t go browsing through them and call people at random, same way I don’t twitter at random. Facebook is my number one web-tool, as I use it as a platform to do other things. Similarly, my friends in real life are an important platform for me also, to discuss ideas and hopefully build on those.

I think there is some kind of parallel between what I feel is effective market-research (many different perspectives, not quantity-, but quality-focussed) and networking (essentially the same). Arguably, my stance on networking may come from my own personal attitudes, I won’t deny it, but also because I believe, from my marketing background, that it just isn’t effective.

But this is just my opinion. What’s yours? Network in mass or Network in class?

Vincent

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Just one post this week, it is again the busy period in Vince’s house. This last week, I’ve read two predictions, both, by coincidence, based on the role-model of Apple. The first was David Carr’s, who asked for an iTunes for news in the New York Times. The second was Ian Betteridge’s, who predicted an iPhone-style app-store, controlled by Apple, for all of the Mac. Let me address them both here.

News… what has that looked like over the years? We had print, which lead to books and perhaps pamphlets. Let’s just jump to the 20th century. We’ve had the onslaught of the marketing age, which also made newspapers big. People have never paid for news really, they pay a minimal fee for the price of the paper, the rest of which is covered by advertisers. Then came the internet and it all went down the toilet. You, me, everyone imagined they could be a journalist, even if it meant just copying the text word-by-word of what someone else had written.

Compare that with music. It started with the production of sound, live performances, then the reproduction of sound across various media. The business-model was 90% of the time a straight sale. Music speaks to our brain, differently from the way news does (it’s all drama anyway, right?), and we are hooked on it, like a drug. So we pay and we pay and we pay. Then comes the internet and the magic of painless reproduction and distribution. The power-houses that are media-companies were slow to catch on and it’s pirate-city all round. CD sales go down! In comes smart Apple with their silly little white box with one button and saves the whole damn industry! We think, oh my god, Apple saved retail! What Apple in fact did was close the loop again. Instead of artist -> CD -> shop -> CD -> consumer, we now have artist -> mp3/4/5 -> iTunes -> iPod -> consumer. Everyone wins, though most of all, Apple.

What is the key here?

• For one, music isn’t news. As I pointed out, music is a drug, while news is a duty. Music is fun, while news is … interesting? We can live without the news, believe me, we can’t live without music.
• Two, news was never a powerful business model to begin with. Since the days of Soap-operas, all media has been owned by advertisers, who somehow have made this industry survive, even though no one was really willing to pay for it. Yes, we can also live without television, but we can’t live without music.
• Music is also a tightly controlled product, it’s expensive to make music and to get it into your ears. News, on the other hand, the media has long learned how easy it is to copy-paste.

The internet has shaken both industries and much more so news. Because its sugar-daddies, the advertisers, suddenly realised that they could get away with no longer paying for the expensive process of print and distribution, as well as having many more options to advertise online. The power-position, which was already unbalanced in the first place, has shifted even more in the direction of the advertisers.

For music, the power of supply continued to be in the hands of the media-companies. In case you haven’t noticed, those are some powerful companies and the world of music and other entertainment media is locked down with some big nails—Pandora, Hulu, Joost, iTunes, take your pick, chances are that most of these are not in your country. The internet has had an effect, to be sure, but they control the supply and they have lot’s of money to change things. They finally got iTunes to succumb as well, with their now variable pricing.

There is no analogy here and no matter the superficial similarities and the coming of the “iReader,” there never will be. News will never be something that we want to pay for. Who wants to pay to hear that Hurricane XX has killed millions, or Region YY is filled with starving children, or that Region ZZ has weapons of mass destruction? Because, that, unlike the stories we may read on the internet, is what news really is: making us aware that our planet isn’t all that. Give me a good song any day over having to hear that!

Just briefly, the iPhone store translated to Macs. Why it’s different: it’s i…Phone, the most locked-down technology on this planet. Vs. the PC, which is the most unlocked technology on the planet. Need I spell it out?

The greater point I’m making is that frequently “visionaries” and “entrepreneurs” write their business plan or manifesto stating that because X is so, my business will work that way too. Analogies, taken too loosely, will kill your business and rather than taking the words of visionaries at their face value, we should work it out: Was X like that really, and is your business like that really too? Chances are… it’s not.

Vincent

(man, I love it when I can pump out all this text in 15 min. or less)

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I’m pretty sure that by now many of you have read at Times Online, or at some blog linking to it, how Google, not only destroys the moral backbone of China, but how they are destroying the world – one search at a time. Nick Carr, as usual, has already written already quite nicely on the subject.

