Ironically, this lesson comes from a manufacturer of hardware (mostly), Nvidia. In a “Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought-leaders” podcast lecture on the role of Vision when building companies, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia says:

[ca. 30 min. in, responding to a question about how the culture of Nvidia was built]
At the core of our company’s success is innovation. A lot of companies say that innovation is important to their company. However, I don’t think you can fundamentally say that you want to nurture the spirit of innovation as a CEO, unless you have a culture of risk-taking. We have to encourage our all of our employees to take calculated risks.

It’s a matter of courage. Most people hate to fail. If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to develop a tolerance for failure. That doesn’t mean fail purposefully. Instead, I want you to try things even though it is impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success, that your instincts, your intuition are something you should follow. Where would we be today, without the intuition of our employees? So you have to have the tolerance for risk-taking.

The thing about failure is this. If you fail often enough, you might actually become a failure! Which is not the same as being successful [laughter]! So the question is, how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly? And to change course, as soon as you know it’s a dead end? And the way to do that, is we call it “Intellectual Honesty.” We assess, on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind!
…
…
That type of culture is very necessary in today’s environment, with competition coming all over the world, 24/7, especially for webservices, where ideas take no time to experiment. A particular company could throw out 20 ideas into the world. So unless you are thoughtful about risk taking, and being able to change your mind, react to market conditions, and being flexible, how are you going to stay alive?

You can almost see what I just described in the nature of older companies and in the nature of newer companies. The modern companies, look at Google, almost every single application is in Beta form! They’re trying all kinds of stuff, right? If they call it production, and it doesn’t work well, you guys would just be upset at them. So they call it BETA! So they can try a lot of things. And it it works, do more, and if it fails, get rid of it.

Innovation requires a little bit of experimentation. Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure. Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment! And if you don’t ever experiment, you will never innovate, you don’t succeed… You’ll just be a dweeb! That’s it!

And that’s why I dig the business of software. Not because I want to be a coder, but because it serves as an example, as an ideal of all the business ventures I want to do. The kind that encourage quick experimentation, developing and building on systems and infrastructures that allow for reducing the cost of failure, and increasing the chance of radical innovation.

Tons of other valuable lessons in that podcast, but this is the one I dug the most.

Vincent

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What all these apps have in common is that they do their work with very little involvement from the user and thus make the computing experience a little more… as it should be. Just discovered the 5th, hence this post

1. Eversave (free): will auto-save your documents in whatever application you’re using. Most useful settings for me: don’t ask for every new application + save front-most window only.
2. Windows Live Sync (free, previously Foldershare): autosyncs your files with other computers, regardless if they’re a Mac or a PC, or what geographic region you’re in.
3. Hazel (payware): auto-cleans folders that you don’t always feels like cleaning. My downloads folder / desktop is organised at last! It also uninstalls all settings with an app when you remove it.
4. F.Lux (free): A new one for me, auto-adjusts the temperature of your monitor according to the time of day it is. Since I already turn the brightness down at night (also using Nocturne ), as I notice it keeps me awake otherwise, this is a welcome addition!
5. Last.fm (free): To be honest, I was really struggling to find a fifth (there’s a few Firefox extensions perhaps) and I’m also not 100% sure how useful it is for me to track what music I play (especially since it doesn’t feed back to iTunes). Still, it’s been my loyal *quiet* companion for the last few years, which should mean something. And I can make up beautiful graphs of my annual listening habits.

Curious if anyone else has a *quiet* background app that they “use” every day? Drop a comment if you do!

Vincent

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It’s high time I came back to give Vincent a hand on making this blog very active as you people deserve.

I’ve been rather inconspicuous on Tech IT Easy ever since I started Verteego, 18 months ago. Initially, I found a hard time looking for economies of scale and synergies between being a tech blogger and a sustainability entrepreneur. I was wrong: the more our company grows, the more I realize how much what we do at Verteego actually leverages Technology.

I’ve got loads to tell and share on bootstrapping, product positionning, building a great team, going abroad, learning from your mistakes, closing sales deals, establishing partnerships, raising funds, getting Press coverage,…but most of all, our core business at Verteego really is enabling organizations, be they companies or local governments, to go green thanks to our software and services.

So, one topic I would like to discuss frequently here is Green IT, because Verteego definitely is a Green IT company.

According to the Gartner Group, Information Technology accounts for 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – about the same as the entire aviation industry. This figure is by and large correct. However, Information Technology has the power to lower the 98% remaining CO2 emissions. That is Green IT: use technology as an enabler.

And that is exactly what we do at Verteego: sustainability software. For instance, one of them, Verteego Carbon, is a carbon management software that enables organizations to collaboratively assess, analyse, and report the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activity or products. Verteego Carbon is also a beautiful entrepreneurial story in itself: started as a side-project by one of my partners, the application now represents a significant chunk of our turnover and a truly global product. Verteego Carbon is indeed available in French, German, and English.

To make a long story short, I’m back on the Tech IT Easy tracks for good and more-than-ever willing to start amazingly interesting conversations about my experience as an entrepreneur in the Green IT business. You can expect one post per week from me on this exciting topic of Green IT.

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No great point to this post; I occasionally grab this book and read a few pages, as I’m an avid film-fan and interested how they are made. This piece, where Alfred Hitchcock talks about silent films and what was lost after sound was introduced, reminded me a little of the experimentation that has been happening on the web and whether or not that is a good or bad thing. I think that those that were masters of the previous mediums, in this case print and all kinds of analog media, will certainly have a strong opinion about what is happening today, just like Hitchcock did, after silent pictures, which he started with, were displaced by the more noisy kind.

Here goes:

Alfred Hitchcock: The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was the simple natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

François Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers—in fact, almost the whole production—had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.

Alfred Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that’s true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call “photographs of people talking.” When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to first to tell a story in the cinematic way, though a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
……
In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you may choose to stage the action, you main concern is to hold the audience’s fullest attention.
Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.

While I’m on this wavelength, this piece also reminds me of another essay, I read recently, this time on making solid investment decisions. The piece, by Andy Kessler, was on the concept of elasticity, which is not only used in evaluating customer decision making under different conditions, but is also relevant when shifts in technology occur, allowing for drastic development on that new platform. From semiconductors, to phones-that-are-computers, each allowed for explosive innovation to happen, displacing the masters of the previous era. But there is still a place for masterdom, I feel, as the example of Hitchcock, a director that will likely never be forgotten, clearly illustrates.

Taking opportunity of opening markets makes a lot of sense; becoming the master of your medium, gives meaning to what you do.
Vincent

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A note: I’m not in software, I’m in startups—a topic for another day—, but these two are ideals that I strive for in any business. They were taken from a recent interview with Joe Spolsky of Fog Creek Software, on the Venture Voice podcast, a recurring classic in entrepreneurship podcasting.

1. you can launch low-cost, i.e. bootstrap your way to the top: Joe differentiates between those companies that need to get to critical mass fast (the Amazon’s and eBay’s of the world) and pretty much everyone else.
2. instead of making (often) senseless financial projections, you can throw it out into the world and use the infrastructure of the internet to monitor actual sales, and make forecasts based on actual data. Again, if you need external funding for things like launching a comprehensive marketing campaign, you’ll probably need to make some (senseless) projections.

I know, it’s a pretty basic set of principles, and there’s lot’s of other good stuff in the podcast as well, such as SaaS vs. licensed software, but these two are the ones for the books. It reminds me a lot of this recent blog post on the Lessons Learned blog, about “Validated learning about customers.”

Vincent

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You may have noticed that I sign my name below my posts on tech it easy. The reason is that when we first started guest writing on this, Jeremy Fain’s blog, he asked us to write a small introduction before each post, a habit which we later abandoned. I miss the practice, but what I think was most valuable about it, was that it positioned each of us as a separate voice on the collection of thoughts that is tech it easy.

As I am, for now, a lonely contributor to tech it easy, this practice is perhaps completely unnecessary, but I still maintain it, perhaps for egotistical reasons. I like standing for what I write. At the same time, it may also cast a kind of shadow across other people’s [unsigned] post, which is definitely not my intention.

I’d like to know your opinion on it, whether you are a blogger (in which case, imagine yourself blogging on a site that once had 15 active writers) or a reader, and how you feel about the signing of names.

What do you think?
Vince

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Rule 101 of blogging: Never write about how you’re planning to lead your life. In my experience, this process of externalising your thoughts, as opposed to internalising them, often leads to people shoving it away from their minds. So, rather than going to deeply into the sh^t that I have to deal with myself, and which would be entirely boring to you, I’ll go across some ‘influences’ for my thinking on work-life balance.

An attractive woman on a plane once told me that life is a like a bunch of rooms in a house (no, not a box of chocolates), each representing one area in your life and each to be kept separate and clean, in order to have a fulfilling life. Since she was beautiful and because it made sense, I try to follow this philosophy as much as possible, with both successes and failures to show for it.