A data center you can drive around to cause even more greenhouse gas emissions.

I wasn’t that surprised to find out that Times had referenced Gartner and, I assume, Koomey’s paper (PDF) on IT power consumption, because these are the first, easiest-to-find and only reliable results one gets if one searches for such information… on Google. I was working on a paper recently and tried to find this same exact information on ICT power consumption and ended up using both above-mentioned papers as my sources.

Anyway, according to the Times and the guy who estimated all this, a Google search pops out 7 grams of CO2, everyone’s favourite greenhouse gas. To put this into perspective, that’s about 58 meters worth of driving on a car that meets EU’s 2012 target of 120g/km. As Carr points out, it’s pretty sad that the calculations behind this number aren’t public, because they’re, as he says, pretty “dubious”. Times talks about actual grams of CO2 and not some hypothetical grams, so I’m assuming that is the average amount of actual CO2 pumped to the atmosphere from a normal search.

So, let’s mangle some other numbers too. EIA estimated 2006 CO2 emissions (from consumption of coal) of US at 2 306 million metric tons and the world total at 12 064 million metric tons. According to Nicholas Carr’s calculations, Google search would account for 0,02% of the world’s CO2 emissions or about as much as Argentina. At around €15 per EUA ton (EU emission Allowance), the cost of those emissions would be about 180 000 MEUR, which is pretty good from a company whose market capitalization is less than half of that (99 billion USD). Also, by combining Google’s emissions with Gartner’s estimate, the global ICT industry is about the size of 100 Google-equivalents. (I think that’s pretty low number.)

This dicking around with guestimations and numerology is, in my opinion, pretty stupid and totally counter-productive. This is suboptimization at its worst. This whole thing reminds me of Blackle, the “black version of Google”. The idea was that white pixels consume more electricity than black ones. Well, it turned out that this was totally wrong.

Your computer does not pump out greenhouse gases through its fans like airplanes or cars do. Much depends on how that electricity is generated. Writing this post caused no CO2 emissions on my part – my computer’s electricity comes from renewable or nuclear sources. And as for hosting this blog post, I think it’s safe to assume that my marginal costs on Wordpress.com are pretty negligible (Wordpress.com says that there are today over 151 000 posts besides mine). As for you, dear readers, I’ve no idea where your electricity comes from.

As Carr points out later on in his post, the problem isn’t Google and it’s a bit wrong to focus on Google, whose interests and profits are aligned with consuming as little energy as possible and who has been active in being energy-efficient. Carr asks readers to look at themselves instead. The additional energy consumption of ICT equipment is pretty massive and it’s only growing. There’s very little we can do to change this, as many see benefits in all their new gadgets like laptops, cell phones and, now, netbooks. And modern laptops are pretty energy-efficient already. I think the solution is to use energy sources that do not cause harmful emissions. The keyword I’m after is sustainability.

Besides, what are you going to do instead of searching on the internet? Surf aimlessly? Even though this just numerology, I’d like to know what’s the break-even point at which it would be more efficient to search instead.

There are many good ways to “save the planet” that are based on facts. Feel free to use Google (or any other search engine) to learn about them.

Unpaid advertisement: The guy who originally started out this blog, Jeremy Fain is running a startup to help companies and other organizations to be “green”. If you are worried about your organization’s sustainability, why not try out Verteego to build up your sustainability report?

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Commenting, as it is today, treats you people like shit. It’s a bad word, sorry, I don’t like swearing on a medium that can be read by small kids, but it’s true. The fact that you have to put your wise words next to trackbacks, spammers, and idiots, is insulting in itself—something that is perhaps more apparent when commenting on a Techcrunch post. Also that your words will then essentially become open sourced adds to the trouble, something that every blogger faces too, of course.

A couple of interesting thoughts about where commenting is going came up this last year, such as:

• Disqus, which allows you to be in control of your comments, also edit them, which I find a worthwhile addition.
• Fred Wilson, who wrote about having people change the blog post as needed, in a Wiki-like fashion. This would never work out practically, we bloggers are way to egocentric, but collaborative thought-collection and -expression is something I’m a big believer in.
• TidBits, an Apple-focussed site, that collects comment in the form of an email-discussion, something I find appealing.
• Kottke, Daring Fireball, Seth Godin, 43folders, all of which don’t allow comments, though welcome mail and track-backs (kottke has the occasional thread).