The one book which has been most influential in my approach towards work is called “The Now Habit” by Neil Fiore. It introduced me to a concept called ‘the Unschedule,’ which basically means that you plan your work around set routines, rather than planning routines around work (which always ends up coming first place). If there’s one complication with this ‘un-scheduling’ approach, it’s this concept of “the economy as a machine,” which always has to keep on turning and turning, making human workers nothing more than replaceable parts in that machine. I think there’s something principally wrong and outdated about this idea, a relic from the industrial age, and will make it my life-mission to change it… at least for myself (if successful, I’ll write a book).

The second book [which I haven't read, but am planning to] is called “the 4-Hour Workweek,” by Tim Ferris, which introduces us to the concept of “personal task outsourcing,” as opposed to outsourcing on an organisational scale. The perhaps third book is “The E-Myth Revisited,” by Michael Gerber, which I’ve written about extensively before, and which deals with developing a type of franchising approach regarding the starting and running of companies. I’m strongly for the idea of dedicating a set amount of my income towards personal assistants, because I think it will allow for more brain-work, which is also better paid, and the whole reason why people go to college, to use their brains.

If there’s a recurring theme to all of these approaches, it’s that they require a clear understanding of one’s capabilities, non-capabilities, and the strength of character to say “yes” and “no” to things. Many self-help books teach you about [identifying] the first two, but can’t help you much about the third. I think I’ll leave it with the stance that I think that the best decisions are made when people are well-slept, well-fed, well-exercised, and made happy by other unmentioned activities. You can read books all you want, but if you don’t maintain those basic ingredients to life, no methodology will ever work that well.

End of thought for today. I’d love to hear yours on what has been influential on your [path towards] work-life balance.

Vincent

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I want to keep this short and leave the floor to you mostly, as I’m not a software developer or smart enough for this topic, I’m just a consumer and user of the product. On the train to my parents for this Easter weekend, two young guys were eying me and my Macbook and, seeing that I was wearing earphones perhaps, discussing the mac. One guy said to the other: “those Macs look like they’re taking over the world. Did you see the new one, it looks slick, but it costs € 1500.” And the other guy responded: “How dare they?” Whereas the other guy said: “Well, they look pretty cool, but interface-wise, I could never get used to them.” And the conversation died after that.

So what makes Macs so cool. Rather than discuss the superficial, the hardware, I just want to briefly write about why I like the Mac OS “interface,” and then leave the floor to you, answering the question: “What makes OS X so damn great?”

My impression: I don’t know how to explain it exactly, maybe it’s because OS X is Unix based. But what I really dig about OS X (Tiger & Leopard) is that every menu-function, every possible action you’d want to undertake, can somehow be translated into a script or service, and thus entered in Quicksilver or another “launcher.” That means that my hands rarely have to leave the keyboard, which I think saves me a few seconds vs. going for the mouse/trackpad, point & clicking. It also means that my Dock [Apple's application launcher] and desktop are clean most of the time, as I don’t need a “visible” shortcut to get to the destination I want.

I could never get that same workflow going on Windows, and perhaps it’s because of the architecture, that it just isn’t written to be that open. Sure, things like SizeUp and Fresh, both of which I discussed last week, are not part of the Leopard interface, but the fact that they exist, the fact that Quicksilver exists, is actually what makes OS X 10 times as effective an OS to me. Once again, I don’t know why exactly this is the case, I attribute it to the open architecture of Unix.

So, now it’s your turn: why makes OS X so damn great (or not, if that’s where you want to take it)?

Have a nice Easter weekend!
Vincent

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I took part in a seminar on venture financing yesterday, at the ABN Amro headquarters in Amsterdam, as part of the New Venture business-plan competition. Some very dry material and not much to report, I’m afraid. I did get some positive signals that this recession will not hit banks as hard as the media makes it out to be, and similarly, equity financing, which makes relatively little use of debt. More on that perhaps when I get sent a copy of the presentation given by Maarten Holleswinkel, from Holland Corporate Finance.

The really enjoyable part is, as always, meeting bright entrepreneurs and inventors, and you can smell the energy in the room, particularly when ideas are being discussed and explored. Last year, I heard that anyone that can create an effective, efficient way to store and transport large amounts of energy will have hit upon a gold mine, and yesterday I happened to meet someone that studied exactly this problem, designing solar-powered micro-sattelites at a Delft company in the Netherlands. The guy went completely nuts on the idea and pretty soon others joined in too. Loved it and I’ll be sure to stay in touch with those guys.

The “Quit Hill”

But the highlight of the evening was definitely when I met a marketeer / artist, called Jan Willem Wartena of urbanjoy.org. He developed this weird park attraction, called “de FLUISTERHEUVEL” (translated: The Quit Hill; see picture) for a park in Utrecht and is a big favourite at the competition.

Google-translated, the “Fluisterheuvel” can be described as:

The Quiet Hill consists of two opposing hills, with parabolic collapsed wall in the form of a half circle, the size of a football goal. When whispering into the focal point of one parabolic, you can hear it in the opposing parabolic as if you were wearing headphones! The unit invites you to play an innovative communicative game, use it as a football goal, a climbing device, and as an open gaming platform.

Talking to him was a real joy because he’s both very kind and constantly talking about different creative ideas. I liked the process in which he came up with the concept of the Quit Hill, which involved first of all, observing how different groups of people, young and old, use the park on a day-to-day basis, and coming up with a contraption that is both fun, multi-usuable, and in it’s own fashion durable and timeless. It’s a great example of what I’m coining a “living portfolio,” and I think is the most effective way for creative types to market themselves.

I decided pretty quickly that he is the perfect candidate for positioning products in a unique communicative fashion, particularly in markets which you hadn’t thought of before. In other words, relevant to most startups! It is the one business card, I’ll be sure to use this year and, who knows, maybe you’re interested in working with him too.

Take care,

Vincent

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This week a Dutch commission on the banking recession to came to an end. Their conclusion: banks should be more customer-focussed (translated article). Wow… If there’s anything this crisis has shown us is that during times of crises, creativity takes a dive out the window. Because I’m pretty sure that people were talking about more customer-focus back when the Lehman brothers went out of business.

Just briefly, before I go on to a more pleasurable topic. Wired Magazine last month had an article on what they identified as the cause this whole crisis: the gaussian copula function (depicted above), invented by a man named David X. Li, which made it possible to model risk down to a simple number, allowing for any idiot out there to label an investment as an affordable risk. As the article states, Mr. Li won’t be getting a Nobel anytime soon, but it only serves to illustrate a simple point: money makes the world go round, and more specifically, money makes the world of finance go round. Banks, until recently, had a nice little formula that allowed them to make money. Now they don’t. Will that formula be found in increased customer-focus, I don’t know. But I do think that we need a better understanding of the complex variables that play a part in our globalised economy, and customer focus alone won’t do the trick.

OK, rant over. My stance for this recession remains: work harder and smarter… and don’t watch the news.

In Hitchcock / Truffaut, Hitchcock tells the story of One-Round Jack, a character in an early film of his, The Ring (1927). Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

A.H. In those days we were very keen on the little visual touches, sometimes so subtle that they weren’t even noticed by the public. You remember that picture started on the fairgrounds. There was a fighter, played by Carl Brisson, and he was called One-Round Jack.

F.T. Because he knocked out his opponents in the first round?

A.H. That’s right. And in the crowd, watching the barker, there was an Australian, played by Ian Hunter. As the barker in front of the tent urged the crowd to go in, he had a little flap and could look back over his shoulders to see how the match was progressing. He used a sign to indicate the round number to the people standing outside. We showed volunteer fighters going into the tent and then coming out holding their jaw. Until Ian Hunter goes in. The seconds were sort of laughing at him and they didn’t even bother to hang up his coat. They just held it, thinking that he would never last more than one round. The match started and I showed the expressions of the seconds changing. Then we showed the barker looking in at the match. And at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two. It was brand-new! One-Round Jack was so good that they’d never got around to using it before! I think this touch was lost on the audience.

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock went on to become a great filmmaker, but even he started small, experimenting with different effects, like the glass ceiling I wrote of last, until he understood the effectiveness of his medium. It’s an attitude that I greatly respect, and try to implement both in blogging and my work. You can’t achieve great things without breaking a few eggs.

There’s a pretty entertaining TED video here with the stereotypical mad scientist, Cliffort Stoll, in which he says:

“The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. The third time, you’re a technician. I’m a scientist, once I’ve done something, I do something else.”

That’s a philosophy I can also respect.