I want to do a little market research exercise here. Basically what I’m thinking about is to allow for trackbacks and allow you to comment via a mailing list, something that may also cut down on spam. I want to know how you feel about that. If I receive a high approval or “don’t care either way” percentage, I’ll go for it and this blog post will be my* last to allow for public comments (Edit: actually, even if the answer is to use mail, it will still take a while, a week or two, to implement it. So this won’t be the last post.). Interesting comments will be added to the bottom of my posts as well, allowing rss-readers to easily check them without having to click through to the site. If the poll shows that you would prefer to keep the old system, then it stays. That’s democracy for you!

So do me a favour and answer the following poll:

[polldaddy poll=1259855]

If you’re really opposed to this, make your argument in a comment.

What commentators said:

Wine Blog, the first and only commentator asked me if I wanted to stop people from giving me feedback on my post. That isn’t my objective at all! But it did lead me to another thought. Another reason why a mailing list is better is that you will know when someone respond to your comment. Having to go back to a random site, instead of receiving a note in your mail, is terribly inefficient.

David thinks that it’s important for some to have their names & thoughts connected to their own sites. I can’t argue with that. A mailing system would certainly not give people the option to market their sites as openly as usual. Of course, I did say that track-backs would still work.

Vincent

*: this would just be for my posts, I am not the boss of Tech IT Easy!

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I wrote a pretty angry post yesterday. You didn’t read it, but the gist came down to that it is frustrating to blog and then not be commented on. 90% of my posts are *out loud thinking* ones, meaning that it doesn’t provide a simple answer, but is meant to start a discussion about, very possibly, how wrong I am. I’m glad it wasn’t published in its original form, though the issue remains and I am considering to drop blogging, because it’s pretty unrewarding to me on the whole.

I do have a theory about blogging though, about the internet really, taking a strategic and economical stance. From a strategic perspective, I’ve already written that the barriers to entry in this industry are extremely low. Last year or the year before, Jeremy wrote about the huge amount of blogs out there. I’m sure that number has increased.

Take that together with the problem of marmalade. Have too much of it on your shelves and you’ll hardly sell anything at all; have a select choice of items, and you’ll do well.

Translation: either don’t blog or don’t blog differently, and you’ll be safe. It’s no wonder that Techmeme was such a success, we love it when one topic is covered over and over again, because there’s only space for so many new topics in our heads.

It’s not just blogs that have to operate this way. The music industry increasingly does too. I wrote a little essay about it, which I also never published. It’s entitled “20,000 songs in your pocket.”

With those words, Steve Jobs essentially signed the death warrant of music. How special is a song, which is a work of love for many an artist, if it has to compete with 19,999 other ones? So technology has killed art, and so there remains little to be said, except to accept that fact.

Whether it’s 20,000 songs, or 1 million blogs, or 1000 blog posts, while before your wisdom may have previously been confined to a single page. Multitude eradicates individuality and the beast it produces is as yet unknown. Can we make order out of chaos, can we bring it to a coherent whole, develop a technology that brings that forward which is of value? These are the questions that should be asked… perhaps… perhaps not.

It is the natural state of humanity to bring change. Our whole lives are centred around birth, a short life, and death. During our lives, new people are born, with new and different lives, different thoughts and ideas. Every generation can and must bring about change, because they cannot do the same thing that their parents have done.

And so, perhaps, 20,000 songs in your pocket isn’t the end of art after all. 20,000 songs merely exposes us to more, more quickly, and also forces us to adapt. Either we set artificial boundaries—10 songs in your pocket, how’s that?—or we do in fact produce an AI that translates it for us all. But truly, doing that would mean that our kind of intelligence, the kind that can block out the nonsense in our lives, has become replaced.

The end… and the beginning!

I guess it was an ode to the human brain, which makes decisions that work best for it. Do I have an answer, except to perhaps quit blogging or try to beat that human brain? Not yet! If you do, feel free to leave a comment.

Have a nice weekend!
Vincent

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I’m sitting in the train, reflecting on the concept of “Free!”, having just listened to a podcast from the London School of Economics on the diminishing role of European citizenship—a British university, a very dry topic, my thoughts naturally drifted elsewhere. I’ve also been thinking about the dwindling state of print-media and the onslaught of digital media—a topic that has been beaten to death over the years.

I was wondering what made a university give its, let’s call them “words” away for a free, until I realised that the one thing that a university probably has in abundance is words. The same applies to print media, with an excess of its type of media, or radio stations, with an excess of music… etc., etc.

My theory of “freeness” is thus that you should release those things for free that you have in abundance. I’m sure there is a more formal economic theory about it, and I think it comes down to the idea of marginal value and that those things that have less marginal value can be released for free or cheap, while those with a higher marginal value should not be (please correct my interpretation in the comments, if I’m wrong).

The reason we are (or I am) so confused about this subject, is because things cost money. It costs money to produce a newspaper, which is why we are forced to look at adverts on every second page and pay a cover charge as well. So, it’s no wonder that we expect that by releasing stuff for free that they must be losing money!

I’m not a good economist, so I can’t throw a complicated formula at you, just that I think that you have to focus on other values, next to the commodity-cost of words / text / music, when selling a service. For universities, it’s the facilities and access to very smart people; for print newspapers, it’s the convenience of the paper at a fair price; for radio-stations, it’s the freshness of supply and witty comments. As long as you can differentiate yourself in areas like these, other things can essentially be given away for free.

As mentioned, I’m sure a theory exists about this, but I thought it would be a nice thought for today’s post.

A quiz to finish. What parts of following businesses could probably be released for free?

• A strategic consultancy
• A mail delivery company
• A gas station
• A word-processing software business
• A social network business
• An author of books

With at least one of these, I think it’s ok to say nothing at all. And I think that for none of them, it’s ok to say that everything should be free.

Vincent

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Not my title, hence the quotes. “Smart Products” is the name of a 2006 Ph.D dissertation by Serge Rijsdijk, which I just purchased in a bookstore—I didn’t know you could buy these things. I’m fascinated with this concept, so much so that it was the reason for choosing Sony as my first serious company to work for, and why I worked in several projects / startups that dealt with interesting matters of industrial design. On this blog, I approached the topic a few times, with blog posts about “creating relevance,” about creating software for right-brained people, and probably some other things that I can’t recall at this time.

Before I go on, a little quiz. Which of these do you consider a smart product?

• The one-buttoned iPod? Is the iPhone a smarter product than the iPod? Why?
• The financial derivative, which was designed by many smart rocket-scientists?
• A bicycle gear-system that changes automatically, according to elevation-angle and intensity?

Think about these before you go on. Essentially, what a smart product means to me, is one that is able to interact with smart* human beings (*: by definition, ALL human beings). I would also say that a smart product adapts to the context of the user and does not force the user to adapt to it (though that, for the moment, is very wishful thinking).

An iPod, while on the surface a stupid device with a single button, is smart enough to just do the job we need it to do. It also has as a smart back-end that allows for a wide variety of content to be streamed through your device. An iPhone does the same job, except that it does more and it allows for two-way interaction: smart. A financial derivative may be smart by design but, from my understanding, it is a type of smartness that is incompatible with what humans consider smart, i.e. what makes sense to them. It does not speak our language, hence we should probably kill it (I fear the day that aliens come to our planet). The argument that it is designed for a different type of person, the financial genius, doesn’t apply either, considering the current crisis. The auto-gear system for bicycles, which I made up, but probably exists, is smart because it uses environmental intelligence to make our life easier. But in order to be able to do that, it must not make mistakes or else it becomes a very stupid device—there is a subtle line between smart and stupid, when speaking of technology… or biking.

Serge Rijsdijk has a much more complex definition of smart products, namely that they fit one or more of following seven dimensions:

1. The ability to co-operate: by which he means co-operating with other devices. He has an interesting quote from Nicoll (1999) who thinks that “the age of discrete products may be ending.” An example of this is a PDA that co-operates with a printer (or more modern: a camera that co-operates with a printer)
2. Adaptability: by which he means the ability to learn and improve the match between its functioning and its environment, e.g. my example of auto-changing gears or a thermostat that collects data about room and outer temperature and uses that to fulfil its user’s wishes.
3. Autonomy: meaning that the device can operate without interference from the user, e.g. some of those autonomous lawnmowers and vacuum-cleaners we keep hearing about.
4. Human-like interaction: as the term states, interacting with humans in a fashion that feels natural to them (I use a more broad description than the author). An example given is car-navigation, though I don’t exactly consider that a successful smart product yet—at least, the nagging voice telling you to “turn right” is not necessarily a characteristic of smartness, if you ask me.
5. Multi-functionality: i.e. a single product fulfilling multiple functions, such as a modern mobile phone. The fact that the iPhone has been so destructive to incumbents in this market would suggest that here too the definition of successful smartness need not necessarily always fit.
6. Personality: meaning the product’s ability to show the properties of credible personality. Examples given include the Furby, the AIBO, and (don’t laugh) Microsoft’s paperclip-assistant. My only experience with personable non-organics would be in the films: King Kong, Transformers, and Wall-E, all of which induced an emotional response in me. The AIBO was fun to play with at Sony, but, back then, not even close to the level of a dog. Still, I was sad to hear it has been discontinued. And I’ve killed many a virtual pet or plant (including that stupid paperclip), I’m not very sad to say.
7. Finally, Reactivity: i.e. the ability of a device to react to its environment in a “stimulus / response manner.” An example given is the Philips Hydraprotect hairdryer, which lowers the temperature of the air when the humidity of the hair decreases.