Back to banking. I think that what is customer focus has changed much over the generations. According to my father, customer focus is having a bank outlet + friendly smile in every neighbourhood. More deeply, back in his day, a bank would contribute more significantly to buying a house, funding well over 50% of the purchase price. I’m not sure how the latter has changed now, but I do now that what is called “customer service” has simply moved online. I haven’t seen the inside of a bank in months and I don’t miss it. To me, customer service is having more payment options, much more innovation, as well as for all transactions, no matter how small or large, to be free, instantaneous, and unencumbered by national borders or currency. I want to see the day where all transactions go via a single device in our pocket. I’d also like to see more funding for things like housing and startups, of course, but I know that a certain measure of reality needs to be in place for that, i.e. how credit worthy is your customer.

I think that won’t be able to count on banks much until they replace the faulty mechanism that was either the gaussian copula function or another one, allowing for banks to regain their profitability. I think that this will entail making mistakes and that room needs to be allowed for that. That banks are supposed to be customer friendly, goes without saying, but that banks are businesses that need a solid balance sheet, goes without saying too.

Went a little overboard there on the text. Sorry about that. Hope it’s readable / entertaining.

Vincent

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If you look at the world of video now, there are a number of trends that reign:

• The shift from TV to web (Youtube, Hulu, iTunes Video, etc.)
• The shift towards gaming, aka interactive video
• The shift towards 3D cinema
• The unabated reign of piracy, which means that content-producers have to look beyond traditional media.
• The relative affordability of the home cinema.
• The rise of televised serials on par with movies in terms of budgets, screenplay, acting, and other qualities
• Something else? Please let me know in the comments!

It kind of makes you wonder whether cinema as we’ve known it is ending. Is cinema, in its constant drive to innovate, losing those things that made it great in the past? It took me something like reading “Hitchcock / Truffaut” to come to the conclusion that that is not the case. As the web2.0 boys like to write, “Shift happens!”

Case in point: when Hitchcock started making movies in the 1930s, they were silent. To give the effect of the sound of a man walking back and forth in the room upstairs in “The Lodger,” he used a glass ceiling. That’s right, you could actually look through the ceiling and see the feet of the man. Today, even a decade or two later, that effect would’ve been completely unnecessary.

Same as today camera rigs are becoming affordable to you and me, changes in technology can and will affect how we give visual meaning to a story. Because that’s what it’s all about, story telling, and the medium is simply the one that is the most effective for that.

There is perhaps a risk of focussing on form over substance. Many have predicted that in order for the status of proprietary cinema to be safeguarded, there would need to be a 3rd and maybe even a 4th dimension. My last IMAX-experience having been the two year old “Superman Returns” movie, I’m no expert, but I found it entirely unconvincing. 2009 is the year of 3D cinema, so I’ll leave it up to the more recent IMAX-visitors to decide whether 3D is as yet ready to replace 2D. I’ve heard critics say that “the screen just points at you,” which I don’t find particularly encouraging. At the same time, as equipment becomes cheaper and people experiment more, I’m sure a way to settle into the new medium will be found.

4D, which is the time-dimension, and in which you can find interactive media like games, and media spread across a longer period of time, such as TV-series, also holds much promise, perhaps more so than 3D. As a story-teller, imagine the potential of having the viewer co-create the story, or of having 50 hours of film to tell a story in. Amazing!

“Hitchcock / Truffaut” is a fascinating study of Hitchcock films, in the form of one long interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, and I encourage anyone interested in classic cinema to give it a read. It’s also about finding visual elements to tell a story and gives an insight into how cinema has evolved over the years. 4 Thumbs up!

Vincent

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On any given day, I work with perhaps 5 apps and 5-10 important files on my Mac. The way people traditionally organise their computing activities, is that they place their most used apps on the Dock or Desktop, and organise their files in folders in the Finder. Life has been made somewhat easier with Spotlight search, as well as Quicksilver triggers, but not so much for getting to the files that matter most quickly.

Fresh takes you out of that context. Instead of doing a search, you press a shortcut key and an overlay like this appears:

The top-bar simply lists the most recent files that you used. Sometimes those files are irrelevant and you can block that file, that extension, that folder, etc. Very simple, very effective. The bottom bar is your shelf where you can place often used things. You can also tag files in Fresh, though I haven’t yet figured out how that, in any way, increases productivity.

Fresh is payware, costs $ 9 (€ 7), but is worth it if you’re into making finding files quicker. Sure, Quicksilver is fast, as is Spotlight, but sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for, just that you used it recently.

I’m not paid for saying this, but I highly endorse this app as another evolutionary step in Mac productivity. You can get it here.