His thesis is focussed on the one issue that smart innovation is all about: how consumers react to smart products. I hope this post has made you think about it! More on this fascinating topic as I get to it.

Vincent

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Maybe a little presumptuous, but the quality of this spoof, from the way the software looks to the acting, is nearly flawless. I nominate this for the best Apple spoof in 2009.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zy_5Tv3d3A&hl=en&fs=1]

I love the way the video ends:

“Thank you for that Jeff. It remains to be seen if the wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

Vincent

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I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

• Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
• FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
• Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
• Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
• Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
• Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
• Wordpress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
• Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
• Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
• Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
• I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

• Last.fm and favtape.com for music
• Tinyurl for rickrollling people
• Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
• Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
• Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
• Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
• Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
• Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

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It feels strange to start 2009 with a dream, but a new year means doing new things and this one felt right. I sometimes have some pretty strange dreams and find it worthwhile to write it down. I don’t quite have notebook lying next to my bed, but close enough. This one was strange too, much stranger than what I’m about to tell you.

In my dream I was looking for a Christmas gift for my brother, a T-shirt actually. For some reason, I imagined that I entered some sort of electronic boutique to do it, I went to pick a shirt, and went to try it out (my brother and me are pretty much the same size).

So there I was in the changing room when I noticed some sort of display on my shirt. It gave me all kinds of options, many of which I can no longer remember, but basically they were something like:

• “Do you want to see the news when eating breakfast?”
• “Do you want me to operate as a timer when brushing your teeth?”
• “Do you want to see traffic information when driving to work?”

You get the idea.

I then had another dream within my dream, which was about imagining other applications, like:

• You’re listening to the radio and the thing suggests Wikipedia entries related to the topic.
• You’re doing exercise, and it suggests other related ones, with instructions.
• You put it on and it sends out a signal to other clothes that match and they start beeping.

And then I woke up, good morning and happy new year, guys!

Ignoring some inconsistencies, like where the display could be on a short-sleeved T-shirt, whether it’s not a little unnecessary for it to display traffic information or a timer when brushing, if those technologies already exist in cars and electronic brushes, and some others, this is the way I imagine it, let’s call it e-clothing, to work:

• It has a wireless connection, which enables it to talk to other devices (including clothes.)
• It has an accelerometer, which senses things like you brushing or doing exercise.
• It can be programmed, manipulated within or remotely, to become relevant to your context.
• It takes on the colour of your clothing when it’s dormant.
• It also has no problem being folded, etc., so it’s like e-paper or better, like e-cloth.

That’s all for now. I would personally love for electronics to be part of our everyday clothing, it makes a lot of sense when thinking about exercising-contexts, where other devices are cumbersome, and for finding matching clothes (hell for some).

Hope you had a happy new year celebration!

Vincent

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Happy new year !

Many thanks to the sir that proclaimed this day a universal holiday!

The wormhole created from this generalized ambiance gave me the time to feel a thought more random and more intense than my routine-fishbowl-thinking. (well I hope…)

I read something very beautiful today.

Paloma, in « L’élégance du hérisson » has a reflection on people flaming up cars in Paris. Because I always have this « rioting thing » on the back of my mind I spent a moment thinking about Paloma’s “why” explanation.

She describes a scene with an adopted Indonesian peasant child drinking tea in the middle of heavily civilized Paris. Mind the gap between the two points of reference of this child. It is half the earth. And the child falls in. His identity and then culture is lost somewhere on the road, and with no culture he is an uncivilized animal. That’s the way she puts it.

I can add nothing to it but another camera : For me, the violence on cars is the scream of somebody falling in this gap. In the case of my country the gap that makes us scream is maybe that we have to live like old people when we are very young and like children as we get older. Having experienced this, I think very high of Internet and its democratic turbines. For the moment and at its present shape internet is one sure open bridge to feel connected to your civilization, whatever you feel this is, with no logistics involved.

very much like santa claus for those of you that gave up believing.

hope?wish

Georgia

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