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I’m sure I’m not the only switcher to find the Finder windows on the Mac… a little tedious (Finder is, to those that don’t know, the Explorer equivalent on the Mac). Nobody can explain exactly what the green button does (it supposedly zooms to the perfect size for what’s in the window, but what does that mean?), and it seems like the least flexible application on the Mac. A number of Finder, aka file-management, alternatives exist, the most famous one being Path Finder, which is a something of an overkill, I think, but it has a loyal fan base.

SizeUp only recently came to the market, previously being a freeware app called TwoUp, which has now been supplemented with this pay-what’s-fair app. Paying what’s fair incidentally means, ca. $1.50 (or € 1.70) and upwards, which is a great system I think.

What SizeUp does is allowing you to assign keyboard shortcuts to how you want a window to be placed. You can have two windows sideways, like so:

Or four windows on the screen, like so:

Not to mention, assign a shortcut to maximise a window to fill the screen (finally!!!). As mentioned, you can use TwoUp for free and get SizeUp at a fair price. So grab a copy and make your life easier here!

Vincent

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Recently, the city of Rotterdam introduced a mandatory way of paying for public transport, using RFID-cards, called OV-chipkaart. This system will eventually be deployed across the Netherlands. This blog post describes my experience with it.

First you have to be aware that, much like in any city, public transport is an umbrella-term that describes busses, trams, trains, and metros (or subways). The RFID cards don’t yet work on trains, you have to check and uncheck yourself for any of the other options. You cannot get into or out of the subway station without doing that, while that is not the case on busses and trams, where you do have to check yourself in, but nobody prevents you from not checking out. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

When you check yourself in, the machine automatically takes of 4 euro from your card. When you check yourself out, the amount that you haven’t used is deposited back. So if you forget… you just lost a few euro, because most trips don’t exceed the 1.50 euro mark. You can’t forget this in the subway, as you can’t enter without checking in, and you can’t leave without checking out—there are human height gates that prevent this (see pic). And the system works fine. On busses and trams, on the other hand, you have to check yourself in, and you have to remember to check yourself out, as there is no one to stop you from leaving without doing so. Confused? Good, so are plenty of other people.

I’m not sure why this system was put in place in such a way:

• one reason might be practicality: instead of giving a destination at the beginning, the check-out machine decides what your destination ends up being. That way, there’s no confusion and no long queue at the beginning of people entering their destination into a machine.
• a second reason might be technical / a privacy issue: it would be optimal if I got on a bus and, without touching the machine, the money would be taken from my card, and vice versa when I leave the bus. It’s more than likely a privacy concern as RFID-chips can have a maximum range of ca. 320 feet (=100 m).
• a third reason might be that subways are the no. 1 way to travel in Rotterdam: I don’t believe this is the case, especially since this system will be rolled out to cities where there aren’t any subways.

I very much dig the idea of RFID, as I like its efficiency, both from a user and a supply chain perspective. The flaw in this system is contextual design. While it works perfectly in subways due to the gate system (as well as in trains, where they are installing similar gates), there is too great a chance of forgetting to check out on other means of public transport. Last night at 11 pm in Amsterdam, the tram was filled with people that where “on something,” and how many of those are very likely to forget to check out? A 4 euro a pop, you’re entering London tube tariffs, which, everyone agrees, are astronomical, especially if you have to pay for that every day.

The only practical solution I see for this problem, is for there to be gates installed in busses and trams, so that people don’t forget to check out. So far, this has not happened and it comes at the expense of travellers who, while being trained to be stupid (don’t worry, the card takes care of everything), now have to be aware of their actions at the beginning and at the end of the journey. And believe me, when this system is rolled out across the Netherlands and perhaps even your country, there’s going to be an exponential increase in complaints, as tons of people will have forgotten to check out and will have lost 3 euros in the process. Good for the government’s short-term cashflow, but definitely creating more overhead in terms of support-costs.

Build those damn gates!

Vincent

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Admittedly a lot of things have gone wrong over the years. As more people came on board, the writing has decreased and we’re all pretty unhappy about how it turned out. We are now reversing that trend and thought it a symbolic move to start with the URL and work our way down.

Starting tomorrow, we will start deleting one post a day and when we get to the invitation of the guest authors, we will send them a nice mail that they are fired. When we reach Jeremy’s first post, he will be alone, several years younger, move back to Barcelona, and rename the site to techiteasy.org again. As he starts writing about technology, he will find himself in need of guest writers. As he grows the site, eventually people find jobs and start businesses, and we reach April 1st again. We will then decide to rename the site Easyittech.org and go back to our roots.

Happy, so are we!

Long live the first of April!

Your loving Tech IT Easy Team.

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